The Best Sci-Fi Ever

The most intelligent sci-fi film ever shot. Surreal and beautiful, it is the only sci-fi movie to date that has resisted the absurd convention of depicting audible sound in out space for the morons in the audience.

This film has an ending so dramatic that it is difficult to equal.

This sequel lacks the impact of the first, but it comes very close. It features some of the most imaginative sets I have seen in sci-fi from the period.

A compelling and hypnotic Kafkaesque vision of the social control of the future. The status quo attempts to create a workers' utopia via enforced conformity and fails miserably.

This environmental story might have influenced the production of Harry Harrison's novel, Make Room! Make Room! into Soylent Green. It is quite believable and profoundly disturbing and upsetting.

Crhicton's clever take on how the government would handle the introduction of an alien virus to our biome.

I am convinced this vision of supreme corporate evil in an overpopulated, poisoned future is one of the several most likely predictions of where we are headed. it is coming true now.

This was based on Harry Harrison's 'Make Room, Make Room. If one also views KING CORN, HOME, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, THE FUTURE OF FOOD and reads Schlesser's Fast Food Nation, it seems intuitive that we are barreling toward the reality depicted in this film.

The robotized vacation resort of the future where nothing can possibli go wrong. Er, ah, make that "possibly . . . That's probably the first time that anything has ever gone wrong.

A damn funny stoner space odyssey from John Carpenter collaborator, Dan O'Bannon.

A mental patient has an electronic device installed in his brain to curb his increasingly violent impulses. But will it workz?

This superb story is not so much science fiction as an Orwellian vision of our corporate future. Regrettably, much of it is already coming true.






A not so futuristic Orwellian study of corporate evil. A possible companion to American Beauty, North Dallas Forty, Office Space and Soylent Green.

This sequel lacked the dramatic punch of the first, but it was equally imaginative and exciting.

A corrupt scientist dangerously exploits a young man's ability to change reality via his dreams.
This original made-for PBS version is hard to find, but worth the effort.

No introduction necessary.

Morons From Outer Space

Complete idiots from another galaxy accidentally stray to earth. The authorities are sure they're nefarious when they refuse to answer any question intelligently, despite controlling vastly superior technology. Do they really not know how their own spaceship works, or is there a more sinister explanation? Some very good jokes.

The Event Horizon

The Event Horizon (1996)
WRITTEN BY: Philip Eisner
DIRECTED BY: Paul Anderson
FEATURING: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, and Kathleen Quinlan
GENRES: SCI FI, HORROR
TAGS: GRIM, HEAVY, DISTURBING, TWISTED
PLOT: A star ship that can bend time goes beyond our universe and opens the door to Hell. The film features a wonderfully heavy, dark, stifling visual footprint.

COMMENTS : Well, well it would seem that Pam has just discovered The Event Horizon and needs to tell everyone. Not exactly. I gave it a rewatch and had mixed feelings. Since almost everyone is already familiar, I'll make this quick and dirty. Not! I adore this film, but I have some issues with it.

Similar to Hellraiser: Bloodliine , (1996), but not as slickly executed The Event Horizon is about Hell in outer space -literally. And I'm not talking about having to put up with DOS-pun cybergeek humor from your shipmates, a female astronaut's abundant long hair in your face in zero gravity, or the pains and embarrassments of the vacuum toilet. The Event Horizon takes the horror of the fire aboard the Mir and amps things up about a thousand notches.

Sam Neill, who always does a great job at portraying sinister and sophisticated creepy people, plays Dr. William Weir, an engineer who designs a new gravity drive star ship in the future. The concept is that a special, complex 3-ringed gravity reactor core (which looks suspiciously like a glorified gyroscope) can create a mini-black hole. The resulting super gravitational field can be harnessed to fold the fabric of space. The wormhole it produces allows the ship, named The Event Horizon, to instantly travel many, many light years. It works! It works too well!

The ship it turns out, overshot its mark and went someplace awful (Theramin music, please) and brought this awful back with it. And we're not talking rap music and Ebonics, or Harley culture and line dancing here. It went to Hell and brought Hell back. Oh, and the ship is now alive and can read your deepest fears and materialize them for you -this last one is a bold, new, highly original paradigm, that has never before been used in sci -fi or horror . . . (joking!).

