The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Environmentalism concerns the awareness and concern for despoliation of the environment, pollution, climate change and endangered species as they are depicted in Fantastic Cinema.
The 1970s Nature’s Revenge and Animals Attack. films began to raise issues of environmental concern, showing various animal species becoming hostile, driven out of their natural habitats or mutated as a result of pollution and destruction of the environment.
Other films depict humanity living in a badly polluted future. In more recent years, rising concerns about Global Warming have led to depictions of futures where global temperatures have risen with catastrophic effect. More recently environmental catastrophes have started to feature in Disaster Movies.
A number of works that were previously regarded as Monster Movies, in particular the Bigfoot film, have started to show said monsters as an endangered species worthy of protection.
One of the great tv series of the 1980s, a powerful and incisive snapshot of Thatcherite England, the backroom politics of the nuclear power industry and the environmentalist movement. A brilliantly written show featuring great performances
James Cameron’s film was a smash phenomenon. Cameron has relocated the plot of Dances With Wolves on another planet and uses motion capture to create one of the most dazzlingly realised alien worlds on film
Hayao Miyazaki’s second film, a visually stunning work set in the aftermath of a holocaust. Miyazai’s frequent themes of pacifism and respect for the environment and run through building to a emotionally wrenching climax
A near-dialogueless story of a lonely robot clearing up junk in the aftermath of civilisation. This is surely Pixar’s most endearing film to date where they are operating at the peak of their creativity
This could be Christopher Nolan’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But where Kubrick was cold and oblique, this is a 2001 with a heart. A pleasure to see a film rooted in credible science and dealing with high concept SF
Excellent Australian-made Nature’s Revenge film with a couple on a weekend at a beach at siege from nature. Like the film’s obvious model The Birds, the attack occurs for never-specified reasons
George Miller of Mad Max fame makes a motion-capture animated film about a young penguin who sets out to fulfill his dream of tap-dancing. This ends up being a film of unexpectedly winning charms
Epic and beautifully animated anime set largely underwater about the struggle to save a dying Earth from an evil super-computer that wants eradicate humanity
Despite being made by the same company, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Final Fantasy videogame. It is a visually stunning work of anime that takes place on an epic scale set after Earth has been invaded by spirit beings
Unexpectedly delightful film about a man and a robot. With Tom Hanks alone with a robot for company in the aftermath of civilisation, it becomes in effect Cast Away meets Wall-E
Delightful and charming Studio Ghibli film about shape-changing raccoons that blend with humanity when their forest is threatened
Here Shusuke Kaneko revived the Gamera series of the 1960s/70s with a series of stunning effects. The result promptly set a new standard for the Japanese monster movie
Visually extraordinary film set in an environmentally devastated future, this place enormous creativity into depicting a strange, very alien world
One of the most intensive and exciting action films of recent with humanity engaged in a furious battle with plants and killer robots
A strong and effective environmental horror film from Larry Fessenden in which the crew of an Alaskan drilling operation disturb something beneath the frozen ground
The 19th Godzilla film, part of the 1990s revival where the series started to employ modern animatronics. This revives Mothra in quite beautiful ways and mounts to a rousing monster battle
Not a seventh sequel to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, this adapts the videogame of the same name. Dazzling anime action but is take-no-prisoners with explanations about what is happening to non game players
A harsh and urgent French-made catastrophe film about a family trying to survive and get to safety with the appearance of a sudden cloud of deadly acid rain
David Cronenberg’s daughter Caitlin makes her directorial debut with a film set around a family dinner in a future where the world has decided to euthanize the world population by twenty percent
This was the first anime film made in CGI, an ambitious SF film involving a time travel plot and a struggle against a machine-dominated future
Maybe the world’s first serious, non-horror, non-cutsie Bigfoot film – an interesting film based on eyewitness accounts that seeks a genteel understanding between the two species
One of the better copies of Night of the Living Dead, a Spanish film where an agricultural pesticide causes the dead to rise from their graves in rural England
A film from Rolf de Heer, a director who makes highly unusual works and should be better known than he is. In this, an alien woman befriends a man after she appears in the Australian Outback
Appealing animated film with an environmentalist theme where four young orphan animals go on a quest to save their woods
Richard Kelly of Donnie Darko fame makes a work set in a near-future L.A., a sprawling film bursting at the edges with too many characters and subplots but not uninteresting
