The Fourth Kind's title refers to UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek's "close encounter" scale, leading from observation to physical evidence to contact and finally to abduction. Of course, the title is also an obvious shout-out to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Here you can already see the sort of galling one-upmanship that is The Fourth Kind's m.o.: You thought Spielberg's alien visitation classic was really something? Wait 'til you see this.

That bit of chutzpah and foolishness is impressive enough, but The Fourth Kind's central gimmick is the real doozy: Apparently enamored of the success of various recent found-footage horror movies -- The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Quarantine -- director Olatunde Osunsanmi decided to do them one better. He would tell his creepy little story of supernatural goings-on in the tiny town of Nome, Alaska not in a simple faux-documentary style, but as a combination of fake documentary and fake reenactment. You know how sometimes, on cable, desperate news magazine shows will use staged scenes with actors to fill gaps in actual footage? Osunsanmi decided to recreate that.

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We may have reached a point where animated movies have ceased to aspire to look more and more like real life. This is a good thing. The slightly blocky, stylized characters of Pixar's Up didn't really look like people -- they looked like characters in a distinctive, beautiful new universe. So it is with Astro Boy, which, for all its serious faults, is a joy to behold. Based on a classic manga character and several Japanese TV series, it looks like a lively, colorful CG anime, combining impressive attention to detail with the sort of cheerfully exaggerated un-reality you used to find in Saturday morning cartoons.

The content seems promising too, for a while. For one thing, Astro Boy has a disarming way of casually introducing weighty and even disturbing undertones to an otherwise upbeat and action-packed story. The main character, for example, is a super-powered boy robot created to mimic the human boy who died in a horrible mishap involving giant rogue machines. Fun stuff, but consider that the robot is created by the boy's father, a brilliant scientist who is convinced that a robot doppelganger endowed with his son's memories and experiences is just what he needs to relieve his grief. And then when it turns out that this robot boy isn't quite his boy, he discards the creation, which is after all just a machine. If this sounds familiar, that's because it's basically the plot of Steven Spielberg's brilliant and deadly-serious A.I. Artificial Intelligence -- toned down for the pre-teen set, but heavy nonetheless.

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Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are contains about nine sentences and a couple dozen illustrations. But in those nine sentences, the book gets at something profound about a childhood impulse that never truly leaves us: A desire to stomp, rage at the world, and run away (i.e., throw a tantrum), coupled with an even deeper need to come home. Director Spike Jonze's wonderful adaptation wonders how to get perspective on those impulses. How, in other words, to grow up. It's a coming-of-age fairy tale, delivered with remarkable subtlety, patience, and confidence in its young audience.

The first thing you'll notice about 9-year-old Max as interpreted by Jonze, co-writer Dave Eggers and star Max Records, is how unprecocious he is. Max is not your typical movie kid, preternaturally smart, poised and brave. Like most 9-year-olds he's rambling, inarticulate, amusing, adorable, fiercely imaginative in a largely incoherent way, and sometimes kind of obnoxious. And because he's so real, when he screams, bites his mother in the shoulder, falls to the ground, cries in horror and shock and runs out of the house, we know exactly how he feels. The emotional specificity of this moment is damn near unprecedented in a family film; I was genuinely shaken.

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The raison d'etre of much science fiction is presenting scenarios that may be impossible, but at the same time are scarily plausible. So it's strange, and kind of fun, to see a movie that cheerfully presents the least plausible technological dystopia since The Running Man. Surrogates's notion that humans will soon spend their days controlling a plasticky cyborg manifestation of themselves in an otherwise unchanged society is kind of funny. But the movie is surprisingly committed to the idea -- and it winds up going to some interesting places.

At the center of Surrogates is a convoluted murder mystery plot. It seems that though the whole idea of surrogacy is being able to do whatever one wants with one's mechanical self while safely ensconced within the confines of one's bedroom, someone has developed a weapon that fries not just the circuits of the robots, but the fleshy sponge-brains of their operators, too. The son of a surrogacy pioneer (James Cromwell) is killed in this way, embroiling investigating FBI Agent Greer (Bruce Willis) in a conspiracy involving anti-surrogate militants and their shadowy leader, known only as The Prophet (Ving Rhames).

