1. ‘Children of Men’
2. ‘Moon’
3. ‘District 9′
4. ‘A Scanner Darkly’
5. ‘Avatar’
6. ‘Donnie Darko’
7. ‘Star Trek’
8. ‘Minority Report’
9. ‘Cloverfield’
10. ‘Serenity’

CoM, check; Moon, looked good, but it didn’t keep me awake; District 9, not — why South Africa? — and on and on. I am just incapable of becoming excited by most of these titles. Minority Report was interesting because of it’s Philip K. Dick cachet (and the fact that it was made during Bush II) , but very few of those movies had the **umph** of the movies I grew up on. As a child of the ’70s and ’80s, I feel as though I’ve lived a charmed life, given that the following came out during the period that sanned 1979-1989:

‘Alien’ (1979)
‘Altered States’ (1980) ‘The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
‘Blade Runner’ (1982)
‘The Thing’ (1982)
‘Return of the Jedi’ (1983)
‘Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai’ (1984)
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1984)
‘Dune’ (1980) ‘Back to the Future’ (1985) ‘Brazil’ (1985)
‘Re-Animator’ (1985)
‘Aliens’ (1986)
‘The Fly’ (1986)
‘Robocop’ (1987)
‘Near Dark (1987)
‘They Live’ (1988)

And I’m still unable to think of a good sf movie for 1989.

Since some of the best sci-fi of the passing decade has occurred on the small screen, I couldn’t resist listing a few television shows, if only because their effect on our pop-culture was indelible. In no particular order:

‘The Man from Earth’ (2007)
‘Children of Men’ (2006)
‘Minority Report’ (2002)
“Firefly”
“Battlestar Galactica”
‘Night Watch’ (2004) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_%282004_film%29
‘Day Watch’ (2007) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Watch_%28film%29
‘Iron Man’ (2008) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man_%28film%29
‘X-Men 2′ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men_2_%28movie%29
“Farscape” (1999-2003) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farscape

Many of these moives and shows, I’ve already written about on this site.
Now, none of these entertainments as groundbreaking as any of those eighties movies, but I just needed a place to start this thing.

During the week, I’ll make an attempt to justify my choices, but in the meantime, I’ll ask readers in the audience to recommend their own science-fiction favorites or offer their own recommendations from a faded

The problem with both previous Predator flicks were that there was very little high-concept. In both preceding entries (Predator and Predator 2), the Predators and the humans were on Earth.

In the first film, the Predators interrupted Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hunt for something or other, and in the sequel, they appeared in a very hot L.A. summer, getting in the way of a police investigation of some sort. In each, it is strictly humans vs. Predators.

In this new Robert Rodriguez film, things have gone 3 paces further, as the protagonists have been kidnapped to an off-world hunting preserve and there is no ‘team’ of humans working against the Predators. Rather, the 7 humans *aren’t* working together. After a short spell they recognize that the 7 of them each represent the worst kind of murderous criminal on Earth and that they have each been selected as quarry for some yet-to-be-determined agent on this new, Earth-like planet.

Rodriguez wrote an original script for Predators back in 1994, long before the AvP franchise was even conceived. To Rodriguez’s credit,Predators (1995) was conceived as a direct sequel to Predator 2.

Most interestingly, this really isn’t a Predator movie until well into the 4th reel, when the Predators finally appear. Until then, the film simply plays as a particularly good episode of The Twilight Zone, where the  hunters  of The Most Dangerous Game size each other up, before trying to do one another in. Rodriguez does a nice job here by prepending a human story to all of the glitchy, gooey and messy effects, remembering that the story should drive the effects and not vice-versa.

The most interesting aspect of this film is the ‘hands-off’ approach that Fox studio chief Tom Rothman has taken with this franchise, after his direct involvement with the ‘AvP‘ franchise. Here, Rothman has handed Rodriguez the entire Predator franchise to shoot, not in some Hollywood backlot, but on Rodriguez’s own Troublemaker Studios, out in Austin, TX. The most interesting thing is that the film works as a late addition to entire concept of Auteur filmmaking.

