Category: Film Review

Cosmos (2019)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours and 8 minutes rated 6.0 by 6067 cinematizens. 

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: First Contact.

DNA: England. 

Verdict: Compelling.  

Tagline: It’s really happening!

Three young men sit in a Volvo station wagon and talk. The result is a far better movie than Blade Runner (1982), Avatar (2009), The Arrival (2016), and much else.

These three are amateur astronomers, an astrophysicist, aerospace engineer, and a radio telescope technician who together drive to a hill top in Sherwood Forest away from light and other interference one night a month to star gaze each in his own way with the gear crammed into the car. These are the self-styled Astro-Nuts.   

Though cold, it promises to be an especially good night with no atmospheric disturbances. The weather inside the car is chilly, too, because there are tensions among them that (very) slowly emerge. The pace is deliberate, leisurely even, but that makes a nice change from Hollywood harm scarum tempo used to conceal shallow characters and plot holes. 

As they banter, doze, take leg-stretching and bladder-emptying breaks and drink more tea, amid the static the radio technician is scanning appears an anomaly. Well that happens and he tries to correct it while being teased about his past mistakes.  Earlier a routine image of a weather satellite disappeared for a minute or two and then returned. That had never happened before. Later there is shadow detected by the (barely) portable telescope they have set up. One, two, three something is up the tree!  

When scrubbed the radio signal persists. Huh? How can that be? Good question, Galileo. The satellite image loss recurs. Using infrared settings on the telescope the shadow look like…. [no one says it but we all think it]. 

Is ET calling? Just maybe. Better to be sure than sorry, so they pick up….  It ends on an upward positive note!  

A recent Brit film I watched had a big name cast, location shooting in Wales, sex, and some flashy special effects with kindergarten science. Only a brave person or a fool watched to the end as I did. Hmmm. 

This film has none of those things but it has a script and the car interior, two first-time film actors, and no special effects apart the grandeur of the night sky. The result is a far, far better thing than most I watch. The film school graduates who produced it could not find anyone to fund it, so they did it themselves. Chapeaux!   

It is too long. The car chase at the end seemed needlessly attenuated, and there was just too much of the bromance.  A producer not emotionally invested in it would have cut it by 30 minutes and improved it to get focus on the really big picture. Really BIG.

I shudder to think what Pox News would make of a first contact. The movies Contact (1997) and Arrival (2016) got the reception right – Madness times N.  Panic, denial, fear, nukes would be round one though the image of a President Trump meeting an alien to sell state secrets sprang to mind. 

Die Delegation (1970)  

IMDb meta-data is a runtime 1 hour and 40 minutes, rated 7.5 by 131 cinematizens. 

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: UFO.

DNA: West Germany.

Verdict: Imaginative.

Tagline: Move over Orson Wells.

In this mockumentary Intrepid, a television journalist, during a routine story gets drawn into a tale of UFOs.  Shifting through the nutcases he finds some of the witnesses credible, the real evidence, though sparse, is intriguing. He follows the threads around the world, losing his job but not his camera and sound man, in so doing.  The visas in his passport are many: Canada (where it started), USA, Peru, Italy, and so many more I lost track.  

Intrepid tries everything to disprove the evidence he keeps finding, to no avail.  He has one Canadian witness tested by psychologists, brain scans, and hypnosis but she continues to offer a low key but consistent account of meeting the titular delegation.  He follows asides and descriptions in her recitations to find other clues. Project Blue Book gets a look-in.  One clue leads to another, and so on. He is Indiana Jones in a suit and tie with a microphone.  

Intrepid is dead when the story starts, that is disappeared and presumed dead, incinerated in a car crash. The movie is pieced together from the footage he had shot on his investigations.  Much of it is cinéma vérité style from the field, because there are the mandatory crop circles. 

It is all played dead straight, none of the nods and winks so unnecessary and so common in Hollywood productions. The commitment of the players to their parts is complete, and there are a lot of them.  Ergo this was not a cheap production.  Moreover, the travelogue must have been pricey. 

It is steadfastly measured with cross cuts to the journalist sitting at a desk who found Intrepid’s footage and has assembled it.  He is matter of fact about it all and leaves it to the viewer to decide.  There is no world-ending hysteria.  (I was reminded of the way German television reported on the 1999 East Timor crisis: cool and methodical, in vivid contrast to the feverish, panicked, judgemental reporting of the ABC.)

Some German viewers mistakenly thought this TV film was a factual report, hence the reference to the Wunderkind above, and not a drama. Today many viewers make the same mistake in taking Pox News for factual. 

