Tag: Science Fiction

Movie Review: PASSENGERS – limp romantic drama/sci fi mashup not even Lawrence and Pratt can save.

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passengers

Chances are, if you went to see Passengers based on the previews alone, you’d have gone in expecting a sci-fi thriller with a solvable mystery at its core.  The movie, which stars fan favourites Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games trilogy) and Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World) certainly looks that way from the minute or so of carefully edited clips that you get.  The giant, somewhat dark looking spaceship in deep space, the two leads running around while things go to hell – and why are they the only two to wake up?!  So, yeah, if that was what you were expecting, I bet like me, you came out of the theater disappointed.

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Movie Review: ARRIVAL – Sci Fi with a strong emotional core, and satisfying payoff at the end.

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arrival

This year’s Hopes Thanksgiving Movie was markedly different to last year’s choice – Spectre – and more enjoyable for a variety of reasons, but not entirely successful.  I’ll start by saying that I’m a huge Denis Velleneuve fan – his last four movies (including Arrival) have shown a real sense of diversity both in content and tone, and I consider that to be the mark of a confident director.  I’m eagerly anticipating his Bladerunner sequel – as I said in my reviews of Enemy and Sicario, I can’t think of many directors out there right now that I’d be as excited to see directing it.

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Movie Review: I ORIGINS – nice performance by Michael Pitt, but the movie lacks the courage of its conviction.

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i-origins-movie-review

There’s a somewhat interesting story behind I Origins – the movie itself, not necessarily the movie’s story.  Mike Cahill, writer and director, unable to resolve story issues during development phase of his follow up movie to Another Earth, essentially scrapped the draft and turned to writing, instead, an origin story for his original concept.  Hoping it would allow him to address the story issues of the first draft, I Origins was produced as a prequel to the main concept, which was set up at Fox Searchlight sometime in late 2015.

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Movie Review: TAKE SHELTER – Another great Michael Shannon performance highlights Jeff Nichols’ intriguing movie

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take-shelter

A few months ago, I watched Midnight Special on the recommendation of a friend, and I liked it.  I’d never heard of Jeff Nichols before that, but I was impressed by everything about the production, despite not being overly wowed by it.  It’s definitely one of the best movies I’ve seen this year (to put that in context, I think I’ve watched about 30 – 40 movies so far in 2016.  It’s October 8th, as I write this), and it’s clear to me that Nichols is a name to watch.  His upcoming movie Loving, starring Joel Edgerton seems like a risky outside-of-his-box move, and feels like it Oscar-bait, but I’ll trust the guy based on the two movies of his I’ve watched now.  Other than Midnight Special, last night I watched his 2012 movie, Take Shelter.  I said Loving was outside of his box, and that’s based on seeing these two movies.

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Movie Review: THE LAZARUS EFFECT – familiar, and badly underdeveloped, horror plot undermines a decent initial premise.

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lazarus

While I was watching The Lazarus Effect, I had a rough idea of what I was watching from recalling the trailers, but my perception of the movie was coloured by other movies, specifically Event Horizon.  If you’ve seen both movies, you might think I’m crazy – but I didn’t say it was a fair comparison!  Part of me was hoping it would be thematically similar to Event Horizon – a flawed horror movie, but one of my favourites – while the other part of me just hoped it wouldn’t suck.

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