And a great big hats off to Adrien Brody for playing against type and to Topher Grace for making another, great, unaticipated career move.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Terry Gilliam attempted to bring ‘Watchmen’ to life twice, once in 1989 and a decade later, in 1999. He gave up because he felt that the story couldn’t be adequately covered in 2 hours’ time and that the material might be better dealt with as a miniseries, Though there is no Gilliam ‘Watchmen’, I credit ‘Watchmen’ and it’s alternate-apocalyptic 1985 for the rich visual landscape of thr film that Gilliam went on to produce in the mid-’90′s, ’12 Monkeys’ (1995).

Moore’s ambivalent heroes were a sea-change for comic book industry back in 1985, but Zack Snyder’s 2009 film stops far, far short of of Moore’s moral revisionism and even further from the Watchmen send-up that was Brad Bird’s ‘The Incredibles‘ (2004).

Anyone attempting to translate Moore’s 12-issue, 264 page graphic novel — a would-be 4-1/2 hours in screenplay-time — into filmed entertainment had a daunting enterprise ahead of them.

Snyder’s ‘Watchmen’ fails as an adaptation because the writers failed to adequately adapt the prosaic storyline to suit the 2-hour commercial format. The David Hayter/Alex Tse screenplay, hews too close to the dramatic beats of the original novel. At full length, those beats have their place because they furnish Moore’s 8 protagonists with engaging backstories, however, even at 166 minutes, the 264 page version of the thing fails to be fully satisfied.My other problem with the movie — besides the length — was the writers’ decision to comp so closely to the comic books’ dialogue and Snyder’s tolerance for some very average performances. I often felt as though the actors were reading their lines off of a teleprompter rather than inhabiting their characters. That and 2009 is not 1986 — people like Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca have neither standing or relevance, 23 years later after Chrysler has been bought, sold and is in the ditch once again. I’m certain that 90% of the cherished 16-24 viewing audience drew a complete blank the movie’s reference to Iacoccoca.

As a fanboy, I generally like to see my favorite stories faithfully reproduced for the screen. However, as an audience member, I saw too many rich characters crowding the screen, only to see their potential wasted. Each and every one of Moore’s Minutemen team were not only superheroes, but also tragic figures, trapped in their own peculiar hells. Silk Spctre (Sally Jupiter) is a 2nd-generation hero, having inherited her title from her mother, Sally Juspeczyk. Similarly, Nite Owl aka Daniel Dreiberg wears the costume of a legendary Silver Age hero. But the most formidable dysfunctions are to be found in the older heroes — Dr. Manhattan, the original Silk Spectre, Ozymandias and the Comedian because their idealism and nostallgia poison their daily lives.

Like Oliver North, The Comedian sees himself as a formidable patriot, despite the fact that his marching orders came from questionable quarters. When the one super-powered being, Jon Osterman, transmigrates into Doctor Manhattan, he leaves his humanity behind.

From my writerly perspective, Watchmen ought to have been Rohrshach’s picture — as with ‘Taxi Driver’, we ought to have had a good long taste of Rohrshach’s daily, hard-luck P.O.V., down to stealing Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl’s beans. The rising action of the Comedian’s death should have allowed Rohrshach to recount his troubled relationship with the man, but deciding to investigate the matter nonetheless.

There was no reason for this movie to run almost 3 hours. If you’ve got 246 pages of comic book script to turn into a movie and only 120 minutes to tell the story, then you’re going to have to cut some pages. Sometimes this happened, but we lost lots of important character development along the way. This is especially tragic because Watchmen is a character-driven piece. Like ‘Rosebud’ in ‘Citizen Kane’ we had an opportunity to see Jon Osterman’s childhood obsession with watches, but that didn’t play out in this film, even though it showed up on ‘Heroes’ (and then, was wasted).

