Dune: Part Two (2024)

Almost ridiculously epic and far too long, this second part of the Frank Herbert sci-fi adaptation is again directed by Denis Villeneuve.

Paul Atreides unites with the Fremen people of Arrakis to wage war on House Harkonnen. 

There are too many shots of Zendaya scowling at Timothée Chalamet.

It’s visually stunning but also quite ponderous in places.

The Thing (1982)

Directed by John Carpenter, this is an intriguing mixture of horror, sci-fi and psychological drama.

Kurt Russell stars as one of a group of US researchers working in Antarctica, where the team encounter an alien life-form able to take on the form of other beings – including dogs and humans.

The plot cleverly explores how no one can trust each other because of the risk that any one of them could have been taken over by the alien. There's plenty of tension, and – although I don't love his acting style – Russell is pretty good in the lead role.

Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Tightly plotted and relentlessly entertaining, this was the second Star Wars film to be released (although it's placed fifth in the overall narrative sequence).

There's an excellent script full of highly quotable lines, and a lot of it is very funny, too. Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill are all at their best.

There’s romance (Han and Leia), adventure, mystery, excitement and peril. Plus an odd recurring theme of disfigurement.

The pacing is perfect. Director Irvin Kershner keeps things moving, but never at the expense of character development.

Dune: Part One (2021)

Denis Villeneuve’s remake of the Frank Herbert novel previously filmed by David Lynch. It’s certainly more coherent than the Lynch version, but some of the wild imaginative magic of that film has been lost. Instead, everything looks great, and is incredibly epic, but it comes across as rather ponderous. Every word or sentence uttered seems intended to carry great gravitas, and sometimes you wish there was a little more life in the drama. That said, the spectacle is remarkable and the vast planetscapes are undeniably impressive.

Timothée Chalamet seems oddly weedy as Paul Atreides, but that’s presumably the point. He’s young and naive but carrying the potential of greatness, and he grows in stature as the film progresses. Better is Rebecca Ferguson as his mother and Oscar Isaacson as his father. Josh Brolin and Charlotte Rampling have small, but important parts, but seem somewhat underused. 

The second part will be released in 2024.

Alien (1979)

Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror masterpiece still looks fantastic and is just as chilling as ever. 

Sigourney Weaver plays Ripley, a warrant officer on the cargo ship Nostromo. The ship picks up a signal from a moon, indicating unexpected life. While investigating, the crew accidentally adopt an alien creature that threatens not just all of them but humanity itself.

Weaver is great in the main role – tough but compassionate, and smart and intuitive in a way that her colleagues aren’t.

It works because it’s mostly about the suspense rather than the monsters, although what you do see of the aliens is terrifying enough.

A long line of sequels and prequels would follow as Alien developed into a franchise, but none of them came close to this original.

Looper (2012)

Sci-fi mind-scrambler that involves time travel and telekinesis. Retired assassin Joe (Bruce Willis) is sent back from 2074 to 2044 to be killed by his younger self (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). But of course things don’t go to plan. 

It’s an intriguing premise but the first half of the film gets a little bogged down in explaining the complicated "rules". It improves in the second half, when farm woman Sara (Emily Blunt) appears as the love interest for the younger of the two Joes. She is also the mother of a boy who will grown up to be an evil future ganglord if the course of events is not disrupted. 

It’s best if you don’t ask too many questions about the time travel aspects of the story. There are some exciting moments, but the film didn’t make me care about any of the characters. It was difficult to believe that Joseph Gordon-Levitt would ever become Bruce Willis, so different were the two actors in terms of charisma. Gordon-Levitt seems to have barely any character at all. I'm no fan of Willis, but he does at least bring a basic presence to his scenes.

On the plus side, it’s not every day that you hear Richard and Linda Thompson’s "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight" on a soundtrack.

Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

A ludicrous mess. Part four of the popular series stars Mark Wahlberg as an inventor, Nicola Peltz as his daughter and Jack Reynor as her boyfriend. The baddies are played by Stanley Tucci and Kelsey Grammer. 

The plot (borrowed from the internet): “The Autobots, a faction of robots from the planet Cybertron, are hunted down by an elite CIA black ops unit and a ruthless bounty hunter. They turn to a struggling inventor and his daughter for help.”

