Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)

Okay, yeah, so everybody likes to point out that Robinson Crusoe on Mars is scientifically inaccurate, that Mars is nothing like they portray it here, and that no one could possibly survive there like Commander Christopher "Kit" Draper (Paul Mantee) does. But who the hell cares about any of that. This is a cracking good story. Helmer Byron Haskins takes Daniel Defoe's classic adventure story and sets it not on a tropical island but instead on the angry red planet itself. When their mother ship is nearly clobbered by a passing astroid, Draper and his co-pilot Colonel Dan McReady (Adam West) are forced to land on Mars. Well, they crash, really, and McReady is killed. Left with only the ship's mascot - a monkey named Mona - Draper must try to survive as best he can, while his supply-laden mother ship orbits the planet, forever out of reach. In short order, Draper and Mona find shelter and discover water, oxygen and edible plants. With all of his basic needs taken care of, Draper slowly starts to go nutty from the isolation. Fear not, though, for soon to arrive on the scene is his man Friday (Victor Lundin), a very-human looking alien slave who is forced to labor in Martian mines by other aliens who buzz about in ships that closely resemble the Martian spacecraft from the 1950 War of the Worlds. Not surprising, either, since Haskins worked on that film too. Friday is pursued relentlessly by his alien task masters, who are able to home in on him by means of his electronic handcuffs. To escape the bad guys, Draper and Friday go underground, following a deep cavern that runs for thousands of miles beneath the surface. In due time, Draper is able to rid Friday of his wrist monitors, and when the two finally emerge near the Martian North Pole, the bad guys are nowhere to be seen. Our two heroes press on to the pole; although, why they do so is never adequately explained. As they near the pole, another earth ship flies over and Draper is able to contact them assuring his and Friday's rescue.

I first saw Robinson Crusoe on Mars when I was about five years old, making it one of that small group of movies that has had a profound impact on me ever since. As a result, I love this movie. It has adventure, thrills, scary stuff, exploding meteors, great special effects that stand up well even today, and even a ghost. Oh, yeah, and don't forget the monkey. The story is a classic, of course, and you can almost never go wrong when you use a classic as your foundation. The screenplay by John C. Higgins is really first rate, and the entire thing is shot in widescreen technicolor, quite an achievement at a time when most scifi films were shot in black and white. The best thing about Robinson Crusoe on Mars, though, is the incredible performance by Paul Mantee. This is, after all, essentially a one man movie, so Mantee must carry the entire film for most of its 110 minute runtime. To say that he pulls it off is an understatement. This veteran character actor does a phenomenal job, bringing a nuanced performance to a film that could have so easily tripped over the edge and fallen into the morass of camp. But Mantee is restrained, subtle. While the common man in him is scared and lonely, the military officer maintains strict discipline, and the scientist in him rationally catalogues all of Mars' many sights. It's all too easy to believe that this man really is seeing these sights for the first time and trying to hold them in his memory for future reference. That's the sign of a truly great actor.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars is one of the finest examples of mid-century science fiction film making. It's rated G, for GREAT!

Silent Running (1972)

Let me start right out by saying that there are a LOT of things wrong with Silent Running, not the least of which is THE MESSAGE, which it beats you over the head with until you're dizzy. Here's the set up. Earth is ecologically destroyed. So, the human race in its wisdom has taken all of the earth's remaining natural habitats, enclosed them in these really cool glass domes, attached them to these two-mile-long space ships and sent them on a round the solar system cruise while we clean up the earth and get it ready to receive its forests once again. Ah, but people being the greedy and short-sighted cretins that they are decide that they really don't need all of those trees as much as they need those really cool space ships, which could be pressed into service hauling fee-paying cargo to...someplace. So the crews of the ships are ordered to jettison the domes and - wait for it - blow them up! But one poor sot named Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) can't accept this. The forests must be saved at all costs. So he kills his fellow crew members in order to save the last dome. Then he takes control of the ship and heads out away from earth where he will ostensibly find...I dunno...something. To help him run the ship and tend to the last dome, Lowell has three little robot companions that he names Huey, Dewy and Louie. And so this happy quartet happily maintains their ship and forest. But, guilt begins to wear on Lowell. And his little robot companions start to get picked off one by one. Finally, there's Lowell and one good droid remaining. Realizing that he is going insane with grief and that the remaining ships from earth are pursuing him, Lowell teaches the his one undamaged droid to tend the forest on its own. Then he jettisons the dome and blows up his ship, killing himself and his remaining crippled droid. The last thing we see is the little dome floating in the vastness of space as Joan Baez clobbers us over the head once more with THE MESSAGE.