I’m sure that the Snyder’s choices will justify themselves upon the 2nd and 3rd viewing, but the name of the game in moving works of literature into film is adaptation. Though I’m a huge fan of Carla Gugino, they ought to have diminished her role more and given Malin Akerman more space to explore being a 2nd-generation hero and Dr. Manhattan’s forgotten love interest, precisely because the Osterman/Janey Slater subplot doesn’t pay off as well as it does in the book.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

The misguided mash-up that resulted in Hellraiser — in Space… by Executive producers Paul W.S. Anderson and Jeremy Bolt have now given us Alien-meets-Serenity-meets-The Descent-meets-Defying Gravity-meets-2001:A Space Odyssey-meets-The Abyss-meets-Cube-meets-Sunshine, allowing the worst aspects of each film a moment for a pirouette of inexplicability.  3 of those 7 movies had serious story problems.

Like the 4 different posters in the movie’s advertising campaign, the PR can’t seem to determine whether the movie is science-fiction, horror or something else completely. While that combination might sound somehow enervating, the fact is that where those producers missed with their horror-fied remake of Andrej Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’ is exactly where this duo have missed with ‘Pandorum’.Pandorum starts out well enough, with an intriguing premise — two astronauts on a long-distance, deep space exploration awake suddenly, after an unknown duration in hypersleep, the side-effect being that they have no memories of how they got where they were or what their mission is supposed to be. The problem is, that seems to be the motivation that the entire production team was using when they put this movie together.

There are no ideas in this movie, unless you’re the kind of science-fiction fan who delights in trainspotting the plagiarized source material. The movie is neither artful nor postmodern in it’s presentation. Like Event Horizon before it, Pandorum is just reheated leftovers, a serving of refried beans, some of them more than 20 years old.

The set design is pretty good, the fight choreography is difficult to follow and Dennis Quaid and Norman Reedus (Blade II, Mimic) are wasted here. Save your money and share a meal with someone you enjoy spending time with. Have a conversation.

I could go on at length, but there are only so many hours in a day and I have other business to attend to.

Rating: 0.5 out of 5 stars

Imagine a couple million dollars of filmmaking equipment, and empty studio and several tens of state-of-the-art technicians waiting on some Seattle lawyers, and you get the idea. though the film is a little more substantive than  that.

As someone who’s hasn’t played many video games in the past 20 years and been disappointed by just about every game-to-movie adaptation I’ve seen. ‘District 9′ exceeds all of the expectations I never had for ‘Halo’.

Plot-wise, ‘District’ is sort of novel because it starts with an unlikely premise — technologically advanced extraterrestrials end up marooned here on Earth, living in dire, 3rd world conditions. Strangely enough, these aliens don’t exert their prowess and take-over the planet. Somehow, they end up as an underclass here on Earth, whiling away their time in an aimless barrio in Johannesburg, as poor as any of the former bantustans living off of cat food

Why Joburg? To quote the characters on ABC’s current space-opera, Defying Gravity, “H2IK” — hell if I know. Any other storyteller would use the Joburg location to make a point — about South Africa’s apartheid history, it’s role as a former British colony or Nelson Mandela’s heroism. Unfortunately, that’s just where ‘District 9′ seems to fail. You shouldn’t pull an ornate prop or set-piece out of storage unless it’s going to serve your play in a constructive manner. Here, Johannesburg is just a city, like any other.

With all of the potential that D9‘s dystopia had to offer, it really doesn’t go anywhere. Had D9 been set in Asia somepalce, the film might have played as an metaphor for the money that the West pours into Asia year after year, only to see human rights violations  and hungry children persist.

My understanding is that director Blokamp hails from Joburg and had done a 6-minute science-fiction film, ‘Alive in Joburg‘ (film) back in 2005. ‘District 9′ is an expansion of the AiJ premise.Though the visuals are fairly impressive, I didn’t get the impression that D9 was ever intended to be a game-changer the way that ‘Close Encounters’ and ‘Star Wars’ were. 30 years ago.

