Director Richard Jones watched all 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone as research for this Almeida production.
The Incredible Shrinking Man starts innocently with a young couple bantering on a small boat off the California coast. Before what looks like an atomic mushroom cloud wafts towards the unfortunate Scott Carey, lightly coating him in glittery fallout. Six months later, Carey seems to be getting smaller. Initially it’s little more than an irritation.
To quote the genius sax player Dexter Gordon, "In nuclear war, all men are cremated equal" – or in this case, all adorable couples will burn as one. Anthony Edwards plays Harry, a not-so-genius trombone player who one sunny afternoon in Los Angeles meets Julie (Mare Cunningham), a waitress enjoying her afternoon off. They flirt amid the remains of extinct animals once dug out of the prehistoric La Brea Tar Pits in downtown LA.
Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner from 1982 stands as an all-time sci-fi classic, so anybody trying to make a sequel (even 35 years later) needs galaxy-sized vision, an army of high-powered collaborators and balls of steel. Is director Denis Villeneuve the man for the job?
Summer's here, which can only mean Hollywood blockbusters. But it's not all Spider-Man, talking apes and World War Two with platoons of thespians fighting on the beaches. There's comedy, a saucy menage-à-trois, a film about golf and even a ghost story. It's called A Ghost Story. We hereby bring you sneak peeks of the season's finest and more titles anticipated in the autumn (and hey, the trailer might even be the best part).
AUGUST
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets starts promisingly: there’s Bowie’s Space Oddity on the soundtrack (a bit clichéd but evocative) and a sly montage of personnel handovers at an international space station over the decades. Astronauts from different earthly nations are superseded by increasingly awkward and funny encounters between human astronauts and phantasmagorical creatures arriving for their tour of duty – which alien protuberance will include an approximate hand to shake?
There’s been talk about the way this latest instalment of the rebooted Ape franchise, and the one which brings the story of the brainy messianic ape Caesar full circle, is an allegory of Isis’s onslaught in Iraq or the rise of Donald Trump.
After dipping a toe in the new-look DC Comics universe to brighten the otherwise leaden Batman v Superman, now Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman gets a chance to shine in her own Hollywood movie. Gadot makes a pretty fine job of it too, bringing a bit of soul and empathy to the proceedings, but sometimes it’s more despite than because of the production surrounding her.
When Ridley Scott returned to his hideous intergalactic monster with Prometheus five years ago, he brought with him a new panoramic vision encompassing infinite space, several millennia of time and the entire history of human existence. With Alien: Covenant, he makes a more modest proposal.
Picture, if you will, a spacecraft loaded with 2,000 hibernating colonists. They are en route to a distant planet called Origae-6, but the voyage is interrupted when the ship (it’s called Covenant) is battered by a blast of cosmic radiation. The emergency wakes the crew, and you might find yourself thinking “why am I watching Passengers again?” Anyway, while they’re repairing the damage, they intercept a strange radio broadcast – very strange indeed, since it’s John Denver singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads”. They find it comes from a nearby but unknown planet, where conditions are remarkably Earth-like.
For no very good reason, other than that it would be really boring to go back into cryogenic frozenness for the seven years it would take to get to Origae-6, mission commander Oram (Billy Crudup, pictured right) decides they’ll go to the new planet instead. But if you were cryogenically frozen, you wouldn’t be aware of how boring it was, surely? No matter. His second-in-command, Daniels (Katherine Waterston, pictured below), thinks this is a bad idea. She is proved right.
Scott has promised, or threatened, that he’s lining up another six Alien movies after this one, which is perhaps why it feels like a rather minor instalment before the interesting stuff happens further down the line. Quite a lot of Covenant is just boilerplate – the hibernating travellers, the flight down to the unknown planet’s surface (which looks uncannily like the equivalent sequence in Prometheus), the discovery of the ominous dead city spattered with ossified corpses, and of course the certainty that you-know-what is going to appear before very long.
The saving grace is not one but two mischievous turns by Michael Fassbender, who reprises the silky-smooth and infinitely treacherous synthetic David from last time, and also plays Walter, Covenant’s in-house droid. Fassbender delineates the two with skill, camping up David with further Peter O’Toole impersonations (there’s even a scene mimicking his rendition of “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” from Lawrence of Arabia), while Walter is more sincere and earnest. Learning from the slippery David, the designers deliberately made Walter less scheming and devious, and he probably wasn’t programmed to expect the outrageous robo-erotic sequence where David teaches him to play the flute.
Walter does his best to save his human charges from the horrors that lie in store, but it’s a big ask. One of the other familiar riffs looping away here is the hopeless unpreparedness of the humans for the inevitable onslaught, now so wearisomely routine that it’s impossible to feel much sympathy for the victims. The part where David invites Oram to take a look inside an Alien pod (“it’s perfectly safe, I assure you”) prompts hilarity rather than terror. Besides, since the threat on the new planet can take the form of microscopic spores entering the ears or the nose, the humans are little more than sacrificial ducks in a row.
Before we reach that familiar moment when survivors try to take off while pursued by Aliens, we get to see a few species variations, some of them created by creepy David in his private Frankenstein’s laboratory. The moment where a soft-porn shower sequence between consenting crew-members turns into a bloodbath suggests that Sir Ridley wasn’t taking this one entirely seriously. Six more? Must we?
“I never saw anything like it,” declares Billy Pilgrim in wonderment. “It’s the Land of Oz.” He has just seen Dresden’s splendour from the train carriage into which he and other American prisoners of war are crammed en route to the city. They’ve been told it will be easier there than the prison camp they’ve left: they will experience less hardship at their new quarters. Dresden is not the Land of Oz, though.