Tag: SF

Girl Gun Lady

  By

★★½
“Get yer kits out…”

With its combination of alternate reality sci-fi and stylized action, this feels like it could have come from the mind of Mamoru Oshii, creator of things such as Avalon and Assault Girls. It’s not. Instead, it was created by toy manufacturer Bandai – like most of their shows, it works largely as a 25-minute long advertisement for product, in this case specifically model kits. But there are some interesting ideas to be found here, though they are somewhat let down by action that clearly has no interest in being realistic, and a tendency towards maudlin emotion. I was left wondering who, exactly, it was aimed at, because the sentimentality feels at odds with the young men who are likely the target consumers.

It takes place in a high school where the favoured hobby of Koharu Tachibana (Shiraishi) is making plastic models. After buying kits of a gun and a figure called Alice, and assembling them, she wakes to find herself an unwilling participant in ‘Girl Gun Fight’. Four teams of three young women, are pitted against each other in battle, overseen by each team’s commander – hers being Alice (Ohara). Between rounds she’s returned to school, along with the other participants, but naturally, nobody believes this story. There’s an awkward twist, in that if you lose all three of your lives in the game, that’s it. You do not get back to the real world, with all trace of you, including other people’s memories, being wiped out.

That’s a wonderfully dark concept, which we see realized as members of the team’s try, and fail, to protect their last life. But it also possesses almost industrial levels of perkiness, particularly reflected in idol-like pop video inserts, and bumpers of enthusiastic model-making. Tonally, it’s all over the place. I suspect that might be the point, in the same way I don’t know at whom it’s aimed. I’m inclined to go for male wish fulfillment, with Koharu being about as far as possible from the typical model-building nerd. On the other hand, it has a lot in common with the “magical schoolgirl” trope, often found in anime, and it’s driven largely by the power of friendship.

That’s especially true in the final two episodes, when Koharu, Alice and the survivors meet the wizard behind the curtain. It all gets a bit too sentimental for my tastes, with the protagonists falling over themselves in a rush to self-sacrifice. The other weakness is action that, in the main, is nothing special – it’s very stagey, in a way at which Power Rangers might look askance. More hard-hitting fights would have added nicely to the contrast with the cheesier elements. Still, I burned through the ten episodes in three sittings, and was entertained, though the emotional impact I felt fell short of what the show was aiming to generate. I also do not feel any strong urge to take up kit-building as a hobby.

Dir: Yûsuke Taki
Star: Sei Shiraishi, Yuno Ohara, Anna Ishii, Natsuki Deguchi

After Blue

  By

★★½
“WTF?”

No, really. What we have here may well be the most bemusing film I’ve ever reviewed on the site. It almost exists in an alternate dimension, where concepts such as “good” or “bad” have no meaning. This simply is, and it’s entirely up to you to deal with it. This takes place in a future where humanity was driven off Earth to find other habitable planets. The titular one here had a nasty side-effect, in that it killed off all the men: “Their hairs grew inside because of the atmosphere.” Wait, what? Anyway, it’s now matriarchal, and living in small communities based on nationality. There appears to be some friction between France and Poland, and it’s key to what happens.

On the beach one day, Roxy (Luna) discovers a woman (Buzek) buried up to her neck. Rescuing her proves a mistake, because she kills Roxy’s three friends before departing. Turns out she was a criminal the Poles buried there so she’d drown, and is called Katajena Bushovsky. Or Kate Bush for short, which eventually leads to unforgettable lines like, “You shaved Kate Bush an hour ago.” This is not a sentence I expected to hear when I woke up this morning. [What the director has against body hair, Polish people and Kate Bush, remains positively opaque.] For Roxy’s sins, she and her mother, Zora (Löwensohn), are sent to the mountain which is Kate’s hideout, meeting and/or fighting a slew of wild and weird characters along the way.

It’s considerably less coherent than the above makes it seem, feeling like a fever dream filtered through far too many French bandes dessinées. There are some cool elementsL the hats frequently worn by the women (top) seem to have been bought of the rack at Pinky Violence R Us, and the guns are named after fashion labels. “I’ll shoot with my Gucci. It can put a hole through rock, through wood, through bones,” is also not a subtitle I expected to read. If you are into the works of someone like Panos Cosmatos, you might enjoy this. I, however, am not, and at a hundred and twenty-nine minutes, I must confess my full attention tapped out, with about thirty still to go.