Shot for only $30M, the film is a marvel of low-budget, high-end effects, but it’s still too expensive for the SyFy channel. I only wish they’d given the script another 2 weeks, to drive home an enduring story.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Threatened with the forcible removal from his house, the last remaining one in the midst of a high-rise construction zone, Carl takes the drastic step of attaching thousands of helium balloons to his house so he can fly off in search of the adventure he and his beloved departed wife Ellie never got to take, the journey to Paradise Falls in the footsteps, or should I say dirigible trail, of famed explorer Charles Munz (Christopher Plummer (voice)).  Munz, disgraced after he returned with the skeleton of a bird that scientists later accused him of assembling from unrelated  bones set off for Paradise Falls when Carl and Ellie were just kids vowing to prove he was not a fraud.

After discovering unintentional stowaway Russell, whom Carl had previously sent literally on a snipe hunt, and some encounters with dangerous weather, Carl and Russell find themselves in Paradise Falls and towing Carl’s house to just the point Ellie had envisioned.

During the course of their journey, the mismatched pair runs into Doug (Bob Peterson (voice)), one of Munz’ dogs outfitted with a collar that translates his thoughts, as well as a specimen of the  bird, whom Russell names Kevin, Munz has been hunting all these years.

The core of this film isn’t Pixar’s stunning, as usual, animation, nor is it the plot.  No, what makes ‘Up’ a good film is character development.  Both Carl and Russell unintentionally end up on a journey that brings them more connection with the world around them and with a way of living that makes them happy rather than the way of living that has become accustomed (Carl) or what is seen as expected (Russell).

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

* Note: While Pixar released this film in 3-D the showing I saw was standard projection.

Wolverine is by far one of the more interesting of the first-generation X-Men. He’s cranky; he carries his own moral code around like an invisible cloud often circumventing plans and strategies to do what he believes is right; he’s confident, and he’s practically indestructible. In short, Wolverine is the perfect anti-hero. Unfortunately, ‘Origins’ does little to dig under those surface qualities to show us just how he actually got to be the way he is.

Beginning in 1845 in rural Canada, ‘Origins’ introduces a sibling relationship between Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) and the years of soldiering the two brothers do between the death of their real, shared father and the Vietnam war are told in a visually artful way that tells us next to nothing about their characters. It isn’t until this last war, it seems, when Wolverine has had enough of his brother’s blood lust.

The bulk of the film centers quite rightly on how Wolverine acquired the adamantium, courtesy Col. William Stryker (Danny Houston here; Brian Cox in ‘X2?), adhering to his skeleton and how he lost his memories of a more than 100-year lifespan. The conflict between the human and the animal is expressly spoken of in the story but never really conveyed; it is a foregone conclusion that Wolverine will take Stryker’s offer and that he will continue to struggle with the beast within himself. And therein lies the major problem with this film: Like ‘Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith’ because we know what comes after it the inherent drama of the origin is vastly diminished.

Visually stylish and packed with both action and fight sequences, director Gavin Hood could have cut about 20 minutes in the second act without sacrificing the intricate set-up of Stryker’s betrayal. Too, Hood, on only his third film, makes a couple of rookie mistakes attempting to show us too much in some places and not allowing for enough breathing room in others; Wolverine’s embarrassment at the accidents caused by his brand new adamantium claws is priceless and a too brief bit of humor in a film that otherwise takes itself with the utmost seriousness. And for those who pay attention to such details, it is worth noting that while he is never referred to in ‘Origins’ as Sabretooth it’s likely because producers wasted the character in the first film in the franchise by presenting him as a mute animal barely up to average intelligence which is a clear diversion from Schreiber’s portrayal.