So what's wrong with the film? Well, okay, for starters, why are the domes in outer space to begin with? I mean, if the earth is so polluted that all of the remaining forests have to be put under glass, wouldn't it have been a whole lot cheaper - not to mention safer - to build the domes right there on terra firma, rather than blasting them into deep space? And couldn't a world capable of building such awesome spaceships figure out a way to protect its remaining natural resources? And if the little droids could be trained to take care of the plants and animals in the domes just as well as a person, then why did they need the people up on the ships to take care of the domes? Why not just program the robots from the start? And when they decide to return the ships to commercial service, why BLOW UP THE DOMES?? Why not simple jettison the domes with the little robots on them to take care of them and send the ships home? That way they could always go back and pick up the domes at some future date when they wizened up. After all, it's not like they need the domes - they BLEW THEM UP! And finally, why did we have to have Joan Baez driving THE MESSAGE home in song like someone driving spikes through our skulls? The movie pushed THE MESSAGE just fine without her whiny singing.

Having said all of that, I would now like to say that I really love this movie. No, it's true. Silent Running has great visuals, outstanding models (this from the era when they used to actually construct space ship models), a pretty good story, and what is probably Bruce Dern's finest on-camera performance ever. I mean, Freeman Lowell is a really complicated character. Here's a guy who commits a serious wrong (killing all of his crew mates) in order to prevent another serious wrong (the wanton destruction of earth's remaining habitats) and then goes slowly insane trying to deal with the grief he's suffering on account of what he's done. And Dern pulls it off brilliantly. This is essentially a one-man movie (not counting the robots, who almost steal the show). Dern is passionate, even zealous in his love of nature. Yet he's also a scientist, and so he has the cold, rational aspect to him as well. But above all, he's a human being who cannot deal with the fact that he has taken the lives of other human beings and that he must spend the rest of his life in isolation. It takes a really good actor to pull all of this off and make it believable. The only other actors I've seen do it as well are Will Smith in I am Legend and Paul Mantee in Robinson Crusoe on Mars. I will also point out that the destruction of the Valley Forge at the end of the movie is so well done that it puts the destruction of the Death Star at the end of Star Wars to shame. Lucas should have taken a cue from Douglas Trumbull and gone with the less is more theory.

Silent Running is rated G and has a runtime of 89 minutes. It's filmed in technicolor and widescreen.

The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

I am a fan of the late Philip K. Dick. No...let me correct that. I am a HUGE fan of the late Philip K. Dick. So it was with eager anticipation that I purchased my tickets and entered the theater to watch The Adjustment Bureau, which was adapted from Dick's short story "The Adjustment Team." I was, I am afraid to admit, underwhelmed. Which is a bad sign. This movie had all of the makings of a great film. It had fantastic source material. It had an outstanding cast. The leads had class and sex appeal and chemistry and a great meet-cute. It had shadowy-men-in-black. What it did not have, unfortunately, was a screen play that could carry it all through a full-length motion picture. Instead, it relied on interminable chase scenes. Yes, our hero and heroine are running away from the eponymous adjustment bureau, but come on! How many scenes do we need of them running down the street? Through a door? Up the stairs? Through another door? Along the corridor? Through yet another door? Around the corner? Through - wait for it - yet another door? Are you starting to get tired of this already? So was I. Oh, and did I mention that they go through doors? Yeah, they do that. Doors. Lots of `em.

Let me throw you the plot so you know where I'm going here. David Norris (Matt Damon) is just about to win a seat in the US Senate. Then he meets Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt) in a men's room. Sparks definitely fly. This is the real thing. They both know it. But, enter the shadowy-men-in-black who do everything in their power to prevent David and Elise from getting together. At least, most of the shadowy-men-in-black do. One of the shadowy-men-in-black (Anthony Mackie) is not so shadowy after all. He kind of runs interference for them. Tells them who they're up against. Shows them the doors. (Oh yeah, you knew they'd be back.) Once everything was established and I was all ready to hunker down with my bucket o' popcorn and gallon o' soda for a bit of good, suspenseful repartee with the shadowy-men-in-black, the film devolved into a rather insipid version of Running Man...with lots of doors. Yeah, cuz the doors let you move around sort of behind the scenes, between the space of reality as it were. Unfortunately, the film doesn't show you any of the space between the space. Instead, we just see our plucky hero and heroine enter a door in one place and - jump cut - exit a door someplace else. Not much to work with there. Then the whole thing ends so abruptly that I almost cracked a tooth on the rim of my soda cup.

