There are three types of movies out there (at least for the purpose of this blog).
The first type (let’s call it mass-market consensus, which is a movie everyone in the bell segment of this particular curve can agree is pretty, more or less okay and buyable) is fairly simple: as the spectacle grows laterally across our culture – after it crosses several dimensions of difference and becomes an international thing – the film transcends the word-of-mouth market paradigm and gets fetishized, franchised, and ends up sticking in the annals of pop-culture for eternity, thus affecting our culture, and even changing the way movies are made from then on. These are movies like Avatar, Batman, Star Wars, Star Trek, Matrix, Indiana Jones, Jaws, Gladiator, Jurassic Park, Terminator 2 and Aliens. You've seen these flicks featured on most Best Films of Whathaveyou lists countless times. These are the greatest movies in their genre (or any genre) that appeal to the largest market chunk, the greatest movies EVER MADE, the crème de medium, the trope makers, the genre benders. . .
The point is, everyone has heard of these flicks. They make it onto everybody’s best film lists, they age well, and every time you happen across them on TV, you’ll stop and watch for a bit. Good flicks that are attached to your very identity, childhood, friendships, templates for masculinity, femininity and adventure. . .
The second type is just as simple. These are the movies you love, that everybody else hates. The anti-blockbuster. The movies that only appeal to the smallest few, that are only significant to a tiny substructure of the market. You hardly ever see them on any lists, and they generally rate low on the various observational report surveys like Rotten Tomatoes, Amazon and Metacritic. But you love these movies, even if you don’t have any delusions about their nature. They’re bad and shoddily produced, horribly written with terrible acting, but none of that matters within the context of your enjoyment. These are the Garbage Pail Kids, Earnest Goes to Jail, Howard the Duck, Street Fighter, and… well, most Van Damme movies. They’re awesome, but not in any way that you could justifiably articulate in public: ego/social-pride entanglements and all that.
The third type is a bit complicated. These are pretty good movies that, for whatever reason – be it poor marketing, shitty release date, low budget or a small box-office window – never seem to catch on. They’re not bad, but the deterministic threads of fate have unfolded in a way that yielded the least amount of public awareness, which pushed them to the wayside of more sensationalized, mass-market blockbusters from the first category. They missed that blockbuster train, but never caught on enough to develop a cult following like the second category, so they languish in that weird margin of half forgotten intellectual properties, waiting for their chance to one day be refurbished into a television series.
These are the movies I’m more interested in, because they’re often the most rewarding to find. Good flicks that most people have probably never heard about, that deserve some reinvigoration. So, in honor of that margin of unkowability, here’s my BEST OF list: The Nine Best Science Fiction Movies You’ve Probably Never Seen, listed in order of awareness-probability, from less to more:
No Escape (1994)
No Escape happened in 1994, when Ray Liotta was still experiencing the upswing of his Goodfellas success, before the dark Revolver and In the Name of the King days. NE was an opportunity for Liotta to break out of his lowlife gangster typecast and become an A-listing action star, and he didn't do too bad of a job.
NE was adapted from a novel called THE PENAL COLONY, by Richard Herley. It’s essentially a futuristic prison movie about a privatized and unregulated system that leaves prisoners on an island in the middle of nowhere to die. The culture of the island splits into two camps that both contend with the forces of scarcity: the tournament, cannibalistic side called The Outsiders, and the pair-bonding, reciprocally altruistic side called The Insiders. The Outsider camp is run by a steely eyed Marek, played by an excellent Stuart Wilson, while the Insiders are led by Lance Henriksen’s Gandhi-like character called The Father. Naturally, these camps battle each other for access to resources and control of the island, and remain largely ignored by the prison administration as long as they don’t try to escape. Think LORD OF THE FLIES mixed with equal parts ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.
Liotta plays Robbins, an ex-marine who’s sentenced to this island-prison after assassinating his commanding officer. Naturally, Robbins is caught in the middle of camp conflict, which kicks the plot into motion. Secrets are learned, hijinks ensue, heads roll. . . it’s a good time. There are more highbrow themes at play here (womanless and homo-androgynous society, the dangers of privatized penal systems, nihilism, fervent nationalism, universal absolutism, constitutional objectivism, the morality of following unethical orders) but it’s subtle and not all up in your grill about it. It’s great action, above average dialogue (some really good lines) clearly defined characters, above average acting, and just plain fun. It’s a good flick that went generally unnoticed during all of the FOREST GUMP and PULP FICTION excitement.
