The Bad Batch (2016) – I can’t decide if I liked this one or not. It’s sometime in the future, when everyone who is determined one of the “bad batch” by the unseen government is tattooed with a number behind their ear and dumped in a walled-off section of desolate Texas and forgotten. We never find out what Suki Waterhouse’s character did to earn the honor, but she’s definitely not prepared for it: The first people she meets are a body-building-obsessed clan of cannibals, led by Jason Momoa, and she escapes only after they’ve cut off and eaten one arm and one leg. Five months later, she’s living in the other community in the enclosure, Comfort, which is like the drugged-out homeless section of town without the rest of town attached, led by a Jim Jones-style spiritual guru played by Keanu Reeves (!) in huge sunglasses. (As you can guess, the only real appeal of Comfort is that it isn’t the other guys.)
Since we never find out what anyone did to get here, or even how they find anything to eat except new arrivals, the audience never gets beyond the surface of any of the characters. Momoa is the only one who’s given much of an emotional depth — despite the fact that he’s a stone killer and cannibal, he loves his daughter, and is a surprisingly good artist — but when a movie’s major achievement is “tries to make a cannibal sympathetic”…
The Edge of Tomorrow (2014) – The last thing you need is my plot description of a Tom Cruise movie, as if you were unfamiliar with it (this is the “live die repeat” one), so I’m going to confine my comments to examining the mechanism of the time loop, especially as contrasted with the obvious comparison, Groundhog Day (1993).
The Edge of Tomorrow is ostensibly science fiction — alien invasions and mech suits, after all — while Groundhog Day is out-and-outy fantasy. But the idea that the protagonist’s consciousness is reset to a specific time over and over while retaining the memories of each iteration of the repeated timeframe is, I would argue, a fantasy idea — it’s pretty close to magical, really. All of the sci-fi set dressing that Edge throws in (the ability comes from exposure to the blood of a certain rank of the alien army, the alien meta-organism has obviously “evolved” the ability to reset time, etc.) doesn’t help; it just spackles over the uneven joint of a fantasy hinge in a sci-fi plot.
Batman: Gotham by Gaslight (2018) – The original Gotham by Gaslight graphic novel is one of my favorite Elseworlds stories, almost entirely because of Mike Mignola’s artwork — a period 1890s backdrop for a story that pits a marginally steampunk Batman against Jack the Ripper is a natural for Mignola’s pencil. This animated movie keeps only some of those visuals (including most of the Batman’s 1890s costume, thankfully) and the very basic premise of “Batman vs. Jack” and weaves a very different story out of it. Plenty of familiar characters from the canon are there, sometimes in very different guises — like the three street urchins named Dick, Jason and Time, or the two-faced DA Harvey Dent, or the costume-less but socially conscious actress Selena Kyle. I certainly won’t spoil the reveal of Jack’s identity, but I will say this: I felt very much like I did when the villain of the first Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible movie was unmasked.