Hugh Jackman shoulders the burden of Wolverine well, delivering with a consistency of performance that should satisfy most casual fans. Let’s just hope that the producers and keepers of the X-Men series are smart enough to make their next move ‘X-Men Origins: Storm’.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Granted that Abrams and his writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman add a little time travel quirk that creates an alternate reality for this new Trek, it does come off with a bit more verve than the original series had some 40 years ago. Both the writing and the SFX have improved, just as Desilu Studios never gave Roddenberry $75M to shoot a single episode.

The idea of a utopian, space-faring human civilization is bourne of a postwar optimism and late ’60′s ebullience that the War on Terror and our current financial debacle have put a fork in. If not for the success of the franchise in years past, nobody would posit a Federation of Planets based upon the United Nations because the latter has been such an overwhelming success.

I certainly don’t number myself among the Whedon-can-do-no-wrong zombies, but Firelfly seemed a better augur of things to come, should humans ever escape Earth’s gravity-well to inhabit the stars. But Paramount has rebooted Trek, keeping many of it’s societal constraints intact, but alterting the biographies of it’s chief protagonists, James Tiberius Kirk

SPOILER WARNING: In this new 2009 film the vengeful Romulan, Nero has altered various timelines in such a way that Kirk both gtows up in single-parent households. Like Like Luke Skywalker before him, Kirk is suddenly an orphan from some backward province. Instead of the son of a decorated officer, he is military orphan with an impetuous streak. He is discovered by one Capt. Christopher Pike and joins Starfleet. Thus is the new new Trek launched.

Given the time-travel abuses that committed by science-fiction, it was probably just a matter of time before Paramount spawned an alternate Trek-verse. This Trek is more action oriented and plagued by coincidences. Like Skywalker, this Kirk finds himself on planet Hoth challenged by Arctic monsters before — surprise! –he comes into contact with the older Spock from the original Trek timeline.

Surely, this alternate-timeline is the stuff of fanboy heaven, creating new possibilities for retelling of the series’ original 79 episodes, but I’m not holding my breath. Trek ’66 was a product of its time as much as Farscape was a product of the late ’90′s.

As Corinthians 13, chapters 11 and 12 says, ” When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child…, but when I became an adult, I gave up childish things.” And that is precisely the head-space Trek occupies for me these days. As a writer, I find it both absurd and arbitrary that Starfleet Officers aren’t allowed to disagree with one another, but Abrahms, Kurzman and Orci seem to be willing to play fast and loose with other Roddenberry Rules ¹.

That said, Chris Pine does a serviceble job as Kirk, not by imitating William Shatner, but by trying to inject some naturalism into the role, emoting rather than projecting, allowing Kirk to be a young, inexperienced captain, ratter than the cocksure swaggart of the old show. Though he can’t separate his ring and middle fingers, Sylar does a serviceable job as young Spock. Though I may not become an adherent of this re-imagined franchise, it will be interesting to watch it develop in the coming years.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Before that damnable show went off the air 6 years ago, all of the major broadcast networks — NBC, ABC and CBS each tried to catch some of Chris Carter’s alt.conspiracy.ufo fire.

Fringe‘s distinction is that the show is hard science-fiction, a rare event for network television — HARD science-fiction, is based on real science, not fantasy, not urban mythology and not old Saturday matinée fare. Though there are plenty of whiz-bang moments in there, most of the spectacle on Fringe is derived from current available technology.

One of Fringe‘s few shortcomings is its superficial resemblance to the X-Files. During the pilot, Special Agent Olivia Dunham (Australian actress Anna Torv) and Special Agent John Scott (Mark Valley) of the FBI are called out to investigate the mysterious circumstances where a plane full of passengers is all evacuated by a flesh-melting virus.

After investigating the plane, the Agents are led to a storage unit rented by one of the passengers thought responsible for the downed plane. Scott is infected by the biological agent and Agent Dunham is required to enlist the assistance of noted ‘Fringe’-scientist, Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), who’s been locked-up in an asylum for the past 17 years.

