Fan Fiction and Kickstarter, a wicked combination. Star Trek Renegades is a collection of older actors and very bad special effects. The big name stars here are Walter Koenig and Tim Russ, both familiar to fans of Star Trek. Sean Young and several other blasts from the past have roles as well. Time has not been kind to these people. There is an odd production error early in the film when we see a monument to Admiral Nimoy that should have been to Admiral Spock. Or maybe it should have been to Leonard Nimoy, without any military titles. Star Trek…
Category: sci fi
Limitless
It’s a popular myth that people only use ten percent of their brain’s potential. This would make evolution look pretty bad. A big brain that never reaches its full capacity. Of course, the brain does more than remember the random crap we read online, it keeps the heart beating, reminds us when to eat, when to sleep, tells us who to flirt with, and also remembers rather a lot of random crap that we read online. Limitless takes the idea that we only use 20% of our brain power and offers up a pill that allows us to use all of…
Extinction
Ice Ice Zombies Ice [easyazon_link identifier=”B011M5B1Y0″ locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Extinction[/easyazon_link]. In classic, post apocalypse style we open up with a group of people crowded together. Random people on buses heading for parts unknown. Then something happens. All but a tiny handful are eaten by zombies. We flash forward about ten years and find three survivors living next door to each other. Two men and one little girl. The world is a frozen wasteland covered in white. The survivors are kind of nuts. Even though they live side by side, they appear to hate each other, or at least, one of them hates…
Minority Report
It’s been awhile since I read [easyazon_link identifier=”140723093X” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Philip K Dick[/easyazon_link]’s story or watched [easyazon_link identifier=”B00A2FSXHK” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Tom Cruise[/easyazon_link]’s movie, but I do recall liking them both. It seems to me that the book was set in a slightly richer world. While PreCrime was kind of an experiment in the film, it appeared to be a well established fact of law enforcement in the story. I always had the feeling that every large city had its own PreCrime bureau. And if the Precog range is a hundred miles, then there should be a set of PreCogs every hundred miles. In Fox’s…
Self/Less
When once isn’t enough. [easyazon_link identifier=”B01169SSOI” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Self/Less[/easyazon_link] tells the tale of a rich man who is dying. Someone slips him a business card with a note that says they can help you. He decides to take a chance and call them. He finds out that for a mere 250 million, he can get a new body. For a rich real estate developer, he doesn’t seem to be bothered that this high tech lab that’s going to give me a brain transplant looks a lot like BioSphere 2. But hey, they have those plastic strip curtain things on all the…
Chappie
A Robot With a Heart. Spoilers [easyazon_link identifier=”B00ZRES1NC” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Chappie[/easyazon_link] is set in the distance future of 2016, where autonomous humanoid robots have replaced flesh and blood law enforcement. Our hero is severely injured while doing his job and becomes part of an experiment. Oh wait, that’s Robocop. Chappie lifts a lot of it’s plot from Robocop and lifts a lot of it’s emotional elements from District 9. We have a poor innocent robot who we are told is a new born. What makes these scenes hard to watch is how evil and heartless everyone he meets is. From his…
Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys
I recently caught [easyazon_link identifier=”B000ICXQF6″ locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]12 Monkey[/easyazon_link]s on Showtime and watched it for the first time in many years. In 1995 Terry Gillian made one of his better trademark weird and brilliant films. 12 Monkeys tells the story of a man forced to volunteer for a dangerous mission into the past. The future is a post pandemic wasteland where wild animals run loose and the survivors have to live underground. Terry Gilliam is a master of using Practical Effects, this means his post apocalyptic world is made with things from the real world and not from a computer. The…
Terminator Genisys
More Terminator on Terminator Action Spoilers and Such I love [easyazon_link identifier=”B00153ZC8Q” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]The Terminator[/easyazon_link]. It’s a damn near perfect film that did a pretty good job of tying up its loose ends. But not so good a job that it didn’t end up with a few too many sequels. So it’s a bittersweet experience to watch the clumsily re-shot scenes from The Terminator and hear familiar dialogue spoken in odd voices. The redo of [easyazon_link identifier=”B0037NVM2C” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Judgement Day[/easyazon_link] as the opening credits roll was a pale imitation of Linda Hamilton’s raspy, hate filled voice from T2. But then, this isn’t that…
Humans-Androids Are Slaves
Another Science Fiction Show where machines with souls are bad. Humans is a British Channel 4 science fiction show picked up by AMC. The big American star in the cast is William Hurt. He plays a grumpy old man who has a strong attachment to his malfunctioning robot. In this alternate reality, health care is not only free, it’s mandatory. The Government tells William he must replace his old model with a new one. The new model appears to be based on Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. The main storyline has to do with a handful…
Mad Max Fury Road
One of the things I hate about new superhero movies is that they spend the first twenty minutes of the film on an Origin Story. Dammit, doesn’t everyone already know that Batman’s parents were gunned down in an alley and Superman was raised by a couple of hicks in Kansas? Well, [easyazon_link identifier=”B00XOXDXV8″ locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Fury Road[/easyazon_link] wastes no time telling us how Max ends up in a desert snacking on a two headed mutant lizard. We have a handful of flashbacks of a little girl begging Max for help and then off we go on our two hour chase scene. Fury…