B- |
*** |
+2-2|
Teens & Up*
Suzanne Collins says she got the idea for
The Hunger Games while sleepily flicking channels between some reality-show game and footage of the invasion of Iraq until the images began to blur in her mind. What’s bracing about Gary Ross’ film of the first book in Collins’ wildly popular young-adult trilogy is that the topicality of the story’s origins still comes across. When was the last Hollywood science-fiction action blockbuster that felt like actual ideas about the world we live in were at stake?
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B- |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
Burroughs didn’t invent science fiction, but he perhaps created a genre of
serial sci-fi fantasy adventure, with an idealized action hero going from one extraterrestrial adventure to another. Carter’s closest literary ancestor may be Sinbad from
One Thousand and One Nights, which is saying something. Buck Rogers, James Kirk and Luke Skywalker are all his descendants, and Jake Sully — the hero of
Avatar, which really
is a patchwork borrowing from everything Burroughs inspired — is perhaps more indebted to John Carter than any other character in history.
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Here’s
in Time in 30 seconds from my “Reel Faith” co-host David DiCerto. For a second opinion, see my associated review.
Read more >
C+ |
**½ |
+1-2|
Adults
In Time is a messier, more problematic film than
The Adjustment Bureau, but I think I found it more interesting. It’s probably firing on about half the cylinders it should be, about par for Niccol. Still, I appreciate its ambition and ideas—qualities sadly rare in popcorn entertainment these days.
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F |
*½ |
-4|
Director Scott Charles Stewart seems to be making a career out of erasing Jesus from history, and celebrating supernatural heroes who rebel against God for the greater good … in apocalyptic action/horror movies starring Paul Bettany.
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C |
** |
-2|
Teens & Up
I don’t want to be too hard on
9. It’s the first film of a director who shows some promise, and a bravely idiosyncratic vision free from commercial pandering. It will probably fade quickly at the box office while soulless marketing machines like
G. I. Joe and
Transformers slog on and on. But Acker does himself no favors with rote anti-dogmatism and vapid characterizations.
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A- |
***½ |
+2-2|
Adults*
C. S. Lewis’s bleak prediction about human mistreatment of extraterrestrial creatures was framed in terms of human spacefarers encountering alien life on distant worlds, but the gist of his thesis is eminently applicable to the scenario proposed in
District 9, a caustic and gory but sharply made sci-fi fable with a pungent South African flavor.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
I don’t object in principle to Keanu–Klaatu’s message. It’s just not a very interesting or enlightening thing for an ambassador from the universe to say. It’s sort of a letdown, not unlike like having the pope show up at your house only to check the batteries in your smoke detectors. There’s nothing wrong with that. You just hope he has more on his mind.
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A |
**** |
+1|
Kids & Up
Even Pixar has never attempted anything on a canvas of this scale. From
Monsters, Inc.’s corporate culture to
Finding Nemo’s submarine suburbia, previous Pixar films have never strayed too far from the rhythms of real life. …
WALL‑E creates a world that, despite clear connections to contemporary culture, looks and feels nothing like life as we know it, with unprecedented dramatic and philosophical scope.
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B- |
*** |
-1|
Adults
For an hour or so it threatens to be one of the best movies of the year, but in the end, despite sci‑fi razzle-dazzle and some undeniably powerful images,
Sunshine ultimately settles for puzzling rather than mysterious.
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B |
*** |
+1-2|
Adults*
It is a truism that every childbirth is a miracle.
Children of Men sets that truism in sharp relief, envisioning a world in which a single ordinary conception, pregnancy and childbirth seems almost as miraculous — and portentous — as a virgin birth.
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F |
***½ |
-4|
Fans and philosophy students endlessly debate whether the world of
The Matrix is most influenced by Eastern mysticism or Cartesian philosophy, Christianity or gnosticism, humanism or post-humanism. No such debates will be occurring over
V for Vendetta, which weighs down what could have been a thought-provoking dystopian scenario with leaden specificity and sanctimonious ideo-political commentary.
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B+ |
***½ |
+1-2|
Adults
For long-suffering “Firefly” fans,
Serenity is at last a precious opportunity to find out what happens next, not to mention to learn the answers to nagging questions left hanging by the series’ abrupt demise — a journey that is at once thrilling, rewarding, heartbreaking, and wistful. For non-fans,
Serenity is a delirious excursion into a world whose setting, characters and relationships are richer and more elaborate than any one-shot movie is likely to be.
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C |
**½ |
+1-2|
Adults
The Island is the closest thing so far to a good Michael Bay film. Damning with faint praise, yes — but bear in mind that most of Bay’s filmography to date (
Armageddon,
Pearl Harbor,
Bad Boys and
Bad Boys II) deserves to be damned with loud damns. So let me repeat:
The Island is Bay’s best film to date, and Bay’s best effort to date at a meaningful, thoughtful film.
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C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Adults
Individual set pieces are riveting, and one seldom doubts that if alien tripods were actually wreaking havoc on the Earth, this is indeed very much what it would be like. Afterwards, though, one is left with little more than ashes.