Carriers (2007)
This was a poorly communicated idea, commercially. I actually thought that it was another zombie apocalypse movie. There are no zombies in this one, for better or worse. I mean, it’s thematically the same thing, but it accomplishes what most zombie flicks try to communicate without zombies. When you think about it, the zombies in most zombie flicks aren't detrimental to what the stories are trying to convey – zombies are just one method for telling that particular narrative – because the idea is usually small-group isolation and survival. You can essentially substitute the zombie trope with anything that forces the characters into isolation, where they have to learn to work together in order to survive.
CARRIERS is basically a viral pandemic flick starring Chris Pine (Captain Kirk) and that SHHMMMOOKIN’ hot chick from COYOTE UGLY. It’s really, really well acted. Since there is no threat of brainless cannibals, there’s significantly less action. Story follows a group of young folks on a road-trip after a nameless plague wipes out civilization. Things get a bit intense when the group comes across other people – and since the virus is extremely hard to detect in its early stages, it’s impossible to know who’s infected and who isn't. The cadre of travelers survive by a very simple premise: the infected are already dead.
They travel across the countryside in a moving quarantine – rubber gloves, medical masks and buckets of bleach – avoiding others as much as they can. Their destination? A childhood beach resort, where they can wait out the desolation in peace.
The film is a thought piece. The idea is whether or not our ethics and morality can survive under world-ending circumstances. Most of these zombie slash end-of-the-world flicks see humanity -- human decency and society -- as mutually exclusive. If one collapses, the other soon follows. Carriers handles this theme a bit differently than most zompoc flicks, which usually tend to fetishize the rise of fascism, brutality, marauders, bandits, and cutthroat-destruction in the wake of a societal collapse. What Carriers says is probably a bit darker – ironic, considering its tone and low body count – which is the idea that, in the direst of situations, the decision between indifference and sticking to our moral standards is the same thing as deciding between life and death. Indifference means life to most people, and staying true to our ethical structure of morals usually means death, which is pretty horrifying when you think about it. The Samurai had a similar way of thinking about honor. . .
It’s sad. But good.
Primer (2004)
Primer is a time-travel story, and arguably one of the most accurate in terms of functionally demonstrable science. It’s about a couple of engineers who are trying to build a device that lowers an object’s mass, which unforeseeably creates a mechanism that allows things to travel back in time. The movie was written and directed by an actual engineer, Shane Curruth – which is probably why it’s so eerily plausible. The man has science on his side, after all (interesting side-note, not only did Curruth star in Primer, he was also one of the main consultants for last year’s Loopers, which was another phenomenal time travel story starring JGL and The BWILLIS). Primer had an exceptionally low-budget (cost of production was $7,000, which sounds insane in the wake of this current $200 million dollar production budget trend) and the acting is… okay. But that’s not the point. The point is that this is a puzzle – and a satisfying puzzle at that, with many layers. It almost watches like a documentary – the editing and cinematography are really grainy and lacking flare – which works well enough, and doesn't distract from story. It might be slow for some, but I personally like my sci-fi in two flavors: slow or fast. Slow, heady, intense and dramatic sci-fi like 2001 space odyssey, Alien, and Solaris – all good – and fast sci-fi like Fifth Element, Predator and T2.
Primer is of the former.
Big concepts aplenty, here - like the causality of things that have yet to happen doubling back to our present to affect paradoxes in the future, triggering the collapse of temporal causalities into nonexistence, which threaten the fabric of reality and. . . well, fun stuff that merit several viewings. If you like your mind blown, you’ll like this.
Strange Days (1995)
There was a brief period in the nineties when the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction had a pretty decent run – there was… Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic (terrible) Hackers. . . I think it culminated with The Matrix, which ended up killing the genre simply because it couldn't be topped (not even by its sequels, apparently). There were more cyberpunk flicks (mostly anime), but these received the most attention. Strange Days came about during the initial wave of millennium-paranoia, which serves nicely as an ominous backdrop for the story: the idea was that the world as we knew it was, you know, going to end at the stroke of midnight, Jan 1 2000. We recently experienced a similar yet brief acceleration in this market during the 2012 Mayan calendar crap.
