Posts Tagged ‘ science fiction ’

Terry Gilliam‘s 1995 Twelve Monkeys went largely unnoticed by most of the cinema-going public, but contains one of the best performances of Brad Pitt‘s career and one of the best and most original performances in, at that time, Bruce Willis‘ career.  Also starring Madeleine Stowe, Twelve Monkeys is the story of a man named James Cole (Willis), a convict in the future who is drafted as a volunteer to go back in time to help restore his present-time.  Forgive me if this gets confusing, but it’s confusing to watch too, in a rewarding way.

The Butterfly Effect is the must-see directorial debut from directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, who worked previously together as a screenwriting team for Final Destination 2.  Ashton Kutcher, made famous by his role on That 70s Show, stars in this film as Evan Treborn, a man who periodically blacks out due to a rare neural disorder he shares with his institutionalized father.  Evan and his best friend Kayleigh Miller (Amy Smart from Road Trip and Rat Race), her brother Tommy (William Lee Scott), and Lenny (Eldon Henson), grow up in a hellish childhood environment and are all traumatized by a childhood incident where a woman and her baby are killed very gruesomely.

It seems kind of funny to me to think that having written quite a few reviews many of my favorite movies aren’t yet among them. Such is the case with Alex Proyas’ 1998 neo-noir Dark City starring Rufus Sewell, Jennifer Connelly, Kiefer Sutherland, and William Hurt in a world of perpetual darkness in an unnamed city. The city is timeless in setting and design; it features things that could make it contemporary or of pretty much any time period since the 1900s.

This is a pretty original concept that is effectively put on-screen. In the very near future, this movie shows an in-progress apocalypse in which all of the world except the United Kingdom has fallen because women are no longer able to get pregnant. It’s refreshing that the film-makers make no effort whatsoever to explain why women can no longer have babies as it just forces the viewer to accept it as a possibility and just watch.

The Matrix: Revolutions is the final installment of the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy which, when viewed on its own merit is a remarkable action movie, but of very poor quality when considered in its proper role as the final episode of this modern epic. In Revolutions, which is set to take place immediately after the conclusion of The Matrix Reloaded (Widescreen Edition), Neo (Keanu Reeves) is in an apparent coma, having been imprisoned by a rogue program, somewhere between the Matrix and the computer network that lies outside of it.