In the pantheon of films made from P.K. Dick stories, The Adjustment Bureau ranks pretty near the bottom. Even the 1995 film Screamers had more on the ball that this one does. And as I said before, that's really too bad, because all of the right elements are there. It just needed a better screenplay, one that was a little more fleshed out, maybe a bit more philosophical, maybe one that actually had something worth saying in the end.

The Adjustment Bureau is rated PG-13 and has a runtime of 106 minutes, which is a long time to watch two people running.

Apollo 18 (2011)

Let's call it The Blair Witch Meets Alien on the Moon. That just about sums up everything you need to know about this low-budget stinker from the Weinstein Brothers. Here's the premise. There were actually 18 Apollo missions, not 17. Recently declassified film footage from 1972 reveals that Apollo 18 was a top secret mission designed to do...something. I think they were placing some transmitter doo-hickeys on the moon to monitor something or other. Once on the moon, though, our intrepid astroboys are attacked by...um...rocks...I think. Or was it strange crab-like creatures? Or was it rocks that turn into crab-like creatures? Or was it the alien? After all, one of the rocks did insert itself into Lloyd Owen, turning him into a goggle-eyed maniac. So maybe it was the alien. Or something else. If I sound unsure of myself, that's because the movie never really seemed to make it clear just what the alien was or what it had against the friendly, visiting delegates from Earth. Well, anyway, Lloyd and fellow moonwalker Ryan Robbins discover a Soviet moonlander. It's abandoned, but otherwise fairly intact. Nearby, in a dark and spooky crater lit only by the strobes of Ryan's camera flash (we spent all that money to send men to the moon, but we forgot to give them flashlights?) they find the corpse of the cosmonaut. Decayed. The movie never gets around to explaining how he decayed in an airless, sub-zero environment, so just work with me here, okay? He's all decayed. Soon after Lloyd starts showing the effects of his own contamination. It's the usual stuff - rapid movement, bulging eyes, wild ranting. After trying to trash the lander, Lloyd escapes and runs off into the night. Ryan tries to follow him into yet another dark and spooky crater, where he is assaulted by crab-like creatures. He escapes, makes his way to the Soviet lander and takes off, only to find that the Soviet lander is full of rocks...that turn into crab-like creatures... and eat him. Of course, everyone dies in the end which presents one slight continuity problem. If the astroboys are filming everything on these handheld cameras that take film cartridges, and they are all killed on the moon, and no one else ever went back to the moon, then how did the film cartridges end up in the super top secret vault at NASA? Oh, but film makers hate people like me. At any rate, as I have already pointed out, Apollo 18 purports to be recently discovered film footage from 1972, and at that, at least, director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego did a very good job of recreating the look of NASA film stock. That both helps and hinders the film. Remember when Neil Armstrong stepped onto Lunar soil for the first time? Remember how fuzzy everything was, as Neil's form, almost a palimpsest of a human being, moved around the Lunar landscape, dragging ghosts of his own image about with him? Okay, now imagine watching a whole movie that was done just like that, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what this movie was like. That and the whole shaky-shaky camera thing gets a little tiresome after a while. I'd have much preferred straight, old-fashioned camera work to this "I gotta camera and I'm gonna film everything I see" garbage. Finally, I found that the astroboys lost their cool extraordinarily fast. I mean, these are guys who are trained for years to keep their cool under any situation, yet they practically fly to pieces at the first corpse they come across. I would expect cooler heads on the moon. After all, it was only one corpse. Still, I suppose that some will find Apollo 18 entertaining. Some may even find it scary. It just failed to scare or entertain me.

Apollo 18 is rated PG-13 and is filmed in grainy, shaky color.