Under its surface, Strange Days is actually a pretty thought provoking film with some serious weight behind it – directed by Kathryn Bigelow (the woman who made Hurt Locker) written and produced by James Cameron. Strange Days has a cool narrative device called SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) that allows users to record their experiences and sell them to others who can then live vicariously through their memories.
The plot is basic detective noire/thriller set in the near future (well, now our past). An ex-cop named Nero – played by Ralph Fiennes – is targeted by a serial killer who uses the SQUID technology while dispatching his victims. Said psychopath taunts Nero with macabre recordings of his nasty expressions until a pretty satisfying climax. Angela Basset is in this too, and she does a lot of spin-kicks – spin-kicks the crap out of an extremely androgynous chick/dude with dreadlocks, if I remember right. SD deals with virtual reality themes and immersion, the blending of biology and technology, addiction, isolation, celebrity, police brutality and racism.
It was a good sci-fi movie that went overlooked by many. Check it out.
Moon (2009)
This movie is all Sam Rockwell (directed by a guy named David Jones, who is David Bowie’s son, I guess). I’ve heard naysayers dismiss Moon as a 2001 Space Odyssey rip-off, but it’s not. A lot of us missed this one, unfortunately. I loved the trailer and thought that it set a decent hook, but I can see how people could have gotten bored with it. I think the whole claustrophobic, single character narrative with a HAL 2000-like robot (whose name is Gerty in the film, voiced by Kevin Spacey) gave people the impression that it wasn't anything new or worth watching – it really isn't new per se – doesn't break any new ground – but it hearkens back to a time when science fiction was taken seriously, when it was all about the performance, which is a refreshing shift from all the hyper overdriven robot-ninja stuff that Michael Bay enjoys making (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It’s a lot of fun, and even more fun watching Rockwell at the top of his game.
Moon is about a miner named Sam Bell who’s getting ready to return home after a three year shift rotation harvesting a mysterious clean-energy phlebotinum on the moon. Weird shit starts to go down after he loses satellite contact with Earth and equipment begins to malfunction. Bell’s sanity is called into question when he starts seeing clones of himself running around doing stuff. It’s an awesome movie, and obviously written out of love of science-fiction with Hitchcockian themes. Moon is all about feeling isolated and thinking about home, and about what happens to the human mind after years of being alone and feeling claustrophobic.
Try this one out, you’ll love it.
A Scanner Darkly (2006)
This movie is one of a kind, done in a cell-shading animation style called Interpolated Rotoscoping, which is a style I've only seen used here. It’s a dystopian thriller with arcing themes of isolation, social-identity, authoritarianism, deception and addiction, but it has its comedic moments. Starring Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr, the future of ASC is under the constant invigilation of an ultra-invasive big-brother type network of surveillance, with the purpose of seemingly identifying the traffic of a new drug called Death, which suffers its users degrading brain function while simultaneously giving feelings of pleasure and euphoria. Keanu’s character – Bob Archer – is an undercover narcotics investigator who becomes addicted.
This is another adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel (that dude’s brain is like gold, by the way, pumping out more marketable IP than Jay Z, George Lucas and James Cameron combined). Seriously, more sci-fi movies are made out of his books than any other author (apart from, you know, Stephen King and Shakespeare): Minority Report, Total Recall, Blade Runner, The Adjustment Bureau, among others. I guess A Scanner Darkly is an allegory for Philip K Dick’s drug days or something, but this is a digression. From Richard Linklater, the same guy who directed School of Rock, so he’s obviously going to capture the funny stuff, but it still remains tragic.
Most people I talk to haven’t seen this one, which is a shame. Great movie.
Sunshine (2007)
This is one of my absolute favorite movies OF ALL TIME – definitely in my top five. Sure, the third act is sort of bogged down by a shitty slasher catalyst, and sure, the science isn't entirely accurate – but the first two acts, combined with perfect direction and amazing performances by an excellent cast – and an awesome climax – completely overshadow any of this film’s fallibilities, not to mention that it’s breathtakingly beautiful.
