SCIENCE-FICTION– tag –

My review of Earth to Echo is on the Empire magazine website. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJgIv_hrjdg [amazon_link asins='B00PKRQGH4,B00M4A92TO' template='ProductCarousel' store='anime04c-21' marketplace='UK' link_id='dbdb8828-c870-1...

I reviewed both halves of the original Mobile Suit Gundam anime series for (Neo, Uncooked Media). My review of the first half is on the Neo website, while my review of the second half is below. In Neo 143, we heaped praise on the first h...

(Neo Magazine, Uncooked Media) French director Jean-Luc Goddard declared, “All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.” In the 1980s a gang of Japanese geeks declared, All you need for an anime is a girl and a mecha... Okay, make that ...

(Neo, Uncooked Media) 2196: the Earth is under attack from the mysterious “Jovian Lizards”. A new ship is launched against the enemy, the Nadesico, with the most eccentric crew imaginable. But they’ll learn that everything they think abo...

(I reviewed the first Mardock Scramble film in Neo magazine, Uncooked Media, below. My reviews of the second and third films are linked underneath.) In a future New York where cars drive on air and technology resembles magic, a wretched ...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Hong Kong, two days from now. For decades, governments round the world have imprisoned and experimented on people with paranormal powers. The sci-fi/chase thriller Push is intermittently interesting, largely unengagi...

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) “You haven’t gone forward, Herbert, you’ve gone back… You, with your absurd notions of a perfect and harmonious society. It’s drivel. The world has caught up with me and surpassed me. Ninety years ago, I...

( Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Tomorrow, When the War Began is a “Young Adult” film which knows that the target audience is too young to remember the film that’s being recycled. That film is Red Dawn, the 1984 John Milius epic featur...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) The future. World society has been transformed by the billionaire pioneer Ken Castle, the creator of a new kind of game. Real people are subjected to brain surgery, then remote-controlled by players on computers....

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) The film Moon, like Spock in the retconned Star Trek, is a member of an endangered species. Made by first-time writer-director Duncan Jones, Moon is an SF film that’s also an earnest, serious drama, aime...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Back in 2004, I spent a strange day at Ealing Studios in west London, watching Simon Pegg and Nick Frost playing whack-a-zombie with snooker cues. If you’ve seen the zombie comedy film Shaun of the Dead,...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) In 2153, a space probe discovers Tanis, an Earth-like planet which can support human life. A giant spacecraft, the Elysium, is launched towards it, carrying thousands of humans in artificial hibernation. Some tim...

My review of the Netflix series Love, Death and Robots is on the AlltheAnime website (although the series itself isn't an anime).

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) In a future of mud, blood and grot, a degenerate, war-addicted humanity is attacked by zom… Sorry, mutants. Only a ragtag band of soldiers can save Earth, led by sonorous, begorrah-sounding monk Ron Perl...

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) Beginnings are important, especially for superheroes. But endings, arguably, matter more. A lot of viewers took against the end of Man of Steel. Partly it was the perversity of showing one huge battle, t...

(Neo, Uncooked Media) (Volume 1 review) Heavy Object rings several changes on the usual mecha show. One of the most obvious is that the fighting machines aren’t giant Gundam humanoids, but come in a variety of shapes. There are giant met...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Despite receiving many scathing reviews, the sci-fi thriller The Darkest Hour is a capable, sometimes suspenseful, alien-invasion thriller for three-quarters of its length, before its belly-flop ending does its b...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion - I also have an interview with the director Gareth Evans about the film on the MangaUK blog.) Monsters is already the subject of much buzz, although it’s one of these films where the punditry blurs two t...

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) This ill-famed film folly from Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly has two advantages on DVD. In the cinema, you were stuck with the Rock, Justin Timberlake, Sarah Michelle Geller and their fellow thespians dis...

I wrote a review of Alita: Battle Angel for the AllTheAnime website.

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Gantz is a live-action film version of a manga strip that, even by Japanese standards, is a long runner. It started in 2000 and continues today after more than 350 episodes, written and drawn by Hiroya O...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Following The Truman Show (1998), The Matrix (1999) and The Village (2004), City of Ember returns to Plato’s fable of the cave, his allegory for how humans are sealed within a deceptive, false reality. Gil Kenan’...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) The new Indiana Jones film starts in a veritable museum to modern myth. It’s a military warehouse in Area 51, hallowed ground for UFOlogists and conspiracy nuts. The set is a reconstruction of one in the closing ...

(Neo, Uncooked Media) This is the Tenchi that British fans are likeliest to have seen already, the 13-part video series from the early 1990s that looks better than most TV fare today. It began a sprawling franchise but remains highly acc...