sci-fi
Nick Hasted
Planet of the Apes is the most artfully replenished franchise, from the original series’ elegant time-travel loop to the reboot’s rich, deepening milieu. Director Wes Ball again offers serious sf, just as much as Dune, considering the consequences of another species’ dominance, and outraged humanity’s resistance.We are unspecified centuries after Matt Reeves’ War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), with Caesar’s reign now a font of vaguely remembered ape faith. Human civilisation – and its weaponry – has fallen away, leaving a green world, with mysterious skyscraper skylines sheathed in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Towards the end of David Haig’s new adaptation of Philip K Dick’s 1956 science fiction short story, someone asks if three humans who have been symbiotically connected to a massive AI computer for a decade can survive the experience.Yes, she’s told, “if they stop surrendering their neurons to the organoid.” Just when I’d assumed the script could not get any more infuriating, I’m offered a line that wouldn’t have been out of place in Flash Gordon. Actually, this show may have benefitted from a little of that film's camp. Sadly it’s a noisy, frantic, heavy-handed spin on a typically Read more ...
Justine Elias
Earthrise, the 1968 Apollo 8 photograph of our small island of a planet, taken from the Moon’s surface, transformed our vision of our fragile home world. “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats,” wrote Archibald MacLeish, “is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.”In I.S.S., a swift, smart science-fiction thriller set aboard the real-life international space station, a new crew member, Dr. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose), is similarly awestruck, and humbled, by that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
From Game of Thrones producers David Benioff and DB Weiss, in cahoots with Alexander Woo, 3 Body Problem is Netflix’s daring attempt to dramatise Liu Cixin’s novel The Three-Body Problem. A mind-bending sci-fi epic spanning multiple decades, while also reaching centuries into the past and future, it can scarcely be faulted for lack of ambition, but sometimes there's just too much going on to digest properly.The story opens in 1960s China, where the Cultural Revolution is burning down everything in its path with hideous brainwashed zeal. One of its countless victims is the physicist Ye Zhetai Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album starts on an extremely literal note. The whole record is themed around Belgian born-and-raised Bolis Pupul’s explorations of the Chinese side of his heritage after his mother’s death in 2008, and his regrets at not having done so when she was alive. And the opening title track has him explaining precisely this, in a portentously pitched-down voiceover reading the titular letter to his mother. It’s sweet in its directness, but in context its “this is what this record is, and this is what it’s going to do” statement seems blunt – like turning the sleeve notes into a tune.It feels a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dennis Villeneuve’s Dune sequel is a sombre science-fiction spectacle that insists on the scale of cinema: erupting sandworms are Cecil B. DeMille colossal, the sound design centred on Hans Zimmer’s score thunderously enveloping. In a genre once jokingly called space opera, its grand aristocratic dynasties and passions justify the term.It also treats its 1965 Frank Herbert source as a classic novel, teasing out abiding themes from its proto-hippie era. Vietnam-style aerial gunships hover, and atomic warfare, religious faith and extremism, ecology and colonialism give the narrative sinew.We Read more ...
Gary Naylor
You really don’t want to pick up The Time Traveller’s Wife in a game of charades. Half the clock would be run down just showing that it’s a novel, a film, a TV series and a musical. That spawning of spin-offs over the last two decades is a testament to the appeal of Audrey Niffenegger’s characters and story, but their relatively lukewarm critical and popular receptions speaks to the difficulty of going from page to screen. Is it any more successful travelling from page to stage? For anyone who has not seen any of those previous adaptations, the plot is tricky to follow Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Masterminded by writer-director Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Spy Kids etc), Hypnotic is a speedy, twisty, riotously enjoyable thriller that seeks to bend your mind into impossible shapes while also delivering more than a few droll wisecracks. Ben Affleck, seemingly reinvigorated as half of "Bennifer 2", is bang on the money here as Austin PD detective Danny Rourke. When he’s called out to investigate a tip-off about a bank heist, he finds himself tumbling down a rabbit-hole where time, space and identity itself all get swirled in a kaleidoscopic blender.Already, things haven’t been going Read more ...
Jon Turney
Humans are unsettled by incomplete data, unanswered questions. Show us dots on paper, and we’ll join them to make a picture. Show us objects in the night sky, and we create worlds.So it has been with Mars, conspicuous to us Earthbound gazers as one of the heavenly bodies that wanders from place to place against the backdrop of the stars. A planet, then, whatever that might be. An occult influence on terrestrial affairs, perhaps, or the sign of some unusually active god. Later, it seemed, a world that could share features with our own, as images of the known and unknown were both refashioned Read more ...
Nick Hasted
James Gunn is running the whole DC show now, but his Guardians films have stayed free from Cinematic Universe snares, even the group’s Avengers cameos beaming in from their own pop-art corner. This swansong is their indulgent, sometimes meandering double-album and darkest chapter, making a visceral anti-vivisection and anti-eugenics case.Volume 3 resembles Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in the shadows cast over a dayglo series by a particularly vicious villain. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s High Evolutionary was a relatively benign, species-splicing Dr Moreau, turned by later writers into a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius is a multiversal dandy, androgynous harlequin, English assassin and sometimes Cockney, an sf adventure hero who grew through four novels into a walker in the elegiac post-Sixties wastelands. He’s an apocalyptic Swinging Londoner, a protopunk Bond.Reincarnated in numerous subsequent novels, as Moorcock and compadres such as JG Ballard led literary responses to the Sixties’ glamorous and violent warps through experimental narratives forged from pulp fiction, Cornelius is a crucial decadent figure from a great writer. All the greater shame, Moorcock bitterly Read more ...
Nick Hasted
We’ve now reached film 31 and Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s increasingly baroque franchise. Four years after Avengers: Endgame’s false finale, Scott Lang aka Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) is still basking in his role in reversing Thanos’s genocidal Blip, and reacting to the MCU’s version of the pandemic by semi-retiring from Avenging for some Me time.Until, that is, his wife the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), their now adult daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) and original Ant-Man Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) ill-advisedly contact the Quantum Realm, and the whole Ant-family are sucked into its Read more ...