Time Bandits
A young boy with neglectful parents helps dwarves time travel throughout history, escaping the owner of a map they stole. I watched this a lot when I was a kid, not realizing how non-kid-friendly it was. I mean, his house burns down and his parents combust right in front of him at the end. I just wanted my bedroom wall to be a time travel portal, for real.
Terminator: Dark Fate
A Terminator travels back in time to kill, not John Connor, but some rando girl in Mexico City. With all the successful franchise carriers getting too old, like Arnold, or out of style, maybe like Arnold, this movie had a “pass the torch” ending. Though, it was more Sarah Connor passing it to Rando Mexico City Girl since John, still a kid, got shotgun-blasted away by an Arnie Terminator in the opening. Arnold’s character dies like he always does in the Terminator installments, but the idea of his character going off and raising a family after accomplishing his mission is a bit funny.
Dune (1984)
A young prince tries to secure the harvesting of the powerful spice Melange on the desert planet of Arrakis. Naturally, other folks want some of that, too, and our prince gets caught up in the battle. This was a little too mature for a lot of folks who were expecting a new Star Wars-type of franchise. This ain’t it, even though Frank Herbert’s Dune (book) series inspired part of what Star Wars became, probably indirectly. Lucas, to my knowledge, never named Herbert’s work directly, but Dune was such a massive and immediate success in the sci-fi world roughly a decade before Lucas began with Star Wars it’s hard to imagine all of it not being an implicit influence on Lucas. If this Dune version was released without the expectation of being another space fantasy like Star Wars, it might’ve been a little better received. That, and if director David Lynch wasn’t so weird.
Lifeforce
Alien vampires end up on earth and start turning everyone into exploding zombies. London gets the worst of it; sorry, mates! I first saw this in middle school, since it had the same title as a game I really liked. The only similarities between the game and the film were space/aliens and explosions. Naked women walking around aren’t very Nintendo-friendly; that’s Playstation content.
Pitch Black
A ship transporting a bunch of folks in suspended animation, one of which is a career mercenary with nighttime-vision-enhanced eyes, crash lands on a planet filled with homicidal, photophobic creatures, and—wouldn’t you know?—there’s about to be a weeks-long eclipse to plunge the planet into darkness. Vin Diesel in his prime, and his limited acting range played well into the stoic, menacing Riddick. Not a bad bit of storytelling, especially for a basic horror film, and a decently-realistic portrayal of religious (Muslim) folks, as they’re not treated as grumpy buzzkills or suicide bombers, or in the script just to the plot along.
The Chronicles of Riddick
Riddick fights against the necromongers, a powerful religious cult who want to kill everyone who won’t convert to their religion, for some reason. Pitch Black did well enough that the franchise was given a bigger budget for a sequel. I remember watching it and thinking it was good, which it very well could be, but I barely remember a thing about it a year later. Maybe it took itself too seriously as a grandiose, sci-fi action movie. Extreme cinematic candy.
Riddick
Riddick is stranded on a planet with some normie mercenaries and has to fight the native monsters. The final installment of the Riddick trilogy, following the trend of some sequels to title it simply after the protagonist. It felt like a bit of a combination of the first two in terms of plot and pacing, but eh…the whole character seemed really played out by that point. The scenes with the alien dog were endearing, though.
Vanilla Sky
A publishing maven’s reality falls apart as he hops into a relationship with a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Tom Cruise acts arrogant and confused for 136 minutes, but his character had some depth to him; it was a bit hard wondering if he was more of a jerk or a victim. I concluded that he was lovable trash—the best of both worlds. I found a video (that I can’t find anymore) that goes into detail about the situation Tom Cruise’s David Aames is in, and the story’s resolution, but…why? The last 15 minutes is a huge info dump that explains everything, rather clearly.
Alephia 2053
A cyberattack spells trouble for a futuristic Islamic totalitarian state. It was an okay story, but the fact that it had a Muslim-flavored libertarian bias in it made for a unique perspective. You can watch Alephia 2053 on YouTube for free.
Midsommar
A group of stupid druggie Americans crash a pagan festival in Sweden and learn the hard way not to trust fellow academics. Even though I dislike horror movies, I was actually looking to watch Rage: Midsummer’s Eve, because Benea Reach had a song playing in it somewhere, but it wasn’t available. Midsommar was. There was, surprisingly, not a lot of supernatural elements to it. I read a few reviews from feminist keyboard nerds who extolled the revenge fantasy thread enjoyed by the protagonist. That’s not a favorable admission, since the offending boyfriend’s sins were venial and incidental to any relationship: he was short with her a few times, talked over her once, and maybe he sincerely disagreed with her on some points. Hardly deserving for the guy to be date-raped or killed over, but I’ve never accused feminists of reacting sensibly.
2 Comments
Dune is the only one on the list I’ve seen so far. Having devoured the entire series of books by Herbert a long time ago, along with a couple more that touched on the underlying story, I was terribly disappointed. I felt that the movie was a serious departure and offered no entertainment value at all, with the exception of a couple of characters being close the book.
I just saw the new Dune last night. I will post a review tomorrow. You might find it better since it follows the novel much more closely.