Movies

Battlefield Earth is the most comprehensively failed film in science fiction history. This isn’t hyperbole or enthusiasm for the negative — it’s an honest accounting of a film where every element…

The first three seasons of The Expanse are the best science fiction television ever made. That’s not hyperbole and it doesn’t require qualification. By the standards that matter — world building,…

I’ve read Dune dozens of times. That context matters for this review because it means I’m not evaluating Villeneuve’s films as films alone. I’m evaluating them as interpretations of a text I know at…

The Running Man is a better idea than film. The concept — a death sport television show operating as the primary mechanism of social control in a dystopian future, with professional killers branded…

eXistenZ is Cronenberg doing what Cronenberg does: making the body the site of horror and the technology that interfaces with it the vector of corruption. The bio-ports, the organic game consoles…

Westworld is great and deserves considerably better than its current reputation as merely the prototype for the HBO series. Michael Crichton’s original concept is tighter, scarier, and structurally…

Interstellar is a bad film that has convinced a large number of people it’s a profound one. The misdirection is accomplished through scale: everything is so large, so loud, so visually ambitious, so…

Avatar is a white savior film wearing the costume of environmental progressivism, and the combination is more offensive than either element alone. James Cameron spent a quarter billion dollars to…