Set in the year 2057 – a Q-Ball (A large blob of bosonic particles that resist fission and evaporation) collides with our sun, preventing it from fusing lighter elements into heavier ones, which causes it to die out or something. The point is that the sun is dying, and a multi-cultural collection of astronauts is sent to reignite the fusion process within its core with a stellar bomb roughly the size of Manhattan.
It’s a space-movie about a crew of scientists on a suicide mission to save the Earth. As they get closer to delivering their payload, stress builds and group-dynamics unfold in exciting and interesting ways . The themes are pretty straight forward: self-sacrifice, the indomitable human spirit, the majesty of nature and the existence of God.
In this editor’s humble opinion, Sunshine is one the best unknown movies in the past decade. If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself the favor…
Children of Men (2006)
I don’t know if the things I look for in movies are the right things to look for? I don’t know if what I value in a story can even be measured by the same standards that professional critics have, I just know what I like. And I really like movies that create an exigent need for their resolution (in a good way), that can pull me into what’s happening on screen on an emotional level. Complete immersion, is what I’m going for, the next best thing to a book for escapism: those moments when reality sort of blends into undifferentiated experience, and you’re there, and it’s real, and nothing else matters. There are two scenes in Children of Men that are so complex, I can’t even begin to fathom the level of detail, choreography, blocking and planning necessary for pulling them off – some of the best seamless, single shot sequences I've ever seen: the car ambush, and the urban battle during the film’s climax. I’m drawn in every time, and the world just melts away, and I’m rapt.
Children of Men is another dystopian vision, which handles the apocalypse a bit differently. Imagine a future in which regulator sequences of our genetic code shut off reproduction. Women stop becoming pregnant, and society crumbles into a hopeless pile of heartache. I mean, things keep working – people still go through the motions – but it’s like everyone is dead inside.
Enter the first pregnant woman in twenty years, along with the plot catalyst. Starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Chiwetel Ejiofor, Children of Men is probably one of the most tragically ignored movies of all time. Of ALL TIME. I’m laying the melodrama on a little thick you say? All right, I’ll stop.
The situation is that Mr. Owen’s character happens along a complex web of political intrigue, as an Underground Weathermen sort of movement endeavors to use said pregnant woman as a tool for their agenda, which is basically to snub the fascist, isolationist English regime that's desperately trying to control an influx of refugees from all over the place, since it’s the only government left standing.
My wife and I saw this movie when it came out, thinking it was going to be huge – nope. Crickets. I understand it’s gathered some semblance of a cult following since its box-office flop, but if you haven’t seen this move, you have to. You. Just. Have to.
Dredd (2012)
Nobody saw this movie. You want to know why? 1995 Judge Dredd, is why. Look people, you have to research your movies the same way money-market managers pick stocks. No time to research movies? NO EXCUSE! The more we go see the good ones in the theaters, the more production companies will make good movies. Granted, the stench of Sylvester Stallone’s version still lingers, but you have to be a meteorologist with this shit – this movie was pinging promising – promising – alert signals that indicated it was going to be effin’ amazing: Alex Garland wrote the script, Peter Travis was slated to direct, filmed on location in Johannesburg, and Karl Urban as the lead (give him a break, he’s a good actor). And the dude who wrote the comic book was going to be involved with the film’s production this time (his input was not allowed in the craptastic 1995 crapfest). O ye, of little faith. . . I KNEW THIS WAS GOING TO BE AWESOME. But it flopped, people were scared, I understand. No hard feelings.
Dredd was pretty straight forward: two Judges (future police officers vested with the power to sentence criminals on the spot, even to death) are trapped inside of a building controlled by a drug-lord named Mama (played by the very talented Lena Headey) and, naturally, in classic comic book fashion, they have to shoot their way out. There’s no subplot, no camp, awesome soundtrack. Character motivation is cut and dry. It’s just a good old fashioned action flick. I know that hyperviolence doesn't sit well on the palate of some, but it’s good. Trust me.
Thanks for reading folks – LET’S SEE YOUR LISTS! DON’T BE SHY!
