10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) ****/*****

Eight years ago a JJ Abrams-produced, Matt Reeves-directed found footage film about a giant monster rampaging through a city called Cloverfield was released. It was pretty successful. That was the end of the story, until a couple months ago when a trailer for a movie called 10 Cloverfield Lane got released out of nowhere. What is this new movie? Is it a sequel to Cloverfield? If so, why didn’t anybody know about its existence until it was already filmed and ready for release? Now that it’s out, we finally have some answers. 10 Cloverfield Lane is an exciting new post-apocalyptic thriller from veteran producer JJ Abrams and first time feature director Dan Trachtenberg. It doesn’t have anything to do with Cloverfield, other than maybe the inclusion of an Easter egg or two for the eagle-eyed to point out, but it does seem to be the beginning of a franchise where Abrams will use the word “Cloverfield” to market mysterious new genre projects with sci-fi conceits. Think, like, The Twilight Zone, or The Outer Limits.

The film stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Michelle, a woman who we first meet skipping town after having a big fight with her boyfriend, and whose story we follow after she’s run off the road in the middle of the night and then wakes up injured and chained to a wall in some kind of underground bunker. The guy who built the bunker and did the chaining is Howard (John Goodman), and according to him some sort of catastrophic attack took place in the world while Michelle was out, leaving the air toxic and pretty much everyone else dead. Howard is quick to anger, and comes with a real creep vibe, so it would be easy to dismiss his story, except for the fact that there’s also a nice young chap named Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) in the bunker, and he says that not only were the attacks real, but he had to fight his way into the bunker at the last minute, right before the whole world went toxic, and Howard wasn’t exactly too happy about it. Who to believe? What to believe? How long are these three going to have to stay down in this bunker? And what’s going to happen to them while they’re in close-quarters confinement? 10 Cloverfield Lane is the sort of movie that raises a whole mess of questions.

Short Round: Turbo Kid (2015) ***/*****

In concept, Turbo Kid is so completely mired in the current Tumblr-generated, 80s-obsessed, throwback culture that’s been driven deeply into the ground that you’d think it would play as being tired, but in execution it’s so sincere and so concerned with celebrating the joys of everything that was fun about 80s genre cinema that you still can’t help but have a good time watching it. The story is a low budget throwback to Mad Max, with dashes of things like Star Wars and Big Trouble in Little China thrown in. The Kid (Munroe Chambers) is our hero, a young punk with a sweet BMX bike and a custom-painted helmet who lives in a fallout shelter full of every awesome toy, comic book, and bit of junk food he can salvage from the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is his surroundings. His life is every ten-year-old’s dream, which is escapist gold in itself, but it’s not all the movie has to offer.

Things pick up when he meets a very manic and very pixie dream girl friend named Apple (Laurence Leboeuf), who he’s reluctant to accept at first but who eventually wins him over through the sheer force of cuteness, and they pick up even further after she’s kidnapped by the evil forces of an after society tribe leader named Zeus (Michael Ironsides). Before you know it, he’s using his turbo-powered weapon that kind of resembles an archaic video game accessory to team up with a grizzled cowboy named Frederic the Arm Wrestler (Aaron Jeffrey) in order to save the girl and bring justice to an outlawed landscape—all set to the kind of pulsing, synth score you’d expect a movie like this to have if it actually did come out in the 80s. It all sounds so cloying, doesn’t it? But it’s just so damned earnest that you can’t help but get on board anyway.

That said, the film isn’t a complete joy. In many ways its low budget nature only ads to the charm of what it’s trying to do, but in other ways it’s still limiting. Clearly there weren’t too many locations writing/directing trio François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell could afford to shoot at, so the film kind of just does the same thing over and over again in similar looking places, with diminishing results. How many battles between goofy, sporting good-equipped good guys and goofy, power tool-equipped bad guys can one sit through? Quite a few, especially given all of the delightful, over the top gore that this film provides, but not quite as many as it requires you to. Somewhere after the fifth time the heroes have suffered a devastating loss you stop caring about their plight and start looking at your watch. Turbo Kid is a lot of fun, it’s just maybe not feature film fun. Cut a half hour off this thing, throw it on Adult Swim, and it would have been legendary.

