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I saw the nominees for the Bradbury Awards the other day and I realized that I had actually seen all of the nominees this year.  Then it hit me…we (the speculative fiction community) have really been treated to an excellent year on the big screen.  While we’ve had a few explosive duds (some that made quite a bit of money), we’ve seen some true gems and game changers too.

Here is the official list of nominees:

1) Avatar, 2) Coraline, 3) District 9, 4) Moon, 5) Star Trek, & 6) Up

Avatar, District 9, and Up were all nominated for Academy Awards too; however I think the only one of these three that truly has a chance of winning is Avatar.

With that said, and since this is an opinion/review blog here are the nominees ranked from worst to first.

6) Up – Now, I may have said worst to first, but in all actuality all of these films are great.  As a general rule, Pixar doesn’t make bad films; however this is a very typical Pixar film.  If you have a dog then this is a must see!!!  I was amazed to see the explosion of 3-D movies this year.  This is one of three 3-D movies that were nominated.

5) Star Trek – I’d bet that many readers are shouting, “BULL$#!T” when seeing that I ranked this movie this low (among these six films), but I felt that this Star Trek was only the third best in the franchise and that the villain wasn’t very well developed.  We reviewed Star Trek on the podcast and generally everybody liked/loved it.

4) Coraline – This movie exemplifies a typical Neil Gaiman story and he’s one of the best writers out there right now (period).  The movie is visually stunning with 3-D stop-motion animation.

3) Avatar – People either seemed to love or criticize Avatar, but mostly people loved it. Either way, an amazing number of people saw it and it was an amazing eco-political-anti-war-religulous-and-a-bunch-of-other-stuff-scifi-fantasy movie that took all of these big topics and successfully meshed them into a single (decently long) film.  I think this film has the best shot at winning an Oscar, but I still feel that two other 2009 movies were better.

2) District 9 – I can’t wait to see more from Neil Blomkamp (the director of D-9).  What a break out movie!  We reviewed District 9 on the podcast and all of us praised this movie the entire time.  I hope District 9 wins the Oscar, but I’m not holding my breath.

1) Moon – I finally got to see Moon when it was recently released on DVD.  What a performance by Sam Rockwell!  This movie really messes with your head in very subtle ways.  In my opinion this movie is what great Sci-Fi is all about.  The reason I picked Moon over D-9 is mostly the fact that you sort of saw where District 9 was going once you had reached the last quarter of the movie (although there are some moments when you’re not quite sure what the protagonist, Wikus, is going to do).  During Moon, it doesn’t even seem the protagonist, Sam Bell, knows what decisions he’ll make until the last seconds of the movie.

Therefore, if I had a vote I’d be voting for Moon as the best Science Fiction/Fantasy film of 2009.  What do you think?

First, let me explain what the Legion I defined as “Science Fiction/Horror Films.” I think of Sci-Fi/Horror as those movies that are science fiction movies first, but find a way scare the $h!T out of you before it’s over.  Ever since we started this podcast I wanted to do a Top 5 list on this very topic.  We didn’t start the Top 5 lists on the podcast until after Halloween last year, so I was very patient and waited to do this Top 5 list until Halloween 2009.  It simply seemed like the most appropriate time to podcast it. I asked the gang to give me the best movies that they felt mixed science fiction with a horror twist.  This included space horror films like Alien, Pitch Black, and Saturn 3, but also films such as The Fly and Altered States. These last two movies really explore the horror of people changing in unnatural ways. I told the guys to pick whatever they wanted as long as they could justify their picks as being a true mix of science fiction and horror. As we discovered there is a real diversity of films that have successfully mixed these two genres and I think we did a good job of covering the best of the best. Here is the Top 5 list:

The Top 5 Picks

1. Alien
2. The Thing
3. Event Horizon
4. The Fly
5. Aliens

This list really isn’t very different from many lists that you might find if you Google the phrase, “Science Fiction Horror Movies.” However, I believe the movies we listed during our fairly long podcast discussion gave an extensive and comprehensive list of movies including such gems as 28 Days Later, Cloverfield, and The Mist. We listed several lesser known films like Tetsuo and Re-Animator too.  So, if you enjoy a good horror flix, then give this Legion of Lethargic Super-Geeks Top 5 podcast episode 65 a listen. Tell us if you think we left any really good films unmentioned (and Jason X doesn’t count as a good film…period).  And if there were any movies you haven’t seen or heard of before then check them out.

