Salon.com > Science Fiction and Fantasy http://www.salon.com Sat, 25 May 2013 18:22:58 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 What’s 2013′s “Gone Girl”? Here are this summer’s best reads http://www.salon.com/2013/05/24/whats_2013s_gone_girl_here_are_this_summers_best_reads/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/24/whats_2013s_gone_girl_here_are_this_summers_best_reads/#comments Fri, 24 May 2013 23:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13306792 Step away from that Dan Brown novel! Better yet, don't let summer's distractions lead you to consider picking it up in the first place. Take our advice now and you won't find yourself scanning the shelves of dispiriting airport bookshops and beach-town drugstores before settling on yet another routine thriller. Contrary to what some mega-selling authors seem to believe, not every page turner has to be packed with ham-fisted clichés, wooden characters, pointlessly frenetic action and cheesy dialogue. Somewhere between Brown's "Inferno" and "War and Peace" lies the sweet spot where literary quality mingles freely with crackerjack storytelling.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/24/whats_2013s_gone_girl_here_are_this_summers_best_reads/feed/ 7 “Jodorowsky’s Dune”: The sci-fi classic that never was http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/jodorowskys_dune_the_sci_fi_classic_that_never_was/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/jodorowskys_dune_the_sci_fi_classic_that_never_was/#comments Sun, 19 May 2013 13:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13302687 CANNES, France – According to “Drive” director Nicolas Winding Refn (who’s also here this year with the ultra-violent “Only God Forgives”), the legendary unmade mid-‘70s film version of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” by Chilean-born mad genius Alejandro Jodorowsky actually exists – and he’s seen it. OK, even Refn hasn’t seen a version of it that can be projected on a screen or played on a high-def monitor, the version that was supposed to star David Carradine, Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dalì. That doesn’t exist. But Refn says he spent a long evening in Jodorowsky’s Paris apartment while the latter went through the storyboards for “Dune” with him page by page, talking through every shot and every line of dialogue. “I am the only spectator who has ever seen this movie,” Refn concludes. “And I have to tell you: It was awesome.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/jodorowskys_dune_the_sci_fi_classic_that_never_was/feed/ 39 Pick of the week: “Oblivion,” Tom Cruise’s gorgeous sci-fi allegory http://www.salon.com/2013/04/19/pick_of_the_week_oblivion_tom_cruises_gorgeous_sci_fi_allegory/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/19/pick_of_the_week_oblivion_tom_cruises_gorgeous_sci_fi_allegory/#comments Fri, 19 Apr 2013 02:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13275381 Science fiction is always more about the present, and even the past, than it is about the future, which by definition we don’t know anything about. That’s certainly true of “Oblivion,” the sly, surprising and visually magnificent Tom Cruise vehicle that has forced me – and many other people, I suspect – to revise my first opinion of director Joseph Kosinski. In fact, on some bizarre level “Oblivion” feels like a more grown-up and vastly improved version of Kosinski’s murky and ludicrous “TRON: Legacy,” a movie I compared to sticking your head into a barrel of ink full of fluorescent glow-sticks.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/19/pick_of_the_week_oblivion_tom_cruises_gorgeous_sci_fi_allegory/feed/ 20 “Antiviral”: New perversity from a new Cronenberg http://www.salon.com/2013/04/09/antiviral_new_perversity_from_a_new_cronenberg/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/09/antiviral_new_perversity_from_a_new_cronenberg/#comments Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:05:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13266018 With its clinical, anonymous interiors, its icily sardonic manner and its vision of a profoundly disordered human future in which celebrity worship merges with cutting-edge biotechnology, the Canadian horror-thriller “Antiviral” would remind viewers of David Cronenberg’s early films no matter who had directed it. But since it’s the debut feature from writer and director Brandon Cronenberg, David’s son, the comparison immediately gets complicated. I’m honestly not sure whether it’s ingenious or foolhardy of the younger Cronenberg to go right at his dad’s legacy this way – quite likely it’s both. At any rate, he’s created an interesting decoding problem for viewers, along with an intriguing low-budget chiller that deserves to be seen on its own terms.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/09/antiviral_new_perversity_from_a_new_cronenberg/feed/ 4 Pick of the week: The year’s most divisive wannabe cult hit http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/pick_of_the_week_the_years_most_divisive_wannabe_cult_hit/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/pick_of_the_week_the_years_most_divisive_wannabe_cult_hit/#comments Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13261835 It’s definitely possible that Shane Carruth’s slo-mo science fiction allegory “Upstream Color” is total hokum, and there’s no doubt that many viewers will experience it that way. My own feeling after one viewing of this disorienting and fragmented fable of thwarted love and obscure interconnection, which caused a sensation at the Sundance and Berlin festivals, is divided and perhaps paradoxical. I was immediately drawn in by the mysterious, meticulous world of vision, sound and sensation Carruth creates, with its blown-out digital color scheme and intimate focus, which simultaneously seems to be contemporary America and also an alien zone of disconnection and isolation. Yet I emerged from that hypnotic dream state, 90 or so minutes later, feeling as if the story Carruth tells in that magical space doesn’t quite carry the transcendent resonance he intends.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/pick_of_the_week_the_years_most_divisive_wannabe_cult_hit/feed/ 8 “River of Stars”: Picture “Game of Thrones” in China http://www.salon.com/2013/04/04/river_of_stars_picture_game_of_thrones_in_china/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/04/river_of_stars_picture_game_of_thrones_in_china/#comments Thu, 04 Apr 2013 21:20:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13261438 Much as I look forward to each new episode of "Game of Thrones" and the less-frequent but even more engrossing books in George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series on which the HBO show is based, epic fantasy's Medieval settings can get old. There's nothing inherently wrong with doublets, broadswords and castles, of course, but there's also no reason why so many works in the genre have to adopt them, either. Even novels that deliberately try to break the conventions established by J.R.R. Tolkien and T.H. White have a hard time establishing worlds with a non-European flavor.

