The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The future concerns any setting at a point ahead of us now in time. Ever since its beginnings, science-fiction has made great efforts at depicting how society may change and evolve, how scientific progresses may transform the world, or alternately showing Dystopias where the future may become a nightmare.
The first major depictions of the future came in the industrial dystopia of Metropolis (1927) and the H.G. Wells scripted Things to Come (1936) that saw the future transformed by science into a world of clean white antiseptic lines where people wore Grecian robes.
By the 1950s, visions of the future headed to the stars, which saw the journey conducted by no-nonsense engineers in boiler suits. This led to the utopianism of Star Trek (1966-9), which saw diverse crews belonging to a galactic federation carrying a message of democracy to other worlds.
The 1960s also brought a series of dystopian visions with Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and other works, which usually extrapolated some undesirable social trend of the day to a nightmare extreme and saw it run by an autocratic government. By the time of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971), the antiseptic white vision of the future was one that saw humanity being strangled and reduced to an imperfection as our machinery and systems turned against us.
The 1950s brought the first depictions of the Post-Holocaust future, where civilisation had been destroyed (usually by nuclear war). By the 1980s, this had become a series of action films set in a world where crazies roamed the wastelands in dune buggies and affected a ragged leather chic. Depictions of the 2000s onwards became more grim and added environmental catastrophe scenarios to the mix.
The 1980s also brought Cyberpunk, a future that was a direct outthrust of today, filled with bustling texture, advertising and extrapolations of technology into A.I. and Virtual Reality. Adjacent to this is the dark future where cyborgs and androids fight in a rundown world teetering on or fully collapsed.
There are other works that take place in Near Future Settings where little of the present-day has changed except perhaps for one technological innovation or trend. Other depictions include futures where humanity has expanded out into the solar system and colonised other worlds or the entire galaxy. Other works are set in Far Future Settings where civilisation is forgotten and humanity has evolved or devolved.
Film from the muchly underrated Peter Watkins about a future where nations maintain peace by holding televised war games. As always with Watkins, this is stark, potent and highly politicised
An ‘illustrated film’ – essentially comic-book panels with voiceover narration. The story about gods inhabiting a burned-out future is far more ambitious than can be crammed into the film
Not an adaptation of the oft-filmed story from Jewish legend about the creation of a creature of clay but a Polish SF film set in a slightly dystopian future featuring the possible creation of artificial people
Ingenue effort from debuting director Angelo Lopes depicting soldiers in combat in the ruins of civilisation
Baffling mix of teen drama and eco-SF film set in an ozone depleted future with Tcheky Karyo engaged in a series of human-plant mutations that transform him into a swarm of insects
The original version of the Margaret Atwood novel made way before the tv series. This aims in the general direction but is more a film that achieves a sense of disquiet rather than the true horror of its’ heroine’s situation in this world
From SF writer Jim Munroe who made the impressive Ghosts With Shit Jobs, a micro-budgeted work set in a post-cyberpunk future where the fascination lies in the casually littered assumptions around the edges
This has the promising idea of a corporate-ruled future where people receive advertising implants but soon dissolves into the equivalent of a B-budget hacker thriller
Anime set in a disquiet utopia where the populace is monitored by cyber implants. Almost completely eschewing the usual action scenes of sf anime, this tells a strong, intelligent and character-driven story
A disappointing sequel to the madcap Hong Kong superheroines film. This reunites the principal cast members but seems to miss all the fun of its predecessor
Probably THE worst sequel ever made. The script’s treatment of continuity to the first film is utterly incoherent, while director Russell Mulcahy and most of the cast go at it with unrestrained OTT excess
Why we needed a sequel to Hot Tub Time Machine is a big question. Essentially, Back to the Future Part II meets The Hangover, all this does is wind the original’s amiable coarseness up by a factor of ten
From the title and poster, you get the impression this is a future-set film about hoverboards or drones. Instead we have a near-future film involving agri-business conspiracy where euthanasia is dispatched by corporate lackeys
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
A Young Adult box-office hit that does little more than competently shuffle around ideas from other SF films. Jennifer Lawrence makes an impressive showing but the film also soft-pedals the moral reality of its scenario
The first sequel to the box-office juggernaut. The surprise is that it spends defies most of the things that made the first film, not to mention has made one of the year’s biggest box-office hits into a parable for Marxist revolution
The third The Hunger Games film starts in with a more brooding complexity but with the book being split in two parts, the story feels more thinly drawn and comes to an abrupt end just when it starts to get interesting
The finale of the saga comes with a tough, gritty edge that make it the best directed of the series. On the other hand, it builds well only to arrive at an ending that goes oddly sideways and throws sympathies to the wind
The Hunger Games was one of the biggest franchise of the 2010s. Here a number of the key talents return to make a prequel to the events, telling a story from the early days of the Hunger Games
Disappointing adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Robot stories. The film pays token acknowledgement to Asimov’s characters and universe and mostly seems interested in spectacular effects set-pieces
A film about stupid people that for once actually is funny. This a raucous but often biting satire where Luke Wilson wakes up in the year 2025 to find that the stupid have inherited the future
An anthology that adapts three stories from Ray Bradbury’s short story collection but does so with singularly heavy-handed regard. The best aspect of the film is the framing story with a brooding Rod Steiger in the title role.
