Tag: SF

Underwater

  By

★★★
“Beneath the sea, no one can hear you scream…”

You know the story: A team of experts in a closed contained space, having to deal with ugly monsters and struggling to survive. The blue-print of this variation on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (better known as: Ten Little Indians) was obviously the classic Alien (1979) that introduced us to one of the defining girls with guns, Ellen Ripley. This format was then repeated endlessly by Hollywood, as well as anyone else.

A special sort of subgenre of this story formed in the late 80s, when studios came to the idea of exchanging outer space for the inner space of the (deep) sea. That resulted in usually trashy but mostly entertaining movies such as Deep Star Six, Leviathan, Virus, Sphere or Deep Rising. Heck, even AlienS director James Cameron created a more positive version of the usual underwater interaction, with friendly aliens, in “The Abyss” (1989). But as far as I can see this genre faded with the 90’s. Recent watery efforts were more shark- or crocodile-focused!

The Alien franchise seemd to be stuck in the hands of Ridley Scott, who wasn’t willing to give anyone else a shot at the series, He said, before Alien: Covenant and about Prometheus, “I thought we should move on. I thought the aliens were done.” Well, if what you deliver is worse than what we got before, why bother? And if you think like that, maybe you shouldn’t cling on to ownership of the franchise. Audiences usually wont the same experience they had last time and if you don’t deliver, will be disappointed. Here’s another pearl of wisdom: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! So 20th Century Fox came up with the idea of resurrecting this subgenre under water. And it has to be said, while Underwater is hardly original, and definitely derivative if you know the Alien movies, it is better and certainly more entertaining than the last two Alien entries from Scott. It never drags, and the “idiocy level” that too often comes with this genre and its tropes, is credibly low.

The story in brief: Deep sea engineers are faced with a sudden accident, after water has flooded their facilities, destroying a large amount of the installation and probably killing off many of the workers who didn’t manage to get to the escape pods. A couple of survivors who find each other must go on an obstacle course deep, well… under water to reach these pods. Okay, that plot probably wouldn’t trouble a match-box, but that does not necessarily have to be a negative. I’ve found in the past, that very often those movies with a simpler, more straighforward premise are the ones which are the most efficient in delivering the goods.

So it proves with this. Yes, we all have seen it before – but not necessarily better. When I look at the list above of “underwater horror movies”, most of them were not good at all. And what the Alien franchise itself delivered, starting probably with David Fincher’s life-less Alien 3 (1992) and ending with Scott’s efforts “to move in a new direction,” was also not very satisfying. Considering that, Underwater is actually quite decent. There is no long build-up with character presentations that have tended to fall flat in recent films of this ilk. The movie goes into action almost immediately, hardly giving Kristen Stewart (with her short-cut blonde hair bearing a strange similarity to 90’s Lori Petty) the chance to finish brushing her teeth.

And it continues at quite a brisk pace, within an economic and more restrained than usual running-time of 95 minutes. We get action, tension, deep sea monsters attacking and reducing the crew, some decent character interaction, a tiny droplet of blood and rather too much of T. J. Miller joking and Jessica Henwick screaming while running around. I’ve seen worse. Much worse, and recently. Indeed, if you are just looking for some good horror survival action and a distraction from your daily routine, this film may do it for you.

Stewart herself seems to have some bad luck. After years making indie-movies in a post-Twilight wilderness, the hope was obviously to return to big Hollywood movies. But this seems to be even more of a financial failure at the box-office than her recent “woke” Charlie’s Angels remake. Though this is actually good entertainment, and free of the usual agenda that has sadly become commonplace nowadays in Hollywood movies. That may have to do with the fact that the movie was already finished – like the upcoming The New Mutants from Fox – in 2017! For reasons I don’t know it was kept back. Did Scott exercise some power to distance it from Alien: Covenant, which also came out in 2017? Did they want to wait until Covenant had squeezed out all possible financial revenues?

Whatever the reason, it became part of Disney when the mega-conglomerate bought 20th Century Fox. And obviously, Disney didn’t really care for the welfare of this movie, so they just threw it out there, with what felt like hardly any marketing. Which is a pity, because it’s a nice bigger-budget horror movie that could have attracted more people in cinemas. I personally guess it might get a second life on Netflix or the new Disney online streaming service later.

