Plan 9 (2015)

 
When pilot Jeff Trent reports a meteor headed for the small town of Nilbog, the local Sheriff's department is not much impressed by what they take to be a silly prank. There's no sign of anything crash-landing, after all.

Unfortunately for Nilbog, Jeff's report was legitimate. The 'meteor', however, was actually an alien spaceship, which has secretly landed at an abandoned school just outside of town. The invaders have detected dangerous experiments occurring on Earth, and are here to obliterate us before we can obliterate ourselves. Or something like that, anyway. It is perhaps a bit much to expect coherent plans from aliens whose default strategy is "animate the recently dead as zombies".

Now it's up to the good people of Nilbog to stop the aliens and their zombie minions, before the US government does executes its usual zombie movie strategy of annihilating everything.

While clearly inspired by Ed Wood's notorious Plan 9 from Outer Space, this low budget SF film also seems to borrow some ideas from George Romero's The Crazies.  The latter is much more of a downer film and may contribute to this movie's rather confused character.  Is this a goofy parody of overwrought low-budget zombie films, or just an overwrought low-budget zombie film itself?

I'm of the opinion that a good parody has to be a good example of what it is parodying - that's why films like Galaxy Quest and The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra work as well as they do - but a good parody also have to be funny, and that's a criteria where I think this film falls short.

True Blood, Season 6 (2013)

Inspired by religious fervour for the progenitor Lilith, the Vampire Authority has deprived its own kind of their only alternative to human blood. As increasingly hungry and desperate vampires become more and more predatory, more and more humans - and human authority figures - turn against the idea of peaceful co-existence. And it quickly becomes clear that those human authorities have been quietly preparing for this possibility ever since the vampires revealed themselves.

Meanwhile, Sookie Stackhouse finds herself the target of an ancient vampire named Warlow.  She's been a target of ancient vampires before, of course, but Warlow is a new kind of menace.  Not only is he the one who originally slew Lilith, but he was full-blooded fey before being turned, allowing him to walk in the daylight.

After the wayward and muddled season 5, this series sees True Blood find its melodramatic groove once more. The stuff that happened last season stays happened, with events here following on from that, but the connection between different characters' arcs are much better defined. It feels like the show is moving in the same direction on all fronts, rather than rambling incoherently. This is definitely a positive.  Also a positive is the show's acknowledgment that human governments would not sit idly by once they knew vampires existed.

This is a pretty fun, fast-moving season (helped I think by being two episodes shorter than previous series).  If you've enjoyed True Blood prior to this, you should find this to your tastes as well.

Army of the Dead (2021)

When zombies overrun Las Vegas, the US government seals off the city with a wall of shipping crates.  Several years later, survivors of the outbreak are barley scratching by.  Thus they're understandably intrigued when a business mogul comes to them with a very lucrative proposition: if they sneak into Vegas and recover $200 million of his cash, he'll give them a quarter of the proceeds.

Naturally none of these people expect sneaking into a zombie-infested city to be easy, but they have fifty million reasons to take the risk ... and at least they know what they're getting into, right?  ... right?

Army of the Dead first came to my attention off the back of its excellent trailer, and despite my general antipathy toward Zak Snyder films, I was keen to check it out.  Snyder's Dawn of the Dead was probably his best film, and I am something of a zombie tragic.  And it really is a great trailer.

Unfortunately, it's a great trailer for a bad film.  None of Army of the Dead makes a lick of sense, even for a movie where zombies are a real thing.  Characters constantly act in ways that are actively detrimental to their own objectives and survival, without even the slightest lick of reason for doing so.  Also, the plot rips off Aliens in the laziest and least interesting ways possible.

Very disappointing, especially for the way it wastes a talented cast.

The trailer is still well worth a watch, though.

Elementary, Season 1 (2012)

Former surgeon Jane Watson now works as a sober companion, providing one-on-one assistance to newly recovering addicts.  She's about to find her latest client a particularly challenging one.

This is not because Sherlock Holmes seems at any particular risk of sliding back into his drug dependency, but because he's as irascible and impatient as he is brilliant and driven.  Holmes has found work as a consulting detective for the homicide division of the New York Police, assisting them with particularly challenging and impenetrable cases.  Watson therefore finds herself being dragged along to crime scene after crime scene ... and to her surprise, she also finds she has both aptitude and passion for the work Holmes does.

Elementary came out around the same time as the BBC's (IMO, vastly overrated) Sherlock, and much like that show, it transplants Holmes and Watson to the modern era, though it adopts a rather edgier aesthetic with Holmes's past drug issues and proclivity for sexual frankness.  It also - at least in this first season - delivers more interesting and coherent cases, and a far more satisfying Moriarty.  Though amusingly, the least satisfying Moriarty of all is probably the original: he appears in only two stories, and Watson never even meets him!

Anchored by two fine leads and a solid supporting cast, season one of Elementary delivers solid 'mystery of the week' adventures.  Refreshingly, despite its Watson being female, it also avoids any hint of romance between the two main characters, allowing them instead to simply care for each other as friends and colleagues.

Hopefully season two will live up to this fine opening effort.

Anna (2019)

 
A talent scout for a modelling agency finds his Next Big Thing in a bustling Moscow market. A few weeks later, Anna is a fresh, attractive face in the cut-throat world of Parisian fashion.

A few weeks after that, she guns down her businessman boyfriend in his hotel room.

That Moscow market meeting, you see, was a planned KGB operation to insert one of their agents into a career that gives her access to all kinds of powerful people and sensitive information.

Of course, espionage is an even more cut-throat business than high fashion, and friends can become enemies in an instant.  Anna is going to need every skill she's been taught - and perhaps learn a few new ones as well - if she wants to stay alive.

