Moneyball (2011)

 

Heading into the 2002 baseball season, Billy Beane seems to face an impossible situation.  His Oakland Athletics team has just lost its three biggest stars, and with one of the lowest salary budgets in the Major Leagues, he has very little hope of bringing in new stars to replace them.

Beane's solution is to embrace a new approach to choosing his team: sabermetrics.  This involves going against many of the core beliefs and traditions of player scouting and selection, bringing a storm of criticism and acrimony.  But Beane is determined to press on, reasoning that it is pointless to follow the same old rules when the financial deck is so stacked against him.

Obviously, the strategy works.  If you follow baseball at all, you know that.  Even if you don't, you can probably guess that there would not be a film if Beane's strategy failed!

But the point of this film is not ever 'will it work?', so it hardly matters that you know the final destination.  The journey is the point here, and it's a good one, with fine performances from the cast to aid the emotional engagement.

Whether you care about baseball or not, Moneyball's 'feisty little guy' narrative should suck you in and deliver an entertaining and engaging two hours.

Lost in Space, Season 2 (2019)

 

The Robinson family have been stranded on a hostile alien planet for the past seven months, eking out a precarious existence while toxic sea and unbreathable air whirls around the small, human-safe 'bubble' they have created.  It is becoming more and more clear, however, that this bubble will one day burst, and they're all on a long, grim road to eventual death.  So in typical Robinson family fashion, they undertake a high risk, "do or die" gambit that will either kill them quickly, or give them the power they need to get their vessel back into space.  From there, they might at least be able to get out a signal to other human ships, or find a more liveable planet.

Of course, this is the new Lost in Space, so they have Parker Posey's malevolent Dr Smith to deal with throughout this whole gambit, and even if they do succeed in getting off-planet, you can bet that their troubles are simply going to multiply from there.  "And now something else goes wrong" is pretty much the show's default plot.

So you can expect to see the Robinsons once again battling a series of mishaps and disasters as they try to keep themselves and those they care about safe, though in this season they'll face more human interference in those efforts than just whatever scheme Dr Smith is up to in order to get herself out of the trouble the last scheme got her into.

This 'more human opposition' thing is probably my least favourite thing about this second season of the show, actually.  One of the things I liked about the first season was that (Dr Smith excepted) everybody wanted to do the right thing, and even if they disagreed about what that was, they didn't start trying to knife each other in the back over it.  The human rivalries here weren't all that interesting to me: probably in large part because The Robinsons Are Always Right.  I mean, I get that these new adversaries are meant to contrast utilitarian pragmatism vs Robinson idealism vs Me Me Me Dr Smithism, but that doesn't really work when utilitarian pragmatism isn't actually utilitarian and is more just 'being a dick'.  We already have Dr Smith for that.

Still, the show has a good cast and some decent science fiction scenarios, so if you're an SF fan it is worth a look.  I'll definitely be checking out the third and final season when it arrives.

Monster Force Zero (2019)

The creators of independent comic book Monster Force Zero attend a convention in order to try and sell their debut issue.  It doesn't go especially well to start with: sales are slow and a group of belligerent con-goers seem to delight in harassing them.  Things seem to turn around, however, when they are invited to an exclusive post-convention party.

Of course, it soon turns out there is more to this party than just drinks and music.  It is in fact a recruitment event, hosted by a group of aliens who are seeking champions to undertake a quest for them!  The Monster Force team - with the aid of a silent stranger dressed in a yeti suit - will need to face off against their erstwhile persecutors in order to win the right (and incidentally, the high tech powers) to undertake the mission.

Monster Force Zero is not really a good movie, per se.  The acting's of varying quality, and the script definitely has some pacing issues, with the contest to be chosen for the mission taking rather more of the run time than it probably ought.  It's clearly something that they cast were keen to make, though: there are a number of cosplayers doing their cosplay thing except on camera.  If you think you'd enjoy that energy, you might like this.  But if not, there are definitely plenty of better made films to watch instead.

The Twilight Zone, Season 3 (1961)

 

I was not a fan of season two of The Twilight Zone.  I felt it had a lot of weak scripts, and few new ideas.  Thoughts like "Oh it's (famous story)" or "This is like that first season episode" were a far too common experience while watching it.

I'm pleased to say that the third season mostly rights the ship.  Which is not to say that every episode is a winner.  With 37 separate stories here, that would honestly be too much to hope for.  So we still have a few failures here.  The conclusion of the episode "The Dummy" is obvious five minutes in, for instance, while the season finale is pretty much just It's A Wonderful Life but done in only half an hour.  And the less said about the pointlessness of the twist ending in "The Midnight Sun", the better.

Still, overall, the story quality is definitely a step up.  Perhaps this is partly due to there being some extension to the writing pool this season, but I think the key thing is a tonal shift.  The Twilight Zone of season three is a less sombre and menacing place than in earlier years.  There are still episodes that play out quote grimly, of course, but there are also a lot more tales that embrace whimsy or optimism or even, on several occasions, outright sentimentality.  This greater diversity of tone, and the increasing number of humorous scenes or stories, definitely helps alleviate some of the "we've seen this already" feel I got during season two.

I should mention that this is the season that includes the renowned episode "To Serve Man".  It is a pretty good one, to be honest, even if the final twist is likely thoroughly spoiled for most viewers by now.

