i'm kael's ghost

I have been thinking about this post for a while now. After watching the first episode of Prophets of Science Fiction: Mary Shelley , which I really enjoyed, I decided it's finally time to bring this post to life - pun absolutely intended. I love scifi. At it's best, it's smart and challenging. To be truly effective, scifi must present us with 3 elements: A plausible account of the science of the day; A humanistic critique of that science; A viable prediction of what’s likely to happen if the ways of science and technology are not controlled. When one of those pieces is missing, or the acting is atrocious, or the writing immature, or any other thing that can go wrong, scifi can become just laughable. If anyone in the movie ever asks, "what's the worst that can happen?" you know that shit is gonna go down and nothing will ever be "okay" again. If the movie you're watching has been shitty up to this point, you may want to return to brow...

Written and directed by Luc Besson , this generation's most brilliant and prolific action movie creator, The Fifth Element is this superb little piece of filmmaking that some how manages to hold up over the years. The quick summary: A cabbie, a priest, a radio show host, and a beautiful alien woman race to save the world. An evil power, a greedy businessman, and some ugly aliens try to stop them. Dramatic adventures ensue. This movie is an amalgamation of all the sci-fi that came before it; Barbarella  (There are whacky costumes galore!), Blade Runner  Flying police cars? Yup. Asian noodles? Sure.), Star Wars  (SO MANY stolen ship designs.), and Total Recall  (nearly identical vision of future transportation.) with a little Roger Rabbit , Brazil , and   Toys on the side. In fact, I think you'd be harder pressed to find a movie NOT  represented in The Fifth Element than for me to continue trying to list ones that definitely are. It's also a mix of...

Sci-fi is such a great genre; it's loaded with forward-thinking folks pushing the bounds of science and morality in order to create better lives for people. It's also loaded with simple mistakes ("Whooops! Life will find a way."), catastrophic failures (just ask Jeff Goldblum ), evil plots ( Weyland Corp .), and unadvised stumbling into god territory (Paging Dr. Frankenstein !) As humans, we have such mixed feelings about medicine and science that any time either comes into play in sci-fi we'll have elements of "HEY! We're doing this for the betterment of human kind!" butting up against "We're furthering our hateful subplots through the targeted, well-funded use of science." Enter Extracted ; many years too late to be unique but, not bad at being what it is. Here's how it goes A scientist creates the technology to "go inside" someone else's memories. Even if this doesn't sound familiar to you, it should a...

Obviously - Creature was made to ride the coattails of Alien 's popularity. (In recent memory think Hansel & Gretel with NO ONE ANYONE KNOWS AND Hansel &Gretel: Witch Hunters  with that guy from Avengers and that broad from Quantum of Solace ). If you've seen Alien, you don't really need to watch Creature to know what happens; like 90% of the shots are exact recreations of shots in Alien. Which is not to say that the level of technical skill that went in making Alien is at all  represented in the pathetic, low-budget abomination that is Creature. Really, the biggest difference between the movies is that the aliens in Creature are like cousins of the giant earwigs from Star Trek that take over your body and make you play out their nefarious plans for world domination. It's a very different take on the fears of maternity and rape that Alien really drove home and inherently changes the type of terror. Alien makes you feel violated - physically dirty and u...

Space is huge and far away and 99% a mystery to us. Its also a place that is more than likely going to kill us when we venture into it. The potential for catastrophic failures, complete disasters, and painful deaths is pretty damn high. We've seen, countless times, in movies and in real life, that space can be terrifying. Children of the 80's, who doesn't remember the Challenger disaster ? And look no further than Alien or Event Horizon  if you want to see examples of how terribly wrong space exploration can go. Recently there's been a whole slew of space movies that promise to be terrifying but are, in fact, just boring. Boring. How can space be boring? What the hell is wrong with these people? Here are just a few of the offenders: Europa Report The gist: Spaceship lands on Jupiter's moon, off target but mostly unharmed. The crew proceeds to make a series of absolutely absurd, unbelievable, not-sciencey decisions and as a consequence, start dying off. ...

On occasion, I've written a bit about my childhood and since no one seems too horrified by that, I thought I'd again take a moment to reflect upon one of my favorite movies from childhood: Forbidden Planet . I consider myself fortunate to have gotten my hands on a copy of the 50th anniversary DVD release. Designed for nerdy fangirls like myself, this edition includes a making of documentary and a collection of replica lobby cards on top of buches of other cool features. Spa-loosh! If you've never seen the movie, I'm likely about to spoil it for you. That's your warning. Read on as you see fit. The 1950's were a complicated time for the film industry. Audiences were staying home to watch television and the major Hollywood production companies were forced to divest their theatre chains. This break down of the Hollywood monopolies forced studios to reduce production timelines and film budgets. This was actually a great time for scifi; do a little leg ...

Head's up kiddies - this blog post will contain SPOILERS about  Prometheus . If you don't want to read them - turn back now. I feel like people are really struggling with Prometheus mostly because of misaligned expectations: this movie IS NOT  Alien . It's not even  Aliens . Is Prometheus related to Alien? Absolutely. It takes place in the same universe that Alien does. (Same planets, same species of beings, etc.) But is it a prequel to Alien? Only in the loosest sense of the word. The events in Prometheus take place prior to the events in Alien. They also partially explain how the events of Alien came to be. Prometheus is not an action movie (like Aliens) and it's not a psychological thriller / horror movie (like Alien.) It's much quieter than either of those things; much more subtle. Prometheus is an exploration of the human condition. It questions what it is to be human. It questions our understandings and ideas about where we come from. It questions w...

" Event Horizon " came out when I was in high school. I saw it in the theatre with my boyfriend. It was nothing new; just another entry into the horror/scifi cross-over genre. But we loved it none the less. Let's be honest - there are so many things wrong with this movie: The Event Horizon is (possibly) the most poorly designed ship in all of scifi history; someone in set design went to town taking the ship from " Alien " and exponentially increasing the haunted-house elements to create a terrifying environment. Too bad no one stopped to ask, "think this thing would fly?" or "why would you have that on a spaceship?" There's hardly any lighting (the ship is constantly shrouded in darkness).  Some rooms are made of spikes, twisting metal, or otherwise life-threatening elements. The medical bay is filled with what look like instruments of torture. Why is the center of the ship filled with a fish tank reminiscent of that at the Boston...

Unquestionably, Zach Snyder is a nerd. A big, comic-reading, video-game-playing, role-playing, fantasy-loving, nerd. How else could he continue directing the special-effects ridden movies that drag the gamers in from their parent's basements? " 300 "? A win. " Watchmen "? A win, albeit one that managed to alienate some older nerds (more on this topic as I go.) Unfortunately, " Sucker Punch " felt like 126 minutes of disjointed hodgepodged failure; a mixture of every sci-fi, fantasy, action movie to come out of the past 40-some-odd-years of film-making with a heavy sprinkling of video games, anime, and a smidge of " Riot Girl " meets " Grind House " culture tossed in for, um... good measure? For a few moments, I thought I was watching " Caged Heat " or some other WiP movie. Zach's biggest saving grace? That he's made enough of a name for himself, and had enough box office success, that he's backed by ...