The film mangles and fails to understand the fine Harry Harrison novel it is based on but in its own right creates an effective and worthwhile portrait of a badly overpopulated 21st Century New York
The first of several animated films based on Marvel Comics properties, this does a solid job in adapting Mark Millar’s The Ultimates, a retelling of The Avengers origin story
Xavier Gens makes an undeniably entertaining big-budget film about killer shark amok in the Seine
Darren Aronofsky’s surreal drama wildly divided critics and was a box-office flop with general audiences. Naturally, what I thought the film was about was completely different to what Aronofsky stated it was about
Likeable effort from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Productions in which a Bigfoot is befriended by a family. The star of the show is Kevin Peter Hall in the amazingly expressive Bigfoot makeup from Rick Baker
Following the success of Jurassic Park, a host of other Michael Crichton books were filmed, including this not entirely successful but not uninteresting work where Crichton attempts to modernise the lost world adventure
Disney family film about an expedition to Africa to find a dinosaur. This was made before Jurassic Park and so the effects are physical and variable but the film has an undeniable tenderness
In another of his big budget disaster spectacles, Roland Emmerich embraces environmental concerns about Global Warming. Here he (unscientifically) imagines the abrupt onset of a new Ice Age worldwide
An interesting if uneven remake of the 1950s SF classic from Scott Derrickson that smartly updates the story from the Atomic Age to a post-9/11 era where it now delivers a modern environmental warning
The film spinoff of a 1970s British tv series about a group who investigate scientific and ecological abuses. The film depicts an outbreak of aromegaly on an island near where growth stimulants have been dumped.
An appealing Danish-made film in which a pilot travels back in time from the future to save the world from environmental disaster but finds she is now stuck in her twelve year-old body
You can almost see the process in the scriptwriters head “What if we had Monster Truck rallies where the trucks were actual monsters?”. Way more entertaining than you ever expect it to be
George Miller had a charming and delightful hit with his dancing penguin film Happy Feet. He returns to make a sequel here that merely tries to repeat the same
After their successful revival of Godzilla in the 1990s, Toho revived Mothra for a series of standalone battles, albeit with a very juvenile focus made for children. This was the second and better of the three films
Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of the Biblical legend was mired in controversy. I can only applaud his decision to defy those who claim ownership of the story and set out to make an interesting film. Yet Noah remains an epic that never seems to quite fill the screen and a human drama that never quite comes to life
Classic SF film from effects man Douglas Trumbull, one that spins 2001: A Space Odyssey with a conservationist bent. Slightly loopy in terms of its science, the design and effects have a grandeur
Anime film spun off from a popular Japanese tv series. Despite crude animation, this has a colourful vigour and taps the same space opera vein as Star Wars, which came only three months earlier
The second of the animated films spun off around the Pokemon phenomenon and an altogether better film than its predecessor due to some imaginative animation
Barry Levinson becomes one of the few name directors to venture into the Found Footage genre and soberingly portrays the outbreak of an ecological catastrophe from multiple viewpoints
Another animated Barbie film, this appropriate the name of the Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale and makes it now about a fairy who preaches conservation. As these films go, this is one of the better made and comes with quite a degree of colour
Sequel to the tv mini-series Category 6: Day of Destruction ups the scale of the super-storm but is also better constructed as a disaster movie
I hate the utterly formulaic films of Blue Sky Studios, the ones behind the endless Ice Age sequels. That said, this is one of their more enjoyable – despite a plot that is amazingly busy trying to reintroduce characters from the first film, the screen overflows with colourful exuberance
Film set in a harsh future as people struggle to survive in a world where oxygen supplies have been reduced to near zero. An okay film that suffers from an implausible premise
Another killer shark survival piece with a family trapped aboard an abandoned oil rig under attack by a megalodon shark that may be the embodiment of an Aztec god
Soviet-made science-fiction film about a mysterious female alien visitor. The set-up intrigues for a time but the directorial delivery is dull and prosaic, while the mystery about who the alien woman is sidetracked by a long-winded interplanetary adventure in the second half
Film adaptation of a time travel novel by John Varley, one of the finest SF writers in the world, that ends up bluntening and dumbing the story down
John Boorman film with Powers Boothe searching for his son who has been snatched by Indians in the Amazon. A mystical film, the first to bring issues of deforestation of the Amazon rainforest to public attention
A post-apocalyptic film that predates Mad Max 2, which set the benchmark for the genre a couple of years later. This is watchable but hat you notice in comparison is that this is lacking the action element.