The film also stars Vincent Cassel who was the only other actor I knew of the underwater crew, apart from Stewart. Mind you, you are not spending much screen time with most of them. Nevertheless there are some interactions that, if not really going deep, give enough of an emotional connection at least to wish they will get out of this unfortunate situation alive. But mainly it’s a showcase for Kristen Stewart who – and I really have to stress I don’t typically care for her much at all – gives a good and credible performance here.Though you’ll have to deal with the fact that she is playing a deep sea rig engineer here, a role I would probably have associated with a muscle-bound man!

I personally wish the last two Alien films by Scott would have been something like this. It could have been a lot more satisfying than the time we had to spend with David, the Fassbender-android. That said the Alien formula – like the Terminator one – seems to have had its day, thanks to having been exploited what feels like a few hundred times. It’s really time for Hollywood to come out with some new ideas. Therefore only 3 stars from me, albeit well-earned ones!

Dir: William Eubank
Star: Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr.

Captain Marvel

  By

★★½
“Hardly marvel-lous”

I had a couple of potential concerns going into this. Firstly, my general unfamiliarity with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This was film #21 in their Infinity Saga. I had seen seven. Would this be like trying to follow Game of Thrones‘s penultimate episode, after having missed two-thirds of what preceded it? Secondly, Brie Larson’s press complaints about movie critics being “overwhelmingly white male.” Yep, guilty as charged, m’lord. Would this questionable attitude – that your skin colour and genital configuration matter more than what you do or say – carry over into the movie?

Fortunately, neither turned out to be a significant issue. On the other hand, it’s still not a very good movie.

Oh, it’s occasionally amusing and sometimes reaches the level of moderately impressive spectacle. But the longer it went on, the less involved I was in it. By the time Vers (Larson), a.k.a. Air Force pilot Carol Danvers enters goddess mode and becomes Captain Marvel, all I could think of was, “That’s a silly-looking helmet.” To reach that point, we follow her as alien Vers gets captured by the enemies of her Kree species, the Skrulls. Their brainwashing attempts succeed in partially re-awakening repressed memories of life on Earth as Danvers. The Krulls are after a light-speed engine being developed there by Danvers’s mentor, Dr. Wendy Lawson (Bening). It’s up to Vers to stop them. Except, almost nothing is quite what it seems at first.

My biggest complaint is how the film relies entirely on dramatically convenient amnesia. I found it painfully obvious, the way Vers’s memories repeatedly dribble back in exactly the manner most appropriate for the plot. The most important elements left are until last, because story-line. The period setting of 1995 turns out to be largely pointless, beyond an excuse to throw a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt onto Larson. [I’ll admit, we did pause the Blockbuster Video scene, to try and recognize some of the VHS sleeves, such as Hook and Jumping Jack Flash] It could just as easily have been set now, considering Marvel vanishes at the end, not returning until Avengers: Endgame, as a mid-credits sequence makes clear.

The above would have been okay if the action had been top-drawer, and it isn’t. This is probably the area in which Battle Angel kicks Captain Marvel’s ass the hardest: almost nothing here has any impact, physically or emotionally. Overall, it just feels lazy: look no further than the most obvious choice of  No Doubt’s Just a Girl as the backing track for the final fight. That was about as cringey as the empowerment got; rather more annoying was the political subtext, of “What if we were the real terrorists?” I watched this literally immediately after seeing Ricky Gervais’s beautifully savage assault on Hollywood at the Golden Globes: “You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world.” This film would seem to prove his point.

Dir: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck
Star: Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Annette Bening

I am Mother

  By

★★★½
“Lies, damned lies and motherhood.”

After an extinction-event has turned Earth uninhabitable, an underground “ark” holds thousands of human embryos, overseen by a robotic Mother (voiced by Byrne, performed by Hawker). One embryo is brought to fruition, becoming Daughter (Rugaard, resembling a young Jennifer Garner), who grows up into a young woman, educated by Mother to believe she’s alone on the planet. But she begins to doubt what Mother tells her, and these doubts are confirmed when another, older woman (Swank) shows up. Let in by Daughter, she tells tales of humanity outside struggling for survival against robot killers. Everything Daughter has been told is a lie. Or is the new arrival telling the whole truth either?

The film’s main strength is the way it manages expertly the shifting sands of audience perception. Initially, we’re led to believe that Mother is potentially the saviour of humanity. However, it soon becomes clear that the robot is not being entirely honest with her charge, and our sympathies move towards the Woman, who wants to rescue Daughter from her enforced isolation. Yet, in the end, there’s another agenda there as well, and right until the credits roll, you’re kept watching to see beyond the next bend in the story-line. While there are clues dropped, almost from the beginning, you may not notice them until everything comes together. Or perhaps even past that point; I’ll confess, I did have to do some light post-viewing Googling in order to grasp all the consequences.

