sci fi

Prometheus: striking sci fi with a tinge of horror

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Prometheus is a striking and well-acted sci fi adventure with a horror film tinge.  What you want in a sci fi movie is cool alien worlds and cool alien creatures – and, for that, it’s hard to top director Ridley Scott, who made the classic sci fi thrillers Blade Runner and Alien (as well as Gladiator, Thelma & Louise and Black Hawk Down).

In Prometheus, there is a space mission to find out if a species of aliens created us and returned to their world in another solar system.  The mission successfully finds the answer, finds the aliens and finds some terrifyingly lethal space monsters.

Don’t think too much about the premise.  The movie is a little ponderous when it drills down to the existential questions here.  We’re far better off enjoying the cool visuals and just rooting for the good guys to escape the space monsters.  And the space monsters are damn scary.  The final sequence, however,  makes the inevitable sequel all too obvious.

If you’re looking for a girl that can take a licking and keep on ticking, you can’t do any better than to cast Noomi Rapace, the star of the Swedish The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series.  As the lead scientist on the mission, Rapace needs to survive a an impressive series of perils, including an alarming self-surgical procedure.

Michael Fassbinder is even better as an android with punctilious correctness and insincere charm, which some reviewers have compared to the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Idris Elba (The Wire) is also notable because he plays the commander of the spaceship more as a tugboat captain than Captain Kirk.  Guy Pearce plays the elderly mogul who is financing the mission; distractingly, he is apparently wearing the same makeup as Dustin Hoffman did to play 121-year-old Jack Crabb in Little Big Man.

Sci fi is not one of my favorite genres and I won’t recommend it as a “must see” to a general audience, but if you’re a sci fi fan, then by all means, see Prometheus.

3D or not 3D?  If you’re gonna see Prometheus, I’d recommend forking over the premium and seeing it in 3D, especially for some scenes in which Fassbender’s android activates some floating holographic images in the alien HQ.

Men in Black 3: just as delightful in 1969

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Our favorite alien-zapping secret agents return in the delightful Men in Black 3.   We still have the yapping Will Smith paired with the Titan of Terseness, Tommy Lee Jones.  In this edition of the  sci fi comedy franchise, Smith must travel back to 1969 to save his partner and the world from a new odious and scary alien villain, Boris The Animal.  We get a Mad Men size dose of 1969, including Andy Warhol’s Factory, the Miracle Mets, the Moon Launch, some hippies and lots of skinny neckties.

The cast is all good, but the most inspired casting has to be Josh Brolin as the young Tommy Lee Jones.  Michael Stuhlbarg, last seen as the uptight depressive in A Serious Man, here almost steals the movie as a blissed out but hyper-perceptive alien.  Michael Chernus, so good in a serious role in Vera Farmiga’s Higher Ground, is excellent as a shady geek. Bill Hader is very funny as Warhol.

I’m usually not one for franchise movies, but MIB3 is gloriously entertaining.  I saw it in 2D – you should, too.  As with most movies, the 3D premium isn’t worth it.

In the trailer (but not the movie) we briefly glimpse the torch-wielding Columbia Picture lady wearing MIB shades – very cool.

Least Convincing Movie Monsters

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The Killer Shrews: This is a dog in a fright mask.

Given the Cowboys & Aliens hubbub and my post on 1994’s Oblivion, I’ve been thinking about phony looking movie monsters.  So here’s my list of the Least Convincing Movie Monsters.  These monsters are so bad that Godzilla doesn’t even make this list.  And the dogs wearing fright masks in The Killer Shrews (above) are only #3.  Enjoy.

The first cowboys & aliens movie

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I really enjoyed the first cowboys and & aliens movie, the sci fi spoof 1994 Oblivion, now available on DVD.    It is set in the year 3030 on the planet Oblivion, which strongly resembles a frontier town from a spaghetti Western, peppered with the occasional cyborg, ray gun and ATM machine.

Oblivion is intentionally campy, has a silly plot and lots of tongue-in-cheek dialogue.  The scene where the funeral is interrupted by the weekly bingo game upstairs is especially funny.  The cast seems to be having lots of fun with the material. Musetta Vander as the  rawhide whip-wielding dominatrix Lash and Carel Struycken as the death-forboding undertaker Gaunt are especially over-the-top good.  In addition, Julie Newmar plays a cougarish saloon proprietor, and Star Trek’s George Takei is the Jim Beam-swilling town doc.  Amazingly, Oblivion rated a 1996 sequel, Oblivion 2:  Backlash, in which most of the cast returned.

I haven’t yet seen the $100 million summer blockbuster Cowboys & Aliens, which opens this weekend.  Cowboys & Aliens is set on the planet Earth, where Daniel Craig, playing a Clint Eastwoodesque Man With No Name, awakes with his memory erased by aliens and a futuristic bracelet.  Harrison Ford’s torch-bearing mounted lynch mob is interrupted by laser attack from an alien spaceship.  Saloon gal Olivia Wilde (House, The OC) is pulled into the sky by alien forces.  It takes itself much more seriously than does Oblivion, and I only hope that it’s half as entertaining as Oblivion.