I Am Legend (2007), The Omega Man (1971), The Last Man on Earth (1964)

How about three movies for the price of one? Why not? After all, they are all the same movie. The plot goes something like this: Earth is ravaged by a terrible plague that kills most of the planet's inhabitants. Those it doesn't kill, it turns into flesh-eating zombies who fear the sunlight. Only one man is immune to the plague - a doctor who struggles to find a cure for those who are already zombified. He lives in a fortified house to keep the zombies from eating him before he can come up with a cure for this dreadful disease. Eventually, he meets a young woman who appears to be immune also. They get real friendly, on account of the fact that neither of them has seen another human for a long time. Just as the doctor is completing his research, the zombies attack. He's killed in the attack, but not before he gives the serum that will cure humanity to the young woman and she escapes to the only known colony of uninfected humans. That's the story in a nutshell, but it's was good enough to persuade the powers that be in Hollywood to make it not once, but three times (well, four really, but the forth one is so bad that it's not worth mentioning here).

Vincent Price played the roll of Dr. Robert Morgan in Ubaldo Ragona's The Last Man on Earth, filmed in and around Eur, Rome. This version of the film is tame, almost laughably so, by today's standards, as the slow-moving zombies bump into the good doctor's house chanting his name. Not much scare there. Yet, the scene where Dr. Morgan tosses the dead bodies into the city dump and lights them on fire was considered so disturbing in 1967 that it was cut from the American release of the film. Boris Sagal's 1971 film The Omega Man stars Charlton Heston as Dr. Robert Neville, the lone survivor charging around LA, blasting zombies, while he searches for a cure in his fortified townhouse. This version is really the classic of the three, and a movie that cannot be much improved upon, except maybe for some better zombie makeup. And in 2007, Francis Lawrence gave us I Am Legend, starring Will Smith as Dr. Robert Neville, who spends his day cruising the streets of New York City with his dog Sam, looking for mutants and his nights in his fortified townhouse looking for a cure. Here the zombies have gone completely animal on us. They no longer think, they simply act aggressively, except perhaps for the leader who holds a slight grudge against Dr. Neville. But even he's only marginally smarter than the rest of the snarling, slobbering brood.

So why three versions of the same story? Cuz the folks in Hollywood don't have a lot of imagination, so they just keep rehashing the same stories again and again. All three movies are adaptations of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend. The Last Man on Earth is, however, not that great, and begged for a remake. It was a low budget film, shot in Italy, with bad make-up on grainy black and white film. Let's face it, brain-eating zombies didn't look all that menacing in movies back in the 1950s and 60s. They usually just put a lot of white pancake on the actors' faces, added a whole bunch of eyeliner, mussed up their hair and put them in shabby clothes. The Omega Man is the best of the lot. Its zombies are really just folks who've been turned into light-sensitive albinos by the plague, and they have it out for old Chuck cuz he's the one they think is responsible for it. These zombies are smart, they're organized, they have weapons, and they have a plan. Also, by 1971, Hollywood had become a little more aware of America's ethnic makeup, and the survivors - zombie and otherwise - were both black and white. This film was pretty radical for its time in that Lisa (Rosalind Cash), the uninfected woman who Heston's character gets jiggy with, is black. By 2007, Hollywood is definitely integrated, at least in the SciFi realm. In I Am Legend, Dr. Neville is played by a black man and Anna (Alice Braga) - the uninfected woman he finds - is played by an Hispanic, making it a much better representation of New York society. Special effects have also gotten more sophisticated (notice I didn't say better). The zombie hoards that Will Smith must contend with are computer animated monsters that move at lightning speed and possess near-superhuman strength. Sucks to fight zombies in the 21st Century, dude.

The Last Man in the World is rated G and is filmed in black and white.

The Omega Man is rated PG and is filmed in color.

I Am Legend is rated PG13 and is filmed in color.

One can only assume that the next version will be rated R and will be filmed in 3D. Oh the horror!

