by ·Comments Off on Mickey 17 (2025, Bong Joon-ho)

Pattison is an idiot, fleeing into space pursued by loansharks after he and Steven Yeun lost a fortune on their macaroon business. Turns out he signed up to be an expendable, now he’s always being sent on deadly missions then getting resurrected in the 3D printer. Movie starts in the middle, when 17 has fallen in a hole surrounded by beasties who rescue him instead of eating him like everyone assumed, while they go ahead and print up 18. Now his girlfriend Naomi Ackie (a friendly interloper in Education) enjoys having two Mickeys while rat spy Kai (Jane from The Empire, a specialist in awkward uneven scifi movies) wants to turn them in.

Bong remains the least subtle dude around, as the ship is led by Trumpian Hulk Ruffalo and Toni Collette, shithead politicians who aim to create “a pure white planet full of superior people.” 17’s narration is funny at least, but it’s no Starship Troopers.

by ·Comments Off on Galaxy Quest (1999, Dean Parisot)

Never seen this before! Rock monster digi-fx are bad, the muppet fx and the acting all hold up, especially V-Mars’ dad as the lead alien. I liked that Justin Long’s hopeless sci-fi nerd is named Brandon, and enjoyed seeing Sigourney’s curse word get blatantly PG-13’d. Twenty years later Parisot made the very good Bill & Ted 3.

by ·Comments Off on The Empire (2024, Bruno Dumont)

The mythology of warring intergalactic races (the evil Zeroes and noble Ones) battling for control of the hearts of humanity is cheesy even for Dumont, but his French countryside weirdos-getting-exponentially-weirder schtick is on point. Both sides are pretty ramshackle, the antichrist kid Freddy is pretty easily kidnapped then re-kidnapped. If you follow the characters and story, it’s all deflated and lame – the long pauses and awkwardness and mismatched performances are the whole show. The space forces collide, forming a black hole over Earth which annihilates all of them and the police car belonging to Team Quinquin – Carpentier gets all the dialogue, the Captain now too twitchy to handle anything else. Elsewhere, the cellphone demon was in the latest Three Musketeers reboot, angel Jane in the latest Count of Monte Cristo.

by ·Comments Off on Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986, Piotr Szulkin)

Unflappable prisoner is sent from one horrid planet to another, his mission to plant a flag claiming the new world for humanity. But this place has received “heroes” from space before and has a ritual for dealing with them: they’re given booze and prostitutes, encouraged to commit crimes, then sentenced to sitting on long sharp pole. At his first stop, hero Daniel Olbrychski (great, of The Tin Drum) is attacked by a severed arm and served fingers instead of hotdogs, then his preferred girl has been replaced by an annoying new one, so he plots to find his original girl and exit this shitty planet. Inspirational, I’ll have to check out more by Szulkin. Having just rewatched Crimes of the Future, I appreciate when a sci-fi movie makes do with a minimum of shabby locations. Everyone here has also been in Wajda and Kieslowski movies, particularly the hero’s handler Jerzy Stuhr.

by ·Comments Off on The Science of Fictions (2019, Yosep Anggi Noen)

Some poor guy “went to a forbidden place” involving a fake moon lander and got his tongue cut out, now thinks about outer space and moves in slow-motion (perfect scenario for a severe 4:3 b/w mastershot festfilm). Soon as he gets back his mom dies, but Siman works hard despite his speed condition, makes a small fortune, apparently travels through time (and through color + aspect ratios; I can’t tell when different scenes are set), and builds himself a spaceship-shaped house out of broken appliances.

The director’s latest is a D.O.A.-style mystery that nobody is watching on netflix. Lead guy starred in Noen’s Solo, Solitude, a couple other actors were in Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash. Later that night I unpaused the first episode of MST3K season 4 on my laptop, and the first line I heard was “poor bastard thinks he’s a spaceman,” which is proof that I’m living in a simulation.

by ·Comments Off on The Right Stuff (1983, Philip Kaufman)

Watched because I thought this might illuminate Ferrari, but it would’ve paired better with Oppenheimer – long entertaining stories about historical situations where Americans lived in makeshift communities in the desert trying to achieve great feats. It’s a bunch of tough guys and their suffering wives until Harry Shearer and Jeff Goldblum show up as a comic team – the addition of humor and absurdity helps immensely. Good work by Jordan Belson on the space visuals.

