Tag: alien

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Features Live Action Movies

Save the Green Planet!
(Jigureul Jikyeora!,
지구를 지켜라!)

Director – Jang Joon-Hwan – 2003 – South Korea – Cert. 18 – 118m

*****

NSFW

Convinced that a corporate boss is an alien who killed his mother, a man takes him prisoner and tortures him to find out his race’s plans for planet Earth – plays alongside Echoes In Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema which runs from Monday, October 28th until the end of 2024 at BFI Southbank

Lee Byong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun) is convinced that corporate CEO Kang Man-shik (Baek Yoon-shik) is not only responsible for the death of his mother but also is an alien spy set to communicate with his extra-terrestrial superiors at the next full moon in seven days time. So, aided by girlfriend Sooni (Hwang Jung-min), Lee kidnaps Kang and brings him back to his underground workshop beneath his hilltop home near which he keeps bees in hives. Lee wants to hear the truth from Kang’s own lips, and is prepared to torture him to get it.

CEO Kang is clearly not a nice guy – he is obviously raking in the money, yet we watch him driven home drunk by a valet who he shamelessly short changes on his fare.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Alien
Romulus

Director – Fede Alvarez – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 119m

*****

A group of young people escape from a planet housing a repressive, corporate mining colony in search of something better … only to find something worse… – latest SF horror franchise entry is out on digital on Friday, October 18th following its release in UK cinemas on Friday, August 16th

The Alien franchise, after quite literally bursting onto cinema screens with Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), then having lost its way somewhat on Alien3 (David Fincher, 1992), picked up again somewhat on Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 1979), and now settled title-wise into the sensible enough format of Alien: Ship’s Name, delivers a new entry made by a writer-director, Fede Alvarez, who understands the franchise enough to both put in everything required of it and throw in some innovative ideas without compromising its essence.

The first 20 or so minutes, arguably the best thing here, could equally easily have opened a science fiction epic unrelated to the franchise. A young woman Rain (the terrific Cailee Spaeny from Civil War, Alex Garland, 2024) is trapped on a planet where the sun is permanently hidden owing to pollution caused by the corporation’s mining operation.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

A Quiet Place
Day One

Director – Michael Sarnoski – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 100m

*****

A terminally ill woman returns to the New York of her childhood as hostile aliens land and start wreaking havoc – franchise prequel is out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, June 28th

Another attempt to duplicate the success of A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018), this time by showing us the first day of the alien invasion in New York City, the sort of thing that couldn’t be done on the small budget of the original. Which sounds like more of the same – and on one level, that’s exactly what this is (so admirers of the original – among whom I number myself – wanting more aliens who hunt by sound, and more terrifying games of hide and seek with them, should find themselves more than satisfied).

There’s a curious attempt by the Studio’s marketing department to offer the chance to find out “why the world went quiet”, which is a great idea but bears no relation whatsoever to this film. Once you know that the aliens hunt by sound, so you must keep quiet to survive – revealed in the original film – this new film offers no further explanation as to why the world went quiet.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Everything, Everywhere

Director – Lim Kah Wai – 2023 – Japan – Cert. none – 88m

**

A woman meets, loses then searches for a film director who makes films by travelling around finding places and people around which and whom to make films – premieres in the Rebels With A Cause Competition in the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Backpacking hosteller Eva returns from Japan to Belgrade, where Jay has a package waiting for her. On collecting it, she is surprised at how little it contains (he’s a film director, and it includes a hard drive containing one of his films). She wanders around the Balkans, where Jay (Shogen) shoots her with his camera before introducing himself as an independent film director currently scouting interesting places and people. He persuades her to star in his upcoming film, but when she nearly drowns in a shot where he’s telling her to go further out in a lake, she refuses to complete the shoot, saying he’s self-obsessed.

Later, she meets other people with whom he’s friends who speak of him in glowing terms, and goes in search of him. Unfortunately, he’s nowhere to be found. He has however hooked up with another woman and lived with her for some period of time.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Asteroid City

Director – Wes Anderson – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 104m

***

A stage play frames a tale of various characters in a 1950s US desert town, built on the site of an asteroid impact, which becomes the centre of a cover-up after an alien appears – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 23rd

Iconoclast Anderson’s latest is being sold as one thing by its trailer, when it’s actually something else. And watching the film, that something else completely threw me. What we are being sold via the standard letterboxed movie framed image is, a 1950s family trapped in the town of Asteroid City, USA when their car irreparably breaks down, then the entire (not very large) population including visitors imprisoned there following an incident with an extra-terrestrial spaceship and an alien. The overall tone is of whimsy, but maybe there’s something unsettling and disturbing about it too.

Anderson’s movies have never been about photorealism as much as artifice, which is part of their undeniable charm. Perhaps that’s even more true of Asteroid City than most. The costumes, the production design, have gone for a very particular, stylized look. This is fifties American desert romanticised into pastel-shaded eye candy, and if all that were required of going to a movie were to sit down in your seat and soak up the scenery, then provided you’re not the type to insist on photo-representational accuracy, this would be a winner hands down.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

Junk Head

All images: ©2021 MAGNET/YAMIKEN

Director – Takahide Hori – 2021 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 101m

****1/2

A cyborg is dropped from the planet’s surface into its depths by his immortal but impotent masters to investigate the beings who have evolved in the levels below – feature length, stop-frame epic is out in UK cinemas on Monday, April 24th

More, I suspect, by accident than design, Junk Head looks and feels like the wandering little sister of Mad God (Phil Tippett, 2021). The latter was made by a top Hollywood stop-frame effects animator as a 34-year, independent, labour of love, the former by a Japanese visionary as a seven-year, independent, labour of love. Hori had worked on puppetry at Tokyo Disneyland and became obsessed with stop-motion, inspired by Motoko Shinkai’s one-man debut 2D animated production Voices of A Distant Star (2002). He made a half hour version Junk Head 1 in 2013, and used it as a building block to this version, which he completed in 2017.