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

The Hindenburg III glides silently above the streets of Manhattan. I kid you not. It docks at the Empire State Building. A nervous passenger has a package sent on ahead of him. Then the passenger vanishes, and a name is scratched off a list. Meanwhile, over at the Tribune, ace reporter Polly Perkins (Gwynneth Paltrow) gets a cryptic message to meet someone at Radio City Music Hall. She goes and meets an aged scientist who's terrified for his life. He will say only one name - Totenkoff. Before Polly can find out any more, New York is attacked by a horde of giant, flying robots. An immediate call goes out to Sky Captain, aka Joe Sullivan (Jude Law), who flies to the rescue in his own P-40 Flying Tiger. After dispatching several of the behemoths, he flies off to his secret base, where Polly is waiting for him. Seems they once had the thing going on that ended badly. As they are hashing out old times, the base is attacked by bat-shaped aircraft that flap their wings. Joe and Polly fly after them, shoot down several and finally escape by diving into the ocean in Joe's plane which promptly turns into a submarine. By the time they get back to Joe's base, the place has been destroyed and Joe's loyal side kick, Dex (Giovanni Ribisi), has been kidnapped. Polly and Joe, following clues left by Dex, fly to Nepal where they find Shangri La, then head out over the ocean in search of Totenkoff's secret base. When they get there, they find that Totenkoff (the very late Laurence Olivier) has been a very naughty boy indeed, and now the entire world is in danger. Folks, I repeat, I am not making this stuff up. Somebody else already did that for us. And they put it all into a movie called Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Written and directed by Kerry Conran, Sky Captain is a loving homage to all of the movie serials of the 1930s and 40s - like Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and The Undersea Kingdom - complete with mad scientists, robotic villains, secret bases, rocket ships and ray guns. The film was shot almost entirely against a blue screen background - only the actors were real, and the scenery and props were all added later digitally. This allowed Conran to create the New York that he wanted to, set in 1939, yet in some strange alternate universe, where the Nazis never came into power and where supersonic aircraft and ray guns were invented. It is a happy, mythical reality that begs us to forget the realities of history as we knew it and come along to a better place. The sub-title the World of Tomorrow is taken from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, as do the Trylon and Persiphere that they find deep in the Himalayas. In Conran's hands, the World of Tomorrow envisioned in 1939 actually existed and much of the world of then never materialized. Would that it had been the case. The sepia tone of the film lends it an air of nostalgia, and the dim lighting and deep shadows bring to mind the lighting techniques of film noir. Unfortunately, it also lends the film a cartoon-like quality that takes away from its magical realism. Probably the film's most memorable performance is by the late Laurence Olivier. Conran took archival footage of Olivier and digitally manipulated it to speak the words he had in his script. In some sense, we truly are in the world of tomorrow if we can get dead actors to keep right on performing years after their demise.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is not going to be to everyone's liking. It's just too fantastical for some people, who apparently have a difficult time suspending their disbelief long enough to enjoy a good adventure yarn. The acting is a bit formal and stiff, much as it was in those old 30s and 40s serials, but after a while you really don't notice too much. Probably the most difficult part of the film to buy is Joe's airplane, which has the ability to fly at near supersonic speeds over unimaginable distances and, as an added bonus, turn itself into a submarine when needed. My favorite World-of-Tomorrow gadget - if you will - was the giant, hovering aircraft carrier. I've seen something similar in old Mechanix Illustrated magazines from that period. They dreamed of it then. Conran's dreaming of it still. We can too, thanks to his movie.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is rated PG-13, and it is available in sepia-toned color.

When Worlds Collide (1951)

Worlds in collision? There's plenty of talk about that these days. Asteroids slamming into the Earth and destroying all life on the planet? Seen it on the Discovery Channel. But back in 1951? Not so much. Rudolph Mate's When Worlds Collide shoves it in the face of post-war America. Based on the 1933 novel by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, the film posits the question of what we would do in the event that a planet were hurtling through space toward our beloved Earth. Well, in this case, there are actually two planets, the first of which misses the Earth and politely takes up orbit about our sun, providing hapless humanity with a place to escape to. So let's build giant space arks and jump onto the new world before the second planet strikes poor, old, doomed Earth. At least that's what Doctors Hendron (Larry Keating), Frye (Stephen Chase), Bronson (Hayden Rorke) and Ottinger (Sandro Giglio) want to do. But where to get the cash? Enter billionaire Sydney Stanton (John Hoyt), who will put up all the needed money, so long as he gets a seat on the rocket. Well okay, let's get this show on the road.

They buy an old military base and start collecting the best and the brightest minds in the country. And animals. And seeds for planting. And books and movies and music and so on and so forth. Soon the rocket is under construction - oh yeah, it's got fins - as the two rogue planets hurl themselves closer and closer every day. Into this mix lands Dave Randall (Richard Derr) a happy-go-lucky air courier who brought the proof of Earth's imminent destruction to our plucky scientists and stuck around to see what Dr. Hendron's daughter, Joyce (Barbara Rush) was doing later on. What she's doing is marrying her fiance', Dr. Tony Drake (Peter Hanson). The obligatory love triangle ensues. As the two men vie for Joyce's affections, they struggle to get the giant ship ready in time. Of course there is one teensy-weensy problem with the ark. It will only hold 300 people. These will be chosen by lottery from among the hand-picked workers who are building the rocket. As for the rest of the earth? Well, I guess they should have built their own rocket.