Comic-book creator Enki Bilal creates a visually extraordinary film about Ancient Egyptian gods awakening in a future New York
Niccol has a smartness that makes him a must-watch director. Considerable conceptual dexterity has gone into this variant on Logan’s Run set in a future in which time is regarded as a currency
Divergent, the first entry in this Young Adult dystopian series, a poor man’s Hunger Games, failed the “I can’t hold any suspension of disbelief” test. This offers more of the same, plus lots of random effects sequences
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
A Japanese film about a cyborg-enhanced bounty hunter chick, the second in a series. This is sort of like RoboCop but played with a much more softcore focus
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
The sixth and last of the Josh Kirby time-travelling juvenile adventures produced by Charles Band and the best of the series, which takes a trip into Josh’s past
The film adaptation of the cult comic-book looks great in terms of design but misses the comic’s satiric sense of humour and simply becomes a thudding Sylvester Stallone action vehicle
Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho turns his hand to making an SF film about the attempts to perfect an android soldier and the fight to complete and control it
This was one of the first US films to depict the future. It is essentially Metropolis having been remade as a Broadway musical with an emphasis on comedy
Dystopian action film that could have only been made during the late 70s Oil Crisis where Lee Majors defies a totalitarian system where vehicles are banned by setting out in his racing car
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
Adaptation of a classic SF short story about children’s toys from the future that give them expanded mental powers. Much of the story has been dropped in favour of banal New Age thinking
One of the most brilliant SF works conducted for television – the adaptation of an Ursula Le Guin book about a a man whose dreams change the world every time he wakes up
Another of the DC Original Animated Movies. This deals with both the Legion of Super-Heroes and Supergirl, bringing them together in a mutual adventure
Set in a future where libraries have armies fighting against the militarised forces of censorship. The social scenario strains credibility but this Japanese Young Adult film works well
An offbeat science-fiction film sold as a work of erotica but one that actually subverts the genre in interesting ways concerning a futuristic apartment block performers where strippers are being fed a drug
Yorgos Lanthimos makes a deadpan black humour SF film set in a future where one is forced to find their perfect romantic partner or else be turned into an animal
Dystopian SF mounted on a big budget by people that don’t have a clue what they are doing. This creates one of prettiest depictions of the future of any film of this era but it is only a surface deep depiction
An adaptation of Stephen King’s Richard Bachman novel set in a future where youths compete in a race where they must walk hundreds of miles without stopping or else be shot
From Rian Johnson, a time travel film that is uneven but is mostly conducted with considerable cleverness and intelligence. One of the few multiplex films driven by plot and some clever twists rather than action
A film I went into with no expectation that quickly creates a fascinating future and offers some ingeniously original treatments of cloning and Virtual Reality themes
Perversely original anime about a sex robot in the aftermath of civilisation who is transformed into a human. Imagine Pinocchio by way of H.R. Giger
An impressively designed Quebecois sf film where it is it is sad to see so much artistry lavished on something completely nonsensical and utterly woolly-headed in terms of its ideas
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
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
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
Francis Ford Coppola’s extraordinarily ambitious SF film about an architect’s vision of building a utopia. Hated by most audiences, this still contains some great if flawed film-making.
