space
Life certainly nails its big moments, but it’s frustrating that what could have been a memorable classic handicapped itself with hapless characters.
Despite initial scepticism, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is a vividly presented and brilliantly executed standalone Star Wars film.
THE SPACE BETWEEN US struggles to find its original voice amidst the plethora of recent space exploration movies.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a flawed yet misunderstood film, imbuing some of the best that the franchise has ever had to offer.
Passengers is a dull sci-fi that is neither saved by its star power nor by the potential of the story which it initially seems to convey.
In Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris, Kris Kelvin (played by Donatas Banionis) journeys to a space station on the sentient planet Solaris in order to investigate whether the planet is still useful for scientific inquiry. Critics at the time considered Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film as the Soviet answer to Stanley Kubrick’s famed 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The cyclical nature of contemporary pop culture means that for every blockbuster released, a backlash is likely imminent over the course of its opening weekend, no matter how good the reviews. JJ Abrams knows better than anybody about the perils of falling victim to the hype train; despite critical and commercial success, mere weeks after its opening his Star Trek sequel Into Darkness was voted the worst Trek film of all time at a leading Trekkie convention. Taking fanboy rage on the chin, he has decided to follow this minor outrage by taking the directorial reigns of the new instalment of one of the most beloved franchises at all time, as audiences worldwide wait with bated breath to see whether or not he has (to use a common expression) “raped their childhood”.
Some of the very best films are those that are immersive experiences. You immediately know after leaving the theater that you have witnessed something special, and for anyone to even suggest otherwise just seems inarguably wrong. The Martian is one of the few films that I have seen this year that has left such an impact.
There is a common misconception that documentaries are somehow easier than traditional narrative film making, that all it constitutes is finding something interesting and pointing your camera in that direction. But that is precisely because that is how they are intended to appear. A great documentary is like a great matte painting in a Hollywood feature; it looks completely real and thus its artifice is practically invisible, but it was actually created with extraordinary craft and is the result of a series of artistic choices.
In some ways, the cinema is the closest thing we can experience to travelling through time – certainly the closest of any art form. In the dark room of a movie theatre, an audience can be transported to the distant past or spectacular visions of the future, and even in watching films from the 30’s and 40’s we can look at the lives and faces of people who died many years ago. Time travel became popular as a literary device with HG Well’s The Time Machine – published in 1895, the same year that the Lumière Brothers made Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.
There’s no arguing that if you have even a mild interest in film, you’ve likely heard of Stanley Kubrick. You’ve probably even seen at least one of his films, or, barring that, maybe some of the more famous clips (especially if you’re a film student). So my approach to this “Beginner’s Guide” is to recommend that you forget all that.
Back in January Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9, Elysium and the forthcoming Chappie posted online some intriguing fan/concept art for an as-yet-announced project related to the now floundering Alien franchise. The art featured some very intriguing illustrations of not only Sigourney Weaver as an almost fully evolved Ripley/xenomorph hybrid but also Michael Biehn as a battle scarred Corporal Hicks. At the time nobody knew what they were for:
Let’s say Star Wars meets The Matrix. What comes to mind? An all-out intergalactic battle?
As this year’s Oscars draw ever closer, one was drawn to re-watching the awards contenders from last year. Some still stand up: Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is ever bit as wonderful as when I first saw it.
In honour of NASA’s successful Orion launch, it’s only fitting that we should take a look at Wanderers, a short speculative science fiction film by Erik Wernquist. Pioneers. Explorers.