It turns out that it was the Transformers, and not a meteorite, that caused the death of the dinosaurs. 

The robots have been given silly voices and accents, which makes them a lot less scary. One of them even seems to have a beard and a cigar. Why? It’s nice to see them transform out of cars and lorries, but it’s utterly exhausting to see so much “impossible” CGI so quickly unfolding for such a long time. The running time of 165 minutes is wildly excessive. 

Everything is so big, loud, fast and explosive that the film quickly finds it has nowhere left to go. In dramatic terms, it’s a disaster: you are left completely numb by the relentlessness of it. But on the plus side, it’s unintentionally funny and some of the daft dialogue is absolutely priceless. For example: “Autobots, we’re going to prove who we are! That’s why we’re here!”

Galaxy Quest (1999)

Sci-fi comedy. 

The cast of a TV show that's very similar to Star Trek find themselves in a real-life space adventure when their episodes are intercepted by aliens who regard them as “historical documents”. 

Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman are all superb as the faded celebrity actors who are required to become their fictional counterparts. 

It works as both a satire and an example of a sci-fi story. It's silly and in places very funny.

Apollo 18 (2011)

“Found footage” horror sci-fi directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego. 

Three astronauts are sent on a secret Apollo mission, and the two men that land on the lunar surface find evidence of sinister alien life. 

Even though the aliens are essentially rock creatures, the film never turns silly. There’s a lot of threat and tension, made more extreme by the “authentically” fuzzy, distressed footage. 

It’s a little like a cross between The Blair Witch Project and Alien, but it's refreshingly different too.

The only criticism is that it’s never explained how the footage is recovered.

Contact (1997)

Sci-fi directed by Robert Zemeckis, adapted from the Carl Sagan novel.

A radio astronomer, Ellie (Jodie Foster) discovers deep-space signals of intelligent life. These turn out to include instructions on how to visit their distant system. 

The slow build-up is interesting. I like the way that political and religious interests get in the way of the pure science that Ellie represents, as this seems quite “real” in terms of how people might react to this sort of news. 

The “space” content of the film occupies only a few minutes of the lengthy running time. In some ways that’s disappointing, and what you actually see feels like a cop-out, but really this is a story about humans’ reactions to learning we are not alone in the universe – rather than a saga about aliens. 

Foster is highly convincing in the lead role. Cameos from John Hurt and Rob Lowe don’t add a great deal, but James Woods is always enjoyable to watch. Matthew McConaughey is OK as Foster’s love interest, a Christian whose spiritual leanings meet in the middle with Foster’s scientific rationality.

Spaceballs (1987)

Daft and sometimes very funny parody of Star Wars, written and directed by Mel Brooks. The humour is so silly that it’s difficult to resist. For example, Rick Moranis plays the Darth Vader character, but he’s so weedy that anything he does seems utterly ridiculous. There are parodies of Princess Leia (Daphne Zuniga as Princess Vespa), Han Solo (Bill Pullman as the Winnebago-driving Lone Starr), Chewbacca (John Candy as the half-man half-dog Barf) and C-3PO (Joan Rivers voicing he droid Dot Matrix). Mel Brooks himself plays the Emperor Palpatine-influenced President Skroob and the Yoda-like Yogurt. There are also references to Star Trek, Alien and Planet of the Apes. 

It’s extremely self-referential and post-modern. At one point the characters have to watch Spaceballs itself to find out what happens next. 

The "story" is largely irrelevant. You just wait for the gags – some of them so basic and obvious that they can’t fail.

Life (2017)

Horror sci-fi directed by Daniel Espinosa. 

A crew of six aboard the International Space Station intercept samples from Mars that turn out to contain a deadly organism. This life form quickly grows in size and power, endangering the crew, the mission and possibly humanity itself. 

Life was criticised for being reminiscent of Alien and Gravity and it’s true that there are similarities with both of those classics. However, what it does it does extremely well: it’s suspenseful and even has a hint of the blackest humour – especially in the bitter twist of the ending. 