By the way the Canadian encounter took place near Sudbury, which is where I had my first teaching appointment with a college of Laurentian University. 

A for Andromeda (2006)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 30 minutes, rated 5.2 by 712 generous cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: UK (Wales).

Verdict: Oh Hum.

Tagline: B for boring.

We know they are scientists by their white coats which protect their clothes from stains while monitoring a radio telescope.  Photons leave such a mess. These astronomers are bullied by a cartoon paymaster general who never wears a uniform and has uniformed military police (Red Caps) to open doors for him. 

They get an SMS from Andromeda (and none of them has seen The Andromeda Strain [1971]) so they click on the link which gives them the directions to build, evidently from materials lying around, a super deluxe super computer in return for their banking passwords. (No they haven’t seen The Forbin Project [1970] either.) Even as this Lego project is going on the number of white coats is being reduced by deaths.  Get it!

The computer they have built wants company and before you can say STUPID these astronomers have cultivated a humanoid in a bento box who looks just one of them, now dead. 

Enough! It gets worse without getting better. There is a gratuitous side plot about the evil CIA. What would screenwriters do without this straw villain.

Just as the scriptwriters and director know nothing about armies they seem to know even less about science. Surprisingly, that is common after a hundred and fifty years of free public education.

I longed for some convoluted but amusing AI subtitles as relief from the pompous but trivial dialogue.  The solution was to turn the sound down…a lot. Some of the photography of Wales is good but has nothing to do with the plot. Yes, I know the plot puts it in the Yorkshire Dales, but shooting location credits says Wales, so there!

Otherwise the camera work is monotonous with one headshot after another, so close up that one sees inverted hairs, acne spots galore, cocaine spots, and some pores that need purgation. At other times it is cinéma vérité jerky or even freeze frame, very distracting in many cases. Most film-school projects have better camera work. 

Apart from so many unnatural deaths there is some ambiguity about what is going on, but that is obliterated by the persistent cartoonish representation of the mufti general.  And of course the male lead is a high school stereotype: so brilliant that others abide his adolescent irresponsibility, so unorthodox that no one knows what he is doing, so handsome beneath the designer (get a new designer!) peach fuzz all the women fall before his myopic gaze, and so underwritten as to be a cipher.

The best thing about it is that it does not have Stephen Seagal in it. Admittedly, that is always a major plus. Sorry Fred, but that’s the truth. The 1961 television series was far more interesting. but does not now seem available. The reconstruction is, well, a poor thing.

Andromeda Nebula or Tumannost Andromedy (1967)

IMDB meta-data is 1 hour and 17 minutes of runtime, rated 5.6 by 315 cinematizens. 

Genre: Sy Fy

DNA: Soviet

Verdict: Melancholy.

Tagline: TMI or TLI.*

A craft on a deep space mission is trapped in the gravitational field of an iron star and cannot escape. Since they are stuck the elderly captain decides to answer a distress signal that comes from a planet in the iron star system, where they find one (or is it two other ships, it being hard to tell in the murk) and they are set upon by a cannibal cloud, suffering casualties, including the captain’s squeeze. Remember the cloud from The Wall (1967), this is its evil twin. 

Meanwhile, back at HQ chaps with big chins dressed for Greco-Roman wrestling babble about compressing time. They watch a girly dance, sad to think those babes were long since dead before the video traversed space to reach them. Huh? The sun shines, the waters lap, everyone smiles all the time. It is exhausting to watch all this good humour. They seem only sightly interested in the fate of captain and crew.  

Meanwhile, back at the Iron Star the crew finds fuel on the downed ships and pirate it to power their way out of the gravity grip and return. Hooray!  Aged captain decides he has to live with the painful memories of this expedition, despite the suggestion of the on-board medic (who wears a crash hemet!) that she erase his memory.  

The design, art work, and sets are marvellous.  It looks like a considerable investment for what then seems to be a truncated movie.  Was it intended to be the first episode of a series? Some reviewers entertain that speculation. Certainly there are many unexplained references like the Great Ring, Station 57, that medical helmet, and what’s for dinner?  None of this is helped by the AI generated subtitles.

Those sets and designs would have attracted that film cutter-extraordinaire Roger Corman, but he seems to have missed this one. 

What traps me is an iron sofa. A near approach and I am pulled into its gravitational field with little chance of escape for the next hour. Best to stretch out and accept my fate.  

* TLI is Too Little Information, Mortimer. 

Kdo chce zabít Jessii? (1966) (Who wants to kill Jesse?)