I wonder if this winning best picture led directly to Top Gun:

Oppenheimer needed them:

by ·Comments Off on Event Horizon (1997, Paul WS Anderson)

My first time rewatching since becoming a Paul WS Anderson convert from the Resident Evil series and Monster Hunter. Funny to learn that the studio cut a half-hour of footage, then tried to restore it for the DVD release but couldn’t find it. Also very nice to see Sam Neill going mad in space so soon after I rewatched In the Mouth of Madness.

Before the hellship Solaris-es Neill into blinding himself and murdering the crew, he was the ship’s designer, brought along on a rescue mission by Captain Laurence Fishburne. Their fellow astronauts have all done other sci-fi/horror work: Quinlan in the Joe Dante segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, Richardson as the mom of Color Out of Space, Jones in the bad 2014 Godzilla, Noseworthy in Bruce Willis virtual thriller Surrogates, Pertwee in Doomsday and Dog Soldiers, and Isaacs in A Cure for Wellness and Don’t.

by ·Comments Off on Fortress & Space Truckers (Stuart Gordon)

Fortress (1992)

A couple of movies I haven’t seen in many years… Fortress being the only Gordon film I saw in theaters, before I knew him as the Re-Animator guy. It sets up a decently convincing sci-fi dystopia, but no actors are “good” in this, not even Jeffrey Combs. Anyway it’s not taking itself too seriously so why should we?

The gang:

That 70s Dad runs a private prison where even an “unauthorized thought process” will get your guts electroshocked (“intestinated”) – after RoboCop, Kurtwood Smith was typecast as an evil boss in cyborg dystopias. Ex-soldier Christopher Lambert and his illegally pregnant hotwife arrive as prisoners, and while T7D macks on the wife (Loryn Locklin of Wes Craven’s Night Visions), Lambert teams up with his cellmates to escape – including timid nerd Combs, Lincoln Kilpatrick of The Omega Man, and Clifton Collins Jr. of Guillermo Del Toro’s Robot Jox remake Pacific Rim. Lambert has to fight a giant psycho (Vernon Wells of Mad Max 2 and some Joe Dante films)… Combs is killed while installing a virus into the mainframe by typing “install virus.exe” or something, which reminds me, isn’t there a new version of Blackhat coming out?

Unauthorized thought process:

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Space Truckers (1996)

An even sillier movie – I don’t think sci-fi action plays to Gordon’s strengths – but Dennis Hopper is a huge upgrade over Lambert, bringing the charm he omitted from Witch Hunt. He’s a Millennium Falcon/Firefly-style independent space trucker, beefing with George Wendt over shipment prices, then accidentally gets involved in a plot to take over the world.

Our heroes in a porta-potty:

Hopper and hired hand Stephen Dorff take a load of killer robots, then get stuck in space while lusting after the same girl (Hopper’s Witch Hunt costar Debi Mazar), then attacked by their own murderbot cargo. Nice cynical ending, the guy plotting a hostile planetary takeover (Shane Rimmer, best known from Thunderbirds) is now President of Earth – the super-soldiers were just a backup plan should he not get elected. But his plan to eliminate witnesses backfires, and our guys flee after blowing up the president. I’d take a sequel, but this straight-to-video widescreen movie was never gonna get one.

Space pirates:

by ·Comments Off on On the Silver Globe (1988, Andrzej Zulawski)

Kind of a fully mad Solaris meets The New World, written by someone in love with death monologues. Astounding costume design, though after a while you realize all the locations are the same couple beaches and caves, and that the director’s opening statement about this movie being canceled during production wasn’t bullshit.

First-person camera from astronauts’ shoulder-mounted webcams, and people being really intense about philosophy. A long, delirious dying rant isn’t intense enough for Zulawski, who jumpcuts the speech, cutting out pauses and gaps between words. The astronauts find a new planet, their kids beget more kids and invent religion, then Astronaut Jesus Marek arrives from their home planet and shakes things up. In the meantime, humanity has become enslaved by the psychic sherm creatures. Marek tries talking with the sherms, whines about the earth woman who left him, then he finally falls for a girl on this planet and stops whining as much.

Not looking up all these characters and actors (or even recounting the rest of the plot), but I assume some of these people are returning from The Devil, just from their ranting endurance. Feels at times like a massive Dune-scale epic, then you realize you’ve spent the last half hour watching people in cool costumes rant on the seashore.

Never model yourself after Jesus, or you know what might happen: