Sci-fi

TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT

Cert 12A 148mins Stars 1

Run for your life as the giant alien robot franchise returns to obliterate the box office.

The previous four films have taken nearly £3 billion in total at the box office and this wretchedly repetitive and grindingly incoherent episode will probably add considerably more.

Never afraid to do less with more, director Michael Bay takes his £200m budget and adds King Arthur to this mangled mess of globe hopping machines, endless explosions and terrible bantz. Even the supposedly quiet moments are played with a rock music video intensity.

The plot shamelessly apes the plot of the most recent Fast Furious film. Hero robot Optimus Prime is coerced by a glamorous female villain to turn on his former comrades so she can rule the universe, or something. 

As Optimus is a pompous, vain, and speechifying dumbbell, it’s a blessing he’s sidelined for long periods.

Mark Wahlberg resumes his role as Cade Yeager, a struggling inventor and now legendary resistance leader. He gamely runs around, shooting stuff and flirting with Laura Haddock.

The Brit actress has been jettisoned in to provide a glamorous love interest and miraculously escapes with her dignity intact.

This is despite her character being described as a ‘professor in a stripper dress’ and being obliged to perform a zero gravity pole dance during one of the many lengthy action sequences.

Anthony Hopkins’ broader eccentricities are unleashed as Sir Edmund Burton, a historian with back door channels to Downing street.

He explains the sub-Da Vinci code nonsense as they chase about castles and stately homes in pursuit of the staff of Merlin.

It’s the weapon of ultimate power. Which is useful as the robot planet Cybertron is en route to suck the life out of Earth. I now understand exactly how that feels.

This obsolete hunk of junk should be sent to the wreckers yard.

 

 

COLOSSAL

Cert 15 109mins Stars 4

Despite the giant lizard co-star which is seen stomping across the Seoul skyline, it’s Anne Hathaway’s talent which dominates this sci-fi black comedy.

The Oscar winner is permanently dishevelled under a heavy fringe and black eyeliner, she’s an irresistible combination of vulnerability, determination, comic ability and sex appeal.

She plays Gloria, a thirty-something writer whose inner demons have prompted a retreat to her small hometown in the US. She wakes one hungover afternoon to discover a real monster has appeared in South Korea.

Though the twisted script threatens to be a romantic uplifting tale of empowerment, we’re repeatedly pushed off balance by its dark turns into childhood trauma, domestic violence and alcoholism.

The creature is designed in homage to Japan’s Godzilla, and this is easily more entertaining than Hollywood’s two most recent attempts to make a Godzilla movie.

But for all the monsters on display, it’s the green-eyed variety which is the most colossal and terrifying.

HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES

Cert 15 103mins Stars 3

Three sex hungry teenagers have a very close encounter in this raucous and oddball 1970’s-set British sci-fi comedy.

Looking for an late night party in Croydon, the lads mistakenly blag their way into an avant garde latex fetish swingers club. Which almost always never happened to me when I lived in the South London borough.

Based on a short story from the weird and wonderful mind of  writer, Neil Gaiman, the central joke is no one can tell the difference between punks, aliens and Americans.

Dazzlingly put together by Brit multi-Oscar winning costume designer, Sandy Powell, the costumes are a riot of electric colours.

Nicole Kidman unleashes her inner anarchist as a punk matriarch called Boudicca, and Elle Fanning is demented as an alien with only 48 hours to experience life, or at least Croydon.

For all its punk posturing the film is more fun than ferocious, and its alarming appearance disguises a surprisingly sweet nature.

 

ALIEN: COVENANT

Cert 15 122mins Stars 5

Scream as though no-one can hear you as the galaxy’s greatest space horror franchise is back to terrorise us once again.

Director Ridley Scott returns to the sci-fi thriller which made his name, and delivers an epic of spine-busting action, exotic locations and stunning design.

The Oscar winning director made the original Alien in 1979 when he was a young man in a hurry. As one of cinemas elder statesmen, in 2012 he belatedly  followed up with the grandly ambitious but less well received, Prometheus.

Now he splices the pair to create an explosive hybrid of blood-splatting thrills and apocalyptic destruction on a mythic scale. It’s all very familiar and at times daringly new.

There are chest-bursters, face-huggers, and acid blood. Orifices are penetrated and cavities evacuated, as we’d expect. But Scott plays on our knowledge of the franchise to skilfully toy with our expectations of the narrative.

We’re challenged to have some sympathy with the the ferocious flesh hungry parasitic alien, called a Xenomorph. A seduction is played with such subtle grace and integrity, it disguises how audacious and mind bendingly freaky it is. 

Set ten years after Prometheus, a small team of colonists are stranded on a planet and are unable to communicate with the orbiting mothership.

As the script wrestles with the big questions of existence, our heroes have to grapple for their lives.

Leading the fight for survival is Daniels, played by Katherine Waterston. The tall, dark-haired beauty is slyly styled by Scott to resemble the undisputed queen of the franchise, Sigourney Weaver.

Despite displaying Weaver’s kick-ass aptitude, Waterston is overawed by a majestic Michael Fassbender. He’s mesmeric in a dual role as synthetic androids, David and Walter.

Scott’s final theatrical flourish sends the franchise spinning out in a new direction. This is screamingly great cinema.

GHOST IN THE SHELL (2017)

Cert 12A 107mins Stars 2

Beneath the glossy exterior there’s not much spirit to be found in this curate’s egg of a sci-fi action thriller.

A hard working Scarlett Johansson stands at the centre of the spectacular visuals, but even the Avengers star can’t bring the soulless storytelling to boil.

The story is based the acclaimed Japanese cyberpunk comic strip which was followed by a successful big screen animated version in 1995. They were a huge influence on The Matrix, which is why a lot of the ideas here seem very familiar.

This future version of Japan is a neon vision of eye popping CGI. The population pay for cybernetic enhancements to make themselves quicker, stronger, smarter, etc.

Johansson gives a nicely judged mechanical performance as a kick-ass military cyborg known as the Major. She’s a human brain in a synthetic body and possessed of unexplained powers of flight and invisibility.

Investigating the assassination of corporate suits, the Major discovers a secret about her past which causes her to question her mission.

Controversy was caused by the casting of Johansson in the lead role. Giving an Asian role to a caucasian actress has led to accusations of whitewashing.

But technically Johansson is playing a robot, and the film’s Chinese financiers don’t seem to have a problem with it. And anyway, it’s the least of the films problems.

Despite casting one of the worlds most desirable women and encasing her in a nude body suit, this is a remarkably sexless enterprise.

Plus the cardboard cutout characters are dwarfed by the locations and the drama is lost in the scrambled action sequences.

A flat script fails to explore the idea of identity, and the dull dialogue suffers from a severe humour malfunction.

And without love, poetry or anything else to give it humanity, the Ghost In The Shell offers very little of substance.

 

THE PREDATOR

Cert 15 106mins Stars 2

Misjudged, misfiring and overbearingly macho, this sci-fi action comedy sequel is easily the worst in the four strong franchise.

When a hi-tech alien hunter crash lands on Earth, a US mercenary and a scientist team up with war damaged army veterans to fight it.

The original 1987 classic was an allegory for the Vietnam war and a blockbuster smash. It was directed with brio by John ‘Die Hard’ McTiernan, and fortified by the commanding presence of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

There’s no-one of his statue here, and the last film of new writer and director, Shane Black, The Nice Guys, was a box office bomb.

In his typical self back-slapping style Black mixes blood-splatting violence with boring banter-heavy bromance while casually exploiting Tourette’s Syndrome for cheap laughs.

His workaday storytelling isn’t helped by the studio cutting a scene after Black cast a friend who was a registered sex offender, and failed to inform his bosses, or the unfortunate female lead, Olivia Munn.

 

 

 

MORTAL ENGINES

Cert 12A Stars 3

The latest blockbuster to rumble across the big screen from the makers of The Lord of the Rings trilogy is surprisingly clunky and run of the mill.

Adapted from a series of books by Brit author Philip Reeve it’s a steampunk sci-fi fantasy epic set 1000 years into the future on an apocalyptic Earth.

Icelandic actress Hera Hilmar plays a young orphan bent on revenging her mother’s death and becomes involved in a fiendish plot to unleash centuries old technology with the power to destroy the world.

Her target is Hugo Weaving’s duplicitous patrician, who’s geared to driving London to a brighter future.

Tremendously designed and rendered in faultless CGI throughout, it’s a world where Europeans inhabit cities resting on ginormous armoured vehicles which prey on smaller mechanical towns for scarce materials such as fuel and salt.

