Early Man (2018) – What starts out as a tale about an isolated cave-tribe with one inventive young man then changes to a tale of said cave-tribe in competition with a Bronze Age civilization for the tribe’s valley — a competition to be waged with the sacred game of “football” (or soccer, as it’s known on this side of the pond). I was disappointed; I was hoping that the visual geniuses behind the Wallace & Gromit shorts/features and Chicken Run would be able to have fun with very British characters inventing the things that make the British British. Instead it was another standard underdogs-come-from-behind story where heart makes up for decades of training or something.
Of course, I bet this plays better in Britain… or pretty much any non-American part of the world.
Alien Hunter (2003) – Given the crank-’em-out tripe that production company Nu Image usually foisted on DVD new-release walls and a certain creature-obsessed cable channel through the nineties and oughts (before it got into the theaters by being involved in Stallone’s 2008 Rambo, although that’s a different story), it was a little surprising to find this movie, with its TV premiere and production strictures to match, actually was a good-faith effort to make a thoughtful SF movie. It didn’t really succeed, but the effort is appreciated.
James Spader, in a faint echo of his much better-paid role in Stargate, is a former SETI cryptographer called in to help figure out weird signals coming from an ice-encrusted something found near an Antarctic research base. Said base has two interesting features: (1) genetically-engineered corn (there was some lip-service on using the Antarctic base as a proxy for hostile non-terrestrial environments for terraforming experiments for NASA, but they didn’t really sell it), and (2) one of the corn scientists, with whom he had an affair when she was a student.
The cryptographic content is a combination of above-the-audience’s-heads and bone-stupid (why would an alien race have a repeating beacon from their escape pod encoded in a multi-level mathematical boondoggle and then have the base message be IN ENGLISH???), and the resulting deadly virus that the alien inadvertently hosts is like War of the Worlds in reverse times a bazillion, and… yeah, it’s not great. But at least they tried.
Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) – The first Pacific Rim was fun, but not memorable. I base this gross generalization on the fact that I remember enjoying watching it, but I can’t now remember anything about it beyond “there were some giant monster fights, and a nosebleed.” The sequel is thus more memorable, at least from this distance; there’s certainly more human story in between kaiju/Jaeger bouts. Not that it’s deep story, as every character seems to have been pulled out of the Cliche Bag (scrappy mechanically-inclined street urchin? Check! belligerent young man with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove? Check! Chinese ice maiden? Check! socially awkward comic-relief genius? Check!), but at least there’s something to hold your attention between the expensive parts. Also, the climactic battle destroys Tokyo, as is proper in these movies.