Terminator Genisys (2015) */*****

Hollywood has been remaking and rebooting so many huge movies from the 80s in recent years that it feels a little bit like I’ve been reliving my childhood—if my childhood were filled with really bland, bad movies made by studio committees instead of really great movies full of blood and boobs that were made by exciting young filmmakers, of course. Terminator Genisys takes this process a step further by not only remaking or rebooting the franchise started with James Cameron’s 1984 film, The Terminator, but by using the series’ killer-robot-sent-back-in-time conceit to actually revisit meticulously recreated scenes from The Terminator and spin them off in new directions, which effectively erases the other sequels and creates a launching point for a new franchise that still pays respect to the original. Watching the film must be what it feels like to experience déjà vu.

Or to use a more damning metaphor, watching Terminator Genisys is like having a dream that starts off as a revisiting of old memories and then spins off in nightmarish, hallucinatory directions. This is a bad movie—a really bad one—maybe the worst Terminator movie that could have been made by generally competent people. Its director, Alan Taylor, proved that he could work in a strictly controlled studio environment before by making the generally acceptable Thor sequel for Marvel in 2013, but when faced with the task of filming a script that’s as broken on a fundamental level as this one, he falls flat on his face.

Jurassic World (2015) **/*****

A big part of what made the original Jurassic Park work so well and that makes it so memorable is the sense of wonder that comes from experiencing something truly incredible for the first time. In an in-movie sense, that wonder came from the characters being among the first human beings to ever lay eyes on real, living dinosaurs. For the audience, the wonder came from seeing CG special effects that brought these dinosaurs to life on the big screen in a seamless, realistic way for the first time ever. The visuals of the first Jurassic Park still look great even this many years later.

Seeing something incredible again isn’t as memorable as seeing something incredible for the first time, however, so the Jurassic Park sequels each experienced diminishing returns upon release. One might even argue that, despite its success, Jurassic Park was exactly the kind of movie that should never have had a sequel, and now that the franchise is seeing a reboot with director Colin Trevorrow’s (Safety Not Guaranteed) Jurassic World, those problems have multiplied to the point where the characters in the film even have to address them. In this world, seeing dinosaurs has become old hat and boring, much like seeing impossible things brought to life on the big screen via CG effects has to movie fans in our world, so the answer that the film offers up is that it’s become necessary to create a dinosaur that’s bigger, scarier, and more impressive in order to capture people’s imaginations. The problem with that strategy in our world is that, after seeing entire cities destroyed on film countless times over the last decade, the visuals in these summer movies can no longer be made any bigger, scarier, or more impressive, so Jurassic World, as it’s crafted, really has no reason to exist. Instead of solving this franchise’s irrelevance problem by making something bigger, they should have attacked it by making something completely different.

Ex Machina (2015) ****/*****

If you’ve seen any of the ads for writer Alex Garland’s (28 Days Later, Dredd) first film as a director, Ex Machina, then you know that it’s one of those robot movies that explores the murky boundaries between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. The basic setup is that Oscar Isaac is playing a genius tech billionaire type called Nathan, he’s created a robotic woman called Ava (Alicia Vikander), and he’s hired an intelligent but slightly nebbish man called Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to test out the limits of her intelligence and determine whether she really is a fully realized consciousness, or just a very convincing approximation of one.

If this movie hadn’t been advertised, you wouldn’t know any of that until you got a good chunk of the way into it though. During the opening few scenes, Gleeson’s character has been thrown into a fairly fantastic setting that he isn’t familiar with, and it isn’t completely clear to him or us why he’s there or what he’s supposed to be doing. There’s a good chunk of runtime, before Isaac’s character explains things, where we’re forced to sit in an uncertain situation and do our best to blindly explore it, just as much as the protagonist is. Is Gleeson’s character in danger? Is he about to embark on a magical and life-changing journey? It’s not clear, but what’s clear is that anything is possible with this setup, and thanks to that the film is instantly interesting.