So in a nutshell, the frozen, hibernating ship is discovered seven years after it departs, drifting aimlessly and dead in the orbit of Neptune. A scout ship is sent to investigate and salvage. (The ship has to be sent, otherwise there would be no movie, just a scribbled high concept in producer Jeremy Bolt's disorganized desktop paper stack.)

The crew of the scout ship, which includes Dr. Weir, discovers evidence that all hell broke loose on The Event Horizon and before they can get away, the ship begins to exert its evil influence on them. They start to go nuts and weird, bad things happen. Then Weir goes mad and wants to take the ship and her new crew back to hell. It starts to look as though nobody will escape the mess.

I loved The Event Horizon but it is full of dreadful cliches. In so many of these hack space flicks, outer space is depicted as being conducive to the propagation of sound waves. The crews of multi-trillion dollar rescue ship behave like a pack of drunken teenage camp counselors at a roadhouse free-for-all. Rainbow coalition stereotypes abound. (There is usually the logical guy, the jock, the tough cookie righteous gal, the black guy engaging in minstrel show humor, the mad scientist who will sacrifice everyone for knowledge, the vapid gung-ho kid, etc. etc., This is typical of the cast in the Alien franchise and every corny space movie that came after it.

The crew in The Event Horizon isn't quite that bad, but it still follows the cliche. They are emotional and confrontational. One of them has tattoos, that's typical of astronauts, right? The intense, street smart Laurence Fishburne is the flight commander. He'd make a believable Naval skipper, but an astronaut leader? C'mon. How about Al Gore. That would be more like it, but I suppose not as entertaining. I 'm not sure when I watch the cast of these films whether I am seeing the portrayal of astronauts or the cast from A Chorus Line. I mean all some of them need to do to complete the "all walks of life" theme is add Marcy from Peanuts and a tortured nerd. But I don't want to give The Event Horizon a black eye for the extremes of other movies in this regard. While reminiscent of them, it wasn't as bad as some.

At one point, Dr. Weir is asked to explain the ship's reactor, which leads to one of the most redeeming and interesting parts of the script -the idea of using a black hole for space travel. The explanation, while fictitious, is fascinating and of course, fairly understandable for the benefit of the movie audience. Then the crew asks him to dumb it down more. Weir does. But the answer still isn't Sesame Street Pablum enough. The black street guy (a triple Ph.D. of course) shouts at Dr. Weir in a racially stereotypical voice, "Hey Doctor, don't give me none of that physics sh*t!"

Um, yeah. Last time I checked, most astronauts and even fighter pilots have mandatory degrees in a pertinent physical engineering field, right up to the doctoral level in some cases. These people are all about physics. Real astronauts are also carefully screened to be the slow walking, slow talking, unemotional, steady nerved, calm, collected, masters of quiet understatement. They have the same patience and emotionally flat responses that the military requires of snipers, only much, much more so. In other words, they don't lose their cool in a crisis. In fact real astronauts are so logical that they seem to border on being idio-savants. This is essential to prevent fights and stupid mistakes in an environment where one has only a single chance to do things the right way the first time. These professional technicians are responsible for handling an unfathomably expensive piece of delicate technology under precarious circumstances. By contrast the crew in The Event Horizon is a careless, impetuous and reckless mob. Out of juvenile negligence they callously cause severe damage to the craft they are in charge of salvaging.

Astronauts are total eggheads and emotional dullards, but then a movie with a bunch of logical, boring quiet people wouldn't be very exciting would it? Yes, it would too, if Kubrick had done it. He could have made The Event Horizon a masterpiece. However this film was marketed to be a widely accessible money maker, so we get fistfights, tattoos, street talk, shouting, a rainbow coalition unisex crew, and sound in outer space. Obviously a major malfunction as far asl realism and quality go.

On the other hand, the sets and special effects are absolutely fabulous for the die hard sci-fi fan. There is some use of CGI to depict weightless objects. I have no problems with CGI or any other method of achieving special effects AS LONG AS IT LOOKS REAL! CGI was well utilized in The Terminator films, but it looked like animation in some parts of The Event Horizon.

The tw spacecraft are cavernous. This provides entertaining visual imagery, but is logically ridiculous. Room and size are an expensive liability in space. They are an unaffordable and impractical luxury.