It’s rare, especially in the SF genre, to see a film without a male speaking part [bar some archive footage from The Tonight Show, anyway!]. Though one senses any money saved on the small cast was simply diverted to an impressive set of production values, depicting not just the facility, but also the devastated outside world after… well, whatever the extinction event was, since it’s never described. That’s not really the focus of the film, yet I felt it was a bit of a shame, The story of the Woman’s survival, up until she came banging on the door, would have been equally interesting as the Daughter’s. I do have… let’s just say, some questions about the coincidence of them arriving at the air-lock at the same time, and also the Woman’s plot-convenient amnesia.

At 113 minutes, it does run somewhat long, and is a little light on action for my tastes. The film is definitely on the more cerebral side of science fiction cinema, something not apparent from the trailer. Rather than explosions, the script prefers to pose awkward questions about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, or the moral implications of ripping it all up to start again. However, it never sinks to boring, with decent performances which help guide the film through the occasional doldrums. Hat-tip to Rob for steering me in the direction of a film which I’d otherwise likely have skipped past, in the never-ending and ongoing stream of Netflix original movies.

Dir: Grant Sputore
Star: Clara Rugaard, Rose Byrne, Hilary Swank, Luke Hawker

Sumuru

  By

★★
“Queen of Outer Space”

A spaceship piloted by Adam Wade (Shanks) and Jake Carpenter (Bridgett) crashes on a planet at the far end of our galaxy. They’re searching for a colony which had landed there almost a millennium previously, only to find things not as expected. Somehow, over the centuries since, women have taken absolute control of society, relegating men to literal slaves, and worshipping a giant serpent as their deity. However, the men discover the planet is about to shake itself to pieces, and the residents need to be evacuated. Adam makes an ally of the current queen, Sumuru (Kamp), but that alone makes an enemy of high-priestess Taxan (Levin). She has held a grudge ever since the women elected Sumuru leader, and is intent on taking her place, by any means necessary.

This was (very loosely) based on a character created by pulp writer Sax Rohmer, best known as the creator of Fu Manchu. Less renowned is his character Sumuru, originally invented by Rohmer for a BBC radio series just after the war. She then became the villainess in five books published during the fifties. There were two previous movie adaptations in the sixties, also with Harry Alan Towers involved as producer. Shirley Eaton – best known for her painted death in Goldfinger – played Sumuru in The Million Eyes of Sumuru and The Girl From Rio. I’ve seen the first, and it doesn’t qualify for inclusion here; though if you’re interested, here’s my review elsewhere.

I mention all this, largely because it means I have about a hundred words less to write in regard to this. It’s a thoroughly forgettable South African film, which plays somewhere between an old-school episode of Doctor Who (the last time I saw so many scenes apparently set in a gravel-pit) and The Perils of Gwendolyn. It is at least slightly closer to the first novel than the previous movies; the book did have Sumuru plotting to create a “new world order,” ruled by women, but here it’s more a result of unfortunate circumstance, centuries ago, than any kind of deliberate plan. And given how quickly society unravels after the arrival of Adam and Jake, I’m uncertain how it lasted 900 years.

This really needs to have done more with the concept of a gynocentric civilization, and pitting warrior priestess against technocrat is an interesting idea. However, the film just doesn’t have the resources to construct anything close to what’s needed, with little more than 20 actors of either sex. There are too many missteps, such as the way the women speak exactly the same language as the spacemen [compare 12th-century English to what we have now, as a yardstick], or the remarkably well-preserved “ancient” technology. Adam occasionally provides a nicely sardonic commentary on the silliness of it all, and we do eventually get the hoped-for face-off between Taxan and Sumuru. It’s precious little return, and you’ve got to endure far too much running around rocky terrain, for even these small pleasures.

Dir: Darrell Roodt
Star: Michael Shanks, Alexandra Kamp, Simona Levin, Terence Bridgett –

Terminator: Dark Fate

  By

★★½
“She’ll not be back”

If you went back in time, and told James Cameron on the set of the original Terminator, that 35 years later, it would have spawned six movies and a TV series, he probably wouldn’t have believed you. It’s not a story which screams “Franchise,” being entirely self-contained. The first sequel justified itself with a sea-change in digital effects which marked a massive shift in the way popular cinema would work thereafter. Everything beyond that? Almost entirely superfluous. And I speak as someone who liked Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines considerably more than most people.