Short Round: Predestination (2015) ***/*****

Predestination is very much one of those movies where plot is the whole point. It’s full of ins and outs, twists and turns, and it demands that you dedicate the bulk of your attention to following along with its various narrative threads and fully absorbing how they eventually tie together. Because of this, it’s hard to discuss what the movie is about. To talk about its themes, conflicts, and ideas would give away too much and rob the movie of the bulk of its magic. When Predestination opens though, it’s clear that the main character is a time traveling cop of some sort played by Ethan Hawke, and it’s clear that his current mission is to use his time traveling powers to stop a series of bombings that happened in New York City in the mid-70s. There’s also a transgendered character played by Sarah Snook who ties into his investigation in some way. There. That’s all we’re going to give away.

You see, this is a movie from twin brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, who also co-wrote and co-directed a 2003 movie called Undead, where meteorites turned the populace of a fishing village into zombies, and the 2009 movie Daybreakers, which concerned itself with a future in which a plague had turned the bulk of humanity into blood-craving vampires, so it comes as no surprise that Predestination is heavily steeped in big science fiction concepts and biological weirdness. There probably hasn’t been a movie as concerned with the logistics of time travel and all of the paradoxes and time loops that come with them since 2004’s Primer, but unlike that Shane Carruth movie, which was known for its dryness and bordering-on-homework complexity, Predestination will likely become known for how pants-pooping crazy it is and how much fun it is to predict just how far it’s going to go with all the head-slapping silliness.

Despite the surface level fun of watching all of the plot pieces converge in the third act, Predestination is ultimately too mediocre a movie to strongly recommend to everyone though. Hawke and Snook are both good in their roles, but by “good” I mostly mean that they take characters and stories that should have played as being ridiculous and they’re able to ground them enough so that you stay with the story. And that story itself—it sure asks a lot of the viewer. While it pays itself off in the end, the pacing problems that come with it setting up all of the disparate pieces that eventually prove to be related are a series of hurdles that the audience has to leap over if they don’t want to get left behind. If you’re into time travel stories, the weirder corners of the sci-fi genre, and movies where Ethan Hawke tries to pull off a mustache, then Predestination will be worth giving a look to, but if none of those things sound like they’re in your wheelhouse, there will be plenty of more pleasing ways for you to spend an evening. Maybe a nice game of canasta?

Interstellar (2014) ****/*****

After all of the profits he generated by making the Dark Knight movies and Inception, filmmaker Christopher Nolan basically had carte blanche to spend as much money as he wanted making whatever movie he wanted the next time around. Similarly, after all the universally praised work that he’s been doing over the course of the last few years, Matthew McConaughey has become essentially free to star in whatever projects he chooses. Given all of that rarified power, what both men chose to do is to work with each other on Interstellar, a science fiction movie about a dying Earth, the ties that bind us together as a species, and a last-ditch gambit to find a way to keep our species—and, by proxy, that connection—alive.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Interstellar is an event movie—large in hype, scale, visual splendor, and storytelling ambition. This isn’t just a story about how humanity deals with a crisis, though it is that. It isn’t just a story about a regular man who gets called on to do an extraordinary thing, though it’s that as well. It’s a big screen adventure. It’s a meditation on the relationships between fathers and daughters. It’s that sort of genre-heavy “hard sci-fi” story that’s more concerned with exploring future possibilities and imaginative ideas than it is in being pure escapism—all while still being pure escapism. When you factor in all of the things that Interstellar is trying to do in one movie, it becomes clear that it really is an attempt at creating one of those sweeping, mythic pieces of art that’s looking to provide answers to all of the big questions of life, the universe, and everything. And, sure, maybe it isn’t quite able to pull all of those lofty goals off, but it is still refreshing to see a mainstream release that’s got the chutzpah to try.