However, that is considerably further than I expected. This was something I threw on, thinking I’d discover it was nothing but pretentious art-wank, bail quickly, and pretend it never existed. Yet here I am, writing a review. It probably is nothing but pretentious art-wank, to be clear. Yet there is something to be said for a film-maker who gets to unleash his fully unfettered imagination onto the screen. How it got funded, is another question: laundering drug money would seem a plausible explanation. Then again, it’s French, so… /Gallic shrug. This certainly is not a film I would recommend, and being made to watch it again could be seen as cruel and unusual punishment. But I didn’t feel my time was entirely wasted.

Dir: Bertrand Mandico
Star: Paula Luna, Elina Löwensohn, Vimala Pons, Agata Buzek
a.k.a. Dirty Paradise

Agent of Death

  By

★★½
“Multiple personality new world order”

I quite liked the idea here, but the execution just wasn’t quite good enough to do justice to the concept. It feels like a matter of resources to some degree. But I also feel that a few tweaks to things would have paid significant dividends. The heroine is Tara Croydon (Fox), a CIA agent who experiences a crisis after an operation means she’s not around when her father passes away. In her depression, she signs up for a cutting-edge but rather dubious experimental project under the oversight of Hype (Medina). This involves her being given the ability to transform, physically, into one of fifteen different personas which have been implanted into her.

Once she has come to terms with this, it obviously offers a wealth of possibilities for use on missions. However, this is not entirely without a downside, not least the instability of one of the personas, Maeve (Miller). As a result, Tara is cautioned against using Maeve. She also discovers eventually that the whole operation is not as officially sanctioned as she  believed, and there’s an unexpected connection to her father. The ending doesn’t exactly tie everything up, leaving the film too open-ended for my tastes. Clearly, Marder was angling for this to spawn a franchise, but since work on this apparently started in 2018 (it seems to have begun as a series called Shifter, which premiered in November 2019), I suspect everyone involved has more probably moved on to other things by now.

With regard to the resources, it tries to be considerably more global than it can manage. Tara’s first mission post-implants is to the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and this is followed up by one to central Africa. Except, in both cases, it’s painfully clear that the production likely never got outside the TMZ of Hollywood or wherever. There’s no reason things had to take place overseas: I could easily come up with domestic operations that could have used her talent just as well. The other problem is the 15 personas are only somewhat different versions of Tara. It would have been much more fun to see her occupying a broad range of shapes, skills and personalities.

It doesn’t help that the thunder has been stolen by Netflix series, In From the Cold, also about a spy with the ability to shapeshift. That came out in January 2022, while this was presumably sitting on a shelf somewhere. It leaves Agent of Death looking like a knock-off, even though that isn’t the case. Something of a pity, since this contains a decent amount of hand-to-hand action (and surprisingly little gun-play for an American show involving the CIA!), with Fox and the various actresses representing her personas, doing reasonable work. On the other hand, Fox’s acting tends to come over as wooden: for example, she’s never able to sell the death of her father adequately. While the time passed here, it’s telling that the cliffhanger ending neither excited nor annoyed me very much.

Dir: Matthew Marder
Star: Alanna Fox, Hugo Medina, Samantha Grace Miller, Richard Rivera

Axira, Episode One, by Odette C. Bell

  By

Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

The first volume is free on Amazon at time of writing, but all four are available for 99 cents, so you certainly can’t complain about value. It’s an interesting concept, too. Axira is a “spacer”, a member of an alien race feared to such an extent that they are almost legends. For centuries, she has been mentally chained up by a member of the Kore sects known only as “Master”, and compelled to do his bidding. Which usually involves copious amounts of violence, directed toward his enemies. Finally, Axira is able to break free and regain her independence, and vows to take revenge on Master.

