Four human players team up to take on a monster – also played by another player. That's the simple version of Evolve, a mainly multiplayer online game developed by the team that created the superlative squad horror series Left 4 Dead. It's a great idea – but is let down in execution, so far.
This almost-no-budget feature by writer/director James Ward Byrkit was created by gathering eight of his actor-friends in his Santa Monica living room, and giving each of them a daily page of notes about their character on which to base their improvised performance. Five nights of shooting gave Byrkit enough material for the finished product, but questions must be asked about whether the process justified the flick's 88 minute running time.
The Wachowskis' sci-fi blockbuster has been getting a kicking from the Stateside critics, but perhaps that's because it's a bit of a shape-shifter with multiple personalities. Part dystopian fantasy, part fairy tale, part cosmic epic, all rolled up in a whole lot of astonishingly vivid special effects, Jupiter Ascending is like spending a day at Alton Towers with your brain marinating in mescaline.
High school – lockers, cliques, jocks. Do these things really even exist? Like Downton Abbey for American viewers, "high school" for non-Americans is a set of abstracted tropes, with most of us unable to tell how close or far from reality they are. Here they're played out to full effect in this tale of an emo girl who suddenly finds herself with time-rewinding powers.
Alex Garland’s directorial debut is spare, clever s.f. Ever since he began his now abandoned novelist’s career with The Beach, he has known how to drive high-concept narratives home, viscerally fuelling them with human foibles. Ex Machina’s tale of artificial, attractive intelligence rings subtle changes on familiar s.f. ideas, while keeping within the clean lines of a mostly three-hand drama. When callow internet search engine employee Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a competition to visit his company’s legendary founder Nathan (Oscar Isaac, pictured below right with Gleeson) in his isolated retreat, Nathan says he wants Caleb to put his latest invention, Ava (Alicia Vikander), to the Turing Test: does his prettily human-shaped robot have true consciousness? Has Nathan created Artificial Intelligence?
Mind games and regular injections of intriguing ideas maintain a steady grip, while claustrophobic corridors keep the budget cannily low. The question of who has a soul also exercised Garland in his adaption of his friend Kazuo Ishiguro’s clone dystopia Never Let Me Go. Garland’s Dredd script is a better comparison. Ex Machina has the mix of fizzy intellect, black humour and streamlined thrills Judge Dredd’s comic-book home 2000 AD has always specialised in (as did an early, obvious homage to it, Blade Runner). It’s a glorified yet subdued version of one of that comic’s standbys, the twist-ending Future Shock. Discarded Dredd composers Ben Salisbury and Portishead’s Geoff Barrow's score, suggesting John Williams’ Close Encounters riff when Ava appears, confirms the link.
Ex Machina’s novelty isn’t in its concept, but its social detail. Isaac’s Nathan embodies the internet geek as alpha male. The Mozart of computer coding by the age of 13, he speaks with the post-hippie informality beloved by Apple and Google, but pumps iron, has eyes cold with control, and lives in a Bond villain’s retreat, much as one imagines Bill Gates did. He has replaced Google with his own Bluebook by improving on the philosophy of search engines, tracking why we search, not what. When Caleb asks if Ava’s face was based on his porn profile, and Nathan mentions hacking into every mobile phone on the planet, the crazy dystopia we already live in is alarmingly clear. Nathan seems just the sort to have his hand on the virtual tiller: a mix of Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, internet activist and corporate raider (and Bill Gates...).
Garland’s three hands are played by actors he has brought together just before their careers sail beyond his reach. Isaac’s versatile intensity has built through fierce supporting parts in Agora and Drive to Inside Llewyn Davis and the new Star Wars, where he’s joined by Gleeson. Swedish star Vikander, great as an abused Danish queen in A Royal Affair and just making her English-language breakthrough in Testament of Youth, is high-wattage for robot Ava. Like the minor fourth hand here, apparent sex slave Katya (Sonoya Mizura), Ava seems a captive victim, a just-born, android innocent. Ex Machina’s subtlest sleight of hand is that our eventual horror at her treatment only makes sense if she has passed the Turing Test. If Ava didn’t look and emote like Vikander, her plight would seem as tragic as a toaster’s.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Ex Machina
Simple to play, fiendish to beat and with a huge depth of theme and beauty, The Talos Principle is a massively welcome end of year surprise. Like Portal and the recent The Swapper (whose writer also is involved here) this deftly blends a series of (120+) puzzles of growing complexity and ingenuity, that arise out of a very simple and brief set of mechanics, into a rich and deep philosophical theme.
The original Planet of the Apes series was Hollywood’s most ingeniously extended franchise, surviving the obliteration of Earth in its first sequel to loop back on itself and spin out a further three. This second film of the successful reboot and its already planned follow-up are both basically remakes of the clapped-out 1973 finale Battle for the Planet of the Apes, a conceptual handicap evident when it climaxes with two chimps in a punch-up.
In 1971, the British rock group UFO released their second album. Titled One Hour Space Rock, its cover bore the subtitle Flying and, yes, images of UFOs in the form of flying saucers and a bald, naked and pink humanoid with claw-like fingernails. Musically, although the album had its freaky sections and sported the lengthy tracks "Star Storm" and "Flying", what was on offer was mostly day-to-day blues-rock.
A sci-fi special would be incomplete without the profoundly influential figure of JG Ballard, a writer who, when he began his career in the late Fifties, fully subscribed to the notion that “sci-fi is the literature of the 20th century.” Unlike the “Hampstead novel,” he once said, “the sci-fi novel plays back the century to itself.”
No Gravity or Interstellar has challenged the might and influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey: its re-release this week is one of the movie events of the year. Those who haven’t previously seen it – but who take CGI for granted – should be prepared to be awestruck, if not necessarily moved, by the classical music-enhanced images of planets, spacecraft, and astronauts created with animation, matting, models, back projection, and Douglas Trumbull’s special photographic effects.