Interesting side note here: 300 people aren't enough to create a viable culture - you need 1,000 unrelated individuals to ensure that you don't end up with a totally inbred population in about 200 years. Another interesting side note: there are no minorities among the hand-picked best and brightest - no blacks, no Hispanics, no Asians - just good ol' college educated, white folks. Can you say racism? How about eugenics? But let's not get bogged down in these niggling details. There's work to do. Earth's about to be pulverized! So our pasty white folks gather their animals and their seeds and their WASP culture, load themselves into the space ship and take off at the last possible moment, heading off to the unknown world. Will it be habitable? But of course. It wouldn't dare not be.

You may be thinking by this point that I hate this film. Actually, it's one of my favorite movies. I love the image of the giant space ship being constructed under the ever-growing orb of the approaching planet. And the special effects of the devastation on Earth as the first planet passes by are iconic. The scenes of the flooded New York City were heavily mimicked in the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow. Of course, the really crappy special effect of the two planets colliding is a let down. Even back in 1951, they could have done better than this. The film was produced by George Pal, who would also create such SciFi classics as War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, Destination Moon, and Doc Savage. Well, maybe the last one wasn't such a classic. But this movie is, in spite of the fact that it is hopelessly rooted in its white male vision of society, a vision in which people of color simply don't exist. That's too bad too, and it's a problem I hope they rectify in the remake currently in production.

When Worlds Collide is rated G, and is filmed in widescreen Technicolor.

Metropolis (1927)

You've all seen the images before. The city of the future, its monumental buildings that soar hundreds of stories into the air. Elevated highways along which people and cars move effortlessly. Clean people living in a clean world free from care and strife. Flying cars. Robots. And the dark secret under their feet. Every utopia has its ugly center hidden within its fluffy shell. Hoards of downtrodden workers, tired, hopeless, living in squalor, working the great machines that keep the city running. The Labor upon whose backs Capital lives. This is the city they thought we would be living in today. This is the future that never was. This is Fritz Lang's masterpiece, Metropolis.

Metropolis has existed on the periphery of my life since I was ten years old. That was the year that I discovered science fiction. That was the year that my uncle gave me a Jules Verne novel to read. That was the year I first saw such classics as The First Men in the Moon, Master of the Universe, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and many others. That was the year that my cousins introduced me to the SciFi and Horror fan mags. On their pages I first saw the iconic images from Metropolis, images that were seared into my consciousness. They became metaphors against which I judged the world about me. It is because of those images that I became a fan of science fiction. I wanted to see that movie. I was obsessed with seeing it. But these were the bad old days, prior to DVD, to VHS. The only way to see a film like Metropolis was to wait and hope that it would air on the Friday Night Creature Feature - after all, robots are creatures too. If you lived in a large enough city, you might be lucky enough to have it shown at an alternative movie house. Neither happened for me. I was in my mid-thirties before I was finally able to view it. I was transfixed from the moment it started until the last credit rolled. It's not often in life that the reality measures up to the expectation. Metropolis did just that.

What's the point of me summarizing the plot. You know it already. The cold and distant head of the government, seated in his lofty office high above the city, concerned only with efficiency; his naive and idealist son; the beautiful young woman who's intent on saving her people and who the son will undoubtedly fall in love with; the evil mad scientist who is bent on destroying every one's good time; the oppressed workers, too downtrodden to even raise their heads as they trudge to work on the great machines. And the robot. How can I leave out the robot, iconic image of an iconic film? She - yes, it's a girl robot - is the grandmother of C3PO and the centerpiece of the movie, almost its star. See her rise slowly from her throne and approach the distant head of the government. Watch in amazement as her metal body, wrapped in rings of electric power, is covered with flesh and transformed into a wicked likeness of the beautiful young woman. See how she uses her new body to destroy everyone in the great city.

Metropolis is the grandaddy of all science fiction movies. Have you seen Blade Runner? The Fifth Element? Dark City? The City of Lost Children? Star Wars? They all owe their existence to this movie, because they all copied it. In fact, it's fairly safe to say that ALL movies made since the release of Metropolis about futuristic cities derive their imagery from this film.