Next post, I’ll be reviewing a series of military sci-fi books I’ve been reading lately, including Robert A. Heinlein’s classic Starship Troopers.

I saw Pandorum a couple of weeks ago during its opening weekend.  There had been a lot of hype about this movie traveling around the web over the past several months, so I was excited to finally see it and I wasn’t disappointed.  While Pandorum is in no way a ground-breaking movie, it was still a lot of fun and felt like it had learned from prior flixs in the genre.  Beth Accomando, from KPBS, really nailed it when she said that Pandorum is Alien meets The Descent.

***Spoiler Alert***

The story opens like so many other space-horror flixs have in the past with the primary protagonist waking up out of some sort of hyper-sleep. Some examples of other movies that have used this exact opening are Alien and Pitch Black.  The kicker here is that Pandorum is psychological condition a person who has been in hyper-sleep can enter soon after waking up. The way I understood it, some individuals are driven into this homicidal state by the long-term sleep.

The short short version of the story is that Ben Foster’s character, Bower, wakes up and has no memory of where, who, or what he is doing (an effect of the hyper-sleep). His commanding officer, played by Dennis Quaid, wakes up after Bower and they quickly figure out they need to stabilize the ships power supply. As the movie moves along Bower discovered more and more about what has actually been going on over the past several months on board the ship by discovering large hoards of mutants, running into several human survivors, and having the occasional flashback.  The small band of survivors attempt to get the ship fixed, so they can eventually make it to their destination. Like I mentioned before it’s a pretty straight forward plot (and in no way original), but the execution was good. However, I thought that towards the end the plot got a little strange and felt a little forced. I can say that I didn’t see the final scene coming, so that was a big plus for me.

Unfortunately, the movie has not done well at the box office and has met some mixed reviews.  I think this is unfortunate because I really enjoy this type of movie and seeing a decent one fail this badly (so far it has lost about $30,000,000) means we probably won’t be seeing many more any time in the near future or they will not be given a large enough budget to make them visually exciting.

I’m giving Pandorum three and 1/2 out of five stars.  *** 1/2

Next post, I’ll be commenting on the Legion’s Top 5 list of science fiction/horror movies.  The actual Top 5 list will be podcast as Episode 65 of The Legion of Lethargic Super-Geeks later this week.

I finally got a chance to watch The Golden Compass tonight and all I can say is, “what a cluster f**k of a movie.”  There is a central storyline that could have been very good, but either the studio didn’t want to spend the money needed to film the extra scenes that would connect all of the various scenes together properly, the studio didn’t want to make another three hour marathon movie, or they had some of the crappiest editors of all-time working on this film.  I’d guess a combination of the first two. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a major Hollywood movie such as this that was this jerky from scene to scene and then simply seemed to go absolutely nowhere. Also there was too much piss poor CGI throughout the flix. I’m not going to go into a synopsis of the movie, because in some ways I’m not exactly sure what I saw (seriously), but just in case you’re interested, here is the Wikipedia entry for the movie.

There have been so many young adult and children’s novels made into movies over the past decade (such as the Harry Potter and Narnia films) that now every studio out there is jumping on the bandwagon.  They’re rushing them out to the theaters and because of this some of them (like the The Golden Compass and Inkheart) are falling flat.  Surprisingly, even though this movie didn’t do well in America, it did extremely well world-wide, so I guess we might be seeing a sequel to The Golden Compass in the next couple of years.  I doubt I’ll take the time to watch it.

I’m giving The Golden Compass only two out of five stars. **
I have seen worse films, but they were all really bad B-movies.

My next movie review will be Pandorum that just came out a few weeks ago.