Furthermore, the futurists overdid the surface detail. Nearly all surfaces in the sets have important looking electrical grid patterns, piping, or just plain Aztec style designs. It is visually stunning and imaginative. I loved it! But it is not realistic Neither is the idea that the crew would remain emotionally stable living in a ship that resembles a Gothic nightmare about dark, leaden, medieval torture chambers. Most of The Event Horizon's onboard bridge and crew areas look like they were designed by Vlad the Impaler.

Furthermore, everything appears to be made of steel or iron, if not lead. A little aluminum, a lot of plastic and a generous amount of Velcro would be more like it. However unrealistic they are, the interiors are absolutely stunning, very creepy, and highly entertaining. The stills I captured will make great profile page decorations and desktop backgrounds for years to come.

One last criticism has to do with the date in the future in which the events unfold. The story is set about 50 years from the time that the film was released. Given the fact that most of the money that could go to scientific research of all kinds is corralled instead into the coffers of the military industrial complex, the war contractors and the oil companies, try about a thousand years in the future, well past the point of civilization as we know it. (Given the fact that the US is collapsing like the Roman Empire, try never.)

As Carl Sagan pointed out, if it had not been for the dark ages, the first star ships would be returning now. We lost 1600 years. I'd say that reasoning is about right, but for the events depicted in The Event Horizon to occur, we would also need to have governments and societies dedicated to enlightenment and not ones that reinforce their populations' stupidity for social control and profit.

All of this aside, The Event Horizon is a must see for that handful of avowed sci-fi and horror fans who have not already gotten to it. If one can get past the cliches and stock production conventions, the redeeming factors are worthwhile. These include the production design and the imaginative concept of making a star ship that can fold space by creating its own black-hole. The idea that The Event Horizon overshot its destination, went to hell, then brought hell back is a bonus, if not a variation of an idea used the previous year in Hellraiser: Bloodline. The story is rife with suspense, horror, and captivating twists and turns. A number of bizarre and colorful incidents keep the viewer squirming and attentive.

"This ship has been beyond the boundaries of our universe, of
known scientific realities. Who knows where its been, what it's
seen...and what it's brought back with it.

"Where we're going we won't need eyes to see. I created the
Event Horizon to reach the stars, but she's gone much much
farther than that. She tore a hole in our universe, a gateway to
another dimension. A dimension of pure chaos. Pure evil. When she
crossed over she was just a ship . . . but when she came back, she
was alive. Look at her, Miller. Isn't she beautiful?" -Dr. Weir.

The Event Horizon - trailer

Anatomy of a Black Hole and The Event Horizon - CLICK TO VIEW

3 of 6 different documentaries about the Universe and Us, comment by Sam Neill. - CLICK TO PLAY

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I expected the worst and was pleasantly surprised. This film had an interesting concept that was reasonably well executed. A miscreant galactic hitchiker brings a very interesting object on board a spacecraft. See if you can guess what it is.

The Final Cut

THE FINAL CUT (2004)

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Omar Naim.

FEATURING: Robin Williams, Brendan Fletcher, and Stephanie Romanov.

PLOT: Robin Williams plays a funeral director with access to highly intimate personal information. When he becomes compromised, so does the information, raising questions about the consequences of a total surveillance society.

The Final Cut is a slick, believable, striking science fiction film which has been mischaracterized and very poorly represented in its trailers and marketing. Without a social agenda it forces the viewer to contemplate the frightful ramifications of the permanent recording of individual experiences and the loss of the most intimate personal privacy. The Final Cut does so in a manner that is not a play to morality but which is riveting and awe-inspiring without being preachy. It brings the old school marm's threats about one's "permanent record" to a devastating new level.

COMMENTS: We live in a near total surveillance society. The average person is allegedly photographed 200-300 times by government and proprietary cameras when they venture into the streets. Additionally, many people now posses, and surreptitiously use such devices as unobtrusive cell phone cameras, tiny digital cameras, and concealed "Nannie cams."

Imagine a world in which one in twenty people would possess a biologically built-in surveillance system that records everything they see and hear from cradle to grave, irrespective of their memory of the events. Any interaction one has with them becomes permanently preserved.

