Closet Sci-Fi Geek

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If you woke up tomorrow with a different set of memories, would you still be you?

A while back I watched A Scanner Darkly. While this is a good enough film (and yet another cinematic adaptation of a Philip K Dick novel), it’s certainly not the best film I’ve seen about fractured identities and perspectives that are warped by drugs or technology. Total Recall has much more fun with the

topic. Based on “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick, it raises the fundamental question - do memories define character? If your memories tell you that you are a gun-slinging, ass-kicking spy; does that make you a gun-slinging, ass-kicking spy? Bladerunner (based on Philip K Dick’s, ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) takes a more meditative approach to the topic. Is the film-noiresque hero, Deckard, real or not? Is he a human or is he a replicant who has forgotten that he is artificial. The random selection of antique photos on Deckard’s piano gives us a clue. Are they a record of Deckard’s past or are they a badly constructed history; a collation of tenuously linked memories. Then there’s the unicorn dream he keeps having. Again, is this his subconscious at work or another memory, implanted by Tyrell Corporation? Similarly, if you can hide memories, can you hide a personality? Take Talia Winters from Babylon 5. One minute she is a mild mannered telepath, minding her own business as best she can, the next minute her ’sleeper’ personality has been activated and she’s a cold-blooded killer. Ditto with The Long Kiss Goodnight. Amiable housewife becomes professional killer. There are many many many other examples. But just one question really. If you woke up tomorrow with a completely different set of memories, would you still be you?

What Dreams May Come

I remember seeing the 1998 film What Dreams May Come when it first came out in the theater. I loved it then; the visuals were absolutely spectacular, especially by 1998 standards. It’s now 10 years later and I just watched it again at home. I’ve also since read the book (which the movie was based on).

What Dreams May Come, in case you missed it, is a film about the afterlife. Specifically, it’s about an afterlife where your thoughts create your reality. Thus, if you are a good person and in a good mental space, you may see an afterlife that is filled with beauty and lush scenery. If not, it’s off to your personal hell you go.

Robin Williams starred in the film as a man who dies and goes to heaven. Soon his wife commits suicide and is sent to hell. (She’s the one who has sent herself to hell.) Throughout all this, we get to see sappy flashbacks of their affluent life, before their kids died in a car crash and everything turned sour. Continue reading What Dreams May Come…

Star Trek Generations

I’m digging through my VCR vault…and finally watching and donating my old VCR tapes. And what did I find? Star Trek Generations, the first of the “Next Generation” movies.

Watching it some 10 years later (yikes, has it been that long?), I’m a bit more forgiving. Maybe it’s the years of disappointing Trek on television, but Generations is actually a pretty decent movie, Trek-wise. (Never mind that it’s an odd-number Trek film!)

Highlights:

Captain Kirk (though we need to see more of him).
Some great lines from Scotty at the beginning of the film.
Data and his new emotion chip (nothing like a tricorder puppet to liven up an away team mission!).
Guinan looking incredibly worried with her big cool hat.
Gordi’s stupid-ass visor finally getting the obvious critique from Malcolm MacDowall’s character…and then being used as a security risk.
The Enterprise-D biting it in a fantastic, spectacular planetary wipe-out (I always hated that model).
Data’s big four-letter swear as the Enterprise-D is about to bite it.

Cons:

Not enough from the original cast, and no Uhura, Bones, or Sulu.
Yet another ridiculous time paradox that does not make any sense.
Kirk’s somewhat ignominious and controversial death.
A bit gloomy with the constant death talk.

Mostly, however, Star Trek Generations stands out as a good Trek movie because of Data. He steals the show. In case you forgot, here is the highlight of the film, Data singing his “tiny little lifeforms” song:

Gotta love it!

Stephen King’s The Shining - 1997 Miniseries

In 1980, Stanley Kubrick directed the horror masterpiece The Shining. It’s something I grew up with (all the school kids used to mimic “Redrum” at lunchtime) and it is definitely a classic. So it was with low hopes that I popped in the DVD for the 1997 version of The Shining.

This is the version Stephen King always wanted to do - he was unhappy with Kubrick’s version, which veered greatly from the book. For example, Kubrick added a hedge maze instead of topiary animals. So King decided he wanted to set things right by creating a miniseries for The Shining. Continue reading Stephen King’s The Shining - 1997 Miniseries…

Horror Meets Sci-Fi on Event Horizon

Ahhhh, there’s nothing like blood and gore on a spaceship. If you like horror mixed with your sci-fi, then 1997’s Event Horizon is for you.

I like 90s sci-fi. Following in the heels of the Alien sequels, a fabulous trend emerged whereby a recalcitrant crew, often made up of a band of rugged misfits, meets terror and daunting challenges out in space (or, alternatively, underwater). It could be in the form of a creepy alien with slime dripping out of its mouth, some sort of terrifying time/space anomaly, or, in the case of Event Horizon, pure evil.

The crew in these types of films is always foul-mouthed and crude; they’ll often get into fights with each other when things start going seriously south. There’s always a few women included, and they are usually wearing the requisite army green tanktops with their hair loosely tied up into a bun or ponytail.

If we’re lucky, a few of these crewmembers will die horrible, nasty deaths, leaving the rest to run around in terror doing stupid things they shouldn’t.

This is, of course, the case with Event Horizon, which has the added bonus of Sam Neill, an excellent actor, duking it out with Laurence Fishburne, who only does well in The Matrix because his wooden acting fit that role. Neill, even with his crappy role here in Event Horizon, still manages to make the screen light up, whereas Fishburne is almost painful to watch at times.

This is too bad, because we get a lot of Fishburne in the film. He plays the captain of a rescue ship that has been called to recover the lost ship Event Horizon, which disappeared from time and space for seven years. Neill plays the scientist who originally designed the Event Horizon.

The Event Horizon is now a spooky relic, and the mystery is, where was it all those seven years? The ship was supposed to create a black hole to travel from any spot in the universe to any other spot. When crazy things start happening on the ship, and the blood starts pouring, it becomes quite evident that the ship has gone much farther - it really has gone where no man has gone before. Meanwhile, Sam Neill’s character starts going completely insane…

As plots go, Event Horizon has an interesting story, if just that there’s a mystery wanting to be solved. I wasn’t blown away by the horror, however, which is strange, since I generally have a low fright threshold. I’ve read others saying this movie was one of the scariest things they’ve seen. Well, not for me. This film did not scare me one bit, nor will it have me up at night with the lights on. That said, I enjoyed the story behind the lost ship, and found the concept to be highly intriguiging.

Alas, the special effects are showing their age: The CGI used in the film is obviously inferior to today’s. Most of this shows up when we see the Event Horizon zero gravity and computer-generated objects are floating around. The rest of the special effects hold up just fine otherwise.

And thus, I give Event Horizon a B grade, meaning it’s a worthwhile rental and a good thing to watch when you’ve seen all the latest releases. It’s not a classic, but it’s a decent flick.