Snowpiercer (2014) ****/*****

Seeing as Bong Joon-ho’s Korean-language film Mother, which was released in the US back in 2010, was one of the darkest, most complex, and most uncompromising thrillers that I’ve seen in a number of years, I went into his new film, Snowpiercer, feeling pretty optimistic—even though it’s a post-apocalypse movie built on the ridiculous premise that the world is a frozen wasteland and the last surviving members of the human race are all living on a super-long, self-sustaining train that continuously circles the globe. Is it possible for anyone, even a talent on the level of Bong’s, to take a premise this inherently head-scratching in its weirdness and still make a movie that’s engaging and relatable to audiences? Apparently it is, and the secret to the formula seems to be to cast Captain America as your lead. 

To get back to the plot though—this is a movie that shouldn’t work. If you give it a moment’s thought, there’s no reason for what happens in this movie to be set on a moving train, there’s no reason for the poor people who act as our heroes to exist on the train in the way that they do, and, in general, there’s no reason that an audience should buy any of the broadly drawn, cartoony characters who we’re introduced to over the course of the story. But Snowpiercer introduces us to those characters, it gives us ridiculous explanations for the particulars of its world, and not only do we buy everything we’re given, we lap it up greedily and we ask for more.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014) ****/*****

The last time we saw Tom Cruise starring in a big budget summer movie, it was in the sci-fi mind-bender Oblivion, which was pretty to look at and featured the usual rock solid star turn from Cruise, but which caught a lot of flack for being a hodgepodge of science fiction conceits that had already been presented in other, better films. With his new project, Edge of Tomorrow, Cruise sees himself once again starring in a pastiche film that has melded together ideas from other genre works, only this time, under the watch of director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity), he sees much better results.

This time around Cruise is playing a prissy bureaucrat named Cage who circumstances have put in the middle of a D-Day-type invasion of Europe meant to stop the spread of an alien threat that has taken over most of the continent and is about to advance on London. Alien invaders aren’t the only crazy thing going on here though. A freak occurrence during the battle also sees Cage gaining the ability to go back in time to the morning before the invasion every time he dies, effectively creating a time loop where he goes to war, gets killed, and wakes up ready to be sent off to war all over again, again and again. His only chance to move forward seems to be to keep dying over and over again until he can somehow figure out a way to save the doomed invasion and defeat the alien threat who has them so vastly outnumbered, by using the advantage of extreme trial and error. The bad news about that is that it sucks to get killed over and over again, but the good news is that an infamously badass warrior named Rita (Emily Blunt) seems to have some answers to what exactly has happened to Cage, and she may just be able to help him kill all the aliens, end the time loop he finds himself stuck in, and save what’s left of the world in the process.

RoboCop (2014) ***/*****

Normally if you told me that Hollywood was throwing its full financial support behind a movie called RoboCop that was about a grizzled Detroit police officer named Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) who gets his body blown up and has his surviving parts salvaged so that they can be fused with machinery—turning him into a robot cop—I would be over the moon. But seeing as there was already a movie called RoboCop about that exact thing when I was a kid, and I not only watched the movie, I also watched the animated series, ate lunch out of the lunchbox, and bought the action figures, this new RoboCop arrives carrying some pretty hefty baggage.

That’s really not the way it should be though. Remake or not, we should approach every movie with an open mind, ready to judge it completely on its own merits. We shouldn’t at all compare the different ways in which the Murphy character gets his body destroyed so that he can become RoboCop in each movie, which is a ridiculously awesome bloodbath in Paul Verhoeven’s original film and is a toothless homogenized nothing in this José Padilha-directed remake. Then again, it’s hard to treat these remakes fairly when this one has a line that references the infamous, “I’ll buy that for a dollar,” line from the original. Why do these things always feel the need to include cloying bits of fan service that just take you out of the movie and remind you that you’re watching something that comes pre-loaded with expectations?

