science fiction movies

Review: Avatar

By Allen Holt ⋅ July 7, 2010 ⋅ View Comments

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a ginormous corporation wants to strip a lush, beautiful (but primitive) environment of all of its natural resources, and the people who live there are none too happy about it. Or this one: a military man finds himself spending time with a beautiful (but primitive) civilization, falls in love with a woman from said civilization and eventually chooses to side with them against his own people. Add those two stories together and stir in quarter of a billion dollars of groundbreaking special effects, and you’ve got James Cameron’s AVATAR.

Review: District 9

By Allen Holt ⋅ June 6, 2010 ⋅ View Comments

Twenty-some-odd years ago, an alien spaceship parked itself over Johannesburg, South Africa, presumably because the alien intelligence knew that was the single best place to go if it wanted to make itself into a heavy-handed metaphor for apartheid.

Review: Star Trek

By Allen Holt ⋅ May 11, 2009 ⋅ View Comments

Now this is what I want out of a summer blockbuster. Star Trek delivered all of the action, all of the spectacle, all of the emotion, all of the characterization I could have asked for and then some. [1] I found myself immersed in the world, in the stunning visual design and the engaging characters, [...]

Review: WALL-E

By Allen Holt ⋅ June 30, 2008 ⋅ View Comments

For all of the usual Pixar brand of amazing technical virtuosity on display in WALL-E (and believe me, there’s plenty of it), it’s the wonderful characterization which makes the movie such a joy to watch. That director Andrew Stanton and his wizards at Pixar were able to draw such well-developed characters with such little dialogue [...]

SPECIAL FEATURE: 7 Days of Serenity

By Allen Holt ⋅ May 31, 2005 ⋅ View Comments

Revisit our special 7 Days of Serenity feature from 2005, in which we tried to pump up the ‘verse for the big-screen return of Mal Reynolds and crew.

Review: Serenity

By Allen Holt ⋅ May 29, 2005 ⋅ View Comments

I found myself experiencing the same problem trying to decide on an approach for this review that I’d imagine the creators of Serenity faced: how to gear the movie/review so that it pleases both the rabid fanbase of the “Firefly” TV series from which the movie spawned and people who’ve never seen the show. It’s [...]

Review: Star Wars, Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

By Allen Holt ⋅ May 29, 2005 ⋅ View Comments

So at least we’ve seen the whole story; the ends of the circle finally meet in the middle. We’ve seen how innocence (well, angry and whiny frustrated innocence, anyway) finds itself corrupted by absolute (and a bit melodramatic) evil and becomes the face of the devil for a generation of consumers. We’ve seen enough poor [...]

A Leaf on the Wind

By Brian Mesick ⋅ May 6, 2005 ⋅ View Comments

Some thoughts on the best sci-fi western based off of a cancelled TV series ever!

Review: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

By Allen Holt ⋅ May 1, 2005 ⋅ View Comments

I don’t consider myself a die-hard Adams junkie, at least not anymore; I haven’t read any of the books in years. They’re pretty much fondly-remembered relics of my nerdy adolesence at this point. And given that I hadn’t read “Hitchhiker’s” in so long, I thought I’d be able to separate what the movie was trying to accomplish from what the book set out to do, to judge the movie on its own merits instead of simply judging how faithfully it aped its source material. But that proved more difficult that I’d anticipated.

Review: I, Robot

By Allen Holt ⋅ March 17, 2005 ⋅ View Comments

Fresh from the Certainly Better Than I Thought It Was Gonna Be Department, we’ve got Will Smith‘s I, Robot, an entertaining and surprisingly thought-provoking movie. Not too thought-provoking, of course…it’s still a movie largely about a bunch of psycho robots. But coming as it did for me hot on the heels of the abysmal Daddy [...]