sci fi

Cinequest: PRODIGY

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PRODIGY
PRODIGY

The psychological thriller Prodigy begins with a psychologist (Richard Neil) being brought to a secret government “black site” to interview a dangerous prisoner.  When he receives an orientation, he and we expect to see a superhuman sociopath like Hannibal Lector.  But he enters the secure room to face a freckled-face nine-year-old girl (Savannah Liles).  Her arms are pinned to her chair with restraints.  We learn that there is an understandable reason for this.

She is abnormal in every way – in her super intelligence, in her telekinetic powers and in her capacity for performing monstrous and lethal acts.  The two embark on a game of wits with very high stakes.  There’s a deadline (literally) so the game is also a race against the clock.

It’s the first feature for writer-directors Alex Haughey and Brian Vidal, and Cinequest hosts Prodigy’s world premiere. Haughey and Vidal have bet their movie, in large part, on the performance of a nine-year-old actor.  Savannah Liles is exceptional as she ranges between a very smart little girl and a monstrous psychopath and between a vulnerable child and a person who has made herself invulnerable.  It’s a very promising performance.

In the Cinequest program notes, Pia Chamberlain describes Prodigy as “reminiscent of a cerebral episode of the Twilight Zone“, which is pretty apt.  Just like the best of Rod Serling, Prodigy’s compact story-telling takes us to an environment that we can recognize, but which has different natural laws than the ones under which we operate.

Filmmakers have shocked us before with the juxtaposition of innocent looking children and their heinous deeds  Sometimes those children have been created fundamentally evil (The Bad Seed, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen) and sometimes possessed by evil (The Exorcist).  Prodigy takes a different tack – exploring how a trauma can produce monstrous behavior and whether evil behavior is reversible.

Prodigy is a thinking person’s edge-of-the-seat thrill ride.  I’m looking forward to the next work from Haughey and Vidal.  Note that this trailer is in color, but the version of the movie that I screened is in black and white.

https://youtu.be/I2a_q8gt6hA

ARRIVAL: communicating in an unknown dimension

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ARRIVAL
ARRIVAL

In Arrival, Amy Adams plays a linguistics professor at a Midwestern college who is drifting, having not recovered emotionally from the death of her child and the failure of her marriage.  When space aliens come to earth (!) with very unclear intentions,  she is deployed to figure out how to communicate with them.

Now if aliens (meaning living creatures in the universe who are not us) ever DO visit earth, I guarantee that we will be surprised at their appearance.  I can’t imagine what they will look like, but they won’t look like the ones in The Day the Earth Stood Still, E.T. or Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Here, Arrival hits a home run.  These aliens don’t look how we would expect, they don’t sound like we would expect and they don’t communicate like we would expect.

More central to the story, the aliens don’t think like we do.  For them, time is not linear, which adds the mystic element that defines Arrival.  Will our linguist learn how to communicate with these advanced beings who don’t seem to have language as we understand it?  Will she connect with beings that think in different (additional?) dimensions?

Arrival is directed by Denis Villaneuve, who made Incendies, rated at the #1 slot on my Best Movies of 2011, as well as the thrillers Prisoners, Enemy and Sicario.  His skill at thrillers pays off in the scenes with the aliens, when we are constantly on the edges of our seats.  The people are actually going INTO the alien spacecraft?  Holy Moley!

I loved Amy Adams in Arrival, as I tend to do in everything she does.  Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker and Michael Stuhlbarg are also solid.  The Wife pointed out that Renner succeeds in an unusual movie role – a hotshot with a healthy ego who recognizes that someone else has the better idea and becomes collaborative.  But Arrival is about the story, not the performances.

Arrival is real science fiction.  So many so-called “sci-fi” movies are really just war movies, revenge dramas, survival tales or Westerns that are set in the future or in space.  Fortunately, we have recently had some truly thoughtful sci-fi including I Origins, Her and, now, Arrival.

Every viewer will be transfixed by the first 80% of Arrival.  How you feel about the finale depends on whether you buy into the disconnected-from-linear-time aspect or you just get confused, like I did.

Least Convincing Movie Monsters

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Killer Shrew mask

Tomorrow, June 10, Turner Classic Movies is airing two films on my list of Least Convincing Movie Monsters.   We’ll get to see The Black Scorpion and The Killer Shrews.

In The Killer Shrews, the voraciously predatory mutant shrews are played by dogs in fright masks. Yes, dogs. As you can see from the bottom photo, the filmmakers have also applied shaggy patches to the sides of the dogs and ropy rat tails to their backs. [SPOILER ALERT: When humans escape from their island, the killer shrews die of overpopulation.]

The Killer Shrews is only #3 on my list.  Visit Least Convincing Movie Monsters to see the two even sillier movie monsters.