The first type (let’s call it mass-market consensus, which is a movie everyone in the bell segment of this particular curve can agree is pretty, more or less okay and buyable) is fairly simple: as the spectacle grows laterally across our culture – after it crosses several dimensions of difference and becomes an international thing – the film transcends the word-of-mouth market paradigm and gets fetishized, franchised, and ends up sticking in the annals of pop-culture for eternity, thus affecting our culture, and even changing the way movies are made from then on. These are movies like Avatar, Batman, Star Wars, Star Trek, Matrix, Indiana Jones, Jaws, Gladiator, Jurassic Park, Terminator 2 and Aliens. You've seen these flicks featured on most Best Films of Whathaveyou lists countless times. These are the greatest movies in their genre (or any genre) that appeal to the largest market chunk, the greatest movies EVER MADE, the crème de medium, the trope makers, the genre benders. . .
The point is, everyone has heard of these flicks. They make it onto everybody’s best film lists, they age well, and every time you happen across them on TV, you’ll stop and watch for a bit. Good flicks that are attached to your very identity, childhood, friendships, templates for masculinity, femininity and adventure. . .
The second type is just as simple. These are the movies you love, that everybody else hates. The anti-blockbuster. The movies that only appeal to the smallest few, that are only significant to a tiny substructure of the market. You hardly ever see them on any lists, and they generally rate low on the various observational report surveys like Rotten Tomatoes, Amazon and Metacritic. But you love these movies, even if you don’t have any delusions about their nature. They’re bad and shoddily produced, horribly written with terrible acting, but none of that matters within the context of your enjoyment. These are the Garbage Pail Kids, Earnest Goes to Jail, Howard the Duck, Street Fighter, and… well, most Van Damme movies. They’re awesome, but not in any way that you could justifiably articulate in public: ego/social-pride entanglements and all that.
The third type is a bit complicated. These are pretty good movies that, for whatever reason – be it poor marketing, shitty release date, low budget or a small box-office window – never seem to catch on. They’re not bad, but the deterministic threads of fate have unfolded in a way that yielded the least amount of public awareness, which pushed them to the wayside of more sensationalized, mass-market blockbusters from the first category. They missed that blockbuster train, but never caught on enough to develop a cult following like the second category, so they languish in that weird margin of half forgotten intellectual properties, waiting for their chance to one day be refurbished into a television series.
These are the movies I’m more interested in, because they’re often the most rewarding to find. Good flicks that most people have probably never heard about, that deserve some reinvigoration. So, in honor of that margin of unkowability, here’s my BEST OF list: The Nine Best Science Fiction Movies You’ve Probably Never Seen, listed in order of awareness-probability, from less to more:
No Escape (1994)
No Escape happened in 1994, when Ray Liotta was still experiencing the upswing of his Goodfellas success, before the dark Revolver and In the Name of the King days. NE was an opportunity for Liotta to break out of his lowlife gangster typecast and become an A-listing action star, and he didn't do too bad of a job.
NE was adapted from a novel called THE PENAL COLONY, by Richard Herley. It’s essentially a futuristic prison movie about a privatized and unregulated system that leaves prisoners on an island in the middle of nowhere to die. The culture of the island splits into two camps that both contend with the forces of scarcity: the tournament, cannibalistic side called The Outsiders, and the pair-bonding, reciprocally altruistic side called The Insiders. The Outsider camp is run by a steely eyed Marek, played by an excellent Stuart Wilson, while the Insiders are led by Lance Henriksen’s Gandhi-like character called The Father. Naturally, these camps battle each other for access to resources and control of the island, and remain largely ignored by the prison administration as long as they don’t try to escape. Think LORD OF THE FLIES mixed with equal parts ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.
Liotta plays Robbins, an ex-marine who’s sentenced to this island-prison after assassinating his commanding officer. Naturally, Robbins is caught in the middle of camp conflict, which kicks the plot into motion. Secrets are learned, hijinks ensue, heads roll. . . it’s a good time. There are more highbrow themes at play here (womanless and homo-androgynous society, the dangers of privatized penal systems, nihilism, fervent nationalism, universal absolutism, constitutional objectivism, the morality of following unethical orders) but it’s subtle and not all up in your grill about it. It’s great action, above average dialogue (some really good lines) clearly defined characters, above average acting, and just plain fun. It’s a good flick that went generally unnoticed during all of the FOREST GUMP and PULP FICTION excitement.
