The information age isn’t finished with us.
Two years after Chronicle, writer Max Landis finally has a new film in production, no wait; this imaginary device in my ear tells me Max Landis’ current production is a remake of Frankenstein with Daniel Radcliffe as Igor. That messes up the drama of my announcement. Anyway, Landis has an original film about to go into production called American Ultra; a regular guy Mike discovered he is in fact a sleeper agent who must call on his hitherto unrealised talents to survive.
Hme, sounds a bit like Chuck… Anyway Jesse Eisenberg stars and Nima (Project X) Nourizadeh directs. I like Landis so I’ll probably check it out.
Back in Grunting (138) we mentioned British Sci-Fi thriller The Anomaly from Noel Clarke, well it is now set to open in the U.K. on July 4th: an ex-soldier wakes up in a van with a kidnapped boy by his side and only moments to figure out how he got there. Is he a victim, is he a villain?
Ooh look, straight to disk DVD, and it’s science fiction. Skyhook from director Drew Hall, no extra’s on the disk.
What is the scenario? A team of scientists build the first space elevator but a mercenary is trying to sabotage it. Hme. In a book this might be good, as a movie it lacks pizzazz
And now for the bad news. There was only one review I could find and,.. well it stunk.
We got another live Patlabor trailer, this one for the second TV episode.
http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/movienewsandreviews/news/?a=98218
There will be a couple more episodes (well something like eleven) then the Feature film.
Everything is turning into Stargate.
Now I’ve been maxing and relaxing catching reruns of original Stargate. And I got to thinking.
It’s all wormholes. For instance Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is about interstellar wormholes; it’s posh Stargate.
Doug Liman is angling to direct an adaptation of Philip (Larklight) Reeve’s forthcoming novel Railhead. I would not have mentioned it, it’s a Young Adult novel, but it’s about trains that go through space portals: Stargate with trains.
The latest project is a Ridely Scott project with wormh.. no wait! This TV series has no wormholes, no space portals and no trains. It’s called Pharaoh.
As you may have guessed I is based in ancient Egypt, but an Egypt where Aliens have build the Pyramids. It’s Stargate, a very upscale Stargate because Scott is teaming up with HBO to make it and you know they don’t play.
I’m guessing Ridley had a ton or research left over from Prometheus and rather than letting it go to waste he thought he’d put all of that Van Daniken Material with alien gods influencing ancient civilisations to use. David Shulner is the series creator and runner, and check this, Scot will executive produce and direct the pilot.
That’s something.
Len (Underworld) Wiseman has settled on his next project, it’s Black Chapter, a science fiction feature Written by Zak Penn.
Penn used to the go-to guy for Comic Book Movies; he wrote The Incredible Hulk, X-Men: X2, and even a version of the Avengers before Joss Weldon got his hands on it.
With Black Chapter we have an FBI Special Agent who stumbles on an American Intelligence program to train secret Operatives with psychic powers.
It appears to be loosely based on the real MK-ULTRA program from the 1960. This was also the basis of the book and the film The Men Who Stare at Goats. But I suspect Black Chapter will take more creative approach. (That goat is going down!)
Kristina Buožytė and Bruno Samper the creative powers behind the (naked) Lithuanian science fiction film Vanishing Waves are back with their second feature: Emergence.
As you can see from the title it is about the coming of artificial intelligence, but it takes a different tack, Lemark’s father was a brilliant bio-engineer, Lemark finds himself going to Morocco to take over his father’s last project a huge artificial consciousness called the Organism which is potentially remarkable, if it wasn’t also dying.
It sounds very visual and utterly fascinating.
Back in Grunt (139) we told you about Mark Millar’s Starlight
Well he hasn’t been sitting on his hands. MPH by Millar and artist Duncan Fegredo has just optioned by Lorenzo di Bonaventura,
This one his take on very fast superheroes. It is set in contemporary Detroit where a group of kids start using a street drug called MPH which lets them go very fast for seven days, and what they do with it is not very heroic.
Hme. Sounds interesting, at the best it could be Chronicle meets the Flash..*
I’ve been scanning the supermarket shelves again and this time I have found Scopers, with Nick Stahl. Some remember Stahl. as John Conner on Terminator III, I’d rather thing of him as the titular Yellow Bastard in Sin City.
Apparently Scopers was renamed from “The Speed of Thought”.
Stahl plays a government trained telepath or “Scoper”. Scoping is a blessing and a curse as uncontrolled telepathy can drive the Scoper mad with voices. Stahl is mentoring a young untrained Scoper when he starts to fall in love with her. Problem is this is forbidden by the government so the pair of them have to go on the run.
Sounds like it has potential, I checked out some reviews. The general word is… they kind of like it.
Check this one from Starburst.
http://www.starburstmagazine.com/reviews/dvd-and-blu-ray-home-entertainment-reviews/8463-dvd-review-scopers
Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer was well reviewed but hardly seen, the director is now trying to put together a new trailer and new promotional art for a re-release and he is trying to crowdfund it.
Check it out
https://rally.org/sleep-dealer
By now you will have heard that Warner Bros is planning a Justice League feature to follow the Batman Vs Superman that is currently in the works.