I can certainly see why this flopped though. It comes on the heels of Salvation and Genesys, both of which were commercially dubious and critically disastrous, to the point that Cameron decreed them to have happened in alternate universes, effectively retconning them out of existence. This set Dark Fate up as a direct sequel to the franchise’s most successful installment, which also happens to be one of the greatest action films of all time (it’s likely in my top five, and not the only James Cameron film there either). Comparisons were never going to be kind to Dark Fate.

Then, Miller opens his film with footage from T2, in which an amazingly intense Sarah Connor describes her vision of Judgment Day. Rather than trying to build the movie’s own universe, the audience is immediately reminded of just how damn good its predecessor was. I turned to Chris and whispered, “We really must watch T2 again.” This is not something you should be thinking, thirty seconds into a sequel. It’s just the first in a number of missteps which end up burying the franchise once again, rather than resurrecting it.

The main problem is, we’ve seen it all before. The story is basically the same as Terminator. Or Terminator 2. Or Terminator 3. Robot gets sent back in time by future self-aware AI to kill a human it deems is a threat. Pro-mankind asset gets sent back in time to protect the target. They fight. A lot. There are a couple of wrinkles here. The protector (Davis) is actually an “augmented” human herself, albeit still short of the levels of her enemy (Luna). And Dani Ramos (Reyes) isn’t the mother of someone who’ll save humanity. But it feels less a sequel than a reboot, as we still have to watch Dani going through the whole explanatory process and “Five stages of being a Terminator target” thing.

Probably the main hook, however, is the presence of both Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, re-united for the first time since T2. Cue another misstep: if their appearances had been unexpected twists, they would both have come as delightful surprises. And the way they are filmed, makes it feel like that may have been the original intent. For instance, when Sarah Connor makes her entrance, we see her feet getting out of the car, the mysterious saviour only eventually revealed. The same is true when the T-800 arrives. Except those bullets were already fired by marketing, with them both showing up, full face, in the trailers. And it’s never explained why a 100% artificial creature like the T-800 has aged 35 years, nor how it’s getting the information with which it helps Sarah.

The familiarity of the plot would be bearable, if the execution was up to much. After all, T2 recycled its plot to a not dissimilar degree. However, it pushed the spectacle to 11, and was superior to the original as a result. This… Did not. Indeed, I was shocked by how ropey much of the CGI and digital work was, for a $190 million budget. Not so much the new Rev-9 model Terminator, which is a slick, oily creation like an intelligent pool of tar. But the meshing with the actors is poor, especially when one or other is made to fly through the air.

Maybe this kind of thing works in superhero films like Miller’s Deadpool. Here, it falls well short of the physical impact we saw in T2, or even T3, where the bathroom brawl felt like it had a bone-crunching realism to it. The low-point here is a battle on a plummeting plane, which is so poorly shot, edited and even lit as to be entirely incoherent. You literally have no idea which was is up, and I was simply left waiting for it to be over, and figure out what happened based on who walks away from the wreckage. [Spoiler: it’s everyone]

The entry isn’t entirely without merit though. While Dani is no Sarah Connor v2.0 (and her brother is worse still, quickly triggering a Chris whisper to me, “I hope he dies soon…”), Sarah 1.0 has a tired cynicism which is endearing and understandable. Maybe if they’d made the film entirely about Connor, spending her life going from place to place, hunting and destroying Terminators? There could then have been a whole slew of styles of opponent, making it the Godzilla: Final Wars entry in the franchise. Arnie, too, possesses a charisma which is mostly notable by its absence from the rest of the cast, though Davis makes a better impression than I feared.

There’s also a brilliant sequence set thirty years ago, depicting a young Sarah and John Connor, which is so well done, I was left wondering if this was unused footage from T2. Again, I’m left to wonder if they should have embraced that wholeheartedly and had the entire film take place in that era. We might then have avoided the SJW beats e.g. Border Patrol = bad, though at least these are relatively light compared to some recent Hollywood product. Well, save the clumsy way Dani becomes the future messiah, which triggered derisive snorting from my direction.