Fritz Lang’s visionary work was something way ahead of it time and is one of the few silent films still screened today. The film’s politics are naive but Lang’s visions of the city of the future and the first screen robot are vivid.
Stunning anime remake of Metropolis based on an Osasmu Tezuka. The visuals and particularly the design are overwhelming – like a Cyberpunk film set in a stylised Art Deco world
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
Steven Spielberg takes on Philip K. Dick in a much grittier film than he usually makes. In the strong and intelligent script, Tom Cruise is an officer on a police force that predicts crime before it happens only to then be hunted by his own side
Film that takes place across three future eras that questions what happens when Virtual Reality produces artificial memories more vivid than real world ones
Jaco Van Dormael film that reaches for epic ideas in a story about multiple life pathways and a babble of ideas taken from physics but fails to assemble them in a way that makes much sense
Long-planned project that creates an interesting future scenario, epic action, an array of Dirty Dozen characters but emerges as surprisingly trivial
Wrongly referred to as an adaptation of the original Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, this South Korean Cyberpunk film does homage many aspects of Blade Runner
The first film adaptation of the classic George Orwell dystopian work. The brilliance of the book only comes through in occasional moments but mostly the film befalls the leaden hand of director Michael Anderson
An Italian exploitation film about gangs fighting in the ruins of a future New York. Director Enzo G. Catsellari has ripped off both Escape from New York and The Warriors
Superb adaptation of the George Orwell novel that was actually shot in the months and year that the book takes place. Orwell’s future is imagined as a bleak post-War dystopia given life by a superlative cast
A new adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. In this case, the film was shot in Russia and imagines the world as a full-on dystopian future quite unlike any of the previous film versions
The novelty of the world’s first Vietnamese science-fiction film set in a future where many areas are underwater as a result of climate change. Much of this is a very dull film observing the day to day life of people affected but the SF elements intrude in occasionally interesting ways
Baffling SF film that lacks anything resembling a plot and seems mostly an experimental film about showing pretty light patterns
Nacho Vigalondo scripted film that seems like a mix between a girls’ boarding school story and an SF film like The Island, all directed with amazingly over-ornamented costuming and design scheme not seen on screen since at least The Cell
This anime has a surprising number of similarities to Upside Down, which was released one year earlier, both being set in two different worlds where gravity in each operates in the opposite directions and of the forbidden relationship between a boy and a girl from either world
The second of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s unsold Genesis II pilots. While you can see the series had some potential, the plot about the venture to a society where women keep men as slaves has a giggly silliness that feels like a throwback to 50s films like Queen of Outer Space
Tim Burton’s much disliked remake. Certainly, the ape makeups are superb. While Burton touches many points with the original, he has dropped the biting satire in favour of adventure, while the ending left everyone scratching their heads
The film that started it all. This takes what could have been a jokey premise and delivers it in bold, exciting stokes. What elevates the film is Rod Serling’s script. filled with embittered soliloquies that become a biting commentary on the human condition, before the film reaches one of the great cinematic twist endings
SF film that plays out like it should be an episode of Black Mirror where Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor play a couple who sign up for a process where a baby can be gestated and born externally inside an egg
Kevin Costner directs David Brin’s post-holocaust tale as an epic Western. Most audiences ridiculed the film’s ardent flag-waving but you cannot deny that Costner makes a stirring and undeniably interesting film
This spends much effort creating an imaginative future where priests battle vampires who are banished to reservations only to do nothing with it other than reach for the tropes of the Western
Gimmick master William Castle makes an SF films about scientists engaged in simulations and mental probing to obtain secrets from a man’s mind
Film spinoff of an anime series about a future police force that uses a system to monitor the brains of the populace for the potential to commit crime. Reminiscent of Minority Report, this is not uninteresting, although falls short of being another Appleseed or Ghost in the Shell