Sadly, Metropolis is also the most butchered movie in the history of cinema. First released in Germany at 210 minutes, it was hacked down on its American release to 114. That's 96 minutes of film gone. 144,000 frames of film. That's not editing. That's slaughter! The movie has not been seen in its entirety since then. In 2002, the Murnau Foundation released a restored version of the film with a 123 minute run-time, and title cards describing what the restorers thought was occurring in the missing sections. Then, in 2008 a nearly complete version of the film was discovered in an archive in Argentina. Unfortunately, the film was badly deteriorated. And it was 16mm. Still, restorers were able to create a new version, released in 2010 with a 145 minute run-time. Barring some miraculous discovery, this is probably the most complete version of Metropolis we will ever get to see.

Metropolis is rated G. Although the film has been lovingly restored, the quality of the film varies due to the level of deterioration of various segments.

I, Robot (2004)

Alex Proyas' I, Robot, is not a bad movie. In fact, it's really quite a good movie. It's just not the movie that anyone wanted. I, Robot is based on the short story collection of the same title by the late Isaac Asimov. Unfortunately, about the only thing it shares with Asimov's book is the title and the fact that it's about robots. All similarity ends there. Proyas's film is about a Chicago cop named Del Spooner (Will Smith) who has a thing against robots. As the time period is 2035, and robots are quite literally everywhere, doing the laundry, walking the dog, emptying the garbage, this is something of a problem for Spooner. That Proyas chose a black man to portray a man who is prejudiced against a bunch of thinking machines is a statement about bigotry that you don't really need me to point out -it's so big, you'll trip over it on your way to get more popcorn!

As the story opens, Spooner is called to the scene of an apparent suicide. The man responsible for inventing robots for U.S. Robotics, Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), has just thrown himself out of a thirtieth-floor window. The case seems cut and dry, but Spooner has his doubts. While investigating the Lanning's office with his assistant, Dr. Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan), Spooner finds Sonny (voiced by Alan Tudyk), one of U. S. Robotics' newest model of robots. Sonny flees Spooner, but is soon recaptured, and Spooner accuses him of murdering Lanning. This is, of course impossible, since all robots must follow the three laws of robotics, which prevent a robot from harming a human in anyway or from allowing a human to be harmed. In other words, robots must sacrifice themselves, if necessary, to prevent a human from being harmed in any way - or from harming themselves. And this is where the new model of robots turn ominous. As soon as they are delivered, the new robots begin to taking over society, because they have been programmed to prevent humans from harming themselves. So the robots decide that they need to take care of us, like a parent taking care of a little child, preventing them from doing anything that might cause them injury. You can probably see how this could present problems for humanity. Spooner, with the help of Sonny and Dr. Calvin, must not only figure out who really killed Dr. Lanning but also how to stop the new robots from taking over the world.

And as I said before, I, Robot is really not a bad movie. In fact, it's really quite entertaining. It's fast paced, there's a lot of action, and the CGI sequences look pretty good. Smith - who is fast becoming the go-to guy for scifi films, a position once held by Charlton Heston - does a very good job with his character, as he always does. The robots look good and are pretty believable. If I had a rating system, I'd give the movie four out of five stars. It's just NOT Asimov's story, and I really think that Proyas should have given it a different title. If you want to know what Asimov's story could have - maybe should have - been like, then I suggest you pick up a copy of I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay. There you will get a glimpse of what the greatest science fiction movie never made might have looked like. But if you don't care about any of that, and you just want to see a good, fast-paced action film, then by all means rent Alex Proyas' I, Robot. You won't be disappointed.

I, Robot is rated PG-13.

Forbidden Planet (1956)

Forbidden Planet is one of the best and one of the most important science fiction movies ever made. It provided the model on which most science fiction movies and TV shows would be based from then on, from the non-traditional space craft that didn't spout fire from its tail, to the white male triumvirate lead that showed up ten years later on Star Trek in the characters of Kirk, Spock and McCoy. But Forbidden Planet is not exactly a modern story. It's essentially Shakespeare's The Tempest dressed up with the trappings of a 1950s space opera. What makes Forbidden Planet stand out is the time and money expended on it as compared to other scifi movies from the period.

