The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
James Cameron had mixed success with this alien contact film. Much of the show is designed to highlight Cameron’s interest in diving and the effects on display are spectacular but the film peters out at a peculiarly abrupt non-ending
TV mini-series released as a theatrical film in some parts of the world that resurrects Captain Nemo in the present-day. It is Irwin Allen returning to his tv roots where Captain Nemo’s adventures become a blatant attempt to copy Star Wars
The Russian Aquaman. One of the most popular hits from the Soviet Union, a film about a merman who comes onto land to woo a woman. Said to have influenced Guillermo del Toro with The Shape of Water
A few years ago Aquaman was regarded as a joke among superheroes. James Wan dispels any notion of Aquaman’s wimpiness in a series of jaw-dropping effects sequences that propel this ahead of anything the MCU is doing at the moment
The sequel to the DCEU’s Aquaman reaches for epic effects spectacle, although the character of Aquaman undergoes a substantial shift and is now given more of a comedy playing
Inspired by Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, this was one among the spate of 1960s underwater adventures. Passable adventure following a team on a quest to plant earthquake sensors on the ocean floor
A low-budget but surprisingly reasonable mix of submarine drama and 1950s alien invader film with a submarine crew tracking a flying saucer
Ishiro Honda, the director of Godzilla, makes a colourful dventure film about a super-submarine battling an undersea empire in the vein of other works of the era like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
James Cameron makes a third venture into the world of Pandora. The question is whether he finds any new territory to explore. What you cannot deny is that he creates a pretty and absorbing picture out of it all
James Cameron finally delivers his sequel to Avatar. Nothing could quite repeat the same phenomenon a second time but this does well with Cameron taking the opportunity to show more depth to his alien world
Seventh of the animated Barbie films, spinoff of the earlier Barbie Fairytopia, all delivered in sugary upbeat sentiments amid pastel colour schemes that would look eye-poppingly psychedelic if one were high
David Twohy, director of Pitch Black, makes a fine subtle, ghost story set aboard a submarine during WWII. At times, this achieves a genuinely haunted atmosphere
A film made to tap the 1970s fascination with the so-called Bermuda Triangle mystery with a name cast lost at sea on a ship as mysterious happenings start to occur
The MCU’s sequel to Black Panther. This offers the peculiarity of a work in which the superhero of the title never actually appears and is instead set around his absence following the death of Chadwick Boseman
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
Amid the fad for Jules Verne adaptations in the 1960s, Captain Nemo was spun off in this original adventure. By now Verne’s brooding inventor has become an absurdly larger-than-life comic-book character
Irwin Allen offers a variant on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in this film about an underwater city. A tv pilot that was foisted onto international audiences as a theatrical film after it failed to be picked up as a series
The title of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem is appropriated in an effort to appeal to the 1960s fad for Poe film adaptations, otherwise this is an unrelated work about a lost underwater city ruled by Vincent Price.
Gripping submarine drama from Tony Scott with captain Gene Hackman and second-in-command Denzel Washington fighting over whether to obey orders and fire their nuclear missiles after receiving a possibly faulty alert
A video-released submarine drama that is a blatant copy of Crimson Tide with a crew unsure whether to launch a nuclear strike. This is competently made if every move feels spelled out in advance
The Death of Superman is still is the top-selling comic-book title of all-time after 25 years. This was the first half of a two-part animated adaptation of the storyline, which brings it to life with a fair and reasonable telling
From Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, an incredibly spooky film, almost all of which is shot underwater, about two divers discovering a haunted house at the bottom of a lake
Entertainingly cheesy monster underwater film from Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham. One of several such Aliens located underwater films that came out the same year that James Cameron made The Abyss
A B movie that essentially locates The Thing from Another World underwater with an alien monster invading a sub-oceanic research laboratory. Not dissimilar to a host of B movie copying Alien in the 80s/90s
An adventure potboiler from The Asylum about the crew of a plane who pass through the Bermuda Triangle to end up in Atlantis just as the Atlanteans prepare to declare war on the surface world
Pixar have never been the same since giving in to sequelitis but this sequel to Finding Nemo does recapturing some of their heyday. Not perfect but this has a winning array of new characters and some delightfully madcap comic set-pieces
An unabashed delight among the Pixar films about a fish parent on a quest to find his missing son. This comes with an extraordinarily vibrant palette of colours and a line-up of winningly eccentric characters
The original and greatest of all SF serial adventures and a huge influence on George Lucas. Despite the primitive effects, this still has a marvellously rousing imagination that stands up today. Two serial sequels followed
Modestly effective tv mini-series about the crew of a British submarine in the 1980s being taken over by the ghosts from a World War II submarine
Charlie Steeds is a low-budget British director who has shown reasonable promise. Here he makes an H.P. Lovecraft homage about a submarine expedition that awakens Cthulhu on the ocean floor
Director Jack Arnold was one of the great voices of 1950s SF cinema. Here he turns to making a none-too-funny comedy set in an underwater habitat. Featuring a teenage Richard Dreyfuss
Okay if never standout Danish-made attempt to copy a Disney animated film concerning the underwater adventures of three children transformed into fish
The first and best Tom Clancy adaptation about a hi-tech Soviet submarine whose captain goes rogue. Director John McTiernan conducts the undersea maneuverings with gripping psychological tension
Another killer shark film from The Asylum, the people behind the Sharknado films. This plays itself seriously and turns out a reasonable story about the crew of a polar base under attacks by prehistoric sharks
An appealingly silly blend of live-action and animation where Don Knotts plays a downtrodden clerk obsessed with fish who falls into the ocean and becomes a porpoise
Zack Snyder completes his run through DC superheroes with mixed results. The introduction of the characters works well but Snyder too readily throws established continuity out the window, while the visual dourness becomes tedious
An animated film adaptation of Crisis on Infinite Earths, one of the classic DC Comics titles of all time. With superhero films now obsessed with multiverses, this seems the perfect time to bring it to the screen
The second part of the epic three film animated adaptation of the classic DC Comics title Crisis on Infinite Earths concerning a battle across the DC multiverse
Not so much a Justice League film as an Aquaman origin film, which at least conducts a character oft regard as a DC laughing stock with suitable dignity
The Justice Society of American was the first comic-book superhero team, bringing together all the heroes at DC Comics of the day. This is an animated film devoted to them
One of the video-released sequels to their animated films that Disney made in the 90s/00s, this slavishly imitates its predecessor but does have a likeable line-up of supporting characters
The beginning of the big Disney renaissance of the 1990s. An adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale that is conducted with an enormous degree of energy, colour and good cheer
Disney’s original The Little Mermaid was an enormously fresh film. This is the live-action remake that came out amid much controversy and is inevitably a lesser shadow of the original.