Her (2013) ****/*****

Just a couple of years ago Megan Ellison founded Annapurna Pictures, a company dedicated to producing and distributing experimental art films by auteur directors. You know, film projects that make the world a better place to live in, but that the big studios might not be too enthusiastic about taking a chance on. To say that the company has so far been a success would be a bit of an understatement. In less than two years Annapurna has already put out The Master by Paul Thomas Anderson, Zero Dark Thirty by Kathryn Bigelow, Spring Breakers by Harmony Korine, The Grandmaster by Wong Kar Wai, and a few others that were okay too. That’s a pretty impressive filmography for such a young company, but even given all of that success, Spike Jonze’s latest film, Her, is probably the best thing that they’ve produced yet. So that’s definitely reason to congratulate everyone involved.

Her stars Joaquin Phoenix as a neurotic sort of everyman who lives in a future version of our world where technology has advanced to the point where urban development is just a little bit more expansive, pleasing design is just a little bit more ubiquitous, and people are just a little bit more preoccupied with their mobile computing devices. Well, until the latest version of these future computers’ OS gets released—a version that’s so advanced it can pass for a real, learning consciousness with a distinct personality—then people go beyond being a little bit more preoccupied with their mobile computing devices, especially Phoenix’s Theodore, who eventually starts dating the new piece of software that’s taken over the duty of organizing his digital goings on. Her name is Samantha (as voiced by Scarlett Johansson). What follows is one part romance, one part science fiction, one part iPhone ad, but shown to us through the lens of a writer/director as visionary (eat it, Zack Snyder) as Spike Jonze, who’s talented enough to make a slightly silly concept engaging to watch on a hypnotic level.

Riddick (2013) ***/*****

From the very beginning, Riddick establishes itself as a Pitch Black sequel that isn’t going to make the same mistakes that The Chronicles of Riddick did. It opens with Riddick (Vin Diesel) broken, battered, and alone on an alien world. His leg has been snapped in half, he’s losing a lot of blood, and there are deadly creatures all around him that want to tear his throat out. For the first fifteen minutes or so of the film we just watch Riddick lick his wounds and fight monsters. For the next ten or so we just watch him bond with some sort of alien tigerdog that he raises from a pup. None of the boring exposition and plot complexities of TCOR are anywhere to be found, because this is a simple survival movie, just like Pitch Black. Well, things do get a little bit more complicated. You can only take so much of Vin Diesel talking to a CG dog.

The complications arise when Riddick and his pup find a trapper’s outpost—the first indication he’s had that the planet he’s on hasn’t always been uninhabited—and he soon after realizes that the planet is populated with a race of water-loving, giant scorpion-reptile things that are going to overpower and kill him as soon as a series of huge storms reach the area he’s in. Faced with certain death, he sounds an emergency beacon that alerts the universe to his presence, and then waits for the first ship of bounty hunters to show up and attempt to collect on the price that’s on his head. Probably easier to kill them and take their ship than take on an entire planet of monsters, after all. Complications get furthered though when two ships show up and the squabbling of the competing crews leads to everyone still being deep in conflict once the rain and the monsters arrive. The film then pushes toward a conclusion where death is closing in on everyone from every angle. Exciting stuff.

The World’s End (2013) ****/*****

Seeing as it’s the third film in what has come to be known as the “Cornetto Trilogy,” along with predecessors Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, the latest effort from director Edgar Wright, co-writers Wright and Simon Pegg, and co-stars Pegg and Nick Frost, The World’s End, is a movie that comes with quite a bit of hype and expectation. Both of the first two films have successfully combined humor and drama with the sorts of genre film tropes that nerds love, and both have become cult favorites as a result. The World’s End is the same sort of movie, only instead of combining hijinx and life lessons with zombie movie tropes or buddy cop movie tropes like the previous films did, it exists in the world of science fiction films—a world in which alien overlords are attempting to replace us with robot impostors.