One of the worst among the usually worthwhile Japanese monster movie revivals of the 1990s. Much of the film is played down at an inanely silly children’s movie level, with there only being the requisite mass destruction effects to enliven the show
The bastard child among the spate of pre-MCU Marvel Comics adaptations during the mid-2000s, a film based on their swamp-dweller that throws out most of the comic-book
Austrian film where three people aboard a space station survive a toxic cloud that obliterates all life on Earth below
Film spinoff from the long-running animated tv series. The familiar gags are there but show feels awkward extruded out to a full-length plot. You keep feeling the film should have been more than it is.
Australian film in which Kodi Smit-McPhee heads through a time portal to save a polluted world resulting in a time paradox that ties back to his childhood. This had promise but badly lets down on its premise
Fourth of the original Star Trek films jumps on board the popularity of time travel themes following Back to the Future to have the regulars time travel back to the present for a series of amiable, easy comic encounters
TV series remake of Michael Crichton’s novel about the attempts to contain a viral outbreak from space. Crichton’s story was a straightforward work, whereas the mini-series has been absurdly overburdened with other plots
Using the framework of an SF film, told from the perspective of a devastated future, this is a documentary about Global Warming, although one that falls short of making a convincing argument
This is what might result if Greenpeace were allowed to take over the BBC arts division. Nicely made but not necessarily a great period drama about a whale curse
John McTiernan was one of the great action directors of the 1980s but this drama with Sean Connery as a scientist in the Amazonian rainforest and his bickering relationship with Lorraine Bracco failed to come off
Likeable Canadian-made children’s film where Mark Harmon and kids come to rescue of a lake monster
Animated film where fairies face the threat to their forest posed by a logging operation. Preachy message-making that is all but a recruitment film for Greenpeace and the Sierra Club
A theatrical film version spun off from The Jetsons, the popular Hanna-Barbera animated tv series about a space age family. Not too much has changed since the 1960s
A British disaster tv mini-series that depicts London being overwhelmed by vast flooding and the struggle by civil authorities to cope
From the pen of Iain Reid who wrote I’m Thinking of Ending Things, an SF film about a man recruited for a space mission and the training of his android replacement. Expectedly, what is going on is shifting and pulls expectation out from under us
Classic film from the 1970s Nature’s Revenge fad with a group gathered for a party on an island finding that flora and fauna all around has become malevolent and turned against humanity
Disappointing tv mini-series remake of the John Wyndham novel about England overrun by killer plants. This abandons most of the book’s sociological portrait for cliche melodramatics
A modernised version of the Goldilocks fairytale, which now comes with the addition of an environmentalist subplot and where the bears are made into an endangered species
A Roland Emmerich-produced film about a space expedition returned to a post-apocalyptic Earth to find a very changed world
Animated Dr. Seuss adaptation that emerges as occasionally cute but little that rises above formula. The original story holds a pro-environmentalist message that is laid on with a trowel in the film
Pointless remake of the cult Australian Nature’s Revenge film. This takes place amid some gorgeously shot natural scenery, is very faithful to the first film but seems to entirely miss the paranoid tone
An adaptation of a Ray Bradbury story set in an environmentally collapsed future as scientists at a research station debate over what to do when one of their colleagues transforms into a chrysalis
Big-budget film with a CGI creature made not long after Jurassic Park with Ted Danson as a zoologist investigating the existence of the Loch Ness Monster film. This only resorts to simplistic cliches
A low-budget post-apocalyptic action film featuring the almost completely forgotten martial arts and (non)-actor Ron Marchini who must venture out into the ruined city to rescue three girls