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Parents of nightmare-prone youngsters would do well to steer them away from Shane Acker's bleak animated fable 9, which unfolds in an all too convincingly dystopian future where machines have annihilated the human race.

9 (Elijah Wood) -- a mute, burlap homunculus with sophisticated camera-lens eyes -- wakes up in the dusty attic of an abandoned building in a field of rubble with no idea who, what or where he is. A fortuitous encounter with 2 (Martin Landau), a puppet creature like himself, gives 9 some sense of the ravaged world around him. But before he can fill 9 in on the history of how things came to such a dismal pass, he's snatched up in the jaws of a skeletal metal monster and borne off to some no-doubt dreadful fate, whereupon it falls on 9 and his fellow tribe of numbered puppets to stage a rescue.

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A streak of genius runs through Crank auteurs Mark Nevaldine and Brian Taylor's dystopian vision of a world in which virtual reality games are played with real people: In Gamer, the titular characters pull the strings of flesh-and-blood avatars who do their bidding, no matter how dangerous or perverse. In the end the Taylor and Nevaldine opt for the obvious, but let's give credit where credit is due: These lads touch a whole lot of nerves before they retreat into generic clichés.

Continue reading "Gamer Review - Young Enough to Drool Over Cybertarts? Old Enough for Self-Loathing?" »

Why would aliens travel light years just to destroy us or conquer our little blue planet? The idea that their homeworld is dying and they need ours is too simple. After all, maybe they just got lost and are starving and helpless, having plunged into the Dark Ages on their vast, immobilized mothership. That is the fascinating premise of Neill Blomkamp's District 9, a busy, exciting, occasionally breathtaking scifi adventure with allegorical overtones. Blomkamp's feature debut is, oddly, the second 2009 release (after the animated Battle for Terra) about a human-alien clash in which we are, for the most part, the bad guys. The movie, meandering in and out of faux documentary, may be a bit klutzy and overstuffed, but it gets enough right that genre fans won't want to miss it.

The aforementioned spaceship, looking a bit like the monstrosities of Independence Day, grinds to a halt over thematically convenient Johannesburg, South Africa. In one of several implausibilities cheerfully glossed over by District 9, the local humans somehow decide to blast their way in -- whereupon they discover not an advanced race of superbeings, but a group of malnourished shrimp-like creatures, huddled together in the darkness. They then proceed to indulge the human impulse to "help the poor things," by transporting the fledgling aliens to Johannesburg, where they are promptly segregated in a slum called District 9. Around the rest of the city, signs command "No Non-Human Loitering" and "Humans Only."

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If I had to choose a 2009 summer movie to hide from the press, I would not have gone with G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Granted, the movie -- which boasts "in association with Hasbro" in its opening titles -- was never likely to become a critical darling. But if the standard is "goofy summer fun" then G.I. Joe, with its underwater cities, metal-eating nanobots and jetpacks, is how it should be done. Nevertheless, I write this after catching a midnight screening at the multiplex -- the closest Paramount Pictures allowed us critics to get to a sneak peek of their $200 million toy story.

The obvious and easy comparison is, of course, to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which shot to the top of the yearly box office charts with a conceptually similar audiovisual assault. The main difference is that, unlike Michael Bay, Stephen Sommers has a plausible claim to being an actual filmmaker -- he knows how to pace a movie, how to shoot an action scene, and even, vaguely, how to tell a story. Most importantly, he's in control of tone: G.I. Joe doesn't have a self-important bone in its body. This is a movie that opens in 1641 France and somehow manages to cut directly to Christopher Eccleston pitching nanotechnology-enhanced warheads in "the not-too-distant future."

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Continue reading "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Review - Not Much More Than Meets the CGI" »