sci-fi
Aleks Sierz
I always advocate in favour of more sci-fi plays, and over the past decade there have been a gratifying number of them. But one essential element of any futuristic fantasy must be its power to convince. And it is precisely this that is missing from Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman’s More Life, currently in the studio space of the Royal Court.These two theatre-makers, who run the Kandinsky theatre company, have had a good light-bulb moment: how would you, and your nearest and dearest, cope with the reality of eternal life? Set in 2075, the play shows how Bridget – who was killed 50 years Read more ...
Joe Muggs
I don’t really want to talk about this year. Genuinely.It’s been so horrific on the macro scale with deranged Fascism and the effects of rampant and undeniable climate change looming everywhere you look – and on the personal level I’ve been been bombarded with all the inevitable, arbitrary slings and arrows that life can muster, from multiple bereavements on down – that I’d very much rather just neck a load of tranquilisers and fine wines and resolutely enter my hands-over-ears, “lalalala can’t hear you”, era. And yet, and yet… life persists, culture persists, community persists, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Time-travel is a trap in debutante Michael Felker’s tender sf two-hander, whose title’s grim irony becomes gradually apparent.There’s golden American promise in the sun and shadow of the diner where Joseph (Adam David Thompson) meets sister Sidney (Riley Dandy, pictured below), cinematographer Carissa Dorson capturing Seventies New Hollywood’s elegiac glow. Joseph has just robbed a bank in the present day, and effects an unlikely getaway through a nearby farmhouse’s previously rumbled time-portal, letting the pair hide in the past till the heat dies down.What seems a sure-fire bolthole in Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In space no one can hear you scream, but they usually can in a cinema. Wednesday night’s gala launch of Alien: Romulus was awash with the gussied-up cast and writer-director Fede Álvarez, alongside assorted Olympians and influencers walking the red carpet.A more enthusiastic audience would have been hard to find, but apart from an auditorium-wide laugh at the reprise of a beloved line from Aliens, there weren’t a lot of gasps, and there were no screams at all. Touted as a return to the original film’s grunge aesthetic and practical effects, Alien: Romulus set itself up for comparison and Read more ...
James Saynor
So, it falls to me to review perhaps the least-anticipated film of the year. Borderlands is based on an admired video game, and there may be nothing more hostile than pissed-off video-gamers.The tsunami of online negativity aimed for weeks at merely the film’s trailer was nothing compared to the onslaught that followed the lifting of review embargoes these past few days. The picture was slammed and dunked. If they think it’s all over for the era of Peak Superhero Movie, it is now. Come back Madame Web, all is forgiven.But there is, at least, a question of interest for readers of this Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I think my dad might have been an alien,” Adam (Faraz Ayub; Line of Duty; Screw) tells a self-help group he wanders into. What does that make him? He doesn’t feel at home anywhere – not with his family or, perhaps not surprisingly, at his job in a burger bar at Sky Peals motorway services.And in fact he is almost homeless: his white mother (Claire Rushbrook) is moving out of their flat with her new man, to Herefordshire - "Where's that?" he asks vaguely. She wants him to pack up his things but he stays in front of his computer, transfixed, while they take his bed apart, and carries on Read more ...
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 ...