The second of the video-released Dr Dolittle films featuring his teenage daughter Kyla Pratt. This is marginally better and less excruciating in its humour than its predecessor Dr. Dolittle 3 was
The first sequel to the massive success of Jurassic Park where Steven Spielberg returns to direct with a script that seems a mishmash of loose ends that only weakly rehashes the original
Directorial debut of Roland Emmerich’s regular screenwriter Dean Devlin who has clearly been given orders to make another Emmerich film. Thus we get all the same effects-driven mass destruction spectacle, absurd science and pro-environmental messages
French film about Earth endangered by an oncoming moon and how only one man can save the world. This seemed it might be something culty – before the mind-bogglingly bizarre science becomes apparent
This has distinct overtones of 2001: Space Odyssey and Event Horizon about an expedition to Mars to investigate a mysterious black sphere – only to find that it offers a gateway to Heaven
The original Mighty Joe Young was a wonderfully underrated giant ape film. This is a remake conducted in the post-Jurassic Park era that adds CGI but holds none of the magic of the original
Near laughable film in which Chuck Norris is cast as the guardian spirit of a forest preaching eco-friendly attitudes to kids and inspiring them to stand up against loggers
The live-action adaptation of the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon series is a film construed entirely around slapstick sequences that never requires you to engage your brain in any way
The eleventh Godzilla in which Godzilla faces the pollution monster Hedorah. For some reason, this gets a listing in The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time, but there are far worse entries in the series
A cheap 1970s Nature’s Revenge film that blatantly borrows all the essentials of The Birds in the story of a group of trampers in the High Sierras coming under attack by wildlife due to an ozone hole.
A directorial outing from actor Bob Hoskins where a kid travels up a rainbow but his doing up sets nature in a heavy-handed environmentalist message
An Italian exploitation ripoff of Jaws with a group of environmentalists in South America dealing with a killer crocodile that has been made giant size by radioactive waste
A sequel to Killer Crocodile, which was a dreary Italian-made Jaws ripoff. Here another radioactive waste mutated crocodile stalks people. Indifferently made.
The Stephen King short story only runs to 16 pages. This is the eleventh film spinoff to date (which runs at about one film per 1.4 pages of story). Unlike the other sequels, this claims to be an origin story
Birdemic was a cult bad movie – incredibly, despite the better budget that must have come his way, James Nguyen has gone and made the same thing filled with laughably flat dialogue and the worst effects ever seen on screen
An obnoxious comedy that has the view that it is fun to watch Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin wreck a bio-dome because the scientists are a bunch of tight-asses
This was the seventh of the 1960s Gamera films and one of the worst of the series. By now, the film is pitched entirely to juvenile audiences, while the effects are pitiful
Excruciating CGI cute animals film where animals gang up to stop Brendan Fraser redeveloping their forest. Essentially a 1970s Nature’s Revenge film by way of the slapstick family-friendly violence of Home Alone
The once celebrated John Frankenheimer flopped with this monster movie about a mutant bear with laughable effects and inflated pretensions to message making
At one point, Birdemic had a bad movie cult that rivalled The Room. Whether we asked for it or not, this is a third film in the series. James Nguyen seems to think everybody has come for a lecture about Global Warming.
The new contender for the Worst Film Ever Made, this fully lives up to its reputation, full of astounding technical ineptitudes, bad acting and hilarious one-liners. A blatant ripoff of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds
The twelfth Godzilla film. Under director Jun Fukuda, a juvenile inanity had by now come to dominate the series by this point. The special effects, often recycled from previous films, are very cheesy