From Peter Watkins, a remarkably stark and brutal film set in a near-future USA where political prisoners are allowed to run for freedom through the desert while hunted by law enforcement officials
Film based around the improbable concept of a future where on one night of each year all crime including murder becomes permissible. While this promises a rich vein of satire, the film only emerges as a variant on Straw Dogs
Slightly more interesting than its predecessor in that it takes the action out from gated communities into the streets, otherwise this offers just the same as The Purge – much in the way of heavy artillery and a patina of contemporary politics that have all the depth of a protest placard
The Purge was a routine film that caught on with audiences but the premise lacks the legs to be a franchise – for one, it is based on a future scenario that has zero plausibility. This makes paper-thin stabs in terms of social issues but all interest evaporates when the guns start blazing
The fourth and final of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass stores, which shows the professor as an old man in decaying future Britain trying to deal with an alien force manifest through ancient megaliths. A surprisingly bleak and cynical end to the saga but still with the greatness of Kneale’s writing
The great Robert Altman’s most frustrating film set around an enigmatic dice game in a frozen future
Standard action film made interesting by the choice of its setting in a post-Soviet Russia Cyberpunk future
This has the interestingly original premise of being set in a post-apocalyptic world where revived dragons have eliminated most of humanity. The show is stolen by Matthew McConaughey in wild man mode
Lisa Joy, co-creator of tv’s Westworld, directs a work of future noir in an ingenious plot involving a memory recording device and Hugh Jackman obsessed with a missing woman
Dazzling French animated Cyberpunk film shot in the performance capture animated process and then rendered in striking two-tone black-and-white
SF film set in a future where agents are sent to repossess artificial organs when the owner’s fall behind on payments. Sort of Sicko by way of Logan’s Run but lacking the necessary sense of black humour to work
Saw series director Darren Lynn Bousman conducts a futuristic Gothic rock opera. A film of constant posturings where Bousman demonstrates remarkably little affinity for either music or sf … a musical that feels made by people who are tone deaf
A popular hit that spins the cyborg cop theme through a Cyberpunk future, while director Paul Verhoeven piles on excesses of violence and black humour. A darkly funny satire of Reaganite America, this is an entertainingly slick comic-book of a movie
With a script co-written by Frank Miller, this sequel comes in as a leaner work that abandons the campier excesses of its predecessor while expanding on its ideas with considerable ingenuity
The third Robocop film killed the series off with a disastrous decision to go for a PG rating and pair Robocop with a cute kid
Stuart Gordon, the cult director of Re-Animator, turns his hand to making a live-action Transformers film way back before anybody had ever head the name Michael Bay
Classic work of dystopian SF set in a future where an ultra-violent sport has been created to pacify the masses
Lucio Fulci was a cult Italian horror director. This was the only occasion that Fulci visited the SF film, a low-budget ripoff of Rollerball by way of Mad Max featuring futuristic gladiatorial games
A Hunger Games wannabe with elderly people forced to eliminate one another while inhabiting young avatar bodies inside a virtual simulation. It is a long time since I have encountered a film where the fundamental premise makes no sense whatsoever when you look at it logically
This adapts one of Stephen King’s Richard Bachman novels but the book is sidelined to become an Arnold Schwarzenegger action comic-book on the oft-used theme of a future where people compete in televised gladiatorial games
Edgar Wright conducts a remake of The Running Man and takes it more back to the original Stephen King book than the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film, while adding a level of biting modern commentary
Ambitious if not entirely successful film with Harvey Keitel building a robot that proceeds to go amok on a moonbase inhabited by Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett
Modest and underrated Philip K. Dick adaptation that builds reasonable atmosphere during its journey across a planet and doubt as to who among the party might be one of a breed of evolving androids
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
South Korean tv mini-series about the investigation of a moonbase with illicit experiments and something possibly alien unleashed
Based on Ray Kurzweil’s non-fiction book about the coming evolution of machine intelligence, this is an odd mix of documentary and SF, including a storyline to illustrate Kurzweil’s main theses … The vision is an extraordinarily utopian one but one has just a few plausibility problems with it