The Japanese Ghost in the Shell phenomenon is celebrating its 25th birthday, and already has a long history in manga cartoons and animated movies.
The latest instalment in this massive open world sci-fi role-playing game joins the 2017 party in full swing, with both Horizon Zero Dawn and Breath of the Wild raising the bar for the RPG genre. But with the Mass Effect games considered the very cream of the crop, the pressure to perform at a new zenith appears a little too much for a trilogy that looks like it has seen better days.
In space, no-one can hear you say “hang on, haven’t I seen this before?” The sprawling, labyrinthine space ship full of ducts and passageways for terrifying creatures to hide in, the laid-back crew who’ve become a little too blasé about life in space, the cute little outer-space organism that looks like an exotic novelty pet…
The X-Men films have frequently managed to bring a shot of ethical awareness and emotional engagement to the superhero party, but even so this swansong for Hugh Jackman’s Logan (aka Wolverine) is likely to take your breath away. With James Mangold at the helm as director and co-writer, this is a haunting elegy for times past, battles fought and comrades lost, as Logan finds himself grudgingly dragged out of a drink-sodden semi-retirement as a limo driver.
Despite being kitted out with a full-scale intergalactic spaceship and all known computerised effects, Passengers is essentially a two-hander for its stars Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. Or you could maybe stretch that to a two-and-a-half-hander, if you include Michael Sheen's oily and obsequious bar-tending android.
Perhaps it's part of director Morten (The Imitation Game) Tyldum's point that even if you're surrounded by the most lavish futuristic technology, space is still an infinite and soulless wasteland of nothingness, into which all human life might easily vanish without trace. The set-up is that Jim Preston (Pratt) is one of 5,000 passengers aboard the good ship Avalon (which resembles an enormous gyroscope whirling through space, pictured below). The passengers and 250-odd crew members are all slumbering in hibernation pods as the Avalon takes them to a new colony planet called Homestead 2. Earth, we gather from the smiley, airbrushed promotional videos broadcast by the Homestead corporation, has become overcrowded, overpriced and overrated. Why not take the journey of a lifetime to a new future on a brand new planet?
Preston, an engineer proud of his practical skills, has decided this could be just what he needed. However, when the Avalon is damaged by a meteorite, this causes Preston's sleeping pod to open and wake him up. Imagine his dismay when he finds that instead of making planet-fall at Homestead 2, he's still 90 years away from his destination. And there's no way of putting himself back to sleep again.
The first chunk of the film depicts his efforts to come to terms with his predicament, as he vainly tries to break into the high-security flight deck to wake the sleeping crew or call earth for help. Writer Jon Spaihts has some fun satirising the familiar predicament of the frustrated customer trying to get sense out of a computerised helpline – he manages to send a message to earth, but then a recorded voice informs him he'll have to wait 25 years for a reply, and by the way that call just cost $60,000. Further humiliation awaits in the fully automated dining-room, where Jim's budget-price ticket only entitles him to bog-standard coffee (not the blueberry java or the Guatemalan latte) and a breakfast which resembles a dollop of stale cement.
Though he diverts himself with space-walks and jitterbugging with holographic dancers in the recreation area, the prospect of spending solitary decades watching the universe slide past weighs crushingly upon him. Things obviously look up when Jim's solitude is banished by the arrival of Aurora Lane (Lawrence), a writer from New York who thinks travelling to Homestead 2 and back would provide great material for a book. Not only is she a higher-class traveller with access to a superior range of comestibles, but she's... well, she's Jennifer Lawrence, equipped with a refreshingly feisty attitude as well as an eye-catching range of svelte sports and swimwear (pictured below, Michael Sheen and Chris Pratt).
But there's a huge twist in the tale, which I daren't reveal (though you can find out about it on the net if you must). Suffice to say that to Jim's physical predicament is added a weighty moral conundrum, which colours the subsequent course of his interminable journey and bends the outcome in ways not all reviewers have been happy with. I would only add that it's never wise to confide too fully in an android (let's hope this isn't Michael Sheen's final role, as he back-pedals frantically from that unfortunate interview where he apparently said he was quitting acting to join the struggle against fascism). This isn't 2001: A Space Odyssey, or even The Martian, but it's an entertaining movie offering some chewy food for thought.
The reasons for enduring cult status can sometimes be hard to fathom for those not embedded in the minutiae of genre cinema. Take The Burning and Hell Comes to Frogtown, both of which are being given top-notch home cinema releases. The Burning is a dual format package with a booklet and masses of extras including an over-the-top three commentaries. Hell Comes to Frogtown is Blu-ray only, has no booklet or commentaries but is replete with extras. Both film looks great: the image quality for each is unlikely to have ever looked better.
Whether you use its optional subtitle A Star Wars Story or not, Rogue One arrives with a diminutive air. Filling in some infamous but minor dopiness in the original Star Wars – why build the Death Star with such a fatal design flaw?
Anyone who expected a simple robots-versus-humans confrontation, like in Michael Crichton's original Westworld movie from 1973, had another think, or bunch of thinks, coming. The final episode of the Jonathan Nolan/JJ Abrams Westworld was more like a sci-fi manifesto for a post-human world.
When David Bowie first met with the producer Robert Fox to discuss Lazarus back in 2013, you now have to wonder if he was seriously contemplating his own mortality. The clue, of course, lies in the title, and that of Bowie's extraordinary last album, Blackstar.
While the world goes to hell in a handbasket, it’s faintly reassuring to imagine that there might be some intelligent life form out there beyond the stars that’s just waiting to land on our planet and make us all love one another – or swiftly put us out of our squabbling misery, once and for all. This familiar story – from The Day the Earth Stood Still, through Close Encounters and Independence Day, to Mars Attacks – is reworked for adults with a philosophical bent in Arrival.