Carriers (2007)
This was a poorly communicated idea, commercially. I actually thought that it was another zombie apocalypse movie. There are no zombies in this one, for better or worse. I mean, it’s thematically the same thing, but it accomplishes what most zombie flicks try to communicate without zombies. When you think about it, the zombies in most zombie flicks aren't detrimental to what the stories are trying to convey – zombies are just one method for telling that particular narrative – because the idea is usually small-group isolation and survival. You can essentially substitute the zombie trope with anything that forces the characters into isolation, where they have to learn to work together in order to survive.
CARRIERS is basically a viral pandemic flick starring Chris Pine (Captain Kirk) and that SHHMMMOOKIN’ hot chick from COYOTE UGLY. It’s really, really well acted. Since there is no threat of brainless cannibals, there’s significantly less action. Story follows a group of young folks on a road-trip after a nameless plague wipes out civilization. Things get a bit intense when the group comes across other people – and since the virus is extremely hard to detect in its early stages, it’s impossible to know who’s infected and who isn't. The cadre of travelers survive by a very simple premise: the infected are already dead.
They travel across the countryside in a moving quarantine – rubber gloves, medical masks and buckets of bleach – avoiding others as much as they can. Their destination? A childhood beach resort, where they can wait out the desolation in peace.
The film is a thought piece. The idea is whether or not our ethics and morality can survive under world-ending circumstances. Most of these zombie slash end-of-the-world flicks see humanity -- human decency and society -- as mutually exclusive. If one collapses, the other soon follows. Carriers handles this theme a bit differently than most zompoc flicks, which usually tend to fetishize the rise of fascism, brutality, marauders, bandits, and cutthroat-destruction in the wake of a societal collapse. What Carriers says is probably a bit darker – ironic, considering its tone and low body count – which is the idea that, in the direst of situations, the decision between indifference and sticking to our moral standards is the same thing as deciding between life and death. Indifference means life to most people, and staying true to our ethical structure of morals usually means death, which is pretty horrifying when you think about it. The Samurai had a similar way of thinking about honor. . .
It’s sad. But good.
Primer (2004)
Primer is a time-travel story, and arguably one of the most accurate in terms of functionally demonstrable science. It’s about a couple of engineers who are trying to build a device that lowers an object’s mass, which unforeseeably creates a mechanism that allows things to travel back in time. The movie was written and directed by an actual engineer, Shane Curruth – which is probably why it’s so eerily plausible. The man has science on his side, after all (interesting side-note, not only did Curruth star in Primer, he was also one of the main consultants for last year’s Loopers, which was another phenomenal time travel story starring JGL and The BWILLIS). Primer had an exceptionally low-budget (cost of production was $7,000, which sounds insane in the wake of this current $200 million dollar production budget trend) and the acting is… okay. But that’s not the point. The point is that this is a puzzle – and a satisfying puzzle at that, with many layers. It almost watches like a documentary – the editing and cinematography are really grainy and lacking flare – which works well enough, and doesn't distract from story. It might be slow for some, but I personally like my sci-fi in two flavors: slow or fast. Slow, heady, intense and dramatic sci-fi like 2001 space odyssey, Alien, and Solaris – all good – and fast sci-fi like Fifth Element, Predator and T2.
Primer is of the former.
Big concepts aplenty, here - like the causality of things that have yet to happen doubling back to our present to affect paradoxes in the future, triggering the collapse of temporal causalities into nonexistence, which threaten the fabric of reality and. . . well, fun stuff that merit several viewings. If you like your mind blown, you’ll like this.
Strange Days (1995)
There was a brief period in the nineties when the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction had a pretty decent run – there was… Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic (terrible) Hackers. . . I think it culminated with The Matrix, which ended up killing the genre simply because it couldn't be topped (not even by its sequels, apparently). There were more cyberpunk flicks (mostly anime), but these received the most attention. Strange Days came about during the initial wave of millennium-paranoia, which serves nicely as an ominous backdrop for the story: the idea was that the world as we knew it was, you know, going to end at the stroke of midnight, Jan 1 2000. We recently experienced a similar yet brief acceleration in this market during the 2012 Mayan calendar crap.