To be more specific, The World’s End is a movie that’s primarily concerned with a pub crawl. Even more specifically, it’s concerned with a pub crawl that a group of five friends were unable to complete on a fateful night in their youth, and that they’re now going to attempt to recreate as they approach their 40s. To be fair, the recreation is the sole plan of the leader of the group, Gary King (Simon Pegg), who is the only one of them who was never quite able to grow up and build an adult life for himself. The other four (Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, and Eddie Marsan) have kind of become uptight squares, so Gary decides to take it upon himself to help them rekindle their lost spirit by finally completing the circuit of 12 bars in their hometown that are known collectively as The Golden Mile. Or perhaps he more accurately just wants to get them back together to try and relive his own glory days now that his life has been exposed as an unequivocal failure. Either way, the specifics don’t much matter, because the whole endeavor gets interrupted by that pesky little realization that the townsfolk have been replaced by robot impostors anyway.

Short Round: Elysium (2013) **/*****

Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 film, District 9, proved that you don’t need a huge budget to make a sci-fi action movie that audiences will love. All you need is an original voice, a little ingenuity, and a lot of luck. It’s the same formula guys like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg used to make things like Star Wars and Jaws, after all. District 9 brought up an interesting question though. If Blomkamp was able to accomplish as much as he did there on a shoestring budget and with a cast of relative unknowns, what would he be able to do if he got the Hollywood machine and a good deal of money behind him? Unfortunately, Elysium provides us the answer to that question, and the answer is that he would make something that looks great, but that panders to the masses so thoroughly it couldn’t possibly be enjoyed by anyone who approaches movies with an ounce of discerning taste.

The story is one that’s rich with allegory, and one that you’d think the guy who explored political questions surrounding refugees so adeptly via an alien invasion story in District 9 would be able to nail. In the future, class lines are divided even further apart than they are today. The poor are huddled together on Earth, which is overpopulated, crime-ridden, and full of sadness and disease. The rich live on an immaculate space station called Elysium, which is basically the ultimate gated community, and where any disease or injury can instantly be cured with a simple scan from a machine that everyone has in their house. Matt Damon plays a poor schlub who’s trying to leave his life of crime behind, but who gets hit with a lethal dose of radiation at his factory job, winds up with only five days to live, and has to resort to consorting with the most wanted kind of criminals—people smugglers who are constantly trying to get the wounded and sick to Elysium, but who generally get them blown up by Elysium security in the process—in order to get him up to the space station and heal himself.

The problems with the film are that its script is just so impossibly, embarrassingly clunky, a few of its performances are so bad that they make you squirm, and Blomkamp’s directorial touch is so heavy-handed that he resembles an old-timey stage actor trying to project to the back of the room before microphones were invented. The dialogue is so hackneyed and it spells the movie’s themes out with so many thuds that it’s likely to leave bruises on you, so many silly symbols and metaphors (an important necklace, and important tattoo, etc...) get introduced and then flashed back to in pivotal moments that you eventually start to feel the filmmakers’ elbows nudging you in your ribs any time something that’s supposed to be important is happening, and so many flashbacks happen, so often, to so many things, that you begin to feel like Blomkamp thinks that you have the short term memory of a goldfish. The film does have a number of entertaining action scenes, and Sharlto Copley does make for a memorably detestable villain, but the transparently manipulative and condescendingly simple nature of the storytelling just smothers anything that would have earned praise otherwise. And let’s not even get started on whatever Jodie Foster was trying to do with her ridiculous performance. What kind of an accent was that? Those were the best takes she provided? 

Pacific Rim (2013) ****/*****

People have come to expect different things from movies they see in the summer than they do from movies they see throughout the rest of the year. Ever since the first few blockbusters that came out in the late 70s and early 80s, summer movies have continuously become less about telling a story and developing characters, and more about being an event. It’s not enough to make a film that’s full of laughs, it also has to be full of thrills. It’s not enough to make a film that’s beautiful, you have to make one that’s a spectacle. It’s not even enough to be just a film, you also have to have merchandise on store shelves, tie-ins with fast food companies, and billboards on the sides of highways. All of those expectations can lead to quite a few disappointments, but with Pacific Rim, director Guillermo del Toro has finally provided filmgoers with a summer 2013 movie that’s going to live up to all of their hopes and dreams.

