Sci-Fi Movies of the 2020s

Palm Springs

2020 Limelight Productions, Lonely Island Classics

OK time-loop sex/romance comedy.

Date: same as yesterday and tomorrow, etc.

Places: mostly Palm Springs; a scene in Austin

This looper is little different: in this one, people go through the time-loop together, and fall in love with one another there.

Sci-fi wise, nevermind — some string theory blither with a physicist, would be blither even without the string theory, does nevertheless qualify the movie as science fiction. Some dinosaurs appear, then they’re gone — nothing more to do with the movie, except in the closing credits. Just, “hey this is weird”.

The main fun, as in many of the other time-loopers, is how the primaries interact with the non-looping people, and eventually develop.

There’s plenty of clever dialog, and surprising situations, and some good music. And a great big messed up romance.

I couldn’t understand the blonde’s talk at all, even though I backed the video up several times. Likewise, no amount of re-watching clarified the main guy’s final remark in the pool. Is that intentional? Did I lose brain cells? Has the population taken on a new argot that is opaque to us geezers?

Warning: we hear the writers talking to themselves a lot in the dialog. That is just lame.

Спутник
[Sputnik]

2020 Vodorod, Art Pictures Studio Hypefilm, Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, Fond Kino, NMG Studios, STS

+ Soviet space monster

Russian

Date 1983

It’s a Russian space-monster movie! Guys in a Soyuz mission come back with an uninvited guest.

Production values are great. Acting, direction, and photography is superb. The CGI monster is, in many respects, somewhat new.

The movie isn’t primarily about the monster, though, it’s mostly about the main characters and their goals and relationships. This keeps the story gripping, as we also slowly learn about the monster.

My problem with the story is that it is very heavy on a certain literary device, that of reversals in who is to be trusted, all while there is a scary monster about. It’s not bad, just overdone, and I’m afraid, to the detriment of the monster story, and any science fiction that might have otherwise played out.

Otherwise, it’s a pretty good movie.

The feeling of late-Soviet oppression and non-benevolent military bureaucracy was convincing to me. The main characters are great. And the monster, while not completely novel, is plenty creepy, and good motivation for seat-jumping.

Tenet

2020 Warner Bros. Pictures, Syncopy

− time-reversed super-spies vs baddies

The opening scenes refer to an infamous terrorist attack, the Moscow theater hostage crisis in 2002. It’s moved to an opera house in Kiev.

We first see ammunition “inverted in time”: the bullet-hole disappears, then the gun fires. The bullet is laying on the table, and un-drops from his hand. Later, we get people, and cars, and boats, and birds going backward.

The main new sci-fi ingredient here is the idea that stuff could travel backward in time. The main special effect is thus video recording played backward; often with one part of the scene backward and the other forward. This is kind of cute, but ultimately it cannot make sense, and makes all these scenes impossible to follow.

It’s another story where you will not get much out of a single viewing unless you keep notes, and back the video up often. For me, it’s not worth a second viewing.

This movie follows the current fashion of actors discussing things at length under their breath. One plausible explanation for this is that the director is trying to make the scene more intimate. But in louder scenes, the background music is cranked up, with the effect of making much of the dialog unintelligible.

When I guessed they were saying something important, I was able to back the video stream up, and watch it several times, to get the gist. But it was never very rewarding — just more complicated details and big-talk.

This seems to be just bad audio, folks. But they had all the money and experts in the world. How could it be? It’s so pronounced in this movie — I suspect a different motivation. One interpretation is that it serves to cover very unnatural dialog. I think the technicians were covering for what they knew to be substandard writing.

Where did I see a movie with so much explanation before???? Oh — Inception. Where did I hear audio this bad before???? Oh — Interstellar. Oh, of course.

The interpersonal relationships, what I can make of them, just dangle unconvincingly. They are no more believable than the scores of un-survivable crashes, falls, explosions, etc etc.

This list is about science fiction, but as it is a super-secret-agent-saves-the-world movie, how does it stack up in that regard?

Standard fare for the super-secret agent genre —
Fabulous settings, fancy yachts: Check. Lots of chase scenes, lots of fast fight scenes: Check. Pretty lady in distress: Check. Bad guy wants to destroy the world: Check. Cronies willing to sacrifice themselves for no apparent gain: Check. Are any of those better than the usual? I can’t tell — not my thing.

The bad guy is pretty scary.

The pretty lady is really fantastically tall and thin, and she uses this to her advantage once: from the back seat of a car, she reaches the driver’s door controls with her toe. I couldn’t have.

It’s not nearly as charming as the old 007 films.

Toward the end, the Protagonist keeps saying “I am the protagonist”. Oh no. That’s the writer talking to himself. That is a trick that was cute exactly one time, but which has been done before. Now, it’s just sloppy.

Oh no, I think they’re setting it up for a sequel, right at the end. Stuff about more adventures. I hope not: in a movie where time is moving forward and backward at the same time (whoof!), how can you sort your sequels from your prequels?

They take the idea of the stuff going backwards about as far as it could be taken. Trouble is, it can’t make sense, even worse than time travel stories can’t make sense.

Playing film backwards is an old trick, and this movie never convinces that it’s anything other than a video trick.

Little Fish

2021 Black Bear Pictures, Automatik, Oddfellows, Tango Entertainment

+ romance vs. memory loss by virus

(Note: A 2005 film from Australia was also called “Little Fish”. It is a different story — by all accounts, quite a good movie.)

(This is another movie filmed in Vancouver, where I once stomped.)

People are getting “NID” “Neural Inflammatory Disorder”, which makes them forget everything. It’s a pandemic, and there’s no cure. That is as far as the science fiction goes. It is certainly not outside of possibility that a contagion would have that effect on people. So sure, it’s science fiction — but only barely.