When the carrier dies, the surveillance device is retrieved. Everything is seen by a third party, and the information is edited into a flattering epitaph to be shown at their funeral. It may even be displayed in a movie on their grave site. Consider what might become of the rest of the information.

The technology is far fetched, but the idea is not when one takes into account behavior such as all of the self reporting that people engage in. It ranges from voluntarily reporting their income, itemizing their possessions and other personal or family information on product warranty cards, to recording and internationally broadcasting their every move on services such as Twitter.

Think about the fact that under The Patriot Act, every book you read can be discovered by the government, every move you make on the internet is now recorded by the FBI, and every phone call you participate in can be monitored without a warrant. Most people seem to be oblivious to, or complacent regarding such monitoring. They have an attitude that "if one has nothing to hide, one has nothing to worry about." (Answer them by asking them to look through their wallet or purse. It is enlightening that they universally decline.) Because of this acceptance it is not a stretch to foresee the institutionalization of even more invasive monitoring when technology makes it feasible.

Now imagine that your parents, perhaps without you ever knowing it, had a surveillance implant embedded in your brain, invitro. You will never be able to take advantage of using it to retrieve lost memories, but everything you do, every second that you experience of every minute of every day will be accessible to others after your death. Think about that. Have you ever done something, or ever had a private moment that you don't want to share? Is there any moment in your life that you would not want to see broadcast on MTV's "The Real World?"

Do you masturbate? Wish not to be observed having sex? Do anything kinky? Want others to see you on the toilet? Have you ever broken rules? Embarrassed yourself? Ever used illegal drugs? Cheated on a test? Blown off your duties at work? Swindled a client? Gone where you shouldn't have? Cheated on your spouse? Committed an embarrassing, or taboo act? Have you ever committed a serious crime? Have you ever done something that was legally justified but that could be misconstrued out of context as a crime? Might you one day?

The ramifications of a stranger being able to watch these private moments is what The Final Cut is about. In the not so distant future, a Zoe (pronounced "Zoey") implant makes total life event recording possible. Robin Williams plays a "Cutter," a funerary professional with supreme confidentiality obligations, who sorts out the unbecoming and damning details of implanted people's lives and edits them into a flattering, family-friendly movie. This enables the friends and loved ones of the deceased to view the production at the implantee's funeral in the way that they want to remember the person.

Suppose the cutter became compromised, or the information fell into the wrong hands. Suppose that somebody you know, with whom you had interactions of a type that you never want discovered, had such an implant and the postmortem information was misappropriated?

The trailers and reviews for The Final Cut simply do not do the film justice. They lead the potential viewer to conclude that the film is a reprise of Robin Williams' One Hour Photo role. Worse yet, they make The Cutter look like a movie with a message, or like a morality play. One description reads, "While cutting a 'rememory' for a high-powered colleague, Alan discovers an image from his childhood that has haunted him his entire life. This discovery leads him on a high intensity search for truth and redemption." True, this is an element of the film, but a corny "one man's 'search for truth and redemption,'" is not what Final Cut is about. If it were, I would have gagged and converted the DVD into a Girl Scout signal mirror after the first five minutes.

Williams plays a cutter who gets into trouble while dealing with a very naughty and controversial client's memories. This incident is a vehicle used to further the "what if?" factor off the surveillance concept described above. The Final Cut examines a simple scenario involving a mind boggling idea, one that would surely be instituted now if feasible. This is a movie that makes one's mind race with ideas and questions. It compels one to contemplate the double edged sword of the surveillance society we live in today, yet it is not a film with an agenda. The film is inspired by an already existing phenomenon, but does not seek to deliberately comment on it.

The Final Cut is also a gripping, compelling movie because of the way its imaginative imagery portrays the access and use of other people's life memories from birth to death. The production design is stunning. While not lavish, it is very well thought-out and credibly suited to the topic, as well as pleasing to the eye.

In , what seems to be far fetched technology is treated with remarkable realism. While it is science fiction, it is very believable. The Final Cut is in my opinion, an example of the best sort of science fiction, No change in the current status quo is required to facilitate the plot, other than the introduction of new technology.

The world in Final Cut is no different from today's except for the ramifications created by this one technological twist. This makes it a very heavy film that will leave a lasting impression long after viewing it. Perhaps you will remember it all of your life. Maybe a third party will one day view that memory.