With pop-culture references a go-go, A Trick Of Light is a surprising read that surfs the conventions of genre yet never wipes out.
Tag: scifi
Forward
Amazon’s Forward collection offers short stories of AI dominance, cloning, genetic fertility, and, why not, good-old planetary doom
Cold Storage
Cold Storage is part sci-fi thriller, part conspiracy cover-up, and all-out b-movie cheese.
The Warehouse
Rob Hart taps into the zeitgeist with The Warehouse, but is more thriller than notice
Cage’s Mandy, not Manilow’s
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…
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…