The premise is simple. Somewhere around 2013 a rift to a different dimension opened up on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and ever since, gigantic, city-destroying monsters have periodically come out of it in order to destroy coastal towns. Humanity tried to fight these monsters off with tanks, planes, bombs, missiles, and all of the ordinary means of warfare, but it didn’t take long to realize that a new weapon was in order if we were going to be able to protect ourselves from these beasts from beyond. What sort of new weapon? Giant robots, each as big as a monster, each tricked out with unique weapons and gizmos, and each piloted by two expert fighters who are mentally linked and share the neural wear and tear that comes from controlling the robot’s advanced computer brain. Does any of this make any sense? Not really, but you have to accept that in order to enjoy the fun that comes from watching giant robots and giant monsters do battle.

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) ***/*****

The 2009 reboot of classic Star Trek that was spear-headed by director JJ Abrams wasn’t a perfect film. Its story relied on a few too many coincidences to move itself along, it presented our heroes with a villain who was too easily defeated, and generally its writing was just too flimsy for it to be fully satisfying. The main conceit that it introduced, however, some alternate reality shenanigans that explained away how we could be once again seeing the early adventures of all the Original Series Star Trek characters, but played by new actors, was a particularly clever piece of work that allowed a fresh start that would please new fans and old alike. And the look of the film, all shiny and polished like the latest gadget to be released by Apple, made Star Trek appear to be more hip and modern than it had in ages. Plus, the principal cast, down to the actor, was a talented and charismatic bunch who managed to embody their characters without living in the shadows of the actors who originally played the roles. 

Abrams put all of the necessary pieces in place to restart a franchise that had been going strong for nearly half a century, and to build a foundation that might allow it to go on for at least another few decades. So, given that Star Trek Into Darkness is the second step in what Paramount surely hopes is going to be a lengthy next phase in their long-running property, how well does it build upon the foundation laid in order to move things forward? Not too well, unfortunately. But it does manage to be a fun action movie, regardless.

Oblivion (2013) ***/*****

Director Joseph Kosinski’s debut feature, 2010’s TRON: Legacy, was a dazzling marriage of sight and sound that made for a unique and immersive filmgoing experience—for about the first half hour of its runtime. Then you got used to the visual style and the Daft Punk soundtrack, and what you were left with was a hollow story with paper thin characters that failed to engage past the initial wow factor. His new film, Oblivion, is much the same. The film’s music, provided by M83, is booming and evocative, the design and effects work that bring the future version of Earth that Kosinski has conceptualized to life are interesting and impressive... and then you get to the story.

Oblivion is the kind of movie that’s hard to write about, because past the initial setup it mostly hangs its hat on plot twists and reveals, and one doesn’t want to give up any of its secrets. What is safe to say is that the film stars Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough as the crew of a maintenance station that’s one of the few things left behind on an Earth that has been decimated by a costly war with the alien “Scavs.” The plan is to move humanity off to one of the moons of Saturn or some such, and our protagonists’ job is to monitor and maintain the drones that are stripping the Earth of what’s left of the vital resources we need. They’ve been mind wiped, the only contact they have with anyone outside of each other is one off-planet supervisor (Melissa Leo) who they communicate with through a little monitor, and generally there’s the looming feeling that something shady is definitely going on. After a mysterious spaceship crashes in a nearby sector, a chain of events is set off that eventually brings some hard truths to light.

Looper (2012) ****/*****

If you’ve seen the advertisements for Rian Johnson’s latest film, Looper, then you know that it’s a time travel story with a violent crime element. The concept, that of mobsters from the future sending targets back in time (via very illegal time machines) so that they can be killed and disposed of by specialized hit men called loopers, sounds convoluted, sure. But to try to explain the logistics of the plot or to fill out more of its details in this space would make things even more confusing. Plus, figuring out why everything that happens is happening is much of the joy of watching the film, and there are even domestic drama and horror elements that creep into Johnson’s script that were never hinted at in the ads and are probably best left as mysteries. So, let’s not do too much plot recap. Just know that it all works in practice.