Post Apocalyptic Commando Shark (2018)

 

In the post-apocalyptic future, the world is at war. The newly instated Soviet Army has invaded the USA.  Their secret weapon: an army of super human soldiers, half-man and half-shark, created by the malevolent German scientist, Siegfried Schröder.

After a decapitation attack wipes out the president and other leaders, US resistance is continued through a patchwork of civilian militias, while a lone scientist struggles to find a counter-weapon to the Red Army's fearsome Commando Sharks.

Fearsome, aren't they?

As you may surmise from the above image, this is a silly movie.  It never pretends to be anything else, which is I think a sensible choice.  Tonally, I'm reminded somewhat of the madcap absurdity of The Goodies, especially episodes like 'Kung Fu Kapers' or 'Bunfight at the O.K. Tea Rooms'.  There's lots of ridiculous situations that are treated as perfectly normal by the people involved, goofy banter, and a focus more on looking for a quick laugh on a regular basis than on telling a coherent narrative.  This film doesn't execute this as well as The Goodies did at their best, though, it has to be said.  Possibly because making this essentially goofy idea stretch for 90 minutes is asking rather a lot of it.

If you've a passion for odd and wacky indie film silliness, this might entertain you, but it's definitely very much a niche product.

 

Legends of Tomorrow, Season 2 (2016)

Having been told that they should absolutely not ever travel to 1942, it's exactly zero surprise that the misfit crew of the timeship Waverider pretty quickly find their way to exactly that year. They have what seem to be good reasons for this, of course - these self-styled "Legends" always do.  It's execution, not motivation, that's generally their issue.

Points for the team, though: they actually resolve the crisis that lured them back to World War Two!  More problematically, they find themselves now not just trying to protect Time, but Reality itself, which is under threat from the machinations of a trio of former Big Bads from Arrow and Flash.  Because as every comic book villain knows, if at first you don't succeed, team up with your fellow failures and fail together!

Okay, maybe that's not quite how the villains themselves think about these things, but "let's team up to finally defeat <hero name>!" is definitely a tried and true comic book plotline.  And hey, when you're facing a team of hero-types (even a team as dysfunctional as the Legends tend to be), then evening the odds by getting some allies of your own makes good sense.

For me, the first season of Legends of Tomorrow was definitely the weakest Arrowverse show in 2015.  I'm pleased to say that the reverse is true in 2016, and it was my favourite of the four programs.  The writing team seems to have identified what does and does not work about this group of characters and leaned into it quite hard here.  There's lots of wacky hijinks and banter, and 'failing forward' as things go awry and the team scramble to rectify them.

Enjoyable superhero silliness.

Anti Matter (2016)

Ana is an advanced student at Oxford University when she stumbles across a strange phenomenon in her scientific research.  Working with her close friend Nate and, more reluctantly, with their mutual acquaintance Liv, she comes to the realisation that she has stumbled across a means of instantaneous teleportation!

Obviously this is a potentially world-altering discovery, but there are some barriers.  Principally, the computing power required to handle the necessary calculations to transport anything larger than a hairclip.  That's where Liv comes in: she's a skilled programmer, and she's able to develop a worm that leaches a tiny bit of processing power from millions of computers across the world.  With this resource, the trio can teleport first larger inanimate objects, then small animals like a caterpillar and a mouse.

When the worm is discovered, however, and a security patch announced to delete it, Ana and her colleagues decide to plunge forward with their final, most vital test: a human trial.  And that's when things start to get weird ...

Anti Matter (AKA Worm) is a film of small budget but considerably larger ambition.  It's refreshingly well acted and well shot for an independent film, and the script concept is an interesting one, though perhaps the run time is a little long: cutting 10 or 15 minutes would probably have helped.

Check it out if you're in the mood for some more thoughtful SF.

Supergirl, Season 2 (2016)

 

When Krypton was destroyed, the infant Kal-El and his older cousin Kara Zor-El were launched toward Earth in tiny space pods.  Kara's went off course, however, and plunged into the timeless Phantom Zone for many years.  When her pod finally landed, the infant had become a man: Superman, in fact.

Now an adult herself, Kara has embraced a similar role as Supergirl, protecting the people of National City from menaces both human and alien.  Most recently, those enemies included her own aunt, who led a group of Kryptonian outcasts in a cabal to conquer Earth.

Shortly after that victory, a third Kryptonian pod crashed to Earth, and the fallout of that event, and of escalating human hostility to aliens in the wake of the Kryptonian coup attempt, will drive a lot of the action in this second season of the show.  As will the arrival in National City of Lena Luthor, Lex Luthor's adopted sister and new director to the Luthor's financial empire.  Lena claims to want to redeem the Luthor name, but can she be trusted?

The first season of Supergirl was rather uneven in script quality and had what I found to be a frustrating tendency to undermine its title character.  This season is better on the second issue - with the exception of the execrable on every level episode 19 - but continues to suffer from the former.  When the scripts embrace the cast's charisma and their talent for positivity and light comedy, all is good.  When the writers try to put on their Big Time Drama pants, though, they tend to wear them on their heads.  Episode 15 is painfully bad, and there's an extended sequence in episode 21 that we're presumably intended to find stirring and dramatic but is instead merely ridiculous.

The cast of this show (including this season's newcomers) and solid and they work hard.  Hopefully one day they'll more consistently get the scripts their talent and efforts deserve.