The only force she can think of who can defeat him is the Galactic Coalition – the same force she was pitted against for 450 years. Adopting a completely new identity, Em, and a different species, she switches sides and joins the Coalition as a recruit in their academy. Her skills have the capacity to make her easily a top student there. But after spending so long as nothing more than a meat puppet, her social skills leave a lot to be desired. She’s soon an object of much curiosity, due to her stamina and tolerance for alcoholic beverages. But she is befriended by Elle Singh, another recruit, after helping her get through the first day.

Elle’s mother is the Admiral in overall charge of the whole program. Her brother, Jason, is also present at the Academy, but he’s a graduate on an undercover mission to find and neutralize a spy operating in the area. This leads to the book’s major action set-piece, when Axira and Jason take on a pair of robotic Kore assassins. But Axira’s identity could be exposed, as part of the course involves probing by a telepathic specialist, Kendra. Axira’s reluctance, for obvious reasons, to allow this is a bit of a red-flag. This is a bit of an odd scenario, having someone so old – both in literal and psychological years – showing up to study alongside teenagers. It’s like if Back to School was SF rather than comedy, or if Gandalf became a freshman at Hogwarts.

The narrative switches between the perspective of Axira and Jason, though the big question is: how did Axira escape from her master? It’s simply not addressed. I suspect that may be corrected down the line, but in this volume is a yawning gap, literally left as a “Five years later” heading. It does seem all her subterfuge might have been unnecessary, since it turns out the Coalition is willing to accept people with questionable pasts – though whether that extends to Axira remains to be seen. She’s basically an unindicted war criminal, though that doesn’t necessarily make her a bad person… At less than a buck to finish this story off, there’s a non-zero chance we’ll be revisiting the series at some point down the road.

Author: Odette C. Bell
Publisher: Self-publised, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in the Axira: A Galactic Coalition Academy series.

Rogue Agent, by Skyler Ramirez

  By

Literary rating: ★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

This is a solid, no-nonsense combination of spy and science-fiction. Though, to be honest, it is skewed towards the former genre, with the latter mostly window-dressing. It wouldn’t take much to change the setting from a solar system whose ownership is disputed by a couple of galactic empires, to a city whose ownership is disputed by a couple of countries. The planet is Hudson, claimed both by the Star Kingdom of Prometheus and the Koratan Confederacy. Heather Kilgore is among the best agents of the Promethean King’s Order, and is dispatched to Hudson after the suspicious death of a man who had betrayed the Kingdom, former commander Connor Monroe

Her job is to find out the truth behind the event, but things are complicated in a number of ways. She and Connor had been lovers previously – while part of a mission, it might have been more than that. Also, she’s partnered with her former mentor, Tabitha Lowry. There’s history there as well, the pair having parted on poor terms during a previous case. They’re going to have to put the past aside, in order to figure out who – if anyone – was behind Monroe’s passing. And it quickly becomes clear that certain parties, with the Koratans the lead suspects, have a strong interest in not letting the truth be discovered by Heather and Tabitha, and will do anything to prevent this.

This is 258 pages, but felt shorter, which is generally a good sign, with a healthy quota of action, both given and received. Heather is undeniably able to take care of herself, even against multiple opponents, but is certainly not bulletproof. Indeed, at one point she has sit things out for several days, after getting hurt. She just chills in a remote cabin with a local kid, learning to appreciate the joys of things like fishing; this could have felt like needless padding, but ends up providing the heroine with additional depth. [The cover pic seems an accurate depiction of her as described; Kilgore is not exactly an under-the-radar kind of operative!]

My main complain was pacing. It felt as if the first eighty percent of the book contained eighty percent of the plot. Then the last twenty percent? Well, that contained eighty percent of the plot as well. As well as going from investigation to resolution in what seemed like just a few pages, it’s there where we discover Heather and Tabitha’s history. To be honest, this didn’t add particularly much, and seemed at odds with the very hard-nosed attitude shown by Heather. Since it wasn’t a secret between them, I would have brought it out far earlier. Despite such missteps down the stretch, this was an entertaining read, with a memorable central character, and a story I could see unfolding cinematically in my mind’s eye. The next volume is on my list for future consideration.

Author: Skyler Ramirez
Publisher: Persephone Entertainment Inc., available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 3 in the A Star Nation in Peril series.