Or so I thought until I stumbled upon Guy Gavriel Kay's "Under Heaven," a bewitching tale set in the invented country of Kitai, which is closely patterned after Tang Dynasty China. It was a meeting shaped by audiobooks, since what I was looking for when I found it was a long multi-character story read by my favorite narrator, Simon Vance. Vance has taken me through a dozen books by Anthony Trollope, the entire "A Dance to the Music of Time" sequence by Anthony Powell and miscellaneous other novels by Dickens, Hilary Mantel and V.S. Naipaul. To my ear, he strikes exactly the right balance between distinct characters and the unified sensibility of a third-person omniscient narrator. When I crave the pleasure of being entirely enveloped in the imaginary world of a long novel, I want Vance to read it to me.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/04/river_of_stars_picture_game_of_thrones_in_china/feed/ 3 “Life After Life”: A World War II do-over http://www.salon.com/2013/04/01/life_after_life_a_world_war_ii_do_over/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/01/life_after_life_a_world_war_ii_do_over/#comments Mon, 01 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13256773 Why do so many time-travel stories unspool into confusion and triviality? Because time is what stories are made of and when you mess around with the main ingredient of anything, you better know exactly what you're doing. Kate Atkinson's new novel, "Life After Life," is not quite a time-travel narrative, but it does dangle before its reader's nose that most tantalizing of impossible offers, "a chance to do it again and again," as one character puts it, "until we finally did get it right."

Ursula Todd, the novel's main character, lives any number of lives in the course of the book. It's as if the providential force that commandeered Bill Murray's Feb. 2 in "Groundhog Day" has taken over her entire existence. She is stillborn in an English country house in 1910, or the doctor arrives on time and she survives. She drowns with her big sister, Pamela, during a seaside holiday at age 4, or they are both rescued by an amateur painter. She falls out a window the next year or, eluding that fate, succumbs to the influenza epidemic of 1918. Her various possible means of demise include domestic violence, the Blitz, suicide and a stroke. No wonder Atkinson gave her heroine a name that means "death" in German; the downside of getting a seemingly infinite number of chances at life is having to die an equal number of deaths.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/01/life_after_life_a_world_war_ii_do_over/feed/ 1 Science-fiction turns real: Genetically engineering animals for war http://www.salon.com/2013/03/23/science_fiction_turns_real_genetically_engineering_animals_for_war/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/23/science_fiction_turns_real_genetically_engineering_animals_for_war/#comments Sat, 23 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13248179 In the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency recruited an unusual field agent: a cat. In an hour-long procedure, a veterinary surgeon transformed the furry feline into an elite spy, implanting a microphone in her ear canal and a small radio transmitter at the base of her skull, and weaving a thin wire antenna into her long gray-and-white fur. This was Operation Acoustic Kitty, a top-secret plan to turn a cat into a living, walking surveillance machine. The leaders of the project hoped that by training the feline to go sit near foreign officials, they could eavesdrop on private conversations.

The problem was that cats are not especially trainable — they don’t have the same deep-seated desire to please a human master that dogs do — and the agency’s robo-cat didn’t seem terribly interested in national security. For its first official test, CIA staffers drove Acoustic Kitty to the park and tasked it with capturing the conversation of two men sitting on a bench. Instead, the cat wandered into the street, where it was promptly squashed by a taxi. The program was abandoned; as a heavily redacted CIA memo from the time delicately phrased it, “Our final examination of trained cats ... convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs.” (Those specialized needs, one assumes, include a decidedly unflattened feline.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/23/science_fiction_turns_real_genetically_engineering_animals_for_war/feed/ 39 “Oz the Great and Powerful”: James Franco, bored in Candyland http://www.salon.com/2013/03/07/oz_the_great_and_powerful_james_franco_bored_in_candyland/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/07/oz_the_great_and_powerful_james_franco_bored_in_candyland/#comments Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:55:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13222156 People probably won’t feel ripped off or confused by “Oz the Great and Powerful” the way they did by “Jack the Giant Slayer” or the parade of dismal, geriatric action movies that have made the depths of winter seem grayer than usual for Hollywood. Sam Raimi’s gazillion-dollar prequel to “The Wizard of Oz” features gorgeous production design – liberally quoting and pilfering from the beloved 1939 original – dazzling costumes (many of them draped on Rachel Weisz) and explosive, imaginative special effects. You can feel its good intentions, even when Michelle Williams isn’t on screen, glowing with the ethereal, saintly blondness of Glinda the Good Witch. Raimi and his collaborators have made an honest effort to capture the family-movie spirit of old Hollywood, while updating the action and humor to more contemporary standards.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/07/oz_the_great_and_powerful_james_franco_bored_in_candyland/feed/ 10 Back to the Round Table http://www.salon.com/2013/03/07/back_to_the_round_table/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/07/back_to_the_round_table/#comments Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13221170 There was a time when rereading seemed a nearly unimaginable luxury to me; with one book review to write per week, plus miscellaneous new books that need to be checked out on top of that, I just didn't have the time, or the eye-power. I'd long yearned to revisit what I remember as one of the most beautiful books I read in my youth, T.H. White's "The Once and Future King." Originally published as four separate novels (the first, "The Sword in the Stone," was animated by Disney) with a later add-on title, "The Book of Merlin," this is an unusual epic, the story of King Arthur and his Round Table -- material that resonates through Western culture -- yet in White's hands the story is also intimate and even humble.

How sad to think I might never get the chance to revisit it! (The list of older books I plan to read once I "retire" is probably longer than the list of books I've already read.) Then I came across the audiobook, an option made irresistible by the fact that it is narrated by Neville Jason, whose sensitive rendering of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" has helped me get past the famous second-book hump in that series of novels. The ideal place to revisit White's masterpiece: Lying in bed in the dark at night, with my iPhone set to turn itself off in a half hour. Soon, however, I found myself squeezing in bits of listening as I waited for the bus or baked a friend's birthday cake.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/07/back_to_the_round_table/feed/ 2 “Beautiful Creatures”: A left-secular answer to “Twilight”? http://www.salon.com/2013/02/13/beautiful_creatures_a_left_secular_answer_to_twilight/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/13/beautiful_creatures_a_left_secular_answer_to_twilight/#comments Wed, 13 Feb 2013 20:45:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13200327 I greatly enjoyed the camped-up teen angst of “Beautiful Creatures,” but I also suspect it might be analogous to those children’s books that are not so secretly meant for grown-ups. (My kids, for example, find the irony of the Lemony Snicket books impenetrable, and the adventures overly dark.) Adapted by writer-director Richard LaGravenese from a young-adult bestseller by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, “Beautiful Creatures” plays like a funnier, edgier, Southern-gothic knockoff of the “Twilight” universe, with a distinct liberal-secular sensibility and without the virginal sexuality, po-faced seriousness or undertones of Christianity.