Under its surface, Strange Days is actually a pretty thought provoking film with some serious weight behind it – directed by Kathryn Bigelow (the woman who made Hurt Locker) written and produced by James Cameron. Strange Days has a cool narrative device called SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) that allows users to record their experiences and sell them to others who can then live vicariously through their memories.
The plot is basic detective noire/thriller set in the near future (well, now our past). An ex-cop named Nero – played by Ralph Fiennes – is targeted by a serial killer who uses the SQUID technology while dispatching his victims. Said psychopath taunts Nero with macabre recordings of his nasty expressions until a pretty satisfying climax. Angela Basset is in this too, and she does a lot of spin-kicks – spin-kicks the crap out of an extremely androgynous chick/dude with dreadlocks, if I remember right. SD deals with virtual reality themes and immersion, the blending of biology and technology, addiction, isolation, celebrity, police brutality and racism.
It was a good sci-fi movie that went overlooked by many. Check it out.
Moon (2009)
This movie is all Sam Rockwell (directed by a guy named David Jones, who is David Bowie’s son, I guess). I’ve heard naysayers dismiss Moon as a 2001 Space Odyssey rip-off, but it’s not. A lot of us missed this one, unfortunately. I loved the trailer and thought that it set a decent hook, but I can see how people could have gotten bored with it. I think the whole claustrophobic, single character narrative with a HAL 2000-like robot (whose name is Gerty in the film, voiced by Kevin Spacey) gave people the impression that it wasn't anything new or worth watching – it really isn't new per se – doesn't break any new ground – but it hearkens back to a time when science fiction was taken seriously, when it was all about the performance, which is a refreshing shift from all the hyper overdriven robot-ninja stuff that Michael Bay enjoys making (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It’s a lot of fun, and even more fun watching Rockwell at the top of his game.
Moon is about a miner named Sam Bell who’s getting ready to return home after a three year shift rotation harvesting a mysterious clean-energy phlebotinum on the moon. Weird shit starts to go down after he loses satellite contact with Earth and equipment begins to malfunction. Bell’s sanity is called into question when he starts seeing clones of himself running around doing stuff. It’s an awesome movie, and obviously written out of love of science-fiction with Hitchcockian themes. Moon is all about feeling isolated and thinking about home, and about what happens to the human mind after years of being alone and feeling claustrophobic.
Try this one out, you’ll love it.
A Scanner Darkly (2006)
This movie is one of a kind, done in a cell-shading animation style called Interpolated Rotoscoping, which is a style I've only seen used here. It’s a dystopian thriller with arcing themes of isolation, social-identity, authoritarianism, deception and addiction, but it has its comedic moments. Starring Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr, the future of ASC is under the constant invigilation of an ultra-invasive big-brother type network of surveillance, with the purpose of seemingly identifying the traffic of a new drug called Death, which suffers its users degrading brain function while simultaneously giving feelings of pleasure and euphoria. Keanu’s character – Bob Archer – is an undercover narcotics investigator who becomes addicted.
This is another adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel (that dude’s brain is like gold, by the way, pumping out more marketable IP than Jay Z, George Lucas and James Cameron combined). Seriously, more sci-fi movies are made out of his books than any other author (apart from, you know, Stephen King and Shakespeare): Minority Report, Total Recall, Blade Runner, The Adjustment Bureau, among others. I guess A Scanner Darkly is an allegory for Philip K Dick’s drug days or something, but this is a digression. From Richard Linklater, the same guy who directed School of Rock, so he’s obviously going to capture the funny stuff, but it still remains tragic.
Most people I talk to haven’t seen this one, which is a shame. Great movie.
Sunshine (2007)
This is one of my absolute favorite movies OF ALL TIME – definitely in my top five. Sure, the third act is sort of bogged down by a shitty slasher catalyst, and sure, the science isn't entirely accurate – but the first two acts, combined with perfect direction and amazing performances by an excellent cast – and an awesome climax – completely overshadow any of this film’s fallibilities, not to mention that it’s breathtakingly beautiful.
