The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Fate and predestination refers to the belief that everything that happens to an individual is preordained, even that an individual’s life pathway and death have been planned in advance. Usually the mechanics behind fate and predestination are left vague or it put down to divine agency. This can often be related to Prophecy – the ability to foresee these events in advance.
In genre cinema, the most common form of fate is that of the hero who elects to step into their destiny as the Chosen One, something that can often have been predicted before their birth. Sometimes fate can offer a choice and it is up to an individual to decide which way their pathway will go. In other cases, this may come in the form of auguries of doom if one follows a particular pathway.
Classic film starring Tyrone Power as an ambitious carnival barker who has success with a mind-reader act. Filled with great film noir atmosphere and a doomed sense of fate at play
A 1940s light fantasy with Robert Cummings as an angel comes down in a Western town to help bad guy outlaw Brian Donlevy redeem his ways
The Stand is regarded as Stephen King’s best novel, an epic that depicts the final showdown between good and evil in the aftermath of civilisation. The mini-series adaptation was alas placed into the ham fists of one of King’s worst adapters. Mick Garris
Would be quirky, surrealistic indie film with lovers on the run in Las Vegas. Quentin Tarantino appears as the spirit of chance from an interdimensional swimming pool
One of Woody Allen’s most warmly funny films of the 90s with a side-splitting and award-winning performance from Mira Sorvino. Throughout, Allen gently spoofs Greek tragedy.
A delightful work of Magical Realism from Cuba where a saint tells us the story of the interwoven fates of various people living in Havana
A film that was as groundbreaking when it came out as Star Wars was in its day. The Wachowskis create a defining work on Virtual Reality themes and do so with a sublime cool and a series of breathtaking action moves that blew everybody away
A Hallmark tv mini-series remake of the Greek myths that fails to stand up to the classic 1963 version. Here Ray Harryhausen’s amazing stop-motion animated effects are replaced by cut-price CGI
M. Night Shyamalan’s immediate follow-up to the huge hit of The Sixth Sense. This similarly builds a big conceptual mystery before arriving at the rather hokey notion that Bruce Willis is really a superhero
This spins the old plot about a clairvoyant dream of an airline disaster out as a teen horror film based around a series of bizarre novelty deaths. This became the first in a franchise of popular horror films.
The directorial debut of Ryuhei Kitamura. A film premised on the idea of mashing the John Woo-styled gangster film up with the gore-drenched George Romero zombie film.
Romance film where John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale meet and leave their details on random items in the belief luck will bring them back together
M. Night Shyamalan delves into the crop circle phenomenon and makes an alien invasion film. At this point his films were predicated on big conceptual surprises and this comes out as a damp squib when we find out what is going on
Third of The Matrix sequels and the weakest of the series. This offers one showstopping effects sequence, on the other hand it also leaves a host of unanswered questions dangling
The first of the sequels to The Matrix inevitably disappointed on the massive build-up. The Wachowskis leave more questions than answers, while the new action scenes are often jaw-dropping they also feel boiler-plated on
Lawrence Kasdan directs an adaptation of the Stephen King novel about a group of men on a weekend get together in the woods who find themselves in the midst of an alien invasion
The collaboration of Hong Kong directors Wai Ka Fai and Johnnie To have resulted in some utterly deranged films. This is a madcap one with Andy Lau as a bodybuilding Buddhist monk who can see people’s past lives
The first of the sequels, this has a group receiving bizarre deaths after receiving a premonition that prevents a deadly pile-up on the highway. It reveals the problems of creating a sequel to a film that was never intended to be a series
Mini-series with the intriguing premise of Timothy Hutton receiving a briefcase from the future with clues that foretells his death in five days time. This befalls utterly predictable handling and is padded out to fill a five-hour slot
Magical Realist film with Aishwarya Rai running a spice bazaar where she is able to tell fortunes
For all its descent into loopy ideas at times, this is a decidedly interesting M. Night Shyamalan film about myth featuring Bryce Dallas Howard as a water nymph who appears out of an apartment pool
Timur Bekmambetov’s sequel to Night Watch comes with a much better budget and the same wild visuals, although is slightly the lesser film
The original creative team behind the Final Destination series, James Wong and Glen Morgan, return for this sequel but only provide a routine series of bizarre novelty deaths following the premonition of a rollercoaster disaster
A sSequel in name only to White Noise, this is a very silly film with Nathan Fillion returning from a near-death experience able to see the auras of those about to die
The fifth of the Highlander films. It is hard to believe people could actually make a film worse than Highlander II but this is akin to Edward D. Wood Jr on a multi-million dollar budget
This adapts a Philip K. Dick story and then throws it out to make a generic action film with Nicolas Cage as a psychic. All the potential of its idea is lost amid a series of ridiculous plot twists
Beautifully filmed work featuring John Malkovich as an enigmatic Messenger of Death. A coolly sophisticated and mysterious film that plays out like an arthouse version of Final Destination by way of the Jeff Bridges Fearless
The film that Hitman should have been concerning a secret world of super-powered assassins, revved up by out of this world visuals from Timur Bekmambetov
This seems to want to do for the lesbian vampire film what Shaun of the Dead did for the zombie film. Alas, the film makes its appeal fairly and squarely into the crude, sexism of British lad culture
The fourth in the series of films about a series of deaths for survivors after premonition of disaster at a speedway. This is shot in 3D but the novelty death set-pieces have become preposterous
Clever concept of five people trapped in an elevator where one of them is The Devil. One of the better films to come out under the much debased name of M. Night Shyamalan who lends his name as producer
This claims to adapt a Chinese fairytale that was the basis for Cinderella. Nicely made but what you get is a cultural portrait with occasional Magical Realist elements more than anything like the traditional fairytale
A Philip K. Dick adaptation in which Matt Damon gets an accidental glimpse of the people that manipulate fate. This proves very satisfying on a conceptual and storytelling level
The series drags another entry out set around the premonition of a bridge collapse. This one is played with such an enthusiasm for the bizarrely improbable deaths that it is one of the best of the sequels
Akiva Goldsman, a screenwriter who has laid a trail of devastation through the genre, attempts to film a classic fantasy novel that has aptly described as unfilmable, resulting in a curtailed story that works in individual scenes but is mostly a spawling patchwork of fantasy elements and a romance that never seems to spark
The Stand is in my opinion Stephen King’s greatest book. The question is whether this new mini-series version will improve on the laughably failed 1994 version
Alex Garland directed-written tv mini-series that grasps at big ideas about the meaning of it all concerning a computer that can track every particle and predict past and future. This emerges as one of the finest SF work of the last few years
Low-budget film that takes an ambitious conceptual grasp in its story of deities and daughters of goddesses warring in the ruins of civilisation
Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, Guillermo Del Toro’s remake of the 1947 film noir tale about a fake clairvoyant is an exquisite piece of mood and design
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have become must-watch directors in the last decade. This film, which was shot in their apartment during Covid lockdown, becomes the ultimate conspiracy theory rabbit hole
A story about an apprentice at a mysterious company that deals with magic, this could well serve as a fix for those wanting something more of the Harry Potter franchise
A horror film based around the phenomenon of tarot cards, a surprise that nobody has done so before
A return to the Final Destination franchise after fourteen years, this comes with an undeniable sense of humour, producing a series of highly entertaining despatches to make the best entry in the series so far