Time travel stories were all the rage back in the 1950s. Everyone was writing them, and most of them weren’t all that good. Grandmaster of Scifi Robert A. Heinlein decided to write the ultimate time travel story. The result was the poorly named All You Zombies. Predestination is a movie that was based on this 1959 short story. We start off with two people moving through shadowy places, we don’t get a good look at their faces. One of them is a bomber, one of them is trying to stop the bomber from succeeding. Things go wrong and a time…
Category: sci fi
12 Monkeys on Syfy
It’s been a while since I last watched Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, but I do recall that it was pretty amazing. It had a brilliant cast and a wonderful premise. Everyone was dead and we just didn’t know it yet. One of the best parts of 12 Monkeys was that we didn’t know whether Cole was really a time traveler or just crazy. We also didn’t understand his mission for some time. We have no such mysteries to worry about in Syfy’s 12 Monkeys, which goes into much more detail about Cole’s ability to travel through time and proves right…
Time Lapse
No one ever has a perfect time machine, there’s no drama if you can easily change things and make the world a perfect place. So all time travel stories have to have a fatal flaw-some little weakness that makes using it a bit of a problem. One way to do this is to set a time limit. Say, you can see into the future, but not very far and only in one place. That’s our premise here in Time Lapse, a camera makes a Polaroid snapshot of events in the apartment across the way, twenty-four hours before it actually happens.…
The Martian
A staple of old school science fiction is the lone man stranded on a desolate world who had to survive on his wits alone. The Martian by Andy Weir follows boldly in that tradition with a fun tale filled with adventure and ingenuity. Our hero finds himself stranded on Mars when his fellow astronauts leave him behind. They can be forgiven for this since they thought he was dead. And thus we start a long journey into the trials and tribulations of being a human on Mars. This is a fun book filled with bad jokes and hard science, or…
The Maze Runner
Yet another post-humans-have-screwed-up-the-world-and-its-up-to-the-kids-to-save-it film. As usual the kids are tossed into some completely contrived world where they have to make sense of things that make no sense. For a nice twist from the Lord of The Flies model, we have our young heroes working together to survive. I was waiting for them to don their buffs and give themselves a cool Survivor tribal name. Living up to its title, there is a lot of running and there is a maze that would put those silly Game Designers over in Mocking Jay Land to shame. This is a huge complex with…
2001: A Space Odyssey
2001 is Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of science fiction and an all around amazing film. It’s not really one film, but a collection of short films, each with its own little reality. We open with several minutes of harmonized noise and a blank screen. This sets the tone for most of the film, where there is very little dialogue and lots of silence intermingled with classical music. Released in 1968, 2001:A Space Odyssey has better special effects than any film made in the last twenty years, not because they fill every frame, but because they are perfect in their execution and…
Interstellar
Spoilers and Such. Yet another post apocalyptic movie about what bastards humans are for destroying the world. But unlike such uplifting films as The Road Warrior, there is no hope left for life on earth. So we have to send out a team of intrepid explorers to find a new world for us to ruin. Interstellar is like a lot of recent films. It has a mostly all star cast, amazing visual effects, a few tear jerker moments and a plot that makes no damned sense at all. The characters spend a lot of time talking about Relativity and Gravity…
The Giver
Spoilers and such. Yet another story of a future utopia/dystopia where a handful of disgruntled people who know the truth want to bring it all to an end. As usual in the past few years, the hero here is a precocious teenager and the villain is an old person. But there is an old person who is sort of a hero as well, as with all of these kinds of films, it’s up for debate whether or not destroying the world is a good idea. Or if, in fact, there are any heroes here. In Book of Eli, it was…
The Twelfth Doctor Who
When Doctor Who was brought back from the dead many years ago, and the role was handed off to Christopher Eccleston, everyone was thrilled and the show was great. Then Eccleston said to hell with this nonsense after one season and there was a great gnashing of teeth and ripping of hair. But then there was a miracle, real actor and actual good looking fellow David Tennant landed the role. David set the tone for the modern Doctors, a man who is both a lot of fun and a cold blooded murder bent on righting wrongs and possibly destroying the…
Forever
Our hero is an immortal who just can’t seem to stay dead. He dies three times in the first episode and once or twice in the second. Since his gift of immortality is a magical one, his body kindly vanishes every time this happens. I like Forever, it has a great cast and I’m always glad to see Judd Hirsch in anything. The show looks good and there are a lot of costumes and sets as we move around in time to see what our two hundred year old hero has been up to lo these many years. The main…