Killer Shrews shag and tails

HIGH-RISE: the villain is an oligarchy

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Tom Hiddleston in HIGH-RISE. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.
Tom Hiddleston in HIGH-RISE. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

The dystopian sci-fi satire High-Rise, adapted from a J.G. Ballard novel, makes a droll and cynical comment on our species.  Taking place in the near future, the very wealthy live on the top floors of a self-contained high-rise, just above the middle class.  Human greed and jealousy creates scarcity for the residents – not Third World-type scarcity, but scarcity of amenities like swimming pool access and power brownouts.  Class competition erupts and a morbid descent into murderous chaos ensues.  We plunge into this complacent, and then hellish, world from the perspective of a young middle class striver (Tom Hiddleston).

The designer of the complex of high-rises (Jeremy Irons) lives in a luxurious penthouse with a staggeringly pastoral garden.  The character’s name is Royal, but he’s not the ruler.  (We actually come to wish that he were benignly in charge.)  And despite his trappings, Royal is not the omnipotent Bond-type villain.   The villain turns out instead to be an oligarchy of the One Percent, along with the darkest aspects of every character’s humanness.

Tom Hiddleston is fine, and the rest of the cast is solid.   The two standouts are Jeremy Irons as Royal and Sienna Miller, dressed in Carnaby Street retro, as a deliciously voracious man-hunter.  The wonderful Elisabeth Moss is wasted in a role where she just doesn’t have much to do.

I saw High-Rise at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF). It opens in Bay Area theaters tomorrow.

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE MARTIAN – an entertaining Must See

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Matt Damon in THE MARTIAN
Matt Damon in THE MARTIAN

The space adventure The Martian delivers what the best big Hollywood movies can offer – a great looking movie that convincingly takes us to a place we’ve never been, inhabited by our favorite movie stars at their most appealing.

In The Martian, Matt Damon plays Mark Watney, a member of a scientific expedition to Mars who is (understandingly) left for dead when his team must make an emergency escape from the Red Planet. The next manned mission to Mars is scheduled to land four years later 1000 miles away and he only has a four months supply of food, so his chances don’t look promising. But Mark Watney is a character of irrepressible resilience, with a wicked sense of humor, and he immediately embarks on solving the many individual problems that stand between him and survival. NASA leadership (Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, Sean Bean and more) and his team en route back to Earth (Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, Michael Pena) all try to help.

Directed masterfully by Ridley Scott, The Martian pops along and there’s never a dull moment. It helps that the character of Watney is very funny.

I’m not highly scientifically literate, but the science in The Martian seemed to be at least internally consistent. I do think that – in real life – the NASA team would have immediately come to the solution thought up in the movie by the geek in the Jet Propulsion Lab.

The awesomely desolate Marscapes are fantastic. It’s all CGI, but you can’t tell – it looks like it is shot on location.

Here’s why The Martian isn’t a great movie:

  • Other than Damon’s Mark Watney, the other characters are types, getting all of their authentic texture from the performances instead of from the writing.
  • Never for a moment does the audience think there’s any chance that The Martian is really going to kill off Matt Damon.

But, overall, The Martian is so entertaining, it’s a Must See – even for folks that usually pass on science fiction.  You can rent The Martian on DVD from Netflix now and from Redbox on February 9.  You can stream it on Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

THE MARTIAN: an entertaining Must See

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Matt Damon in THE MARTIAN
Matt Damon in THE MARTIAN

The space adventure The Martian delivers what the best big Hollywood movies can offer – a great looking movie that convincingly takes us to a place we’ve never been, inhabited by our favorite movie stars at their most appealing.

In The Martian, Matt Damon plays Mark Watney, a member of a scientific expedition to Mars who is (understandingly) left for dead when his team must make an emergency escape from the Red Planet.  The next manned mission to Mars is scheduled to land four years later 1000 miles away and he only has a four months supply of food, so his chances don’t look promising.  But Mark Watney is a character of irrepressible resilience, with a wicked sense of humor, and he immediately embarks on solving the many individual problems that stand between him and survival.  NASA leadership (Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, Sean Bean and more) and his team en route back to Earth (Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, Michael Pena) all try to help.

Directed masterfully by Ridley Scott, The Martian pops along and there’s never a dull moment.  It helps that the character of Watney is very funny.

I’m not highly scientifically literate, but the science in The Martian seemed to be at least internally consistent.  I do think that – in real life – the NASA team would have immediately come to the solution thought up in the movie by the geek in the Jet Propulsion Lab.

The awesomely desolate Marscapes are fantastic.  It’s all CGI, but you can’t tell – it looks like it is shot on location.

Here’s why The Martian isn’t a great movie:

  • Other than Damon’s Mark Watney, the other characters are types, getting all of their authentic texture from the performances instead of from the writing.
  • Never for a moment does the audience think there’s any chance that The Martian is really going to kill off Matt Damon.