However, people in real life do lose their memories, and that makes this movie is pretty painful to watch. The movie handles the subject sensitively, the frustration and confusion of the afflicted, and the desperation and fear of the others.

The main characters have a very touching relationship, and it is falling apart, and so is everybody else’s.

승리호
[Spaceship Victory]
aka. “Space Sweepers”

2021 Bidangil Pictures, Dexter Studios

− space desperado junk-men cram-packed comedy/action

Korean

Date: 2092

Place: mostly Earth orbit, some on Earth, some in Earth Lagrange points.

This is one of those CGI mega-movies, this time about a group of despicable space-junk collectors.

They find a little girl “Dorothy” in a place she shouldn’t be. Turns out, the little girl isn’t what she appears to be. Is bomb! They contrive to sell her to some even worse guys, then it turns out she isn’t what she turned out to be, she’s something else, even more scary!

Vehicles: space is crammed with ships. Pretty cool transporter rides a space tower. The sweeper’s ship is the “Victory”.

Many space action scenes are straight from Star Wars.

Science-fiction-wise, every popular sci-fi theme is packed in somewhere. It’s crammed to busting:

• giant space station
• robots
• space ships
• terraforming of Mars
• full-body armor
• ray guns
• nanobots
• environmental disaster on Earth
• Lagrange point space debris field
• mad, evil scientist
• class structure
• propaganda machine
• mega-bomb to blow up Earth
• the usual escape through air vents
• death-defying deeds of derring-do a dollar a dozen

If everything seems too confusing, just wait. It will all be explained at length in one of the many in-depth explanation sessions.

It’s a cute movie, with loads of violence.

It’s heart-warming, and funny, and sad, in convulsive waves.

It is emotional manipulation. Some may like that — I don’t.

The best parts, as a movie:

The little girl is seriously cute. International cast. Color, action action action. The main characters are individually interesting, and some of them develop (although the pathos and the action interfere a lot).

It gets one sci-fi point for a physics topic that rarely appears in sci-fi movies: Lagrange points. It gets one point for some sympathetic characters. The evil genius scientist is actually one of the better parts — not for his evil bits (that’s easy), but for his complex, human bits.

If you are in need of an invasive emotional massage, if you are in need of a protracted, dizzyingly fast, often very familiar CGI roller-coaster ride, you might give it a shot.

However, if having complicated plot elements that require lengthy explanation bugs you: avoid.

It loses points for a plot so complicated one really needs to take notes, and so many sympathetic characters, I forget who most of them are the second time I see them (which is usually the last time).

It gets and loses a lot of points, because there’s so much packed into it. And that packing, overall, is the worst problem. Minus one point.

Oxygène

2021 Getaway Films, Wild Bunch International Sales, Echo Lake Entertainment

++ paranoid claustrophobic whodunnit

French

Spoiler alert: any description of the story would involve giving away some of the suspense. I’ll describe lightly, but you will lose something by reading this before seeing the movie.

This starts out as a sort of medical horror story, becomes and remains a claustrophobic nightmare involving a scary artificial intelligence, then gradually evolves through action/escape, paranoid whodunnit, and emerges a story about cloning and space travel.

Well, it’s a lot, a multi-sci-fi — but they pull it off.

Destination is planet “Wolf 1061 c”. (Look it up: there is such a thing!)

Date: a not-too-distant future.

Vehicle: a nuclear star ship.

The plot features a robot arm steered menacingly by artificial somewhat-intelligence, suspended animation, weightlessness (physically inaccurate), and clones.

I would warn against watching this if you have issues with claustrophobia — it starts out claustrophobic, and it does not let up.

It is a gripping story, fast-paced and well-acted. I never knew what would happen next, and I came to care about the poor woman.

After Yang

2021 A24, Cinereach, Per Capita Productions

++ family robotics

The setup is that a small family has taken in an android robot, a “techno-sapiens“, Yang, as an older brother for their adopted only child. Shortly into the story, Yang frizzes out. He is dying. Can he be repaired? What to tell the child?

Sci-fi-wise, it covers all the artificial intelligence ground, explores all the questions of how people and intelligent machines might interact, what kind of life a machine might have, what it is to be a family, and even what our own lives mean.

It discusses some modern issues, such as the mega-corporation that wants customers’ private information for unknown nefarious purposes — but doesn’t take them very far.

The moviemakers applied the impression of a future world with very light strokes here and there. There seem to be few people in the world — the movie suggests no explanation. The people live in lovely, comfortable residences. There are androids, and there are clones — both somehow replacement people. When they take a drive, we don’t see the car, but it looks as if they’re under a glass bubble, it’s utterly quiet, and nobody is driving — no dialog mentions any of this.

The social-media dance game is a hoot.

This is a little gem of a story. It’s gently told, beautifully shot, and very thought provoking.

Brian and Charles

2022 Focus Features, BFI, Film4 Productions, Mr Box Productions

+ mad inventor’s buddy robot

The crazed inventor, Brian, in a tiny Welsh village, who mostly delights in creating amazingly non-functional whatnots, including:

• pinecone bag,
• egg belt,
• flying cuckoo clock,
• trawler nets for shoes,
• plunger / refreshment bottle,

sets out to build a robot, an AI, (of a washing machine and a mannequin head). Perhaps with the intervention of an electric storm, the AI somehow comes to life, discovers a taste for cabbage, and names himself Charles Petrescu. (A book on Brian’s shelf reads “Wire World / R. M. Petrescu”.)

OK, it’s a very light theme. The science fiction doesn’t go beyond that. But taken as a sort of buddy-adventure, and coming-of-age story, it is amusing, very charming, and very very odd.

The movie is an expansion on a short of 2017.