Control

  By

★★★½
“So how do they go to the bathroom?”

This is is a very small-scale bit of science fiction, with barely a handful of speaking parts, and mostly taking part in a single room. Despite this, and some qualms about the use of cinematically convenient amnesia, it works rather well. Eileen (Mitich) wakes to find herself in a room without windows or doors. A disembodied voice (LeBlanc) tells her to move a pencil on the table. She does and is knocked out. Regaining consciousness, the voice repeats the instruction. Except, Eileen is now chained to her chair. And if she doesn’t complete the test quickly enough, Eileen is informed her daugher, Eve (Loiselle) will be killed. OK, the movie has my attention. 

Turns out, Eileen has psychokinetic skills, the ability to move things with her mind. The tests are an escalating series of experiments, designed to force this talent up from her subconscious, to the point where she can control it. Part of the process involves adding her husband, Roger (Tchortov) into the room. Though they’re clearly in there for a lengthy period, leading Chris to pose the question at the top of this review. No answer is ever obtained, and that’s probably the film’s biggest weakness. Not specifically the toilet question, just a tendency to handwave its way past issues. The way Eileen’s lost memories return at the pace needed by the script is also a bit weak, though the validity of these is questionable. 

Despite these weaknesses, there’s a lot here that is done right. The positives begin with Mitich, who hits all the points in a fine performance. She shifts from sympathetic through to scary, as the strength of her abilities becomes apparent, then back to poignant when we discover – albeit through that cinematic amnesia – the truth about her situation. Inevitably (and this is kinda obvious, so barely counts as any kind of a spoiler), the decision to torment someone with paranormal talents ends up with Eileen using them against her captors. This is done mostly in an extended sequence where she walks through the complex at a sedate pace, absolutely unstoppable. The effects are more restrained than, say, Marvel or DC, yet are certainly up to the task. 

Despite the cover, I don’t remember Eileen actually holding a gun at any point. Not with her hands: one of the trials does involve her assembling a pistol from its component parts, purely with her mind (below). Admittedly, she doesn’t need a physical weapon: the telekinetic abilities she has pose more than enough threat. In hindsight, she does go for more spectacular methods of dispatch than necessary: a simple squeeze of the heart would suffice. However, I’m happy to err on the side of style over substance, and by this point, I was sufficiently invested in Eileen’s past, present and future to buy into whatever might happen. If there’s similarity to another slice of Canadian SF, Cube, the better-defined plot here means it’s something I’m prepared to tolerate. 

Dir: James Mark
Star: Sara Mitich, George Tchortov, Evie Loiselle, Karen LeBlanc

The Red Sparrow

  By

★★½
“Better red than… uh…”

This is not to be confused, in any way, with the Jennifer Lawrence spy movie, which is missing the definite article. What we have here is a hyperactive Chinese movie, where it feels as if almost nothing is real. Chris walked in during it, and her first reaction was, “Is that anime?” It’s not, but it definitely has a similar vibe to things like the Ghost in the Shell universe. The other obvious influence might be the first Matrix movie, both in the superkinetic action, and with its tale of a hero who rises to lead a human rebellion against a technological threat. Though as Wachowski movies go… Speed Racer is a better visual reference point.

That’s especially true in the opening scenes, which takes place in 2060. The corporation belonging to Mr. Ron (Zhang) is putting the finishing touches to their human/robot combination, with the first such child, Yi Ni, is about to be born. The facility comes under ferocious attack, and to be honest, the depiction was so frenetic, I needed a bit of a nap by the time it was over. We’re talking giant automated cannons popping up out of the landscape, mecha being dropped to aid in the assault, and thousands of rounds of ammo being expended. It’s all barking mad and completely over the top, ending in infant Yi Ni being sent out in an escape capsule and she’s lost to the company. 