The six characters are well drawn and Rebecca Ferguson is especially convincing as Dr. Miranda North. The only thing that pulled me out of the film was that Jake Gyllenhaal plays a character who is too “weird” and “troubled” to fit the easygoing well-balanced profile of an astronaut. He would never have passed the psychometric tests for selection.

The music, by Jon Ekstrand, is terrific and does a lot to build the mood.

Morgan (2016)

Grisly sci-fi/horror drama directed by Ridley Scott’s son Luke. 

A “risk-management specialist” (Kate Mara) is sent to a scientific facility in a rural location where the L-9 artificial being has been created. This being (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) is a super-advanced augmented human but with a violent side that begins to cause problems when she turns on one of the staff. To complicate things further, those members of staff have personally invested in Morgan as their precious daughter and seem bewitched by her incredibly advanced development. 

Like Blade Runner, the film raises moral questions about the value of human life when it’s not entirely human. Unlike that innovative classic, it has a rather unpleasant aesthetic – a deliberate cold, nasty quality. It’s also extremely violent – which is kind of the point – but the later sections make for horrible viewing. Expertly made as it may be, I found it difficult to take much away from the film.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Mind-bending sci-fi masterpiece produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, with a screenplay written by Kubrick with Arthur C. Clarke. 

The “plot”, what there is of one, concerns the presence of an enigmatic monolith found on Earth in early human times, on the Moon and near Jupiter in the present day – presumably an artefact of extraterrestrial life. And a manned mission to Jupiter becomes increasingly precarious as the onboard computer, HAL (voiced by Douglas Rain), increasingly takes control of life-and-death decisions involving Bowman (Keir Dullea) and the rest of the crew. 

The film becomes increasingly abstract as it progresses. It’s impossible to say how it ends or “what happens”. It insists on you interpreting what you see.

Visually, it’s ridiculously ahead of its time. It still looks stunning now. Musically, it’s also awe-inspiring, with the classic “Also Sprach Zarathustra” being the perfect choice to express the epic, visionary quality of the film. The same goes for every piece of music chosen. It couldn’t be better matched to the visuals and the narrative. 

I also love the audacious slowness of 2001. Unlike so many films made now, it has the complete confidence and assurance to unfold at a glacial pace – often very quietly. And yet it’s never less than captivating. Let’s hope no one is ever silly enough to remake it.

Oblivion (2013)

Derivative, shallow sci-fi starring Tom Cruise. I probably wouldn’t have bought this DVD, but I watched it because I found it being given away on a wall. 

The plot is rather confused, but Google usefully summarises it as follows: “Jack Harper, a drone repairman stationed on Earth that has been ravaged by war with extraterrestrials, questions his identity after rescuing the woman who keeps appearing in his dreams.”

That woman is Olga Kurylenko, who, like Cruise, hardly gets any dialogue at all. Another barely filled-in, completely thrown-away character is played by Morgan Freeman, who struggles to convey the grizzled leader of a band of human survivors. 

There are so many things wrong with Oblivion:

• As usual, Tom Cruise is a good-at-everything action-hero dullard who manages to save the world single-handedly. It’s Top Gun all over again. 

• In the absence of dialogue – or any kind of personality – Tom spends much of the film staring moodily yet conveying little emotion.

• Almost every element is borrowed from another sci-fi film. 

• We visit the remains of what used to be New York, but it’s nothing but lush, clean and green vistas. Where’s all the rubble and filth? Could it be transformed that thoroughly in just 60 years?

• There are plot holes aplenty. Best not to ask many questions. 

• Attempts to be “philosophical” end up hollow and self-conscious. 

• When we finally meet the alien presence, it’s a huge let-down. 

• The title has absolutely nothing to do with anything in the film. It's like they wanted a high-impact, single-word title, but all of the relevant words had already been taken.

The Fifth Element (1997)

I hated this film. I don’t think it’s rubbish, necessarily (I’m sure it turned out the way director Luc Besson intended), but I hated it. It’s irritating on so many levels: the aesthetic is ugly, the characters are completely uninteresting and even the sci-fi elements lack the all-important “wow” factor. Bruce Willis runs around in a vest, shooting a lot and looking like he’d rather be in a different sort of film. Gary Oldman hams it up as a daft villain. And Milla Jovovich plays a sort of super-human “perfect” woman with orange hair. 