It would be a stretch to say we were storming the box-office, demanding a refund. We don’t see many films at the cinema, and despite my criticisms, this did not feel like we wasted our time or our money. It does deliver, as a cinematic spectacle, and is certainly an improvement over Salvation and Genesys, both of which triggered actual sleep. Yet I was reminded of a definition of insanity: repeating the same actions, over and over, hoping for a different result. It appears making Terminator sequels potentially qualifies.

Dir: Tim Miller
Star: Natalia Reyes, Mackenzie Davis, Linda Hamilton, Gabriel Luna

Bloody Chainsaw Girl

  By

★★★
“Japan Chainsaw Mascara.”

A solid enough entry in the Jap-splat genre, this benefits mostly from a winning central performance from Uchida as the title character, Giko Nokomura. Her family are in the demolition business, which is at least a token gesture towards explaining the F-sized chainsaw she carries everywhere – initially in a guitar case! She’s a bit of a delinquent, harking back to the sukeban movies of the sixties like Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom, and with some resemblance to Meiko Kaji, in attitude more than anything. Despite her bad girl credentials, she does want to graduate (there’s a speech later on about how delinquents actually love their schools, and the identity it gives them), and on this summer day, is going back to the otherwise largely-deserted educational establishment, to re-take a missed test.

Of course, it’s never that simple, is it. For pitted against her is her nemesis, Nero Aoi (Yamachi), plus the army of cyborg students created by this wannabe mad scientist. She started off by kidnapping and working on pets, but now has a lethal array of “enhanced” humans at her disposal, such as “Whole-Body Bomber” and former cheerleader Sayuri Bakutani (Sato). Nero is intent on taking her revenge on Giko, following a perceived slight which the latter has long forgotten. Even before she has arrived at school for the exam, Giko is under attack by the first three of these, including a girl with a rocket-launcher embedded in… a most unusual part of her body. Let’s just say, reloading is fun.

Based on the manga series Chimamire Sukeban Chainsaw, by Rei Mikamoto, it has the fast-and-loose sensibility you’d expect, with things taking place for little or no reason other than the maker thought it’d be entertaining. Sometimes they are correct, other times… not so much. There seem to be flashbacks every three minutes, explaining how everyone got to where they are, and it alternates between scenes that go on beyond their merit or purpose, and ones which feel too short. The low-budget is often palpable, falling well short of being able to deliver what is asked of it, and the blood is more digital than physical.

Despite these flaws, I was entertained, though obviously, those of delicate sensibilities should stay well away. Uchida has an appropriate range of expressions for the situations in which Giko finds herself – “deadpan astonishment” is probably the main one which gets used. There’s a dry sense of humour in concepts like the school having a Ninja Club, such as them still deferring obsequiously to the jocks). When Giko meets the president of Shop Club, who is also about its only un-cyborged member, her chainsaw gets some power-ups (“Extending Chainsaw”), though it still proves no match for Nero’s “Chainsaw of the Dead”. Actually, how you react to that sentence will likely determine whether or not you’ll enjoy this. Personally, if a little short of the best entries in this strange little genre, I still found plenty here to appreciate.

Dir: Hiroki Yamaguchi
Star: Rio Uchida, Mari Yamachi, Seira Sato, Yuki Tamaki

The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion

  By

★★★
“Lucy  in disguise…”

The first in an intended trilogy, this stands on its own reasonably well, balancing between tying up the loose ends and leaving the future uncertain. The heroine is Ja-Yoon (Kim), who begins by escaping from a shadowy, quasi-governmental facility as a raw eight-year-old, despite being hunted by the woman in charge, Dr. Baek (Jo) and her minions. She is found by husband and wife farmers, and they adopt Ja-Yoon, who has no apparent memory of her early life as their own. Ten years later, with Mom suffering from Alzheimer’s, and the farm struggling financially, Ja-Yoon enters a nationwide singing contest. However, the resulting attention brings her firmly back on the radar of Dr. Baek and Nobleman (Choi), the other survivor from that night a decade ago. The not-so-good doctor won’t let Ja-Yoon escape this time.

After a messy opening, which establishes Dr. Baek as someone specializing in giving no damns at all, this certainly takes its time to get going. For most of the first hour and a half, it’s mostly Ja-Yoon and perky best friend Myung-hee (Go) interacting and progressing through the competition. Though when you hear her… ah, let’s just say “startling” and leave it at that, rendition of Danny Boy, you’ll wonder if perhaps she was selected as the Korean version of William Hung. Meanwhile, the villains are hovering nearby in ways which appear so obvious and suspicious, they would be rejected as painfully unsubtle by Auric Goldfinger.