All I can say is… why? After all it seems most of the Justice League will turn up in Batman Vs Superman anyway, as well as the titular characters there will be Wonder Woman, Cyborg
Now this is embarrassing, Sci Fi London was not last month, it started on 24th April.
In addition to the films I previously mention it screened (because it will be too late by the time you read this).
Some actually interesting.
Aura.
A Hungarian Science Fiction film about four young friends trapped by an invisible force field, their supernatural prison starts changing and producing different environments until strange secrets about the origin of humanity are revealed.
Soulmate
Directed by Axelle Carolyn , produced by Neil Marshall who happens to be husband, this ghost story is about a woman who fails at a suicide attempt then takes a cabin in the woods (actually a remote cottage, but you get where I’m going) to recuperate, the house is haunted and she gets to know the ghost.
Struggled Reagans
(No I don’t get the title either) six sexually traumatised teens are given superpowers and spandex then sent on a mission. Um, no, I’m not commenting further.
Despertar
A man receives a phone call that his girlfriend has been in a car accident.
He finds her in an experimental facility but she has no signs of injury. Slowly they realise that they have both been part of a strange procedure and they cannot trust that anything is real.
What is interesting is that this one comes from the Dominican Republic.
The Scribbler
I blogged this one back in… wait, I read about it but did not blog it. How did that happen.
This was one of a series of films from New Artist Alliance budgeted at under a million dollars. It is based on a comic by Dan Schafferís.
a young woman in a halfway house for mental patients starts getting a radical new treatment from something called The Siamese Burn machine, but discovers her fellow former inmates are dying at an alarming rate. Is it real, is it delusion?
Upside Down
Sadly enough this is indeed the Canadian feature about star-crossed lovers who live in two different worlds where gravity work in opposite direction and can only interact by climbing very tall buildings. Sounds silly but there are all sorts of possibilities for upside down Spider-man style kissing.
I have been waiting for this film for years… and now it turns up?
Reviews for Transcendence are out and they are,.. universally negative. Hme. Although they all hate it, the each hate different aspects, some hate Wally Pfister’s flat direction, some hate Johnny Depp’s lifeless performance, some hate the story line which goes from challenging ideas to dumb action, there is a lot here, and apparently all to hate.
I’m going anyway, because if we don’t go see original science fiction… then who will?
Transcendence
Review
I set out to see this film with apprehension, I have seen so stinkers of late and dislike paying for the privilege.
Will and Evelyn are computer scientists, he dreams of discovering the deeper truths of artificial intelligence , he dreams of changing the world with groundbreaking technology.
Which is all undermined by RIFT a terrorists group with the skills of black hat hackers and the deadly focus of Jihadists, they shoot will, he survives but the bullet was laced with polonium and he faces an agonising extended death.
Evelyn is unwilling to face this and she uses an experimental to record Will’s mind and upload it to AI cores.
Transcendence, had some very negative reviews followed by disastrous box office. But I went along anyway, determined to put my suckometer on it and take the measure of it’s suckage.
Transcendence is movie of ideas, it asks many questions and wisely answers none of them, but it does layout the major issues of transformative change and what it will do to us: Brain Uploading, nanotechnology, mind downloading…. immortality.
The acting is very fine Johnny Depp is admirably restrained, Paul Bettany is , well the most human I have seen him in years, and Rebecca Hall as Evelyn is fascinating; taking the roll Hugh Jackman had in The Fountain she is the one who will not accept fate and chooses to use science to keep her spouse from death. It’s kind-of refreshing.
From the midsection things pick up, as Will becomes superhumanly intelligent, developing nanotechnology which revolutionises eco- science , manufacturing and medicine.
At first everything looks positive, Will gives jobs to the needy, heals the lame, and the blind, brings the dead back to life.
But of course it is not all sweetness and light, RIFT, is still around, and the US government is not very enthusiastic about this technology out of control and belonging to someone else.
It does not take long until these unlikely allies decide something has to be done (and you know that involves some gratuitous violence and explosions).
This is a different kind of science fiction movie, for the most part it is gently paced and leaves the pyrotechnics largely to the end.
I have a few objections, most of the scenes take place in a solar panel array, making it look like the technology is well.. evil.
If there is anything to object to it’s that the film wants to have its cake and eat it too; it wants to show the wonders of transformative technology and to lay a disapproving eye upon it at the same time. And it does not seem to be passionate enough about either viewpoint.
If networking technology turns us into zombies, then they are the mild, not especially dangerous kind.
And if we are going to rid ourselves of digital technology them we don’t have to display the horrendous loss of life, and real suffering that will inevitably bring.
In the end I suspect the writer Jack Paglen had the last laugh: after all, Will dies, heals the sick cures the earth but for all his pain attracts the opprobrium of the powers that be who seek to drag him down and destroy all his works. It looks like the act of a techno messiah.
By and large however this is a thoughtful movie with real ideas, a rarity for science fiction in recent times.
It was worth a look and I liked it.
*I could not have meant that, I mean “Chronicle meets any very fast superhero….”
And if you want some real movie news you know what to do.
http://www.darkhorizons.com/
And if you want to walk the wild side of genre video try Starburst’s review section
http://www.starburstmagazine.com/reviews/DVD-and-blu-ray-home-entertainment-reviews
I’m Jack Eris and if you know me, you know Jack.