It has some of the pantomime silliness of Flash Gordon, but absolutely none of the charm. And it steals from Blade Runner (there’s Vangelis-like music at one point, and Jovovich seems modelled on Daryl Hannah’s Pris at others), but it has none of that film’s vision or innovation. It’s played for comedy, but it’s never funny. It falls flat. The crass talk-show host Ruby Rhod (Chris Tucker) is just embarrassing – possibly the most annoying film character I’ve ever encountered. 

Absolutely nothing about this film appeals.

Ad Astra (2019)

Brad Pitt stars in an existential sci-fi mind-bender. He’s an astronaut who leaves Earth in search of his father (Tommy Lee Jones), who is fixated on seeking intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But that search has deadly repercussions for Earth and needs to be stopped.

The film asks intelligent questions about what’s important in life. It looks remarkably “realistic”, and there are moments of great beauty – especially around Jupiter. Pitt has never particularly impressed me with his acting, but he’s excellent here. He conveys the desperately lonely experience of being on your own in the vastness of space. 

Liv Tyler and Donald Sutherland play supporting roles.

Predator (1987)

Bunch of tough guys in a Central American jungle hunt an invisible alien. It’s a bit like a B-movie, but with a bigger than usual budget – and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

A shoddy script offers one-dimensional characters that are hardly fleshed out at all. They issue stupid one-liners to accompany scenes of gratuitous violence. You get to see lot of oiled muscles, almost fetishistically presented. 

The “rules” about the Predator’s invisibility seem to come and go. It’s difficult to take a monster seriously when it is revealed to have boots and dreadlocks. Likewise, why does its hi-tech heat-sensing equipment fail to “see” Arnie when he’s smeared with mud?

I’d heard this film talked about a fair bit over the years, but didn’t realise how disappointingly mediocre it would turn out to be.

Starship Troopers (1997)

Stunning hybrid of sci-fi, horror and war film that cleverly masters those genres while simultaneously pastiching them. Directed by Paul Verhoeven, and based on Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel, it also works as ultra-black comedy in the way it satirises military propaganda. 

Earth is at war with a devastating species of bugs. A young soldier named Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) enlists to fight, and moves up through the ranks. He’s involved in different ways with two colleagues – “Dizzy” (Dina Meyer), who fights alongside him in the Mobile Infantry, and Carmen (Denise Richards), who is a gifted pilot. Blandly handsome and obedient, they perfectly epitomise the patriotic ideal. 

The effects are extraordinary, and they don't seem to have the slick veneer of CGI. It’s extremely violent, with plenty of bloody dismemberment presented in a semi-cartoonish manner, but it’s also a hugely entertaining romp that's both intelligent and memorable. I liked it even more on second and third viewings.

Waterworld (1995)

A very strange epic. With a budget of $172–175 million, was the most expensive film ever at the time it was made.

It’s the future. The ice caps have melted and the old civilisations are now underwater graveyards. A few humans survive as nomads and warriors in battered boats and makeshift floating villages. 

The Deacon (Dennis Hopper) is a crazed leader seeking to capture a little girl named Enola (Tina Majorino), who has a map of the mythical “Dryland” tattooed on her back. Jeanne Tripplehorn is Enola’s guardian. And Kevin Costner is the monosyllabic “mariner” who reluctantly becomes their protector.

It’s a technically impressive film that’s also quite daft in many ways. The slight pantomime quality actually works: the world has become more extreme and absurd, and people have degenerated as a result. I was frequently reminded of recent American political rallies, and the villain at the centre of them – an orange, deranged monster – is very reminiscent of someone else in US politics.

It’s such an unusual film. There are hints of Apocalypse Now, Flash Gordon, Mad Max, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Return of the Jedi, but it has a peculiar tone and feel of its own. A few things keep greatness at bay:
• Why has Costner evolved to have gills and webbed feet so quickly? It’s described as a “mutation”, but no more detail is given.
• Cheery “adventure” music undercuts the drama – what I think of as the “Spielberg Syndrome”.
• The lighting is all over the place. Bright studio lights come and go with little relation to the weather or environment.

Hugely enjoyable, though.