Lost in Space

September 16, 2013 Leave a comment

Lost in SpaceGenre: Sci-fi | Year: 1998 | Duration: 130 mins | Director: Stephen Hopkins | Medium: VCD (Eagle Entertainment) | Trailer: HERE | My rating: 2.5*/5*

Favorite Dialogue: “Robot: Warning! Warning! Alien approaching!”

The plot of this film is an adaptation from the 1960s TV series by the same name. In year 2058, the Robinson family comprising of five members, who apparently are all nerds and space explorers, along with Major Don West (Matt Leblanc) begins their journey from the dying Earth to another planet, Alpha Prime, using the newly built Hyper-drive for the next 10 years in stasis. However a terrorist re-programs an on-board robot, that changes the course of pre-fixed trajectory, and all of them gets lost in space, and crash-lands on a dying planet, after fighting off alien spiders, and rescuing a chameleon variety of monkey from a broken space ship from future. The rest of the movie is about entering bubbled time-warps and meeting Robinson Jr. in future where he has successfully built a time machine, and escape from being sucked into the black hole to the vast outer space.

Even though the special effects and animation are brilliant considering 1990s , the story line is totally unfocused and depressing. The future looked as bleak as the past with similar domestic problems and realities, so much so that sometimes the sci-fi turned into a family drama. The end was very bleak, and even a viewer with low IQ can conjure up the time vortex goof-up. I think i would have enjoyed the movie if I was 10!

This ‘lost & incoherent’ sci-fi with hollow adventure is my Movie of the Day.

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The One

May 16, 2013 Leave a comment

Photo source: http://imdb.com

Photo source: http://imdb.com

Genre: Sci-fi | Year: 2001 | Duration: 87 mins | Director: James Wong | Medium: VCD (ASIA VISION) | Trailer: HERE | My rating: 3*/5*

Favorite Dialogue: “YuLaw: I am Yulaw! I am nobody’s bitch! You are mine.”

The movie is based on the idea of ‘multi-verses’ consisting of parallel universes where events are intertwined. A group of Universes that decoded this formed a special multi-verse police force to stop the abuse of ‘quantum wormholes’ for inter-dimensional travel travelling across the parallel universes. Gabriel YuLaw (Jet Li) who was once an officer with the Multi-verse Authority becomes rogue and discovered that his strength increases when he kills a version of himself from another Universe. He then goes about killing the 123 copies of himself that are known to exist and their life energies flow to him and his one remaining counterpart, Gabe (Li again), in the 124th Universe, making him believe that after he kills Gabe, he will become ‘The One’, become the god. This idea seems to be based on a flawed zen-like concept of the First law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy).  Gabe, a regular cop in a Universe similar to ours, is unable to explain his sudden increase in strength. Helped by two Multi-verse agents, Roedecker (Delroy Lindo) and Funsch (Jason Statham), Gabe stops Yulaw before Yulaw becomes “the one” and rule the Multiverse as a despotic god. The gadgets used for time travel looks cool (thought very much like a mobile phone), and I expected the multi-verse guns to have lasers instead of bullets, and certainly humorous to see Bush proposing universal health care in one of the Universes!

This science fiction with mindless fight scenes is my Movie of the Day.

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The Avengers

May 13, 2013 Leave a comment

avengGenre: Sci-fi | Year: 2012 | Duration: 143 mins | Director: Joss Whedon | Medium: Theater (DT Cinemas, Saket) | Trailer: HERE | My rating: 4.5*/5*

Favorite Dialogue: “Steve Rogers (Capt. America): Stark, we need a plan of attack!

                               Tony Stark (Iron Man): I have a plan: attack!”

Nick Fury, director of SHIELD assembles a team of super heroes (Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Hawkeye, and Black Widow) to counter from subjugating Earth, and protecting Tesseract.  They all assemble on a freighter, which takes shape of a spaceship with stealth capabilities and make it their base of operations to launch counter strike against Loki and his army of Chitauris, an alien force from space. Loki brings his army for invasion of earth through a portal into space using Tesseract. The super heroes fight tooth and nail and defeat the highly mechanized (very much reminded me of the machines from Matrix) Chitauri fleet, with Iron Man nailing the Mother ship parked in space using a nuclear missile and setting its course through the open portal. In the end, Thor arrests Loki and surrenders him and the Tesseract to Asgard. Among all assembled super heroes, I wondered at the usefulness of Black Widow in the team other than glam factor. Guess they should have borrowed Cat Woman from DC who would have been better choice, adding both power and glam together.

This science fiction out of Marvel’s with impressive feat of cinematic engineering is my Movie of the Day

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The Astronaut’s Wife

April 25, 2013 Leave a comment

wifeGenre: Sci Fi | Year: 1999 | Duration: 109 mins | Director: Rand Ravich | Medium: DVD (Sony Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | My rating: 3.5*/5*

Fav Dialogue: Nan: “You know, men are like… like parking spaces. All the good ones are taken. All the available ones are handicapped.”

While space-walking, Commander Spencer Armacost (Johnny Depp), a NASA astronaut along with Alex Streck (Nick Cassavetes) encounters a communication glitch, and later return to earth as heroes. Upon return they turn hostile towards each other, and Alex dies bleeding at a conference and his wife commits suicide. Spencer retires from NASA and takes up an executive position in New York. His wife Jillian (Charlize Theron) becomes pregnant with a twin, and she continuously notices behavioral change in Spencer, which gets further suspicious after the account of Reese (Jow Morton) a former NASA employee. Spencer kills Reese and Jillian’s sister Nan after they get some video proof about Spencer being possessed by Extra Terrestrial being. Jillian tries to electrocute both Spencer and herself, to which the true energy alien form of her husband comes out and gets transferred into Jillian thus protecting herself from getting electrocuted. Jillian later re-marries a fighter pilot, and gives birth to the twin who seems to be aliens in human form  being concieved after the return of Spencer from Space.

This intriguingly creepy yet bland thriller lacking better direction and tightness in the plot is my ‘Movie of the Day’.

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SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW

April 8, 2013 Leave a comment

skyGenre: Action/Sci-fi | Year: 2004 | Duration: 106 mins | Director: Kerry Conran| Medium: VCD (BIG Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | My rating: 4*/5*

Fav dialogue: “Dex: [walks in on Joe aiming a gun at Polly] Oh, great, we all made up!?”

Manhattan is attacked by giant robots and robotic birds, and mysterious disappearances of world’s top scientists, makes Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) and her dashing ex, Sky captain ( Jude Law) go around the world on man hunt for Totenkopf (with a biblical plot of futuristic arc and miniaturised animals), till they reach Tibet to find underground lair of the nerd villain. The entire film reminded me of moving comics and brilliant CGI, and even the robots were cool along with the mysterious protector of the legion (Bai Ling), the use of amphibious WWII plane by the sky captain seemed too outdated (he certainly deserved a mean machine). Franky Cook (Angelina Jolie) as the commander of an all-female fleet adds the oomph factor (even though there are no hot scenes throughout the movie), and Dex (Giovanni Ribisi) the technical genius abducted by the robots suddenly re-appear at climax to rescue Polly & Sky Captain.

Being a lover of sci-fi & comics/animation, I enjoyed it as my ‘Movie of the Day’.

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