Tag: spaceship

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Features Live Action Movies

Alienoid
(Oegye+in 1bu,
외계+인)

Director – Choi Dong-hoon – 2022 – South Korea – LKFF Cert. 12 – 142m

*****

In Part One of a proposed double feature, aliens incarcerate prisoners in human brains and time travel between present day and fourteenth century Korea and mayhem ensues – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2022;

Part Two Alienoid: Return to the Future plays in LKFF 2024

The first film of a two-part adventure, which would be more sensibly released as Alienoid – Part One (which may already be the case in some territories), this revolves around multiple protagonists in two separate timelines divided by six or seven centuries. In the fourteenth century, Guard, who morphs between true robot and fake human appearances not unlike the T-1000 of Terminator 2 Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991), and his even more confusing companion Thunder, who is sometimes a car, sometimes a flying pod and sometimes any number of human manifestations (both / all played by Kim Woo-bin), fail to save a woman from dying after an alien escapes incarceration within her brain, however Thunder rescues the woman’s baby.

The pair travel forward in time to raise Lee Ahn (Choi Yu-ri) in the twenty-first century where she sees what she’s not supposed to: the impregnation process whereby alien prisoners are incarcerated in human brains, a memory wiped immediately afterwards from the humans used for this purpose, meaning people wander around not knowing there are aliens trapped inside their heads.… 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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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Diplodocus
(Smok Diplodok)

Director – Wojtek Wawszczyk – 20234 – Poland – 84m

****

A young diplodocus must save the comic book in which he lives from being erased by the artist who created – from the 2024 Annecy International Animation Festival in the Annecy Presents section

Animation. A bookworm (English voice: Wayne Greyson; Polish voice: Tadeusz Baranowski) appears, a “respected devourer of picture stories”. His function is not exactly that of a Greek chorus, more like a comic interlude who occasionally wanders into the narrative as light relief, to leaven the whole. Not that this likeable romp, is any need of leavening, but it’s a nice touch which nicely sets the tone for the whole piece. It’s about characters in a comic book whose very existence is threatened by the originating artist’s run-in with his commercially driven but artistically clueless lady publisher.

Beyond a vast, bubbling, primeval swamp in a crater, an inventive and adventurous, male diplodocus child (English voice: Julian Wanderer; Polish voice: Mikołaj Wachowski), Diplodocus as the credits calls him, nicks snails off a frog to use as climbing suckers. A butterfly flies past. Diplodocus gets sent to his room by his essentially conservative parents (English voices: Alyson Leigh Rosenfeld, Marc Thompson; Polish voices: Monica Pikuła, Grzegorz Pawlak) for wanting a life of adventure.… 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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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Monty Python’s
Life Of Brian

Director – Terry Jones – 1979 – UK – Cert. 12a – 93m

****

An absurdist comedy about of Brian, Jesus Christ’s next-door neighbour, who falls in with left-wing activists, develops a religious following and ends up crucified – back out in UK cinemas in Glorious Standard Definition on Friday, April 7th

Like The Last Temptation Of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988), a Biblical epic made by a New Yorker who tries to bring first century Palestine to life on the screen by filling it with actors who speak as if they’re on the streets he knows, so too Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, made by the Monty Python team, nurtured first by Oxbridge student drama society culture then by British radio and television, attempts a comic equivalent of the Christian Gospel narrative by filling it with characters possessing such quintessentially English names as Brian and Reg and sporting English accents. For the Pythons and their audience, this strategy works because of its familiarity from Britain’s hugely popular Monty Python’s Flying Circus television show, made for the BBC. It’s what everyone attending the film in the UK expected.

The Monty Python team (Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle & Michael Palin) all wrote the film between them and take on multiple acting roles, with Jones also directing, animator Gilliam also taking on production design, and Chapman, who had studied medicine, also taking on the role of set medic.… 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

A.I. Rising

Original title: Ederlezi Rising

Director – Ladar Bodroza – 2018 – Serbia – 18 – 86 mins

****

Serbian Sci-Fi shot in the English language in which a male astronaut becomes dissatisfied with the female android programmed to satisfy his every desire on a deep space mission – on Amazon and iTunes

You’ve got to admire the sheer ambition of A.I. Rising, a Serbian sci-fi movie shot in the English language with production values and visual effects on a par – mostly – with anything Hollywood at its most lavish can offer.

I say mostly because there’s an early rocket launch sequence which cries out for exterior shots of the rocket on its launch pad and then taking off, but all we get is an admittedly impressive view from space of the distant ship ascending into the atmosphere. It’s the only time the production misses a trick like this and it doesn’t detract from what follows.

The plot concerns one man and his dealings with women – well, one woman in particular. Milutin (Sebastian Cavazza) is given a new assignment by the Ederlezi corporation. Prior to his flight into deep space, a woman social engineer (Marusa Majer) explains the nature of his mission and that he’ll be required to work in a team of two, the other member being an android modelled after a human woman “but unlike a human woman, she’ll be unable to hurt you.”… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Warning
From Space
(Uchujin
Tokyo
Ni Arawaru,
宇宙
人東京に現わる,
lit. Spacemen
Appear
In Tokyo)

Director – Koji Shima – 1956 – Japan – Cert. PG – 87m

***

Out on Arrow Blu-ray

The first Japanese science fiction film to be made in colour, Warning From Space (1956) features peaceful, star-shaped aliens, one of whom transforms herself into a nightclub singer to make contact with Japanese scientists. Not that the aliens possess any discernible gender themselves, but the human likenesses into which they are transformed most definitely do. If you watch the original Japanese version, the aliens’ transformation into human form doesn’t take place until a third of the way in. When the Americans got hold of the film, they not only dubbed it into English, but also did some deft re-editing to create new opening and closing sequences so that the film now both starts and ends inside the alien ship. The closing sequence is basically the transformation sequence backwards. [read more…]

The full review can be found at All The Anime.

Trailers:

Categories
Animation Features Movies

SCOOB!

Director – Tony Cervone – 2020 – US – Cert. PG – 93m

****

Available on VoD from Friday, July 10th and BD/DVD Monday, September 28th

I grew up watching Hanna-Barbera cartoons which would play in, if I recall, the 5.20 slot on the BBC. Some were better than others. Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969-70) was one of the better ones. It had five memorable characters who each week would investigate some mystery suggesting monsters or the paranormal for which there would always turn out to be a rational explanation as the perpetrator was unmasked at the end, usually with the words “and I would have gotten away with it too if it hadn’t have been for you kids.”

The original cartoon TV series (1969-70) has spawned numerous spin-offs over the years including a so-so live action / special effects theatrical feature Scooby-Doo (2002) and a sequel. Which brings us to SCOOB!, an animated theatrical movie once again bringing the franchise to the big screen.

It starts off with a couple of tried and tested big screen adaptation tropes. One, taking one of the characters and having them somehow meet up with the others for their first adventure. Two, an origin story.… Read the rest