Eventually, even they realize a more direct approach is needed, i.e. Nobleman storming the farmhouse and threatening everyone Ja-Yoon cares about if she refuses to co-operate. This proves successful, and she meekly goes off to see Dr Baek at her new facility. But as the title and the cover both suggest, Ja-Yoon might be quite comfortable, coming to terms with her inner superwoman. The final 30 minutes show her to be not so meek after all. The movie certainly makes up for lost time, with a slew of well-choreographed mayhem, as our heroine goes all Lucy on the asses of everyone within reach, now she’s using more than 10% of her brain. Or maybe all Hanna? For, in many ways, this is a cross between them, with the pseudo-scientific approach of the former, and the “innocent who strikes back” of the latter.

At more than two hours in length, it would probably have benefited from being about half an hour shorter. The entire “talent show” angle could have been covered just as effectively in about five minutes. And if the bad guys has been more direct, instead of opting for lurking and dropping ominous hints, that would have been a major time-saver as well. However, the twist near the end is handled effectively, and the resulting carnage is brutal and effective. I was left with more than slight interest in the next entry. It will hopefully provide more in the action department, and less in the way of poorly-executed exposition.

Dir: Park Hoon-jung
Star: Kim Da-mi, Jo Min-su, Choi Woo-shik, Go Min-si
a.k.a. Manyeo

Kiss Kiss

  By

★★½
“Weaponized strippers. What could go wrong?”

Four exotic dancers go on a trip to vineyard, courtesy of a customer at their club. However, they get more than they bargained for, falling unconscious and waking up to find themselves test subject in a scientific experiment run by Gibson (Wagner – no, not that one). He is attempting to convince the military-industrial complex to invest in his project to create “super soldiers”. To this end, he has a serum which vastly enhances both aggression and compliance, and has invited Senator Graham (Farino) to witness a test, under carefully controlled laboratory conditions. Oh, who am I trying to kid: he actually just shoots up the strippers with the serum and makes them fight to their deaths. In sports bikinis. And face-paint. In subdued yet artistic lighting. Because science! And that’s how government funding works!

It’s every bit as silly as it sounds. Unfortunately, it’s probably not as entertaining. It’s as if the editors of Maxim rented a copy of Raze, and decided to do an unofficial remake for their target demographic. They just forgot to bring along any of the significant players, leading to a result which is more pale imitation than loving homage. Even beyond the color filters, King does shoot proceedings with a good deal of style, and certainly no excess of slow-motion. Though he mixes this up with over-kinetic editing, e.g. showing the same punch landing from multiple different angles in quick succession. This can, however, only go so far in covering up that the fights are no more than average.

It’s never clear quite why the protagonists have to be strippers. Even during the opening scenes, where we see them “at work,” they don’t actually show any significant skin, and it’s weird having them called each other by stage names, like Kiss (Hopkins) and Promise (Castellon). I will admit that I knew some dancers back in my youth, and they never used the fake names outside. It may backfire, in that these pseudonyms repress the feeling these are real people, and I certainly didn’t feel any significant connection to the victims. Instead, it feels for much of the time like you are watching video-game: a well-rendered one, it has to be admitted, though one where the cut scenes go on considerably longer than normal.

To that end, I did quite enjoy Wagner, who chews the scenery to good, “mad scientist” effect. His performance reaches the point that the silly trappings (I mean, do we really need an electric fence around the ring?) begin to make weirdly flamboyant sense. You can even believe his scientific research establishment has a whole team of hair and make-up artists, to ensure the test subjects never have a lock or lick of mascara out of place, despite repeatedly brawling each other in the dirt. But in the end, it’s all just too daft. 35 years ago, it would, however, have made an excellent Duran Duran video.

