Science Fiction

Avatar: Fire and Ash review: In the Flame of the Father

Jeremy BeckReviews
Zoe Saldaña and Sam Worthington in Avatar: Fire and Ash

Pandora represents the promise of the new. In narrative terms, the Avatar pictures aren’t revolutionary; they refract age-old tales—about conquest and heroism, exploration and degradation, love and loss—through their own giddy popular mythology. But they are nonetheless designed to astonish viewers with their visual bravado and innovative grammar. In Avatar and its sequel, The Way of Water, James Cameron showed us things we’ve never seen before: blue warriors catapulting through the air and landing on orange winged beasts; reef-dwellers diving into the ocean and communing with its exotic flora and fauna; luminescent landscapes glittering with color and danger. The challenge for the third installment, Fire and Ash, is not just to perpetuate Pandora’s extant wonders, but to conceive of even more dazzling forms of cinematic novelty.

Judged against that lofty standard, Fire and Ash falls a bit short. It is, to be clear, a hugely impressive movie: vibrant and gorgeous, with engaging characters and provocative ideas. But it is also something of a recycling, repurposing its predecessors’ brilliant technique without equaling their sense of true discovery. It’s expectedly amazing. Read More

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The Running Man review: Sprint the Legend

Jeremy BeckReviews
Glen Powell in The Running Man

Glen Powell is a charmer. Yes he’s obscenely good-looking, but he also possesses a natural magnetism—a glint in his eye, a spark in his smile—that draws you toward him. Hit Man, Twisters, and Anyone But You may be of varying quality, but Powell is roguishly appealing in all of them, elevating the material with his calibrated carelessness. The Running Man, the new science-fiction movie from Edgar Wright, attempts to nudge the actor’s inherent allure into a different register, envisioning him not as an amiable romantic lead but as a bruising, brooding action hero.

“I’m not angry,” are the first words we hear from Ben Richards (Powell), in a tone that indicates the opposite. Myself, I am hardly incensed by The Running Man, but I nonetheless find it misguided and dispiriting. Not only does it fail to leverage the skills of its leading man, but it also struggles to work as a piece of blockbuster filmmaking. For a movie ostensibly focused on speed and excitement, it is oddly sluggish and sullen. Read More

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Predator: Badlands review: All Riot on the Western Hunt

Jeremy BeckReviews
Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi in Predator: Badlands

In Alien, Ian Holm described the titular xenomorph as a creature “unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” The Predator, the snarling extraterrestrial villain of Fox’s other flagship sci-fi/horror franchise, is marginally more humanoid, but it’s similarly ruthless; in the 38 years since Arnold Schwarzenegger christened it “one ugly motherfucker,” it’s never betrayed any sense of compassion. Still, beneath its primal bloodlust there has always lurked a hint of, if not humanity, then at least sincerity. Whereas the Alien is driven by evolutionary imperatives, the Predator carries itself with a certain swagger, busting heads and ripping out spinal cords with taunting superiority. It doesn’t kill because it has to; it kills because that’s what makes it happy.

So it isn’t entirely a subversion that Predator: Badlands envisions its central beast not as a savage lone wolf but as a scorned member of a functioning society. Its main character, Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), may have the flattened snout and black dreadlocks from Predator flicks of yore, but he is initially defined by his relative weakness. Dek isn’t a murdering machine; he’s just a little brother, one who’s desperate to impress both his elder sibling and his disapproving father, the latter of whom dismisses him as a runt. Inferiority complex, daddy issues, obsessed with cool toys—Predators, they’re just like us! Read More

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Tron: Ares review: Jet with the Program

Jeremy BeckReviews
Greta Lee, Jared Leto, and Arturo Castro in Tron: Ares

There has never been a good Tron movie. But Ares, the third installment in this baffling techno-obsessed franchise, is probably the least bad of the bunch. It retains the series’ sleek, color-coded aesthetic while also taking steps to minimize its mythological inanity. Calling it smart would be a stretch, but it reflects enough considered thought to qualify as sensible debugging.

Not that the storytelling in Ares is especially persuasive, or even interesting. In an accidental flirtation with topicality, its screenplay (by Jesse Wigutow) contemplates the rewards and costs of artificial intelligence. Corporate warfare has broken out over the search for “the permanence code,” an electronic MacGuffin that will allow digitized creations to attain lasting physical form. On one side of this commercial conflict is Eve (Greta Lee), an environmentally conscious entrepreneur who longs to continue the work of her deceased sister, envisioning the code as a vehicle for medical and scientific breakthroughs. On the other is Dillinger (Evan Peters), an industrial scion who dreams of commodifying and militarizing the technology; when we first meet him, he’s demoing its capabilities to a brigade of generals who salivate at the notion of a powerful and indefatigable soldier who executes all commands without question. Eve, in contrast, wants to make an orange grove whose trees always bear fruit. You earn no points for guessing which character is the movie’s chief villain. Read More

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Jurassic World Rebirth: Yawn of the Dinosaurs

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jonathan Bailey and Scarlett Johansson in Jurassic World Rebirth

Do people still like dinosaurs? The box office data would seem to say so, but the deflated characters of the new Jurassic World movie aren’t so sure. “Nobody cares about these animals anymore,” bemoans Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), the curator of a prehistoric museum with flagging attendance. Shortly before, we learn that a brachiosaur has escaped from confinement in New York City, yet while the sight of a mighty beast roaming the Big Apple’s sidewalks might have once provoked astonishment or panic, now it results in a simple traffic jam. The return of ancient “terrible lizards” to contemporary civilization is no longer cause for wonder or terror. It’s just an annoyance.

The chief innovation (or regression) of this latest episode in the Jurassic World franchise—which is subtitled Rebirth, and which has been directed by Gareth Edwards from a script by David Koepp—is that it’s aware of its own potential obsolescence. Now that hulking computer-generated monsters are pro forma in mainstream cinema, a new Jurassic flick has little hope of conjuring the sense of majesty that accompanied Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic. So despite some cheeky references to that picture—the shot of a car’s mirror with its famous “Objects are closer than they appear” warning; a faded banner proclaiming “When dinosaurs ruled the earth”—Rebirth doesn’t attempt to match its conceptual grandeur or vast ambition. It’s a blockbuster about huge creatures that keeps things relatively small. Read More

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