Word: sci-fi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ANGELES in 2019 presents few surprises Traffic trangles are thicker and constant rain has replaced the smog, but a skeletal Bradford building still towers over a freakish mob in the high-tech skyline of Blade Runner. Not that the skyline appears very often in Ridley Scott's latest sci-fi film. The director instead focuses on crowded halls and packed rooms, using flying billboards and continuous drizzle to further enclose the outdoor scenes. The atmosphere is stifling; this future world is a cage...
...infiltrated our society and cannot be distinguished from us. This premise, which worked so well in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, fails miserably here. The dazzling effects and set are the entire movie; plot and characterization are virtually nonexistent. Scott, director of Alien, should know how to make believable sci-fi by now. For Blade Runner, he teamed with special effects magician Douglas Trumbull, of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the dashing Harrison Ford, star of last year's smash Raiders of the Lost Ark. But these three are not enough. The film lacks both focus and depth...
After the awards ceremony on closing night, the huge movie screen filled with the letters E.T., and 2,500 merchants and moviemakers became dreamers again. Steven Spielberg had brought his sci-fi romance to Cannes for its world premiere, and throughout the day he had loped down the Carlton corridors dodging the dozens of would-be interviewers, photographers and starlets, all cadging for a moment with the world's most successful director. In the Palais des Festivals he heard applause erupt throughout the screening and watched an audience of grim professionals laugh and cry after two weeks of wheeling...
Black holes have attracted a lot of attention in the past few years, spawning pinball games, adventure movies, and dozens of sci-fi novels. Hawking says he's very glad to see all the popular interest, but he's not always so pleased with the form it takes. For instance. Walt Disney invited him to be a consultant for its film. "The Black Hole." Although he turned them down, he did accept an invitation to the movie premier. "It was an awful film," he says...
White's technology often seems creaky, partly because he was a pioneer. Modern sci-fi doomsdayers would never predict the end of the world from an excess of radio waves, or have radial-engine Curtiss Condor transports symbolize the overreach of the air age. Even so, White was always among the first to discern the now familiar signs and portents: ecological disturbances, the decline of various species, the discovery that last year's medical boons may lead to tomorrow's degenerative diseases, the horrors of a mindless but ubiquitous visual press, and the debilitating result of trying...