But, overall,  The Martian is so entertaining, it’s a Must See – even for folks that usually pass on science fiction.

DVD/Stream of the Week: EX MACHINA – a thinker’s Must See sci-fi

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EX MACHINA
EX MACHINA

The intensely thought-provoking Ex Machina is a Must See and one of the year’s best films. Set in the present or the very near future, we meet the genius Nathan (played with predatory menace by Oscar Isaac) who developed the worlds top search engine when he was 13 and is now fantastically wealthy. Nathan lives in an extremely remote wilderness with his apparently mute housekeeper Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), and brings up one of his smartest software engineers under the pretext of winning a contest for a week with the boss. But Nathan really has brought in the young coder Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to test his latest invention – a machine equipped with artificial intelligence.

Specifically, Caleb is tasked with the Turing Test (named after Alan Turing, the subject of The Imitation Game) – he is to converse with the machine to determine whether it’s thinking and behavior is indistinguishable from a human’s. Nathan and Caleb reference that a chess-playing computer may be very efficient, but does it know that it’s playing chess and does it know what chess is? Nathan says that – if he has succeeded – he has the greatest advancement in the history of the world; Caleb rejoins that it would be the greatest invention in the history of gods.

That raises the issue of playing god. If a being – even one that is human-created – is self-aware, conscious and has feelings and its own thoughts, then who has the right to end its life or take away its liberty? And can it seek liberty on its own?

We care about these questions because the machine, named Ava, is so, well, human. Ava is played by Alicia Vikander, an actress with an uncommonly sensitive face. Vikander’s performance is top-notch, and like Caleb, we are soon seduced into liking her and then NEEDING to protect her.

Ex Machina makes so much so-called science fiction pale in comparison, because it really challenges the audience with the moral implications of a real scientific concept. Not everything set in the future is really SCIENCE fiction. Gravity, a superb movie, was basically a survival tale, and Star Wars was a Quest Fantasy and Avatar was basically a remake of the Western A Man Called Horse. Most movies set in the future are just dumb excuses to put a lot of explosions on-screen. The few recent examples of truly thoughtful sci-fi include I Origins and Her.

Ex Machina is both a great-looking movie and a stellar example of economic filmmaking. There essentially only four characters and one set. Computer graphics aren’t used for empty action eye candy, just to allow an actress to credibly play a machine. Nathan’s house/laboratory looks amazing, and the overall art direction and production design is stellar. The stark landscape surrounding Nathan’s hideaway was shot in Norway.

This is the first directing feature for writer-director Alex Garland, and it’s a triumph. He wrote the screenplay for Danny Boyles’ brilliant 28 Days Later, one of my Zombie Movies for People Who Don’t Like Zombie Movies.

Ex Machina is on my Best Movies of 2015 – So Far. It’s available on DVD from both Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

EX MACHINA: a MUST SEE thinker’s sci-fi

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EX MACHINA
EX MACHINA

The intensely thought-provoking Ex Machina is a Must See and one of the year’s best films. Set in the present or the very near future, we meet the genius Nathan (played with predatory menace by Oscar Isaac) who developed the worlds top search engine when he was 13 and is now fantastically wealthy. Nathan lives in an extremely remote wilderness with his apparently mute housekeeper Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), and brings up one of his smartest software engineers under the pretext of winning a contest for a week with the boss. But Nathan really has brought in the young coder Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to test his latest invention – a machine equipped with artificial intelligence.

Specifically, Caleb is tasked with the Turing Test (named after Alan Turing, the subject of The Imitation Game) – he is to converse with the machine to determine whether it’s thinking and behavior is indistinguishable from a human’s. Nathan and Caleb reference that a chess-playing computer may be very efficient, but does it know that it’s playing chess and does it know what chess is? Nathan says that – if he has succeeded – he has the greatest advancement in the history of the world; Caleb rejoins that it would be the greatest invention in the history of gods.

That raises the issue of playing god. If a being – even one that is human-created – is self-aware, conscious and has feelings and its own thoughts, then who has the right to end its life or take away its liberty? And can it seek liberty on its own?

We care about these questions because the machine, named Ava, is so, well, human. Ava is played by Alicia Vikander, an actress with an uncommonly sensitive face. Vikander’s performance is top-notch, and like Caleb, we are soon seduced into liking her and then NEEDING to protect her.

Ex Machina makes so much so-called science fiction pale in comparison, because it really challenges the audience with the moral implications of a real scientific concept. Not everything set in the future is really SCIENCE fiction. Gravity, a superb movie, was basically a survival tale, and Star Wars was a Quest Fantasy and Avatar was basically a remake of the Western A Man Called Horse. Most movies set in the future are just dumb excuses to put a lot of explosions on-screen. The few recent examples of truly thoughtful sci-fi include I Origins and Her.