Twenty years later, the now adult Yi (Han) is living on the edge of society in a megalopolis, when her innate abilities are triggered. The bad news, is this brings her back on the radar for Ron, who has never quite been able to reproduce the success of Yi, and wants to bring her in. He aims to use her DNA to create an army of super soldiers, with which he can conquer the world. After escaping his clutches, she teams up with the rebels, under Qiu De (Jiang), and becomes part of the resistance. If you’re thinking this might lead to further hypersonic action sequences? Yeah, especially as Yi approaches her final form of “Dark Phoenix”. Incoming cease and desist from Marvel in 3…

There’s a LOT to cram in to a mere seventy-six minutes, and doing so basically requires the sacrifice of any effort at characterization. From a technical point of view, it is quite impressive. I don’t know what the budget was: likely, less than it looks, and I sense it’s the wave of the future. However, this comes at the cost of almost any humanity. As a result, at times it feels you are simply watching someone playing a video-game on ultra-hard level. Certainly, the action sequences are closer to subliminal flashes, where you don’t follow the action, so much as desperately cling on for the ride. I hope this is not the wave of the future. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I am off for that nice lie-down in a dark room I mentioned. 

Dir: Ji Zhizhong
Star: Han Cong Cong, Jiang Zheng Hao, Zhu Hong, Zhang Xuan Mo

Light

  By

★½
“Dark, more like.”

Fair play to Woollard and his team for making a feature movie with no resources to speak of. The problem is, watching this, it’s painfully obvious that they had no resources to speak of. Two space-suits and a fog machine are not enough for a film, especially in a genre like science-fiction, which tends to rely on spectacle. Oh, smaller scale works can still be remarkably successful: the night before this, I watched glorious and highly recommended time-travel film Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes. But if you’re not going to offer epic scale, you need to have something else to repay the audience. An hour and three-quarters of watching characters stumbling about in the gloom is not it.

I was lured in by this synopsis: “After crash-landing in an escape pod on a dark and misty planet, a mother is hunted by an alien creature which is drawn to the lights she must use to find her missing son.” That high concept sounds pretty cool, and I hoped I was in line for an action heroine take on Pitch Black, perhaps. It just never materializes. There are, indeed, two women who have crash-landed: Tallie (Lilly) and Nia (Ann-Roche, under the name of Chrissy Randall). It’s the latter who is desperately seeking her son, Luccas, only to be hampered by the presence of the hungry creature.  She and Tallie have some things in common. However, it’s what separates them, which might be more important.

Turns out the pair’s presence on the planet is not coincidental, because the monster’s excrement is a precious stone – think oysters and how they make pearls. Some parties therefore have a definite interest in providing a steady stream of sustenance for it. However, the potentially interesting ideas here are utterly undone by the woeful execution. 90% of the scenes are one or other woman, shot in close-up to try and hide the lack of scale, while they talk to each other over the radio. It’s boring after about ten minutes of this. The bad news is, you’ve got another hour and twenty of the same thing, before they finally come into each other’s presence for a (brief) spot of plot resolution.  Don’t expect to be impressed by the creature, either.

It’s never a good sign when you have to read the director’s comments on Reddit to make sense of a film. I also learned the film was a metaphor for illegal immigration. Yeah. That whirring sounds is this legal immigrant’s eyes rolling. On the plus side, it’s muddied enough in its plotting that this was unclear at the time, so I guess it wasn’t heavy-handed, albeit more through incompetence than design. Admittedly, I may potentially have tuned-out during the scenes which alluded to this moral topic. However, if a film is going to do such a dismal job at holding my attention, I don’t feel responsible for missing out on any nuances of plot.

Dir: Matt Woollard
Star: Christine Ann-Roche, Gia Lily, Tedroy Newell. James Woollard

Ark of Ascension, by Michael R. Schultheiss

  By

Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

I don’t necessarily expect to understand a literary universe from the first page. These things take time: I get that. But I do expect that, as I go through the chapters, things will become clear. If I reach the end, and am still vague on a number of significant plot points, then something has gone wrong. Sadly, it’s the case here, and that largely hampered the effectiveness of the narrative. In this case, it had a cascading effect. Because I didn’t understand one situation, that rendered a character’s purpose uncertain, and this then meant the heroine’s motivation wasn’t clear.