IMDb meta-date is a runtime of 1 hour 20 minutes, rated 7.2 by 1099 cinematizens.  

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Comedy; Phylum: Zany.

DNA: Czech-o-Slovak. 

Verdict: Droll.

Tag-line: Freedom for dreamers! 

Dr He is plagued by problems at work and to relieve his frustration he reads the silly comic strip on the back of the technical magazines he has been ransacking for ideas which comics involve a blonde Amazon named Jesse, thwarting a Superman villain and his six-gun totting Subman associate with her mysterious gloves.

Meanwhile his wife, Dr She, is a medical researcher who has devised a means to monitor and edit the dreams of sleepers. Somnolentology can be used to make citizens work harder, better, and happier for the good of all. (Uh?) Did this discovery inspire the 2009 Hungarian movie 1 reviewed elsewhere on this blog.

There are sceptics about her device, so while Dr He dreams of the Amazon’s anti-gravity gloves that could solve his work problem, Dr She attaches her device to this sleeping head. She recoils at the sight of the Amazon in his dream, not realising that her attached device projects the dreams into the world, and Dr She storms off in a jealous rage as Dr He wakes up, even more confused and distressed than usual to find the Amazon is now a reality, as well as the two villains. 

So far, so screwy, but wait there is more. All three of the cartoon characters communicate only in speech balloons. Cute. At one point, one of the speech balloons has to be turned so it can be read. 

A crazy pursuit follows, up and down buildings, flying through the air, diving into sewers, destroying a lecture hall at Charles University (where I gave a talk once), all to get those gloves, followed by ever more Keystone police and officials. In the midst of this melée Dr He realises how the gloves work. In between scrapes he manufactures a pair of such gloves.  

Amazon sees Dr He as her saviour, embroiling him ever more in her escapades to defeat Super- and Sub-man who are so two-dimensional that they cannot be reasoned with, bought off, or reformed. Much chaos follows, and much implied social criticism of the mindless routine of bureaucracy and of institutionalised petty corruption does too. Remember Closely Watched Trains?  

Dr She blames him for dreaming of them, and Dr He blames her for objectifying them (per Hegel).  Meanwhile, the cartoon characters continue their struggle over the those gloves.  

It is fun to watch. ‘Zany’ is the right word.  Nothing makes sense but the pace is so fast there is no time to Tsk, tsk.  There are well-placed early hints about what is coming, say with the flies, and some nice sight-gags like the doctor smoking a cigar during a medical procedure. The characters are likeable. Even the Super and Sub villains are only acting the way they are drawn, right Jessica Rabbitt?  

We escape reality in our dreams but when our dreams come true we are right back in reality!  One of the toons does declare ‘Freedom for Dreams!’  While courtroom judge denounces free dreaming and demands the full weight of the law be applied to dreamers to maintain the social order. For more on this circle see the entry on the Hungarian film 1 (2009) elsewhere on this blog. Maybe dreaming was one escape from the heavy hand of communism.

Abrigo Nuclear (Nuclear Shelter) (1981) 

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 26 minutes, rated 6.6 by 77 cinematizens. 

Genre: Sy FY; Species: Nuke.

DNA: Brazil. 

Verdict:  Didactic. 

Tagline: Chernobyl next!

Leaks, mishaps, explosions from nuclear power plants have poisoned the earth of the Earth. Surviving humanity has retreated to underground hives. One such nest is in Brazil, which had embraced nuclear power with enthusiasm and the low bid contractors did the rest, no corner went uncut. Remember Homer Simpson worked in a nuclear power plant!

For oxygen supply and solar power, periodic forays to the surface are necessary, one scientist who performs this routine maintenance begins to realise that the crisis has passed and the surface is no longer dangerous.  He tries to tell his superiors, who (1) don’t believe him (saying he is stir crazy), (2) don’t listen to him (because he shouts), and (3) discredit his data with 15-minutes of Google clicking.  (4) Pox News weighs in, calling him a woke liberal snowflake in Brazil. Case closed. Remember Plato’s Cave?

He discovers that some others share his misgivings about the current arrangements, and they begin to plot…something.  Their secret is safe with AI.

For some reason it suits Pox News to keep everyone else in the hives. I didn’t fathom that at all. The A.I. generated subtitles didn’t help, and the acting ranges from the blank recitation of lines to shouting for no apparent reason, though it seemed a surprise for most inhabitants to realise the very same scientists who run the hive are the ones that devised and applied nuclear energy, and so are responsible for the catastrophe (I think). It all seemed rather preachy about the evils of nukes like the climate change priests of doom today who never tire of hearing their own voices prophesying fire and brimstone for us all.  