Ex Machina is both a great-looking movie and a stellar example of economic filmmaking.  There essentially only four characters and one set.  Computer graphics aren’t used for empty action eye candy, just to allow an actress to credibly play a machine.  Nathan’s house/laboratory looks amazing, and the overall art direction and production design is stellar.  The stark landscape surrounding Nathan’s hideaway was shot in Norway.

This is the first directing feature for writer-director Alex Garland, and it’s a triumph.  He wrote the screenplay for Danny Boyles’ brilliant 28 Days Later, one of my Zombie Movies for People Who Don’t Like Zombie Movies.

DVD/Stream of the Week: I ORIGINS – a thoughtful romance that muses on the boundaries of science and spirituality

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Michael Pitt and Brit Marling in I ORIGINS
Michael Pitt and Brit Marling in I ORIGINS

The romance I Origins (which opens tomorrow) explores the conflict between science and spirituality. Our scientist protagonist (Michael Pitt) is completely empirical and militantly anti-spiritual. He is obsessed with the study of iris scans and patterns of the eye (the “I” in the title is a pun). He is hoping to prove that eyes can be evolved, which he believes will debunk the Creationist pseudo-science of Intelligent Design. He meets a model (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) – and they don’t meet CUTE, they meet HOT. Through a string of scientifically improbable coincidences, he is able to track her down for a second encounter that is sharply romantic. They fall in love – an attraction of opposites because she is mercurial and vaguely New Agey.

Along the way, he gains a new lab assistant (Brit Marling), who is just as smart and more driven than is he. Together they find the lab breakthrough to prove his theory. The main three characters are affected by a life-altering tragedy. Seven years later, the story resumes with the public release of the discovery. As our hero takes his victory lap over religion, he is faced with new evidence that cannot be explained by science…

Writer-director Mike Cahill (Another Earth, also starring Marling) has constructed a story that sets up a discussion on the limits of empiricism. I give Cahill extra points for raising the issue without ponderosity or pretension. Some critics have harshly judged the movie, but they see it wrongly as a corny religion-beats-science movie instead of a contemplation on the possibilities. And they altogether miss the fact that the film is basically a romance, which Cahill himself sees as one of the two central aspects of I Origins. Cahill explores and compares the intense lust-at-first-sight, opposites-attract type of love with the love relationship based on common values and aspirations.

There are, however, two shots involving pivotal moments in the story (and both involving billboards) that are such self-consciously ostentatious filmmaking that they distracted me, rather than bringing emphasis to each moment.

Pitt, an actor of sometimes unsettling affect, is very good here, as he was in The Dreamers and Last Days. Berges-Frisbey and Marling deliver fine performances, too. If Marling is in a movie, it aspires to being good – I loved The East, which she co-write and starred in. Archie Panjabi, without the boots and the upfront sexiness she wears on The Good Wife, is solid in a minor part.

I Origins works both as a scientific detective story and as a meditation on romance. I found it to be smart and entertaining.  I Origins is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Instant Video.

THE ZERO THEOREM: visually arresting sci-fi meh

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THE ZERO THEOREM
THE ZERO THEOREM

Zero Theorem2
Terry Gilliam directed The Zero Theorem, which tells you that it’s going to be visually arresting and Way Out There.  Former Monty Python member Gilliam wrote and directed Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus – all much better movies than The Zero Theorem (which he did not write).

The Zero Theorem takes place in a dystopian future world where the powers that be completely control everything that they need for the economy (what you do, how continually you work and how little you get paid), but allow individual freedom to consume crappy consumer goods and follow phony religions. Those that are too troubled to be productive are left to fend for themselves on the filthy streets, free of public services.   It’s the realization of Antonin Scalia’s world view.

Christoph Waltz plays a poor workaday Everyman who just wants some time off to look after his deteriorating health.  He’s literally a wage slave to a malevolent character named Management.  A professional numbers cruncher, Waltz is attacking a very fundamental mathematical discovery.  And that’s the whole movie –  as he hacks away on his keyboard, he is battered and abused by The System, cajoled by an obnoxious middle manager (David Thewlis – very funny) and distracted by a sexually available temptress.

For what it’s worth, Waltz is pretty good as the protagonist, a perpetual victim.  Matt Damon and Tilda Swinton show up in brief parts.  Melanie Thierry, a very beautiful actress of limited range (see The Princess of Montpensier), plays the hottie.

All in all, it’s just not Far Out enough and the story – stretched to feature length – is tedious.  You’re better off watching one of Gilliam’s good films, or Lost in La Mancha, the documentary on his snake-bitten attempt to make a movie out of Don Quixote.

The Zero Theorem releases tomorrow in theaters, but is already streaming on Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video, among others, including your cable/satellite On Demand.