There are sea-travelling prison towns on crab-like legs, small scavenger villages and a floating hot air balloon metropolis, while in the Asiatic east a static settlement sits behind a huge wall, and is presented as a fortified Shangri-la.

However the inspired premise is crushed beneath the wheels of misfiring storytelling, which has clanking dialogue, comedy and romance which barely register and is bereft of a sense of time or distance.

London is a giant tank thundering across Europe, flattening opposition and scooping up resources for it’s over-privileged upper classes, but this abundant wealth of satirical possibilities is wasted.

Despite determined efforts by the actors to provide emotional fuel, they’re too often squandered as grist for the towering spectacle.

Plus Hilmar’s nominal central role is squeezed out of focus by a bevy of subplots and not particularly interesting characters.

The best of which are Stephen Lang’s undead cyborg, who takes the story into an agreeably dark place, but it’s all too quickly back-pedalled from in favour of more family friendly action scenes.

And despite some game playing by Irishman, Robert Sheehan, his lowly historian and wannabe aviator is required to bridge an awkward divide between romantic lead and comic support.

With it’s strong Antipodean accent in front and behind the camera, this too often feels like an enormously souped up riff on Mad Max, but one with a fraction of the dynamism.

 

 

DIVISION 19

Cert 15 93mins Stars 2

This ambitious dystopian sci-fi doesn’t lack for interesting ideas, but is guilty of terrible incoherence, a near terminal over-serious tone and lacklustre action.

In the near future the government keeps the population under control through strict surveillance and identity control.

Prisoners are now reality TV stars used by companies to sell consumer products to the citizens. This is a great satirical concept and is deserving of a far better movie.

Division 19 is the underground resistance who exist off the security grid, and plan to rescue the world’s most popular prisoner to dent an evil corporations profit-swelling expansionist plans.

Jamie Dravin is a sadly anodyne hero, Linus Rosche riffs on Alan Rickman as the sheriff of Nottingham in Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and the film’s one undoubted bright spot is Alison Doody’s immaculate and villainous CEO.

The abandoned areas of modern Detroit make for a suitably apocalyptic backdrop and has featured in many films previously, notably in Ryan Gosling’s 2014 directorial debut, Lost River, which was shot concurrently.

But there’s no sense of geography or distance between locations, and while low flying skyscraper-sized satellites fill the skies, the quality of the CGI makes they seem tacked on rather than organic part of the world. In a similar manner robots appear briefly and randomly, and seem to be there to offer fleeting comic relief, but it’s hard to be sure.

Meanwhile the roof-hopping parkour action is leaden and dated, and the downtrodden masses are conspicuous by their absence.

From Westworld to Mad Max the influences are obvious, but this feels like a clumsy fan-fiction low-budget episode of the Divergent franchise.

MORTAL ENGINES

Cert 12A 128mins Stars 3

The latest blockbuster from the makers of The Lord of the Rings trilogy is surprisingly clunky and run of the mill as it rumbles across the big screen.

Adapted from a series of books by Brit author Philip Reeve with tremendous design and faultless CGI, it’s a steampunk sci-fi fantasy epic set 1000 years into the future on an apocalyptic Earth.

European cities are now ginormous armoured vehicles which prey on smaller mechanical towns for scarce materials such as fuel and salt.

However this inspired premise is crushed beneath the wheels of the misfiring storytelling which has clanking dialogue and no sense of time or distance while the comedy and romance barely register.

Icelandic actress Hera Hilmar does her best as an orphaned outcast intent on murdering Hugo Weaving’s duplicitous patrician, while he’ll stop at nothing to drive London to a brighter future.

Despite the actors determined efforts to provide emotional fuel, they’re too often squandered as grist for the towering spectacle.

BEYOND THE GATES

Director: Jackson Stewart (2017) BBFC cert: 18

 

Rewind to the era of the video nasty with this lovingly made, entertaining and accurate homage to cult comedy horrors such as such as Fright Night and Re-Animator.

When two brothers return to their parents’ defunct video store, they find a mysterious interactive video cassette game movie called Beyond The Gate.

They realise it holds clues to their father’s disappearance, but are warned playing the game could cost them their souls.

There’s a healthy amount of camp fun among  the blood letting action and enough menace to give you the shivers.

★★★☆☆

@ChrisHunneysett