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B |
*** |
-1|
Teens & Up*
Adapted by Rod Serling from Pierre Boulle’s Swiftian social
satire, Planet of the Apes is basically a feature-length
"Twilight Zone" episode, with all that that implies for good and
ill. There’s an ironic sci-fi reversal of real-world conditions,
a rather thin plot padded to fill out the running time,
heavy-handed but sincere allegorical moralizing,
thought-provoking social satire, and a stunningly imagined
climactic twist.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
Surreal, sprawling, and operatic, drawing on
biblical and medieval Christian imagery as well as H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine, Fritz Lang’s deeply influential pulp
allegory
Metropolis colonized a new realm of the
imagination that has shaped subsequent science fiction from
Flash Gordon to
Star Wars, from "The Jetsons" to
Blade Runner.
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C |
**½ |
-2|
Adults
Beyond that, unlike
Reloaded, which featured an
impressive but hardly groundbreaking freeway chase scene as its
biggest set piece,
Revolutions has startling new sights to
offer, notably a spectacular siege scene that recalls the first
act of
The Empire Strikes
Back with its Walker attack on the Hoth Rebel base. In
fact,
The Matrix Revolutions arguably had the potential to
be the
Empire Strikes Back to The Matrix’s
Star
Wars, had the Wachowskis not squandered that opportunity six
months ago with
Reloaded.
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C- |
**½ |
-3|
Adults*
Morpheus’s expository speech to Neo in the first film about
the history of the power behind the Matrix — particularly the bit
about the solar issue and the moment when he holds up the battery — is both the least persuasive and the least interesting thing
about the film. It’s a perfunctory plot-level explanation that
one accepts for the sake of the action and the hero’s journey,
not something one particularly cares about for its own sake.
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B |
***½ |
-3|
Adults*
Be that as it may, scratch the surface of the vast body of
commentary and discussion devoted to
The Matrix, and you
could start to get the impression that Morpheus’s comment is a
fairly accurate description of the film itself.
The Matrix
has been described as everything from a neo-gnostic parable to a
Christian allegory, from a strikingly innovative action film to a
derivative rip-off of kung-fu clichés and stock anime
conventions. Commentators have found influences from Plato and
Descartes, Lewis Carroll and
Star Wars. At the end of the day, can anyone really say what
The Matrix is?
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B |
*** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Yet against all odds,
T3 is a smart, rousing extension
of Cameron’s paranoid fantasy that not only meshes seamlessly
with the past and future continuities of the earlier films, but
actually advances and develops the series’ apocalyptic mythology.
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C |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Helena Bonham Carter is also convincingly simian as the
chimpanzee Ari, though less so than Thade, since she has to be
visibly feminine and potentially attractive to the human lead
(Mark Wahlberg). But the gorillas, like Attar (Michael Clarke
Duncan) and Krull (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), are as compellingly
realistic as Thade, if not quite as expressive.
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A |
**** |
+1|
Adults
Spielberg has always known how to manipulate an audience’s
emotions, a knack he makes effective use of here. Humor
alternates with squirming discomfort and emotional release as the
director pokes fun of Cruise’s sex-symbol status in a couple of
funny incidents, then leaves us wincing with a number of scenes
involving eyeballs, or a character fumbling blindly for the one
edible sandwich in a squalid refrigerator.
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F |
**½ |
-3|
The film’s central conceit is that the process of colorization
is spread through acts of exploration or self-discovery by which
people step outside their customary ways into a new world. In the
black-and-white world of the 1950s TV sitcom, one common means of
transformation is sexual activity, which didn’t exist in
"Pleasantville" until the teenagers (Jennifer in particular)
introduced it. When Jennifer gently explains the facts of life to
her sitcom mother (Joan Allen), the latter is certain that her
prosaic husband (William H. Macy) could never be induced to
engage in such activity; so Jennifer proceeds to coach her mother
(offscreen) on how to commit self-abuse. The mother then proceeds
to do so, with such explosive results that by a kind of
sympathetic magic the tree in the front yard bursts into
flame.
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D |
* |
+0|
Teens & Up
The Time Machine is so sloppy that it makes
Kate and Leopold look like
Back to the Future. It’s also pitiful entertainment, succeeding neither as spectacle, as action-adventure, or as love story.
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C- |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Based on a computer game,
Final Fantasy is always
interesting to look at, and is sometimes visually spectacular,
but it hasn’t transcended its gaming origins. The sci-fi
scavanger-hunt premise hasn’t been fleshed out into a coherent or
satisfying story. The heroes, though eye-poppingly rendered,
remain emotionally as one-dimensional as any computer-game
avatar. Even basic rules and motivations never become clear.
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F |
0 |
+0|
Teens & Up*
Here is the closest thing to a positive statement I can make about
Battlefield Earth: Although it is an adaptation of a novel by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the sect of Scientology - and although it stars John Travolta, one of Hollywood’s most high-profile Scientologists and a long-time champion of this project - Battlefield Earth is not a cryptic tract or allegory of Scientology.
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B- |
**** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
A.I. is a science-fiction fairy tale: a terrible, revisionistic revisiting of "Pinocchio," the story of the little manmade boy who wants to be real — as told by a nihilist who condemns Gepetto for creating Pinocchio, the world for laughing at him, and the Blue Fairy for leading him on when he’s better off being made of wood, which will after all be around long after Gepetto is pushing up daisies.
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B- |
**½ |
+1-1|
Adults
Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s latest vehicle brings us to a rather well-realized, not-too-distant future ("sooner than you think" according to an ominous caption) in which human cloning is possible but forbidden by "sixth-day laws" (so called after the sixth day of creation week in Genesis 1, the day when God created man).
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(Co-written with Chris Otsuki) "Those who made us," Joe explains to David, with a glance at the statue of the Blessed Mother, "are always looking for the ones who made
them."
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