The production mode of stop-frame can be a solitary one involving one person alone in a room with a camera and armatured puppets, the approach typified by Willis O’Brien, Ray Harryhausen, the bolexbrothers, Jiri Trnka, Kihachiro Kawamoto, the early David Lynch and many others – a single person or very small number of people producing the work, either complete films or stop-frame effects sequences within live action films.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Nope

Director – Jordan Peele – 2022 – US – Cert. 15 – 130m

Overall **

The alien in the sky finale when the film finally dumps the other stuff *****

A black Muybridge model’s ranch-owning descendants and the survivor of a TV sitcom which turned into a bloodbath encounter a dangerous alien presence that attacks from the sky – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 12th

There appear to be three separate films here.

In the first, a descendant of the black rider photographed in Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of a horse in motion, here historically repurposed as the first piece of moving film (which is debatable), is an old man OJ Haywood Sr. (Keith David) who dies in a bizarre accident on his ranch, where he runs a horse rental service for the motion picture business, leaving behind his children OJ (Dan Kaluuya from Judas And The Black Messiah, Shaka King, 2021; Black Panther, Ryan Coogler, 2018; Get Out, Jordan Peele, 2017) and Emerald (Keke Palmer from Lightyear, Angus MacLane, 2021; Hustlers, Lorene Scafaria, 2019). The bizarre accident may be related to the third plot. Or may not be.

In the second, a wholesome, family TV sitcom is shut down after its star chimpanzee goes on a rampage during the shooting of an episode, killing all members of the cast except the young boy Ricky Park (Jacob Kim) hiding under the table, who witnesses the animal being shot.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

Lightyear

Director – Angus MacLane – 2022 – US – Cert. PG – 107m

**1/2

Stranded on a hostile planet, Buzz Lightyear sets out on a series of missions which eventually lead to his first confrontation with the evil Emperor Zurg – plays in the Annecy Animation Festival 2022 which is taking place in a 100% on-site edition this year right now as a Screening Event on Friday, June 17th, and opens in UK cinemas the same day.

A caption at the start explains that this was the favourite film of child protagonist Andy (from Pixar’s Toy Story franchise) and the reason he got a Buzz Lightyear toy in the first place. Other than that, though, this is a completely separate and self-enclosed film.

As the literal meaning of its title implies, Lightyear delivers a narrative that races through vast periods of time at a stretch, so that we and ace space pilot Buzz Lightyear (voice: Chris Evans) and his colleague Alisha Hawthorne (voice: Uzo Aduba) land their spaceship on an unexplored planet which turns out to be populated with hostile life-forms, specifically (1) plant tendrils which burst out of the planet’s surface and try to drag anything they can back under the ground and (2) giant, flying bugs.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

Boonie Bears
Back To Earth
(Xiong Chu Mo
Chong Fan
Di Qiu,
熊出沒·重返地球)

Director – Lin Huida – 2022 – China – Cert. PG – 100m

****

The latest movie in this long-running, animated Chinese franchise, hugely successful at the Chinese (and therefore global) box office, is the first to get a UK cinema release – in a dubbed format for family audiences – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 27th

Urban bear superhero Bramble (voiced in the English language version by Joseph S. Lambert) successfully battles and defeats a monster formed from the garbage that people in the city have failed to properly throw away, lapping up the ensuing admiration from local child and cute animal residents until rudely awakened from his urban daydream by the human Vick (voice: Paul ‘Maxx’ Rinehart), who wants him to clean up the litter in the rest area of the Pine Tree Mountain forest / national park where they live.

Motivated by the promise of an ice cream on completion, Bramble speedily undertakes the task by racing around gathering the detritus in his arms only to come a cropper at the very end, spilling all the collected rubbish at its allotted bins. Although he has the best intentions and tries hard, Bramble is not the smartest bear in the woodlands.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Tremors

Director – Ron Underwood – 1990 – US – Cert. 15 – 96m

*****

Review from TNT magazine, June 1990, republished here on the death of actor Fred Ward, May 2022

If Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) was Jaws In Outer Space, Tremors is Jaws In The Nevada Desert. As such, the film represents a return to the production values of the desert bound sci-fi of fifties alien invasion staple It Came From Outer Space (Jack Arnold, 1953). In place of the shark from Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) is a species of malevolent giant worm which burrows under the earth like something out of Frank Herbert’s Dune (most recent version: Denis Villeneuve, 2021).

It’s never explained where these monsters have come from, but then you tend not to worry about such things when one of them is about to knock down your home. Hapless victims disappear into sudden holes formed in the sand like a rerun of Blood Beach (Jeffrey Bloom, 1980); then muppet-like snakes grab people, bite them, and tug them under the ground, finally the full-grown beasties get to attack.

Producer-writers Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson plunder numerous other sources too, but the emerging whole is infinitely better than the sum of its parts.… Read the rest