What is essential to say is that our main character is one of these loopers, a guy named Joe, and he’s being played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Joe’s life is sad, but going well enough. He does his hits, he enjoys recreational drugs, the prostitute he regularly visits is rather good looking... but everything suddenly goes to hell when his latest hit blinks into existence and winds up being a future version of himself (now played by Bruce Willis). What to do when faced with the task of killing yourself? What’s the high stakes task that future Joe has escaped his younger self’s clutches in order to pull off, and how might it change the future? The game of cat and mouse that Gordon-Levitt and Willis engage themselves in is full of thrills, but Looper’s main focus isn’t its sci-fi action, it’s more about its sci-fi ideas. The layers of interesting questions brought up by the film’s non-stop twists and turns are the meat of the experience here, and it’s all compelling enough stuff that you’ll find yourself lingering outside the theater after the end credits, going over the fine points with your friends. Looper is a movie that sticks with you.

Total Recall (2012) **/*****

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before... A guy named Quaid (Colin Farrell) is unsatisfied with his life. Sure, he’s got a smoking hot wife (Kate Beckinsale) and a solid 9 to 5, but there’s something missing. Sometimes he feels like he was meant for something more, and every night he’s haunted by action-packed dreams where he and some other smoking hot brunette (Jessica Biel) are being attacked by government agents. What’s a restless fellow to do? Luckily Quaid doesn’t live in our present, he lives in the future, and there’s a company named Rekall that claims they can implant his brain with memories that will make his wildest fantasies come true. Should he partake? Sure, why not? The only thing he’s risking is having his brain completely fried and accidentally mixing himself up in government matters that have world-ending consequences.

If it sounded in the previous paragraph like I was describing Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 film, Total Recall, I wasn’t. I was actually describing Len Wiseman’s 2012 film, Total Recall. If you’ve seen the original, then it would make sense that we jump right in and start talking about what’s different and what’s the same this time around. If you haven’t seen the original, then how dare you? I can’t believe we’re even friends. Go back and see that one, come back here, and then we’ll talk. 

Prometheus (2012) ***/*****

The bulk of the talk about Prometheus, from the point it was announced to the day of its release, concerned the degree to which it was going to serve as a prequel to one of its director’s most beloved works, Alien. At first Ridley Scott made mention that there would be a connection between this film and that. Then that position was pulled back on a bit. This kept happening, back and forth, up until it finally screened for audiences. So, now that it’s out, is it really a prequel to Alien? Sort of. It certainly exists in the same universe as Alien. It gives us a look at the beginnings of some of the things we saw in Alien. But where it really counts, in making a direct narrative bridge between what’s happening with the humans in this story and what happened with the humans in that story, the connection is incidental. Prometheus exists on its own as a standalone story to the point where I would recommend you get all thoughts and comparisons to Alien out of your head before you see it. As a matter of fact, I would go as far as to say that this story would have worked better if it had no connections to Alien at all. The connective tissue between the two films seemed incidental and in no way integral to the story that Scott wanted to tell this time around.

What’s the director concerning himself with this time around? Prometheus is a story that’s considered with origins, certainly, but it’s attacking the theme in a much broader sense than just explaining the origins of a sci-fi horror film from the late 70s. The story told here involves a starship full of scientists who have sent themselves off on a journey in search of the beginnings of mankind. You see, some cave paintings that have been unearthed all around our planet have shared the same images of primitive man worshipping Godlike beings, with the same constellation of stars in the background. This particular configuration of stars only exists one place in the galaxy, and the theory is that if we travel there we’ll be able to make contact with the beings who engineered our species. In the end, there’s some truth to that theory, but our scientists don’t end up finding exactly what they hoped for. In fact, what they end up finding is something much more horrific.