That’s where the X-Files similarities end, because Fringe is not a Mulder/Scully ‘shipper show, but an ensemble show that rounds out with the son of Dr Noble, Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson), Phillip Broyles (Lance Reddick), and actors Kirk Acevedo and Blair Brown in supporting roles.

While the X-Files was content to meander into the occult, urban legends and UFO lore, Fringe remains firmly planted in the realm of viable, cutting-edge, so-called fringe-science While I can’t vouch for the ‘Altered States‘-like sensory-deprivation tank, the flesh-eating virus, the gas attacks and the genetically-engineered parasite of subsequent episodes are all currently viable technologies.

That said, Torv, Jackson and Noble are compelling character-actors who fill out an hour’s wort of television in interesting ways — Jackson and Noble have and ongoing Father-Son shtick, while Torv’s character has ongoing encounters with the bits of Scott’s personality that were left behind in her head after the aforementioned isolation-tank experience.

Let’s hope the show maintains it’s strong ratings when the show returns in January ’09.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

While the franchise’s demons, the Cenobytes, appear within the film’s first 5 minutes, we only get a glimpse — they are by no means central to the story. Rather, Pinhead and the Cenobytes are simply the vehicles of hubris:The cenobytes both identify and punish those who are willing to overreach. Though the SciFi Channel insists that all genre movies reveal their creatures within the first 15 minutes, that formula — dictated by commercial requirements — is really irrelevant because ‘Hellraiser’ is an epic drama that circulates around Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence) and her evil stepmother, Julia (Clare Higgins).

Indeed, writer-director Clive Barker waits over an hour to give the audience a good look at the franchise’s signature demons, the Cenobytes, specifically Pinhead. The key antagonists in the first film are really Julia and the posthumous Uncle Frank. Julia wears little makeup, and Frank little skin.

What makes ‘Hellraiser’ an effective and entertaining movie is its emphasis on character and story, rather than makeup.

Uncle Frank rises from the dead at approximately the 20-minute mark, whereupon he marches around for the next 45 minutes fully flayed and in search of skin that can only be acquired vampirically, via the victims that Julia supplies him.

Looking back, ‘Hellraiser’ really was one of the precursors to the big genre franchises that the studios are wont to get ahold of these days — you know, the one-picture spec that turns into the 3 picture franchise-project after box-office receipts cross the $120M mark. Even Mr. Barker is probably surprised that his little million dollar picture spawned seven sequels and warranted a remake.

The remake — due in either 2009 or 2010, depending on where you look — one hopes that Seraphim Films and the Weinstein Company will work toward a 3 picture story-arc and take into into account the many continuity errors of the first two movies, like the Julia-spawning mattress that somehow survived the Dresden-like house fire at the conclusion of the first movie. Though substantial time is spent on a retcon-recap at the beginning of ‘Hellraiser:Hellbound’ (1988) that one would hope that the Weinsteins would choose a capable director and take the LoTR approach.

But the real value of ‘Hellraiser’ lays not so much in its latex prosthetics and stage-blood, but the slow burn of it’s domestic taboo themes: incest, infidelity and lust. It’s not selling her soul to the Devil that’s Julia’s error, it’s her transgressive relationship to brother-in-law Frank that drives her to participate in a Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka-like serial-killing spree, to restore skin to Uncle Frank’s undead sinews. Certainly, the soap operatic Bonnie and Clyde prepending of Hellraiser that makes the first movie so effective, especially when one considers similar movies — Bernard Rose’s ‘Candyman‘ (1992) and Paul W.S. Anderson’s ‘Event Horizon‘ (1997) — and their reasons for relative mediocrity.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

*Actually, the Cenobytes do make an appearance at the 3 minute mark, but it’s dark and ambiguous — the only real concluusions viewers can draw is that they wear leather and are comfortable around medical waste.