The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Super Soldiers refer to efforts to artificially create a superior form of soldier – one that usually has superior strength, fighting skills, agility, ability to sustain damage, or is Cyborg enhanced. A common trope in these is of the human whose emotions is suppressed to make them a more efficient killer and their rediscovering feelings throughout the course of the story.
Genre works are full of these. Frequently, Superheroes emerge from experiments to create super-soldiers – the most famous example being Captain America, while others appear in franchise like Universal Soldier, Hitman and Halo. Judge Dredd and RoboCop are attempts to do so for law enforcement.
An equal number of Super-Villains come from such programs – a frequent plot is of the super-soldier that is revived and proceeds to go amok. A regular plot in genre cinema is of Nazi or Soviet super-soldiers that are unearthed and revived.
Animated film that takes place in a Steampunk alternate history. This brims over with an extraordinary degree of visual invention from the amazingly detailed vistas of the world to a script tossing in quirky twists and wacky inventions
The culmination of one of the most ambitious cinematic exercises ever conducted, with Marvel weaving storylines through several films to finally merge here with flawless regard. The characters get far more depth than in all of their previous films
The first Avengers film came with a massive anticipation in seeing the characters come together and the snappiness of their interplay; here this seems more flat, while the rest is overrun by wall-to-wall action
Marvel conclude the cliffhanger they left Avengers: Infinity War on and offer up a bigger-than-big line-up, overspilling with just about every MCU character to ever appear on screen up to that point
Marvel’s third Avengers film, uniting almost every superhero under their roof, resulting in some thirty characters on screen and a plot that becomes a blur of changing locations and superheroic punch-ups
A Jet Li vehicle that falls into the masked superhero genre where the show has taken a few leaves from the tv series The Green Hornet. Enjoyable fun with some exhilarating action sequences
Jackie Chan starring action film that reads like an earthbound Star Wars with he up against a villain in black and his army of super-soldiers
That starts out seeming a standard mindless action film in which Vin Diesel is resurrected as an augmented super-soldier only for everything we assume to get turned on its head in interesting ways
The DC Comics superhero Blue Beetle, one of the Teen Titans, is given his own film. One of the more quickly forgettable entries among DC Comics’ attempts to compete with the MCU
A reboot of the Jason Bourne series with Jeremy Renner replacing Matt Damon. The exhiliratingly kinetic action scenes are watered down, while the plot lacks the same focus. The first of the series to enter genre territory however
Cheap and fairly terrible adaptation of the Marvel Comics superhero from low-budget director Albert Pyun. The superheroics look impoverished and Matt Salinger makes a dopey-looking Steve Rogers
Another of the mostly disastrous Marvel tv adaptations of the 1970s. Captain America is sidelined for much of the show. This does conduct the coup of casting Christopher Lee as the villain but criminally gives him nothing to do
Laughably cheap and dull tv pilot version of comic-book superhero, which emerges less the Captain America of Marvel Comics fame than Captain America imagined as Evel Knievel superhero
The fourth Captain America film, where Anthony Mackie now takes over the shield and costume. And you really need to have been following MCU continuity to make sense of much of what is going on
Less Captain America 3 than The Avengers 3 – the entire film has been conceived as a massive superheroic punch-up. The results move with an exhilarating pace, but the Russo Brothers haven’t yet mastered Joss Whedon’s hand with character humour
One of the more disappointing of the Marvel Comics adaptations. Despite all the elements assembled, this never comes to life in director Joe Johnston’s hands and takes forever to get into action
Captain America’s second solo outing feels more like a Mission: Impossible film or an episode of 24 than a superhero film. Lots of Marvel continuity and fanservice and you are taken aback at how political it is prepared to be
Bruce Lee popularised the kung fu genre but then died. Welcome to the Brucespolitation phenomenon where for several years we had Bruce lookalikes appearing in copycat works. Several Bruce imitators appear here as his clones
This gets full marks for an attention grabbing title – outside of that it has the cheap shabbiness of a Troma film, substituting a gonzo sarcasm and plentiful bad taste and gore for many of the filmmaking basics
One of the worst of Uwe Boll’s videogame adaptations. This consists of action sequences slung together with random indifference and badly mismatched casting
Ang Lee dips his feet into the action genre in a conceptually fascinating work where assassin Will Smith facies a younger clone of himself. Smith’s performance and the effects used to de-age his double are top-notch
An extraordinary anime adapted from Project Itoh, a conceptually challenging work concerning a villain who can manipulate language to drive populations to genocide
Adam Wingard thriller about a sinister stranger who inveigles his way into a household. This does well playing off the handsomely polished charms of Dan Stevens, less well when it turns into an a left field action film