Set in the year 2057 – a Q-Ball (A large blob of bosonic particles that resist fission and evaporation) collides with our sun, preventing it from fusing lighter elements into heavier ones, which causes it to die out or something. The point is that the sun is dying, and a multi-cultural collection of astronauts is sent to reignite the fusion process within its core with a stellar bomb roughly the size of Manhattan.
It’s a space-movie about a crew of scientists on a suicide mission to save the Earth. As they get closer to delivering their payload, stress builds and group-dynamics unfold in exciting and interesting ways . The themes are pretty straight forward: self-sacrifice, the indomitable human spirit, the majesty of nature and the existence of God.
In this editor’s humble opinion, Sunshine is one the best unknown movies in the past decade. If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself the favor…
Children of Men (2006)
I don’t know if the things I look for in movies are the right things to look for? I don’t know if what I value in a story can even be measured by the same standards that professional critics have, I just know what I like. And I really like movies that create an exigent need for their resolution (in a good way), that can pull me into what’s happening on screen on an emotional level. Complete immersion, is what I’m going for, the next best thing to a book for escapism: those moments when reality sort of blends into undifferentiated experience, and you’re there, and it’s real, and nothing else matters. There are two scenes in Children of Men that are so complex, I can’t even begin to fathom the level of detail, choreography, blocking and planning necessary for pulling them off – some of the best seamless, single shot sequences I've ever seen: the car ambush, and the urban battle during the film’s climax. I’m drawn in every time, and the world just melts away, and I’m rapt.
Children of Men is another dystopian vision, which handles the apocalypse a bit differently. Imagine a future in which regulator sequences of our genetic code shut off reproduction. Women stop becoming pregnant, and society crumbles into a hopeless pile of heartache. I mean, things keep working – people still go through the motions – but it’s like everyone is dead inside.
Enter the first pregnant woman in twenty years, along with the plot catalyst. Starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Chiwetel Ejiofor, Children of Men is probably one of the most tragically ignored movies of all time. Of ALL TIME. I’m laying the melodrama on a little thick you say? All right, I’ll stop.
The situation is that Mr. Owen’s character happens along a complex web of political intrigue, as an Underground Weathermen sort of movement endeavors to use said pregnant woman as a tool for their agenda, which is basically to snub the fascist, isolationist English regime that's desperately trying to control an influx of refugees from all over the place, since it’s the only government left standing.
My wife and I saw this movie when it came out, thinking it was going to be huge – nope. Crickets. I understand it’s gathered some semblance of a cult following since its box-office flop, but if you haven’t seen this move, you have to. You. Just. Have to.
Dredd (2012)
Nobody saw this movie. You want to know why? 1995 Judge Dredd, is why. Look people, you have to research your movies the same way money-market managers pick stocks. No time to research movies? NO EXCUSE! The more we go see the good ones in the theaters, the more production companies will make good movies. Granted, the stench of Sylvester Stallone’s version still lingers, but you have to be a meteorologist with this shit – this movie was pinging promising – promising – alert signals that indicated it was going to be effin’ amazing: Alex Garland wrote the script, Peter Travis was slated to direct, filmed on location in Johannesburg, and Karl Urban as the lead (give him a break, he’s a good actor). And the dude who wrote the comic book was going to be involved with the film’s production this time (his input was not allowed in the craptastic 1995 crapfest). O ye, of little faith. . . I KNEW THIS WAS GOING TO BE AWESOME. But it flopped, people were scared, I understand. No hard feelings.
Dredd was pretty straight forward: two Judges (future police officers vested with the power to sentence criminals on the spot, even to death) are trapped inside of a building controlled by a drug-lord named Mama (played by the very talented Lena Headey) and, naturally, in classic comic book fashion, they have to shoot their way out. There’s no subplot, no camp, awesome soundtrack. Character motivation is cut and dry. It’s just a good old fashioned action flick. I know that hyperviolence doesn't sit well on the palate of some, but it’s good. Trust me.
Thanks for reading folks – LET’S SEE YOUR LISTS! DON’T BE SHY!
