Category Archives: Sci-Fi

Brent Bonacorso – The Narrow World (2017)

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A giant alien creature comes to Earth. The reasons for its arrival, however, remain unknown as mankind fails to make contact with the visitor.

Review:
The Narrow World follows a group of scientists as they try to unravel the enigma of the alien’s purpose. That setup may have the sound of a schlocky ‘alien invasion’ film – the sort where evil E.T.s are out to destroy Earth and an all out battle for the future of humanity must ensue – but surfaces can be deceiving. Bonacorso subverts the film’s familiar setup by positing his invader as a passive observer. His alien doesn’t attack Earth. Nor does it communicate in any way, shape or form. In fact, it doesn’t do much of anything but walk and watch. Continue reading →

Andrei Tarkovsky – Stalker [The Criterion Collection] (1979)

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Quote:
Andrei Tarkovsky’s final Soviet feature is a metaphys­ical journey through an enigmatic postapocalyptic landscape, and a rarefied cinematic experience like no other. A hired guide—the Stalker—leads a writer and a professor into the heart of the Zone, the restricted site of a long-ago disaster, where the three men eventually zero in on the Room, a place rumored to fulfill one’s most deeply held desires. Adapting a science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Tarkovsky created an immersive world with a wealth of material detail and a sense of organic atmosphere. A religious allegory, a reflection of contemporaneous political anxieties, a meditation on film itself—Stalker envelops the viewer by opening up a multitude of possible meanings. Continue reading →

Hideaki Anno & Shinji Higuchi – Shin Gojira AKA Godzilla Resurgance (2016)

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Synopsis:
It’s a peaceful day in Japan when a strange fountain of water erupts in the bay, causing panic to spread among government officials. At first, they suspect only volcanic activity, but one young executive dares to wonder if it may be something different; something alive. His worst nightmare comes to life when a massive, gilled monster emerges from the deep and begins tearing through the city, leaving nothing but destruction in its wake. Continue reading →

Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson – In Search of UIQ (2013)

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FOR THOSE WHO WANTS LOVE AND FREEDOM
In Search of UIQ unfolds the story of Félix Guattari’s lost science-fiction screenplay, Un Amour d’UIQ. Conceived during the 1980s, this unmade film imagines the discovery of the Infra-quark Universe (UIQ), an alien intelligence from a parallel dimension that falls in love with one of its human hosts, an event which has catastrophic consequences for the whole planet. Moving between documentary, fiction and essay, through the deployment of video, film and sound archives, letters and other documents that are enmeshed in a series of fabulations, In Search of UIQ explores what the cinema of the Infra-quark might have been (and may still become) and considers its rapport with key social and political transformations of our time from autonomist struggles to the digital recoding of life. Continue reading →

Andrei Tarkovsky – Solyaris (1972)

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Quote:
One of the most frequent charges against science-fiction is that it replaces emotion with intellect. Its characters are people who live by and for the mind, and their personal relationships are likely to be stifled and awkward, That’s probably true enough of most s-f novels (although exceptions range from Fredric Brown’s “The Lights in the Sky are Stars” to a lot of the work by Theodore Sturgeon), but it’s even more true of science-fiction movies. Continue reading →

David Cronenberg – eXistenZ (1999)

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Quote:
Allegra Geller, the leading game designer in the world, is testing her new virtual reality game, eXistenZ with a focus group. As they begin, she is attacked by a fanatic assassin employing a bizarre organic gun. She flees with a young marketing trainee, Ted Pikul, who is suddenly assigned as her bodyguard. Unfortunately, her pod, an organic gaming device that contains the only copy of the eXistenZ game program, is damaged. To inspect it, she talks Ted into accepting a gameport in his own body so he can play the game with her. The events leading up to this, and the resulting game lead the pair on a strange adventure where reality and their actions are impossible to determine from either their own or the game’s perspective. Continue reading →