Her name is Evalla Taryu, and she’s a bounty-hunter, tracking down those who are looking to escape justice, after having previously served in the Commonality Legion. During this military service, her strength, speed, reactions, etc. were artificially enhanced, abilities which come in handy for her new profession. Then, out of the blue, her estranged and fairly disreputable uncle, Kard, contacts her. Evalla’s sister, Ashta, has fallen in with a religious cult, the Disciples of Fire, under their leader Centom. Ashta needs to be rescued, because she is about to become an “ark-ascendant”. What is that exactly? I’m glad you asked. Unfortunately, I don’t know the answer. Some kind of religious transformation, apparently; but exactly what results and why it’s both so terrible and so valuable, is uncertain.

Putting that to one side, Evalla heads off with Kard to the planet in question, only to find Ashta has no interest in being rescued. However, it becomes clear (or, at least clear-ish) that there are a lot of bigger forces at play, and whatever it is that Ashta is going to become, is of interest on a trans-planetary political scale. Kard, who until recently was in prison for treason, has his own agenda too, leaving Evalla to try and negotiate her way through a maze of treachery, family loyalty and religious zealotry. But since we don’t have any real information regarding what’s going to happen to Ashta, we don’t know what’s so bad about it, and consequently why Evalla is prepared to risk life and limb to save her sibling forcibly.

There are some good aspects here. There was previously an incredibly-advanced race, the Makers, who are no longer around: but some of their technology is, and their presence almost hangs over everything that happens. We get a decent amount of action, with Evalla very much able to take care of herself, and I liked that she cares about the taking of life, only doing so as a last resort, in situations of extreme necessity. But there are key pieces of the puzzle missing, in particular from the reader’s perspective. The story almost feels as if it has been built from the top down, rather than the bottom up, and it makes for a frustrating experience.

Author: Michael R. Schultheiss
Publisher: Lyamgallal Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 1 (so far) in the Huntress for Hire series.

The Gorge

  By

★★★½
“Falling – in love again.”

This was more entertaining than I expected, and managed in a number of ways to overcome its limitations. From reviews, I was expecting it to be more a romance with occasional monsters. In reality though, it’s more a monster movie with occasional romance. The set-up revolves around a canyon in a remote area, of uncertain location and provenance. Since the end of World War II, the East and West have tacitly co-operated, in a project even their leaders don’t know about, to ensure that what’s in there, doesn’t get out. To this end, automated defense systems have been set up, monitored by one person from each side, on each side of the chasm, and replaced annually.

The latest pair are former US sniper Levi Kane (Teller) and Lithuanian counterpart, Drasa (Taylor-Joy). In what’s probably an accidentally damning indictment about the perils of putting women in front-line situations, Levi ends up zip-lining across the gorge, for a slice of her rabbit pie (if you know what I mean, and I think you do… but also for literal rabbit pie). Heading back, his line snaps, plummeting him into the danger zone below. Drasa immediately goes after him. They subsequently find out what’s in there, the truth about where it came from, and why they are guarding it. It’s not fun. The fate of the man Levi relieved (Dirisu) points towards that, and the presence of Sigourney Weaver as his boss is nicely ironic.

To be honest, the specifics are perhaps a little disappointing, being the kind of human malfeasance we’ve seen in SF/horror too often. After the ominous suggestion it’s a literal gate to hell, the actual answer left me a bit, “Is that it?” However, the makers have done a really nice job of creating the location, which is entirely convincing. The creatures crawling out of it are imaginative and icky too, although I would have like to see some more of the non-humanoid ones. There’s a point where I thought it was going to become that scene in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, which would have been nice. Still, there’s no shortage of mayhem once things kick off, and the 127 mins gallop past.

You could argue Teller is the lead, but I would say they are genuine co-stars: the film needs both of them in order to function. After her turn in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Taylor-Joy definitely seems to be positioning herself as an action heroine. She does well here, although her Lithuanianicity (is that a word?) is a little in question, and overall I still put Samara Weaving ahead of Taylor-Joy. It is a bit of a shame this went straight to streaming, since it has more big-screen presence than many theatrical releases. You’ll perhaps have questions about some aspects, but if you’re like me, you won’t think of these until after the final credits have rolled – a good sign that the film has kept you engaged.

Dir: Scott Derrickson
Star: Anya Taylor-Joy, Miles Teller, Sigourney Weaver, Sope Dirisu