Tag: Science fiction
Cloud Atlas & The Paperboy
Saturday, March 2nd, 2013 Film Reviews,Watching a movie can occasionally inspire us to adopt that quaint old-fashioned pasttime of reading a book. The new adaptation of Anna Karenina sent me back to Tolstoy, if only to confirm that a terrible film may be made from a great novel. Over the past year I’ve found myself re-reading Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, […]
Looper
Saturday, October 20th, 2012 Film Reviews,Ever since 1895 when H.G.Wells sent his Time Traveller into a bleak, dystopian future, science fiction writers have been imagining the ways civilisation can progress and decline at the same time. Before Wells the vogue was to use a vision of the future to show the ‘earthly paradise’ the world could become under socialism. If […]
Total Recall
Saturday, September 1st, 2012 Film Reviews, Other Writing,Philip K. Dick’s brief science fiction story, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (1965) has travelled a long way since it was adapted for Paul Verhoeven’s film, Total Recall in 1990. In Dick’s original version, Doug Quail visits a business called Rekall that promises to provide its clients with a false memory superior to […]
Cosmopolis
Saturday, August 11th, 2012 Film Reviews,If ever a film might be used to demonstrate how not to adapt a novel, that film is Cosmopolis. Don DeLillo published his tale in 2003, but set it “In the year 2000 – A Day in April.” Director, David Cronenberg, has taken this black satire on global capitalism, and let us believe the action […]
Prometheus
Saturday, June 16th, 2012 Film Reviews, Other Writing,No film this year has arrived with such high expectations as Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, the long-awaited prequel to Alien – a movie that spawned a franchise and a cult. I attended a preview at the iMax in Darling Harbour on a night when the wind and rain were causing mayhem all over Sydney. The place […]
Frankenstein
Saturday, June 9th, 2012 Film Reviews, Other Writing,Frankenstein is one of those rare stories that seems to grow more meaningful with every passing year. Written by the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley, in 1816-17, it has the distinction of being both a literary classic and the ancestor of the two popular genres we know as horror and science fiction. It has always been recognised […]