The 2018 Panos Cosmatos film Mandy could very well have been released in 1978, directed by John Carpenter or Tobe Hooper, and, aside from Nic Cage’s Academy Award-winning visage, no one would be the wiser. Featuring a crazed cult, motorcycle-riding demons, over-saturated film stock, and, well, Nic Cage wielding a custom axe, Mandy is a…
Tag: scifi
Extinction
The alien invasion plot is an industry standard that is now as boilerplate as Batman’s origin and Netflix’s Extinction upholds this formula in a by-the-books thriller yet manages to present the film in a slick and entertaining way. Yes, there is a plot twist deep in the third act that is satisfying and, believe it or not,…
ANON: SciFi blast for cliché crime caper
The future can be scary, and that’s exactly how writer/director Andrew Niccol (Gattica) likes it. Niccol’s latest, Anon, directly distributed by Netflix, takes social media privacy scares and concerns and makes those issues a substantial threat as every event every single person sees is stored forever in an Orwell-ian cloud. Anon presents an original, albeit…
What’s A MATTER?!
Dark Matter is wonderfully weird and borderline depressing. Drawing on elements of s/f and everyday happenstance of the comic book realm, Blake Crouch crafts a fun tale of a man on the run whose sole desire to simply get home to his wife and son. Be careful what you wish for, eh? In fact, Crouch’s…
The Adjustment Bureau
A mash of sci-fi, fantasy and rom-com, The Adjustment Bureau works quite well as a suspend-your-disbelief narrative goes, mostly due to the believable chemistry between likable stars Matt Damon, a senator-to-be, and Emily Blunt, an NYC dancer. Writer/director George Nolfi chose not to go easy with his first-time outing and adapted a Philip K. Dick…
Welcome to Lunar Industries
Science Fiction used to be just that: fictional storytelling with an underlying, relatable theme set in a fantastic environment pseudo-grounded within the realities of science. Authors like Heinlein, Bradbury, and Dick understood and thrived in this medium, setting the tempo for the imaginations of the next generation; their film adaptations, for the most part, were…