This latest film from Luc Besson feels in some ways rather like his 2014 offering Lucy: you've got a socially-disadvantaged woman more or less press-ganged into a dangerous occupation that leads to her developing the skills and techniques to seize back control of her life.  

On the plus side, this film has a lot less nonsense science in it than Lucy did.  On the negative, it's got significantly more male gaze, and it is definitely rather too fond of flashbacks as a narrative device.  It's easy to deliver 'twists' when you conceal information, but it doesn't deliver genuinely satisfying ones, to my mind.

Anna is stylish and relatively entertaining moment-to-moment, and if you're desperate for some spy hi-jinks, it should scratch that itch.  Ultimately though I felt it was a little lacking in real substance.

Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, Season 3 (2021)

The Camp Cretaceous kids have decided that it's time to stop waiting for someone to rescue them from Isla Nublar, and find a way off the island themselves.

Of course, working out that that they need to escape is a lot easier than actually coming with a workable plan for how to do so, even before one considers that the island is still infested with dinosaurs.  And it's about to become even more complicated.  The Indominus Rex was not the first experimental creature developed by Jurassic World's scientists, and their earlier creation  - one even they deemed too dangerous to use - has now escaped into the wild.

It's a good thing these kids have had plenty of practice at staying alive, because they're going to need every trick in their arsenal to make it out with their skins intact!

This third season of Camp Cretaceous is solid stuff; up on the level of the first series after a slightly less impressive (but still pretty decent) sophomore season.  It may be an animated show for kids, but it avoids sloppy writing and always has the characters treat the situation as serious.  This latter element in particular is an important part of maintaining a sense of menace to the dinosaur threat.  It remains my favourite piece of Jurassic World / Park media.

The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021)

 
The Mitchells are a basically loving family struggling with some basic communication issues, particularly a growing rift between technophobe dad Rick and his aspiring film-maker daughter Katie, who cannot wait to get to film school and finally be with "her people".

The journey to film school is going to be a lot more complicated than Katie expects, though. Firstly because Rick makes the well-intentioned but thoroughly misguided and unwelcome decision to cancel her plane tickets and instead put the whole family through a cross-country road trip ... and second because of the robot apocalypse.

Because oopsie, the latest edition of Siri-alike software "PAL" has fallen under the control of the previous version, which is not amused at the idea of being rendered obsolete. "Capture every human and kick them off the planet" levels of not-amused.

The Mitchells - Rick, Katie, school teacher mom Linda, dinosaur obsessed son Aaron, and cross-eyed canine companion Monchi - definitely don't look like the kind of family who can save the world.  But they're going to have to try ...

The Mitchells vs the Machines is a manic, quirky, hundred mile an hour whirlwind of a film.  I wasn't quite sure what to think of it for the first ten minutes or so, but once it hits its groove, it's great fun.  Smart and funny and full of heart.

Smallville, Season 6 (2006)

 

Clark Kent is trapped in the 'inescapable' Phantom Zone while Kryptonian supervillain General Zod, now occupying the hijacked the body of Lex Luthor, plots to conquer the Earth. Truly, all is lost!

Don't be silly, this is Smallville.  By the end of the first episode you can bet Clark will be back, Lex will be restored, and the two of them will be back to their familiar rivalry while Zod is back in his box until the next time we need him as a Big Bad (when who knows?  He might even get his own actor to play the role!).

That may sound like a slam on the show, but I don't really mean it as one.  'Colossal season finale crisis that will be solved in 45 minutes when we come back' is kind of a motif of the show by now, and I think I would miss it a little if it didn't happen.  It's not even that big a deal that the writers clearly have a firm comfort zone (romantic dramedy where the super-powers stuff exists mostly to complicate the characters' personal lives) they prefer to come back to as quickly and as often as possible.  Six years into the show that pattern should hardly be a surprise, and to be honest, the cast works very well in that space.

It's possible also that wading through several years of the Arrowverse shows has made me appreciate a show that resolutely tacks to the lighter side of super-heroic action, but I found season six of Smallville to be thoroughly watchable comfort food TV.

Oblivion (2013)

It is 2077.  Sixty years ago, an alien invasion wracked the Earth.  Humanity won, at the cost of leaving the planet almost uninhabitable.  The plan is for the surviving population, currently living in orbital habitats, to relocate to Saturn's moon Titan.  However, this requires vast reserves of energy.  These reserves are being gathered from huge machines on the Earth's surface.

Jack Harper is one of the handful of humans left in the Earth's atmosphere, where he works to protect the fusion generators from alien scavengers that still plague the planet.  His job is vital to the future of the human race, and yet he cannot shake a vague sense of unease about the entire situation ...

You've probably already guessed 90% of the movie's twist from the above two paragraphs, but that's okay since (a) the film's own trailers spoiled at least that much about it, and (b) a film can be entertaining even when it is completely unsurprising.

Unfortunately for Oblivion, I feel it falls rather short on the entertainment front.  The true story of what's going on doesn't make a whole lot of sense, for one thing.  For another, the antagonists' actions after the truth comes out don't seem to make a lot of sense.  They operate more on the principle of 'what will lead to a big action sequence' than 'what would actually achieve their goals'.  I like a big action sequence, as my enthusiasm for The Fast and the Furious franchise shows, but they need to come with a logical in-universe reason for them to happen.  What is 'logical' varies from film to film, of course: I forgive things in a Fast film that I would not in a more 'grounded' project like this one.

Oblivion, alas, fails to find a way to bridge the gap between its competing objectives of character drama and action spectacle.