Web-series, later released as a film, based on the Halo 4 videogame. While the games have a massively detailed backhistory of the universe, this is disappointingly only a low-budget military recruits in training scenario
A compilation of shorts from anime directors set in the Halo videogame universe. The first two episodes have a breathtaking scale but the others are bitsy stories but nothing standout
A film about a genetically tinkered teenage girl assassin that never lives up to its potential. Saoirse Ronan is great in the title role but director Joe Wright never gives the action scenes the kick they need
An intense kick of pure adrenaline. Imagine a version of The Six Million Dollar Man shot First Person Shooter style by hyper-adrenalised parkour junkies dragging the audience through a series of death-defying stunts
Disappointing film adaptation of the videogame from Xavier Gens that comes with unremarkable action scenes, a script filled with holes and Timothy Olyphant miscast as Agent 47
The second film based on the videogame, more a reboot than a sequel. This is far closer to the game than the earlier film and emerges as the superior of the two due to a slick action movie polish
An animated Marvel Comics adaptation that is actually two separate stories involving The Incredible Hulk, who battles respectively Wolverine and Thor
A mindless action film made for video as a copy of Universal Soldier in which FBI agent Bryan Genesse comes up against soldiers turned into programmed killers via implanted chips
This Canadian effort about Soviet super-soldiers unfrozen in the present-day feels like one of a bunch of cheap direct-to-video copies of Universal Soldier that came out in the late 1990s
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
Action film with Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson as a cyborg soldier fighting a one-man war against rogue police drones of the future. A fairly generic assemblage of cliches
Robert Rodriguez turns his earlier action film into an insanely creative comic-book overflowing with SF devices (and homages). The casting alone is side-splitting and Rodriguez’s visual absurdism wins the day
Based on the popular videogame, this is fairly much Death Wish by way of Jacob’s Ladder and proves an underwhelming delivery of its promise
Outpost was a modestly effective Nazi zombie film. This was the second of two sequels, a prequel that goes back to depict the original Nazi experiments
Steven Seagal makes an SF film. Even more bizarrely, Seagal plays the villain for one of the few times in his career, namely the dictator of a dystopian future. An overweight and aging Seagal has a handful of scenes philosophising, while the bulk of the film is a super-soldier plot carried by others
The most violent, brutal, blood-drenched films one has seen in recent memory, a South Korean entry about a monster loose aboard a prison ship
Not wishing to insult anyone’s beliefs but Christian cinema has produced some really bad films. With such lowered expectations, this Rapture film approaches halfway watchable with a story that somewhat resembles Mad Max 1 about a biker seeking vengeance against a decent man
This has been conceived as the ultimate modern exploitation film featuring Nazi zombie piloting flying sharks. Think Iron Sky by way of Sharknado. The results are highly entertaining
Kurt Russell gives a fine performance as a programmed soldier who discovers emotions but under Paul W.S. Anderson the rest of the big-budgeted film collapses into over-inflated cliches
Not a time travel film as the title leads you to expect but a Chinese copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark where you expect they were trying to call it ‘tomb raiders’. The director is also the production designer leading to a gorgeously designed film but also one of constant action postures almost entirely lacking in substance
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
Follow-up to the previous animated Marvel Comics film featuring The Avengers, this serves to introduce Black Panther to the screen for the first time
The first of two cheap Universal Soldier sequels made in Canada with Matt Battaglia inheriting Jean-Claude Van Damme’s role
he second of two cheap video-released sequels to the Jean-Claude Van Damme film. This has the novelty of featuring Burt Reynolds as the bad guy
The first studio film from Roland Emmerich, a loud, noisy action featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren as Vietnam Vets resurrected as super-soldiers
Sixth entry in the series, this throws out all the themes the previous sequels operated by and feels like a Universal Soldier film written by Philip K. Dick with utterly fascinating results. John Hyams hits in with a brutal intensity that shows he is one of the most exciting up and coming action directors
The fifth of the Universal Soldier films reuniting both Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, while being given a tough, brutal action punch by director John Hyams
Sequel to Roland Emmerich’s Universal Soldier, this brings back Jean-Claude Van Damme but otherwise substitutes a brain dead plot that has him facing an evil A.I.
Horror comedy told from the perspective of four friends who are unaware they have been transformed into zombies. The contrast of their reactions with everybody else as they flee in terror is mildly amusing for awhile but this is essentially a one-gag film