Precisely those factors – along with the fact that the movie’s real stars are Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson, in scenery-chewing supporting roles – may well reduce its appeal to teenage girls, who presumably crave the ultra-earnest romantic intensity of the Twi-verse. I’d love to be proven wrong on that forecast, but for now I’ll just insist that “Beautiful Creatures” is surprisingly fun, and deserves much more of a look from adult viewers than it’s likely to get. LaGravenese, a Hollywood veteran with a wobbly but intriguing résumé that goes clear back to his Oscar-nominated screenplay for “The Fisher King” in 1991, has wrestled considerable humor, emotion and atmosphere from this pulpy and derivative material.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/13/beautiful_creatures_a_left_secular_answer_to_twilight/feed/ 1 “Warm Bodies”: Love with an emo zombie http://www.salon.com/2013/02/01/warm_bodies_love_with_an_emo_zombie/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/01/warm_bodies_love_with_an_emo_zombie/#comments Fri, 01 Feb 2013 19:28:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13188286 “Warm Bodies” sounds a lot better in theory than it turns out to be in practice. Of course, that’s true of about 90 percent of Hollywood movies, and let’s pause for a second to reflect that the original concept here involves a retelling of “Romeo and Juliet,” with zombies. So to say that the movie is not quite as good as its mind-blowingly moronic premise is not praise. At any rate, “Warm Bodies” is more a mild-mannered, emo-flavored romcom than a zombie movie. It has some tepid action scenes, a few swatches of genuine humor and a general spirit of cheerfulness, especially considering it depicts a future in which civilization has been destroyed. That’s more than enough to make it a hit in the dreary depths of February, and early reviews suggest that we’ve all agreed to overlook the fact that it’s essentially lazy and stupid hackwork that makes the “Twilight” movies look like a collaboration between David Lynch and Robert Bresson.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/01/warm_bodies_love_with_an_emo_zombie/feed/ 10 Pick of the week: Exorcists, zombies and bromance, oh my! http://www.salon.com/2013/01/25/pick_of_the_week_exorcists_zombies_and_bromance_oh_my/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/25/pick_of_the_week_exorcists_zombies_and_bromance_oh_my/#comments Fri, 25 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13181139 I come to bury “John Dies at the End,” not to praise it. Of course, after burying it I’ll dig it up again, replace its head with a frozen turkey and send it, staggering and undead, to batter down your door in the middle of the night with a bloody shovel. So lend me your ears, detached from your head.

One thing that Paul Giamatti said in our conversation about Don Coscarelli’s crazily inventive horror movie (adapted from a similarly nutso novel by David Wong), which Giamatti appears in and helped produce, is that the film’s mode is “excess.” That’s both true and not true. Coscarelli throws us into the middle of a bewildering story about two small-town exorcists who are battling extra-dimensional invaders while addicted to a mysterious street drug called “soy sauce” that alters time, space and human perception and seems to be a parasitical organism with its own agenda. And even before that, the movie begins with a gruesome and hilarious philosophical puzzler, a kind of shaggy-dog anecdote that has nothing to do with the so-called story. (For the record, my answer to the vengeful zombie’s unanswerable Zen-koan question is yes.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/25/pick_of_the_week_exorcists_zombies_and_bromance_oh_my/feed/ 8 Paul Giamatti and Don Coscarelli on “John Dies at the End” http://www.salon.com/2013/01/24/paul_giamatti_and_don_coscarelli_on_john_dies_at_the_end/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/24/paul_giamatti_and_don_coscarelli_on_john_dies_at_the_end/#comments Thu, 24 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13180137 Here’s the problem with explaining how cool it is that veteran character actor Paul Giamatti and cult horror director Don Coscarelli (he of the “Phantasm” series) have joined forces to make a thoroughly deranged, time-stretching, alternate-universe, hallucinatory horror-comedy called “John Dies at the End.” Either you’re already incredibly excited by what I’ve just written, or your reaction is a bit more polite and confused -- Don who? This isn’t making any sense -- and you’re starting to back toward the door with a polite smile on your face.

