After all the indie, foreign, direct-to-DVD movies that I’ve been watching lately in my 50-movie marathon, I thought I’d end my adventure with a blockbuster bang. After the first Transformers movie blew out my eardrums, I was not eager to watch Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen on the big screen. However, since those robots-in-disguise played…
Category: Sci-fi
Movie #47: The Outlander
After a slew of indie-type, serious movies, I was really starting to crave some escapist sci-fi. There wasn’t too much of that left that I hadn’t already seen, but I did find The Outlander, which fit the qualifications, but only barely. Jim Caviezel (yes, Jesus does sci-fi too) stars as Kainan: a warrior from another…
Movie #40: Under The Mountain
I can’t believe that people on the internet found Under The Mountain imaginative and fresh. It was a lame fantasy/horror adventure for tweens is what it was. Generally, I go for those kinds of Harry Potter, Golden Compass, even Lemony Snickett kind of movies, but this one was beyond-blah. Essentially, after the death of their…
Movie #35: Repo Men
I knew that Repo Men was going to be cut-rate sci-fi, so I didn’t watch it in the theatre. Set in future Toronto (at least it looks like Toronto, since it was filmed less than a block from where I live — Hey, the subway does not fly over Yonge-Dundas Square!) where everyone seems to…
Movie #21: The Time Traveler’s Wife
Whoever thought that romance and science fiction could be blended so well together? Even though nobody’s trying to prevent robots from taking over the world or stop a global calamity, I think it’s genius that The Time Traveler’s Wife takes a classic sci-fi device such as people traveling in time and uses it to tell…
Movie #14: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
I love modern takes on old classics (especially dark classics) like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Since the audience is presumably acquainted with the original, there’s usually an interesting spin on the story. While it’s set in modern day rather than Victorian times, this modernization has Jekyll (played by Dougray Scott) as a medical doctor….
Movie #13: The Book of Eli
At first, The Book of Eli looks like just another post-apocalyptic B-movie. A lone traveller (played by Denzel Washington) hacks and slashes his way through desert biker gangs preying upon innocent passersby. I feel like I’ve seen this movie many times before. Then he arrives at a dust-bowl town in the middle of the endless desert…
Inception – Movie Review
It won’t take a viewer long to notice that Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending movie Inception has a lot in common with the Wachowski Brothers’ reality-questioning Matrix trilogy. In Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio (as Dom Cobb) is our new Morpheus, expertly manipulating the virtual reality, except this time he’s an “extractor” who steals corporate secrets by entering a…
Movie #11: Moon
One thing I’ve learned about indie sci-fi is that it’s usually high-concept. Moon is no exception (though I don’t want to reveal how, exactly). Sam Rockwell stars as Sam Bell, a lowly labourer maintaining and monitoring harvester machines as they glean high-energy elements from the moon. He’s all alone and spends the duration of his…
