SCIENCE-FICTION– tag –

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Philip K Dick died three months before the US release of Blade Runner, the film based on his 1968 science-fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. But what he had seen impressed him. He described the fo...

(Neo Magazine, Uncooked Media - I also wrote an article about the production of the film for the AllTheAnime blog and another article that's reproduced below the review.) Picture a world different from ours in intricate, tiny details, ye...

(I interviewed Lilo and Stitch's directors, Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, for the Animation World Network website; I also interviewed Lilo's animator Andreas Deja. Additionally, I wrote a piece on the Japanese TV version of Lilo and St...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) “John Carter of Earth? John Carter of Mars sounds much better.” So the titular hero of the planetary-romance screen blockbuster John Carter renounces his birthworld and homo sapiens peers, as Sam Worthin...

(SFX, Future Publishing) In space, no-one should be able to hear other people eating popcorn, or slurping soda, or locking lips with one another. For all these reasons, watching Gravity at home has advantages, removing the multiplex audi...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Rise of the Planet of the Apes reflects the human/sentient ape condition by being both ingenious and dumb, sometimes at the same time. Directed by Britain’s Rupert Wyatt, it’s a second-try reboot, follow...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) The cannily populist Attack the Block, by new director Joe Cornish, is about an interstellar first contact with the most feared life-forms in the universe. We are talking, of course, about London hoodies...

(SFX, Future Publishing) Ant-Man starts with our hero, played by Paul Rudd, seeming hopelessly outmatched in a prison brawl with a mountain-sized convict. It foreshadows the challenges he’ll face when he’s insect-sized, dodging stamping ...

(This is my review of the first season for Neo magazine, Uncooked Media; my Neo review of the second season is below the first.) Aldnoah.Zero is set in an alternative present, after humans found a “Hyper Gate” on the moon left by aliens ...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) It’s sadly appropriate that a boy robot reject from a high-tech future world is the hero of a CGI cartoon that’s already flopped in America and Japan, the two countries he might call home. Astro Boy (Mighty Atom ...

My review of the first two Psycho-Pass: Sinners of the System films is on the AlltheAnime website.

(SFX, Future Publishing) The new Robocop has an impressive brain. We know because we see it on the big screen, being prodded and sutured by Doctor Gary Oldman with an insouciance to impress Peter Cushing. Another scene shows Robocop nake...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Chronicle, a debut film by director John Trank, retells the Steven King Carrie story but with a male outsider. Andrew (Dane Dehaan) is a high-school geek with an abusive dad and terminal mother, who deci...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Never Let Me Go is based on the acclaimed novel of the same name by British author Kazuo Ishiguro, best known for his period piece The Remains of the Day. Never Let Me Go is also a period piece of sorts;...

(Neo, Uncooked Media - I also have an article on the live-action Netflix version on the AlltheAnime site.) (Volume 1) If Stephen King scripted an anime, it might look like Erased, which Anime Limited is releasing in two six-part volumes....

(Neo, Uncooked Media - I also add further observations in an article on the AllTheAnime website.) How many anime fans are fans of animation – animation as a medium, whether it’s anime or not? There are some (just google “sakuga”), but pe...

(Neo, Uncooked Media - I also wrote a review of the first live-action Parasyte film for the MangaUK website.) (Volume 1) Parasyte starts with its money shot. A middle-aged husband and wife face each other in a dimmed room; then the man’s...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) The Running Man, Stephen King’s 1982 novella about a gameshow which kills its contestants, ended with its hero grinning through a mask of blood and giving the TV producer the finger, before spoiler spoil...

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) You wait years for a serious-minded space blockbuster, then two arrive almost at once. Following Gravity, a tight adventure story where people in space struggle to get back to Earth, here’s Christopher N...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Super 8 is directed by J.J. Abrams, but an Abrams who for this outing is channeling the spirt of producer Papa Spielberg. The story opens with a tragedy, obliquely handled in the language of film. We see...

(Neo, Uncooked Media) As the film Empire of Corpses opens, a steam train chuffs before Saint Paul’s Cathedral. A caption reads, “London, 1878.” Then we’re in a Frankenstein-style laboratory where a young man forces a metal helmet over th...