I Feel Old. But Not Very Wise.
February 1st – February 7th
An Education – Upon seeing the trailer for this one, I was pretty certain that I was going to really like the movie. It was right up my alley. Upon seeing it, I have to say that I liked it more than even I expected. I was a little afraid that the story would devolve into a tired tale of male fantasy. A cute girl interested in interesting things (with a school uniform to boot) who fulfills the every desire of the older man. Even 15 minutes into the film, I was worried about this. Thankfully, the story didn’t turn out that way. Carey Mulligan’s Jenny is very much her own woman. Sure, she makes mistakes along the way. She is both teenager and human after all. Mulligan is wonderful and surrounded by an excellent cast.
Pandorum - The first of six movies in a Sci-Fi Horror Marathon. This is a 2009 movie starring Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid. The movie’s title refers to a form of psychosis suffered as a result of space travel and suspended animation. Unfortunately, this psychological condition doesn’t figure much into the film, except perhaps to shoehorn in a “twist” ending. If you’re going to name the movie after this psychosis, it’s my opinion that it should figure into the plot quite prominently and create a sense of psychological horror. If you’re not going to go that route, then there needs to be more monsters and more action. The monsters and spaceship here were fine. Not $40 million budget fine, but serviceable. They were adequate to support a more gory plot. I’m not sure if this director could have even pulled that off though. Some of the visual cues in the few action scenes we get are a bit confusing. There was a problem with the audio on this…although it may have just been the Blu-ray disc and/or my player. As it was, the dialogue was not in sync and the audio levels seemed improperly mixed. The score and/or fx music often drowned out Foster’s whispered dialogue. Finally, there is Dennis Quaid. I’m not sure what I think of The Quaid. I can’t tell if he’s genuinely horrible or just never quite totally invested. In this movie, he seemed to be phoning it in. In fact, he could have quite literally been phoning it in here (since half his dialogue comes off-screen through Bower’s headset).
Moon - The second installment in the Sci-Fi Horror Marathon. Much, much, much better than Pandorum. And apparently it was made with 1/8th the budget of the former. Like Pandorum, and many recent sci-fi movies, the story is predicated on the destruction of Earth’s resources. In this case, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is sent to the moon to mine helium-3 for fuel. Just before reaching the end of his three-year stint on the moon, he crashes his rover which results in a series of interesting events. The succeeding events both allow Rockwell to shine as an actor in dual roles and explore free will and consciousness in a classic sci-fi sort of way.
While GERTY is an obvious homage to HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, my favorite reference was to 2001′s computer monitors. I’ve always appreciated the design of 2001′s computer monitors…with the three-letter codes projected onto a flat screen. It always seem to hold up to the test of time much better than other “futuristic” movies where the immediately dated monochromatic and text-only monitors were employed, usually only to rapidly scroll a bunch of gibberish. The design used in 2001, and copied here in Moon, goes for something different enough to seem plausibly futuristic. On a side note, Benedict Wong who appears here briefly will figure into the third installment of this marathon.