Well, please don’t go yet, because if you do you’ll accidentally ingest a drug that will make you start receiving cellphone calls from dead people (channeled through hot dogs), be attacked by unreal police officers, undead street-talkin’ white boys and monsters assembled from a freezer-case full of frozen meat, and discover that what you thought was a defunct fast-food franchise in a dead shopping mall is actually a portal to another universe. Such is the simultaneously unsettling and ridiculous world of “John Dies at the End,” which was first a crackpot cult novel by David Wong (the nom de plume of humorist Jason Pargin), and has now been adapted for the screen by writer-director Coscarelli, one of the genuine underappreciated geniuses of American cinema.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/24/paul_giamatti_and_don_coscarelli_on_john_dies_at_the_end/feed/ 7 “The Rise of Ransom City”: Steampunk Western http://www.salon.com/2012/12/16/the_rise_of_ransom_city_steampunk_western/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/16/the_rise_of_ransom_city_steampunk_western/#comments Sun, 16 Dec 2012 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13146238 Compared to British fantasists, American writers have often felt the lack of a deeply rooted national mythos. In place of ancient folklore handed down from generation to generation, we have a shallow, polyglot history imposed over a native culture that was demonized and in many cases eradicated by European settlers. American writers ranging from Stephen King to Michael Chabon have tried to fill this archetype gap, but it isn't always easy to create imagery and ideas that resonate, which is one reason why so much fantasy falls back on Anglo-Saxon and Celtic motifs.

Felix Gilman's two vaguely steampunkish novels, "The Half-Made World" and the just-published "The Rise of Ransom City," come closer than many previous efforts to nailing America's conflicted collective unconscious. The setting is not, of course, called America (any more than Middle-earth is called England). Nevertheless, it's instantly recognizable as a version of the Wild West, a frontier land with towns named Clementine, Gibson or Jasper City, sandwiched between the distant, civilized East and, to the West, a region known only as the Rim. Way out West, as Harry Ransom, the narrator of "The Rise of Ransom City," explains it, are "territories where the future was still open, where laws were still unsettled -- I mean not least what they call the laws of nature, which as everyone knows are different on the Rim."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/16/the_rise_of_ransom_city_steampunk_western/feed/ 6 “The Hobbit”: Middle-earth faces a phantom menace http://www.salon.com/2012/12/13/the_hobbit_middle_earth_faces_a_phantom_menace/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/13/the_hobbit_middle_earth_faces_a_phantom_menace/#comments Thu, 13 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13123323 So let’s jump right in: Is Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” a gaseous and self-indulgent disaster, a “Phantom Menace”-scale overinflated blimp of a movie that casts retroactive shadows across Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy? Counsel is leading the witness, as they used to say on “Law & Order,” but those were among the thoughts I had after leaving a screening of the first installment of Jackson’s prequel trilogy, especially as seen in the eerie and distracting 48 frames per second 3-D format. (The best single description of which came in a tweet from Salon contributor Bob Calhoun: It “looks like Jehovah’s Witness art.”)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/13/the_hobbit_middle_earth_faces_a_phantom_menace/feed/ 35 Why does “The Hobbit” look so weird? http://www.salon.com/2012/12/06/why_does_the_hobbit_look_so_weird/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/06/why_does_the_hobbit_look_so_weird/#comments Thu, 06 Dec 2012 18:38:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13117132 No movie all year arrives with the crazy fan anticipation of Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” which has morphed from being a straightforward adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 children’s novel into the first installment of a full-blown (and perhaps overblown) prequel trilogy to Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings.” I’ll have a great deal more to say about all that next week, when “The Hobbit” finally reaches theaters. But without jumping the gun on a full review, there’s a technical and aesthetic issue we can talk about right now, one that has provoked considerable anxiety among LOTR fans ever since Jackson previewed some footage last year, and one that could poison the movie for many viewers.

