Archive
Transcendence (2014)
If you like good Sci-Fi and haven’t seen this movie, I recommend watching it.
Transcendence is unlike most recent and popular Sci-Fi movies, where the story usually goes like this: AI takes over the world and its first goal is to exterminate or enslave humans. I’m personally getting a little tired of the meme that AI will make us miserable…
Spoiler warning
Transcendence depicts human fears of new technologies. In this movie, the scientist, who uploaded his own mind to a computer, becomes the good guy and humans who don’t understand him are the villains. Given the currently increasing fear of AI, I’d say that’s a quite believable story…
Skyline (2010)
I’ve seen this movie a long time ago, but it was in some way exceptional and thus memorable. I highly recommend seeing it if you’re into the SciFi genre.
It is not a AAA movie, I did not know the actors earlier and some of their acting was not of the best, although it was not totally bad either.
The visual effects are interesting, the story is a little bit believable and the aliens in this movie are awesome in my opinion. You can’t tell the same about most SciFi movies, especially when you take into account the recent outbreak of idiotic superhero movies. Skyline brings some fresh ideas and an original plot and that’s why I think it’s worth seeing.
Spoilers
The trailer makes it clear that it’s a movie about an invasion. What I like is that it is not one of those movies in which humans always win. To the contrary, puny humans stand no chance! There is a little twist at the end though.
The scene with huge aliens wandering around the city is my favorite.
There are some things I did not like, of course. For example the whole setting is unrealistic – the aliens came to conquer humans just to use their brains in their machines. It makes no sense to me, because computers and artificial brains we will create in the coming decades can have much better capabilities and performance than human brain. Aliens capable of interstellar travel should have computer technology beyond what we can currently imagine.
Nevertheless, it’s worth seeing in my opinion, even as a pure entertainment. Enjoy!
Prometheus (2012)
Prometheus is yet another sequel to a popular series, Alien(s). The movie is actually a prequel of the original Alien (1979) movie. While previously every Alien movie had a different director, this one is directed by the same person as the original Alien, Ridley Scott.
The story is placed before Alien and the ending blends quite well with Alien. I watched Alien long ago, so I checked out its screenshots on the web and it seems the Prometheus team took the original spaceship concepts which we could see in Alien and reused them. The spaceship looks similar in both movies, both inside and outside.
The movie does not attempt to be as scary as Alien. There was one or two jumpy scenes, but that was it. It’s actually good, since I was expecting a good SciFi instead of just a horror.
Prometheus explains the existence of the nasty alien creatures, although it (fortunately) bears no connection with the B-movie Alien vs. Predator, which was silly IMHO.
The plot evolves around a scientific expedition trying to find origins of human civilization. The flick tries to have a deeper meaning, by exploring the questions of existence and life creation, god, and alien civilizations.
If you’ve seen any of the Alien movies and liked them, I strongly recommend seeing this one. It’s very well made, excellent piece of SciFi. There is a lot of action in it and no boring moments.
Spoilers
Nowadays there is a “creationism” movement in the US, which tries to enforce new laws of teaching that god created life on Earth and that evolution is “just a theory”. Â Prometheus seems to be aiming at that. The message of the movie is that humans are neither a creation of god nor evolution, but rather direct descendants of an alien species. The first scene in the movie is the creation scene where an alien being throws itself from a rock into water to seed the Earth with its DNA.
Although the movie is quite clear about it, the ending leaves the interpretation slightly open – people who believe in god will be able to say that there must be god after all, since the only person who survived was a deep believer. I don’t know if this was intended, I suspect that the studio wanted this to satisfy a broader audience. This is what I didn’t like about this movie.
There are several things in the movie which don’t make scientific sense, such as the abovementioned indication that humans descendent from aliens, gravity on the ship and on the alien moon seemingly the same as on Earth, the aliens growing in several hours without eating a lot of food, etc. But it’s fun to watch regardless.
The thing I liked the most is that the vicious alien creatures turned out to be an engineered biological weapon. This makes a lot of sense, because I don’t believe that an alien species could evolve the capabilities of surviving in so many environments and eating humans.
Would I watch it again? I will!
The Thing (2011)
A post in a new category – movie reviews. Hopefully everyone’s favorite. 🙂 This new category will in fact be not only about reviews, but also about my commentary.
The Thing is a movie about an alien lifeform which crash-landed on Earth in Antarctica long ago. It’s actually a prequel to John Carpenter’s original movie from 1982 with the same title.
If you like movies about evil aliens like I do, you would certainly like this one. The prequel blends very well with the original movie, in fact it at the end it is surprisingly well connected to the original. They did not overdo the monsters but made them more believable using current technology. There is a lot of action in it, boring scenes were kept to a minimum to sustain the story. Definitely worth watching if you like thrillers, action and aliens.
Spoilers
The lifeform in the movie is bloodthirsty, but it does not only want to just consume Earth’s lifeforms. When the organism catches and swallows a dog or a human, or even if it only sprinkles one with its fluids, the alien cells attack prey’s cells and convert them into alien cells.
It wasn’t said in the movie, but one can suspect the alien lifeform attacked some other intelligent aliens who had a spaceship and this way came into the possession of that spaceship, which it used to come to Earth. This could potentially explain why a graceful landing would be too hard for that creature.
What does not make much sense is how such lifeform with the ability to understand and pretend other lifeforms from other planets could evolve in the first place. All lifeforms are bound to their environment. They are used to pressure and chemical composition of that environment. Advanced organisms don’t have the flexibility to live in environments beyond their home, because they are too complex for that. I find it hardly believable that a species from another planet could come to Earth and breathe our air, eat our meat, let alone have the ability to change itself into one of us in a matter of minutes.
However there is one scenario in which such a life form could be possible – if it was deliberately created as a weapon or even just as a crazy experiment.
But even if such a lifeform existed, I still find it quite improbable that it could find another alien with spaceship technology who it could mimic. I would argue, that civilisations able to travel in space to other planets must have evolved beyond physical limitations of biological life and consist of cybernetic beings, which we today consider as “robots” or “androids” etc. For this reason I think that even if such a creature existed, it wouldn’t be able to spread effectively to other planets.
Chris Dragan's Corner 