One among the series of cheap video-released sequels to their classic animated films made during the 1990s/2000s, this is a prequel that offers up a Little Mermaid origin story
A Pixar offering that is an enjoyable work about merpeople/human friendship but this also sits on the B-rung of their films along with Onward and The Good Dinosaur
The sequel to the Jason Statham starring killer shark film, bigger and more over the top than before. The surprise is seeing cult director Ben Wheatley turning to making a big, dumb film
Tim Burton used to be the great hope of fantastic cinema but his efforts since 2000 have been greeted with general disappointment. This Young Adult adaptation plays out like a fantasy version of the X-Men
Enjoyably colourful and silly retelling of the classic Chinese legend. This is one Wu Xia film that leaps aboard the CGI and 3D bandwagon to create a wildly fantastical airbrushed world that comes out resembling a flying swordsman film by way of Avatar
One of the better mockbusters from The Asylum, timed to come out at the same time as the US Godzilla, King of the Monsters and actually far more modestly enjoyable
The first film adaptation of Jules Verne’s sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The original book is a desert island adventure story; the film throws all that out and has a story about Captain Nemo encountering a race of merpeople
Underwater adventure movie that tries to emulate 2001: A Space Odyssey, this has a bad movie reputation
Probably the least great of Hayao Miyazaki’s films. The plot feels recycled from The Little Mermaid while Miyazaki’s recurrent themes seem more perfunctory and the film lacks many of the beautiful contrasts of epic and fragile he specialises in
A cheap submarine adventure/underwater monster encounter from Spanish director Juan Pique Simon that was intended as a copy of James Cameron’s The Abyss
Guillermo Del Toro makes monster movies with sympathy for the monster. This is his take onThe Creature from the Black Lagoon where the romance between creature and heroine is brought out to centre stage
DreamWorks animated talking fish film that was dismissed in the shadow of Pixar’s earlier Finding Nemo but is perfectly likeable in its own right
An early CGI animated film conducted on a cut-price budget that tells further adventures of Sinbad
Michael Crichton was hot property after the success of Jurassic Park but this was one flop. A by no means uninteresting film about a group of scientists in an underwater habitat making contact with an alien lifeform
Spongebob Squarepants was a sleeper hit on the Nickelodeon Channel that crossed over to find an adult following; this is the first of the film spinoffs. The film comes with a zanily surreal sense of humour that ran through the series that is frequently downright hilarious
The tenth of the James Bond films, the third for Roger Moore. This determines to be spectacular in terms of international locales, effects and sets. It was also the point where the Moore Bond films started to become giant cartoon spectacles of the absurd
Japanese movie made for international sales where a scientist has built a race of amphibian cyborgs to take over the world
The Asylum conduct their cheap version of the Jules Verne novel, so cheap it doesn’t even look like they went to sea or underwater to film. Here the oft-filmed Verne story has been modernised
The fourth James Bond film and crippled by the misfortune of coming just after Goldfinger, which defined the formula and became the peak of the series. By contrast, this is stuck with having to make everything bigger and more spectacular
Film made entirely with stop-motion animated plastic toys and with a sublimely nonsensical absurdiism that has more hilarity and creativity than most mainstream animated fare you will see all year
The fifth of Michael Bay’s Transformers films. This comes with more of an outright comedy focus than any of the other films where Bay seems to be second-guessing his critics and spoofing his own peccadilloes in quote marks, only to produce the silliest entry in the series yet
A silent movie version of the Jules Verne novel, the first film to be shot underwater, this spends its time marvelling at the underwater environment
Disney’s adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel is a lavishly produced period adventure. This became the definitive version of the book and inspired a string of other period-set Verne adaptations over the next decade
Throwback to late 80s/early 90s films like The Abyss and Sphere with the crew of a sub-oceanic station fighting off a monster. Generic in plot terms bit directorially this is an intense and claustrophobic ride
The film that inspired the popular tv series. As always with Irwin Allen, stolid dramatics, bad science and colourful spectacle
Not one of the Doug McClure Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations but by the same people and in the same vein. Thanks to a particularly inventive script this is the best of these lost world adventures
Part live-action, part animated adaptation of a classic Victorian children’s story about an urchin who discovers a secret world underwater
The most expensive film ever made at the time, a Kevin Costner epic in which he is a lone mariner in a drowned world where survivors cling to shantytowns floating on the surface. Essentially a Mad Max film located on water.