Instead of The Tempset's dessert island, Forbidden Planet is set on a distant and deserted planet. Instead of Prospero and his daughter Miranda, we have Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pigeon) and Altaira (Anne Francis). The sprite Arial is replaced by the dry-witted Robby, the world's first truly believable movie robot. And the role of Caliban is taken over by the huge, vicious and invisible Monster from the Id. When Captain J. J. Adams (Leslie Neilson) and his crew arrive on the Planet Altair 4, they discover that the original crew of the space ship Bellerophon that land two decades earlier has been reduced to only the reclusive doctor and his naive daughter. When questioned, Dr. Morbius explains that the rest of the colonists were killed by some unseen monster that "tore them literally limb from limb." Captain Adams is suspicious and - despite Morbius' pleas for him to leave - decides to investigate further. Along with his first mate, L.t Jerry Farman (Jack Kelly) and Dr. Ostrow (Warren Stevens), he presses Morbius for more answers. Morbius tells them of an extinct race known as the Krell who once lived on the planet. The only thing that remains of the Krell is the huge machine they constructed beneath the planet's surface, a machine that can turn thought patterns into solid matter and transport it anywhere on the planet. Meanwhile, back at the ship, a series of break-ins and vandalism culminates in the death of Chief Quinn (Richard Anderson).

The crew sets up defenses, and when the monster attacks again, they open fire, revealing a hideous, invisible creature that cannot be stopped by their ray guns. In the end, Captain Adams figures out that Morbius' mind is creating the monster. Morbius confronts the demon he's created and is destroyed by it. But before he dies, he triggers a self-destruction sequence that will destroy the planet, and the remains of the crew escape with Altaira and Robbie as the planet explodes.

Forbidden Planet incorporated many advances in special effects that raised it above the run of the mill 50s scifi matinee. First of all, it was filmed on Technicolor, which none of the low-budget scifi films of the day could afford. Secondly, the sets were expertly crafted. Morbius's house looks like something from The Jetsons, and all of the scenes of the Krell's great machine were matt paintings dome by the folks at Walt Disney Studios. Third, the Monster from the Id and the laser blasts were accomplished by etching the film with a laser, a common practice today, but almost unheard in 1956. It lends the monster a true otherworldly quality, at a time when most aliens consisted of actors in silly rubber costumes. Fourth, there was the wise-cracking Robbie the Robot, who steals every scene that he's in. So important was he, that he graced most of the movie posters, not Leslie Neilson or Walter Pigeon. Finally, there was the musical score by Louis and Bebe Barron, which was done entirely using electronic tonalities. It is - as far as I know - the only score that also doubles as the sound effects. All of this, combined with a great story and sympathetic characters, make Forbidden Planet one of the greatest science fiction movies ever made.

Forbidden Planet is filmed in wide screen and Technicolor, and it's rated G.

Inception (2010)

Imagine what it would be like if you could enter somebody else's dreams. You could see their innermost secrets, their desires, their fears, their intentions, their demons. Now, imagine that you had the power to alter those dreams, to erase their demons. Or give them new ones. Would you go there? That's the central idea in Christopher Nolan's Inception, a mind-bending thriller about a near-future world where dreams can be shared and controlled. The story revolves around Cobb (Leaonardo DiCaprio). Cobb is a haunted man, a man on the run, a man who can't go home because he's wanted for the murder of his wife. Cobb makes his living by entering people's dreams and stealing their secrets, which he then sells to interested third parties. One day Cobb is approached by Saito (Ken Watanabe) and asked to do a job that is supposed to be impossible. Instead of stealing an idea, Saito wants Cobb to place an idea inside the mind of his main business rival, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). When Cobb refuses, Saito offers to erase Cobb's criminal record so that he can return home and see his children again. Cobb agrees, assembles his team and goes to work. Saito gets Cobb close enough to Fischer to enter his dreams, and Cobb and his crew drill down through one dream layer after another until they reach a point that is deep enough to plant an idea that Fischer will think is his own. There are only two problems: Fischer's mind has been trained to fight off a dream invasion, and Cobb's own secret demons threaten to derail the entire caper.

Inception is an intelligent movie with an incredibly complicated plot and truly mind-blowing special effects. Watching it, I was reminded of the novels of Philip K. Dick, where the characters are often unclear as to what is actually reality and what is simulation or dream or insanity. Inception plays with reality in the same way, until neither the characters nor we are sure of what is real and what is dream. In the end, Cobb washes up on the shores of Saito's subconscious, where a minute of real time feels like a 1,000 years in dream time. Will Saito believe that the reality he's constructed around himself is an illusion and follow Cobb back up to the real world? Would you believe someone if they told you that "everything you see or seem was but a dream within a dream?"

Inception is rated PG-13.