Dir: Dallas King
Star: Natascha Hopkins, Robert Wagner, Nathalia Castellon, Julia Farino

Into the Dark, by J.A. Sutherland

  By

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

Alexis Carew is a third-generation settler on the planet Dalthus, and the ward of her grandfather, her parents having been killed in an accident. But her future is murky, for Dalthusian law prohibits women from inheriting property, such as her family’s estates. With the alternative being a marriage Alexis really doesn’t want, the 15-year-old girl instead signs up to become a midshipman in Her Majesty’s Navy (or, at least, the space version thereof), on the interstellar sloop Merlin. However, this is largely just exchanging one set of problems for another, whether winning the respect of her colleagues, fending off the too admiring ones, or adapting to the harsh life of outer space – and, stranger still, the “darkspace” which facilitates interstellar travel. And then there are the pirates…

This isn’t the first SF/sailing combination to feature a female protagonist, apparently being quite similar to David Weber’s Honor Harrington series. The first volume of that is still sitting in my “to read” list, so while I can’t directly compare them, Werner has you covered for a review of Weber’s book. They definitely seem to have a mutual inspiration in C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series, with a futuristic spin. Here, I’m not certain quite how well it works: some of the sailing elements definitely seem forced, even with the hand-waving nature of “darkspace”. For it basically behaves in whatever way is necessary for the plot to be jammed into Sutherland’s nautical peghole.

That’s probably the main weakness: it’s one especially apparent in the early going, when Alexis first goes into space, until my brain seemed to get used to it. On the plus side, she does make for an admirable heroine, one who uses her wits more than her fists. As such, the action quotient is fairly low; there’s a steep learning curve here, for both Alexis and the reader, as we all learn the mechanics of how things work in this strange universe. When that is finally out of the way, the energy ramps up: in particular, when a ship captured by the Merlin, is being taken back to port with Alexis at the helm, when the captured crew mutiny and retake the vessel.

This sequence likely the action highlight of this first volume, the rest being mostly long-distance space battles. Though with war breaking out right at the end, it’s likely things escalate further in subsequent volumes. Although the supporting characters are nicely drawn, I could perhaps have done with more of an antagonist.  The nearest this book has to offer never meets Alexis directly – his son being the closest she comes. Again, I suspect this angle may be further developed down the road. There’s enough promise shown here to keep the door open to continuing the series. But I should probably read On Basilisk Station first, as I suspect one series of pseudo-aquatic sci-fi is probably enough!

Author: J.A. Sutherland
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 6 in the Alexis Carew series.

Curvature

  By

★★★
“Time out for fun.”

Helen (Fonseca) is struggling to come to terms with the sudden, unexpected death of her scientist husband, who was engaged on a top-secret project with his partner, Tomas (Morshower). Then things get truly weird: she experiences the mother of all blackouts, missing an entire week, and shortly afterward, Helen receives a phone-call warning her to get out of her house… from herself. It turns out, husband and Tomas had come up with a limited form of time-travel. As a result of this and subsequent events, there are now two Helens running around this point in. And future Helen appears to be considerably more militant. She leaves present Helen a sniper rifle as a gift, as well as stocking up on things like pressure cookers – and you can safely assume she’s not preparing a nourishing casserole. Present Helen decides future Helen needs to be stopped. But the more she uncovers, not least about the circumstances of her husband’s demise, the more she understands why future Helen is intent on carrying out her take on Project Mayhem.

I love me a good time-travel movie, and this is just that – a good time-travel movie, rather than a great one, like Retroactive or Run Lola Run. It manages to keep its two heroines in the air, revealing information at a decent rate, and also to balance brain and brawn. To the latter end, the heroine has to solve puzzles left behind by her other self to clue her in – without doing so to Tomas or the others seeking to shut the Helens down. On her side is work colleague Alex (Avery), though to be honest, he seems there mostly as a proxy for the audience, so Helen can explain stuff to him. Against her is Kravitz (Lanipekun), a crypto-federal agent – for it seems the defense industry has its own plans for the technology in question. That said, if it were really all that important, you’d think more than one guy might be sent in pursuit. Whatevs….

A bonus point is awarded for gratuitously casting Linda Hamilton in a small role as Helen’s former mentor. For, of course, Hamilton was part of the original “Going to the past to save the future” franchise: Terminator. Here, she doesn’t get to do much; it’s still a nice nod to one of the film’s influences. However, it feels as if the film couldn’t quite work out how it wanted to use time-travel. There’s a nice get-out which explains why future Helen didn’t come back and prevent her husband’s death. But beyond that, it’s more mildly engaging than deeply engrossing, as one Helen gradually closes in on the other Helen, and Kravitz closes in on them both. To be honest, I’d rather have focused on future Helen, since she seems the one actively involved in changing the world, rather than reacting to it, as present Helen does. Though scripting that version might have caused too many headaches – both for the writer and the viewer.

Dir: Diego Hallivis
Star: Lyndsy Fonseca, Zach Avery, Glenn Morshower, Alex Lanipekun