The hive is well realised with a couple of corridors (that reminded me of the Soviet nuclear bunker I once toured in Moscow) and lots of computer screens that in 1980 would have had novelty value. 

Ok, ok, it sounds a lot like THX-1138 (1971) now doesn’t it, right down to the uniform white clothing.  (Don’t these people ever eat soup?) Well yes it does.  But there are no enforcers here nor did I get any sense of waist-down rebellion per Orwell. Maybe it was too subtle for me.  A lot is.   

11 a.m. (Yeolhansi)(2013) 

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 39 minutes, rated 5.6 by 493 cinematizens 

Genre: Sy Fy: Species: Time Travel.

DNA: Korean, South.

Verdict: Kaboom!

Tagline: Trans-genre!

In the not too distant future a group of very young researchers in a deep-sea laboratory work on a time machine.  (Someone should have told them about clocks.)  The lab is astride a Blue Hole near the Marshall Islands because gravity in a Blue Hole ‘behaves differently.’ (So much for science.) The project is funded by a Russian oligarch in a wheel chair.  

(1) Contrary to one reviewer, the Marshall Islands are in the middle of the Pacific, no where near Belize in Central America. (2) Is the duty free shopping in the sovereign micro-state of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (Pop. 58,500) good?  (3) Why is a Russian funding SOUTH Koreans?  What do NORTH Koreans think of that? 

The Russian wants to send them into the future to bring back a cure for wheelchairitis. The lab is expensive and the Russian may have a hidden agenda, hidden at least from the subtitles. The scientists isolated in the lab look like four high school students and two teachers who all seem self-conscious about the age difference among them.  

Via a zoom meeting with no lag, no drop-out, no incomprehensible error message, no black screen, no loss of synchronisation, no nasal shots (see, it is fiction) the Russians gives the submerged Korean crew a deadline. They travel a minute into the future. BFD.* I do that every 60 seconds without spending a ruble. The Russki wants more or he wants his rubles back. So they try a desperate gamble on the as yet untested equipment to go for a 15-minute projection into the future. That would be enough for proof of concept, and in such a short space of time, what can go wrong? [Psst, check the script.]   

Two of them strap into the telephone box and the others push buttons. Everything gets convoluted after this and the genre changes from sort of Sy Fy to Total Disaster when the Kimchi hits the fan. 

Spoiler Alert! Go further at your own risk!

It takes a lot of energy to project that Tardis box and sending it off drains the tanks, then it returns with a mighty jolt that destroys the lab before the SSRN Seaview with Admiral Harriman could get there. 

The characters react in the way any well-trained, highly selected, wholly dedicated small elite group of individuals would do: they run amok, blame each other, blame Hillary, look for Hunter’s lap top, cry foul, eat canned food, smash computers which give the wrong answers, admire raging fires while keeping the sea water out, keep the sea water out while admiring the raging fires, inhale noxious chemicals while admiring the fire, recover from X-degree burns, beat up on each other with handy steel bars…this spectacle goes on at Hollywood length.  

They should have tried Joe’s cocktail shaker from As Time Goes By reviewed on this blog. 

The Ground Hog Day-repeated mayhem is as boring as it is exhausting to watch. None of the characters is developed enough to care about, despite an earlier scene of guitar strumming which was supposed to humanise one of the mannequins in the crew. It didn’t work. 

But maybe I missed the subtlety of it all. The version I watched had AI English subtitles with the dialogue dubbed in Russian over the Korean, a combination that distracted me.    

*All right, already when Joe Bogart time travelled back a minute from 10:26 it was a big deal in a small way. See As Time Goes By reviewed elsewhere on this blog. 

Dark City (1998)

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 40 minutes, rated 7.6 by 203,000 layabouts.

Genre: Sy Fy

DNA: Anglo

Verdict: Where’s Dagwood. 

Tagline: [I forget.]

It’s all pretty mysterious, but Auriole Zen wakes up in Gotham City and concludes he is an amnesiac killer. Seemed obvious at the time.  (See Sherlock Holmes The Woman in Green [1944].) He scoots before John Law arrives in the form of — wait for it — Inspector Bumstead, known as Dagwood to me.  

The parenthetical reference above is relevant because most of the dark setting is 1940s: fedoras, ash trays, wide lapels, automats, cars, trench coats, and cold water walk-up tenements. Yep.