“The Hobbit” looks really, really strange. At least it does when projected in 3-D, at the 48 frames per second rate (known as high-frame rate, or HFR) that Jackson intends as the preferred format. (The movie was shot on the latest iteration of cutting-edge digital video, using a brand-new camera called the Red Epic that was developed alongside the film.) Granted, most viewers probably won’t see it that way; outside major cities, theaters will primarily screen “The Hobbit” in more familiar formats, either 3-D or 2-D, at a conventional frame rate of 24 frames per second.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/06/why_does_the_hobbit_look_so_weird/feed/ 62 National Book Awards: Genre fiction dissed again http://www.salon.com/2012/10/11/national_book_awards_genre_fiction_dissed_again/ http://www.salon.com/2012/10/11/national_book_awards_genre_fiction_dissed_again/#comments Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13036310 The five finalists for the 2012 National Book Award for fiction make for an exemplary shortlist — and I say that even though none of them is likely to end up on my own best-of list at the end of the year. There's a good variety: a popular short-story collection by the recent MacArthur recipient Junot Diaz ("This is How You Lose Her"), a debut novel about the Iraq War ("Yellow Birds" by Kevin Powers), a small-press title (Dave Eggers' "A Hologram for the King"), an overlooked midlist book (Ben Fountain's "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk"), even the 14th novel by an established writer, Louise Erdrich's "The Round House" — precisely the sort of title people don't bother to read because they assume they already know what's in it.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/10/11/national_book_awards_genre_fiction_dissed_again/feed/ 23 Pick of the week: A tough, smart time-travel thriller http://www.salon.com/2012/09/28/pick_of_the_week_a_tough_smart_time_travel_thriller/ http://www.salon.com/2012/09/28/pick_of_the_week_a_tough_smart_time_travel_thriller/#comments Fri, 28 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13024015 If there’s any consensus to be drawn about the future from recent trends in science-fiction movies, it’s that it doesn’t seem worth waiting around for. The idea that the future will suck incalculably worse than the present did not begin with “The Hunger Games,” of course. It goes back at least as far as the Cold War and the A-bomb. (It’s not as if the dystopian vision was brand-new then, either – Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” was published in 1932.) Authors, screenwriters and directors are always future-casting based on the most visible present-tense trends, which is no doubt why the chaotic years from the late ‘60s through the early ‘80s produced so many memorable futuristic nightmares, from “Planet of the Apes” to “Soylent Green” to “Escape From New York.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/09/28/pick_of_the_week_a_tough_smart_time_travel_thriller/feed/ 3 Sci-fi short “Loom” shows off new technology http://www.salon.com/2012/08/30/sci_fi_short_loom_shows_off_new_technology/ http://www.salon.com/2012/08/30/sci_fi_short_loom_shows_off_new_technology/#comments Thu, 30 Aug 2012 21:20:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12997178 Written and directed by Luke Scott (Ridley's son), the sci-fi short film “Loom” is gathering attention and praise on both film and sci-fi sites as an example of the clear beauty of RED Epic 3D and the company's new laser projector. Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski does gorgeous work with the camera, bolstered by an atmospheric score, but it's Scott's script and direction, along with Giovanni Ribisi's quiet performance, that demonstrate the 20-minute film has potential to be more.

Ribisi plays Tommy, a dogged lab tech of industrial food who, though once known in the business as “The Apostate,” seems to have rededicated himself to producing scientifically engineered meat. With deliberate nods to his father's “Blade Runner,” the film portrays a dystopian future rife with genetic engineering, corporate corruption of government and rampant infection, but it's really about Tommy's loneliness and the at-home experiment he conducts, perhaps over and over, in attempts to get it right. We don't know how or when his loyalties shifted, but “the human genome is not proprietary” is part of an answer. Tommy's caught in a circular enterprise, trying to capture something he's lost.

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