All of this is presided over by men in Gestapo coats and pancake makeup led by Francis Urquhart under a ton of makeup in a latex suit.  Round and round it goes.  

By some means or other, Zen and Dagwood team up, brokered by Mrs Zen. They find out Neo was right though his movie has not yet been released.  

A great deal of eye candy with very little plot. Water is mentioned as crucial and then…forgotten.  Yes, I got all the guff about the experiments and it made no sense. Ask Neo next year.  

I saw a few refugees from more diverting material like Popov from Loveboy.  

The doctor seemed laboured and superfluous, but we viewers are like that. Opinionated.  

Yes, I know it is supposed to be about dreams, memory, and reality. If we don’t remember it, did it happen? If we do remember it, did it happen? Are our memories real or not?  Does it matter? All very Marcel Proust, but — pssst! — no one seems to try very hard, say by writing things down, or cutting a hole in a sock, or breeding mayflies. Or even reading a book or eating a madeleine.

Roger Ebert waxed lyrical about it, both the look and content. Hmm. Not convinced myself.

The Gotham Tourist Board, by the way, claims the sun does shine there.  Some times.  

As Time Goes By (1988)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 36 minutes rated a measly 5.5 by a paltry 157 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Alien incursion

DNA: Strine.

Verdict: More!  

Tagline: Play it!

A sun bleached surfer boy with a board travels 800 miles into the desert (near Broken Hill, again) to keep an appointment made for him twenty-five years ago (when he was born). That’s odd, but wait, there’s more!

Joe Bogart crash landed his extraterrestrial bar and grill smack dab in the middle of nowhere, 800 miles into the desert. Can this proximity be a coincidence?  Hardly. Screenwriters don’t rely on chance.

Thanks to inhaling helium, this Bogart outdoes Robin Williams, spouting passages from films in the original voices lickity-split which explains a little, very little, of what is going on but which is fun to watch and identify, ‘my dear, if you give a damn.’ Meanwhile, the born again gloomy copper pursues some Mad Max wannabe’s led by a none too bright but half baked arch villain in spurs. Maybe the copper is so glum because he is pining for The Quiet Earth (1985) where he had even fewer lines.

There are many misunderstandings and much to-ing and fro-ing, but it always comes back to Bogart’s Bar out there in the desert.  

The plots holes are many but there is too much pace to look back. When I caught my breath I listed these:  

• How did the baby survive unbeknownst to his father?
• Where was the mother in all this?
• Did the six count?  
• Where can I get a cocktail shaker like that?
• What happened to the bow-tie wearing CSIRO man?
• Did it hurt? (Hope so.)
• Who cares? (Not me.) 
• And last but not least, was it that Strasser?  

Despite these plot holes, it makes more sense than the ever so serious Incident at Raven’s Gate of the same year filmed in the same locale (at the same time?) with a similar storyline played entirely differently. And also used helium! Must of been on special.

As with Incident at Raven’s Gate this Australian outback is devoid of aborigines in any form.  

Aniara 1960

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours, rated 5.7 by 36 cinematizens.  

Genre: SY Fy; Species: Musical; Phylum: Opera.

DNA: Sweden

Verdict:  Bergman bleak.

Tagline: A Space Opera! 

So static watch screen timer to be sure it is running because no one is inclined to move at first.

A group of leotard clad Swedes prepare to rocket off a dying Earth in 2038, despoiled by nuclear war, to join an established human colony on Mars, where they will live the Swedish Model so loved by Australian public intellectuals in the 1980s.  

They prepare to immigrate by standing still and singing.

They board the rocket while standing still and singing.

The rocket goes off course as they stand still and sing.

Time passes.  They stand still and sing. 

More time passes: They stand still and sing.

The three week trip to Mars will last forever, as the next generation is born on the ship (with its endless supply of food, water, oxygen, Ikea parts).  The party of eight thousand settles down to live our their lives in transit, rather as many Qantas passengers have felt at times. They take out their frustrations on each other. Situation normal. 

The story started as an epic poem by Nobel Prize winner Harry Martinson so it is a science fiction poem of more than a hundred pages in the English translation. That is perhaps unique. On a long winter night, some one had the idea of rendering it as the libretto of an opera in 1959, which in turn sired this film, using the opera cast and most of its staging and direction. Lugubrious is the result.  

He must be the only Sy Fy author with a Nobel Prize for Literature. 

Beware! Killjoys can find the full text on line and insist on reading to you.  It’s as preachy as a Green politician, and just as interesting.  

It was remade in 2018, sharing the blame with Norway, and I can hardly wait to see that version.