How do you make a disaster film in 2020, when going outside to check the mailbox felt like auditioning for “Contagion 2”? The answer, in “Greenland,” is with impressive restraint: it’s a comet-disaster movie that, instead of blowing up the White House for the nineteenth time, asks you to remember to bring your son’s insulin.
Primitive War lurches to life as if someone siphoned the lunacy from Platoon, spliced it with the animal anarchism of Jurassic Park, set the blender to “puree,” and handed the results not to Spielberg and Oliver Stone, but an upstart Aussie with a larcenous joy in genre. If you stroll into Luke Sparke’s dino-in-the-jungle opus expecting a childish rerun or Syfy-channel barrel-scraping, prepare for a rude, exuberant awakening. This is a film that knows exactly how daft its premise sounds but, by some ferocious, inexplicable alchemy, ends up giving the last three Jurassic World movies a savage trouncing.
There’s something very contemporary about Companion, that sense of ordinary people, lacquered in anxiety, stumbling into catastrophe by way of a Silicon Valley fever dream. Drew Hancock, no hack, has made a movie that wants to stare at the icy void where technology and human vanity collide, then crack a joke so the void doesn’t stare back too hard. It’s a science fiction thriller in horror makeup, but with the nervous giggle of a dinner party gone off the rails.
There is an itch in contemporary science fiction which no number of tight scripts and digital vistas can entirely scratch: the genre longs to mean something again, to be both playground and arena, but all too often balloons out into ponderous “themes” and sterile future-worlds. It’s a relief, a relief laced with a kind of giddy disbelief, to witness Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, a film that doesn’t just cross genres, but seems to tear them up and ball them in one trembling fist.
Once in a while, a film comes drifting in on the wind, caught by almost no one, championed by even fewer, carrying the kind of oddball, heart-clutching enchantment that threatens to restore faith in the very act of cinema. Fish Story, Yoshihiro Nakamura’s time-hopping wonder, is precisely that sort of late-breaking revelation: a freewheeling, postmodern fable, at once as headlong and as intricately assembled as the punk anthem at its core. It’s hard to think of a movie, in these battered days, that is so bracingly, disarmingly optimistic—so resolutely happy to believe that music, and thus art, can literally save the world. And damned if the movie doesn’t just about convince you.
This American adaptation of Liu Cixin's acclaimed novel series has captivated audiences with its premise rooted in the mystery of extraterrestrial civilizations and humanity’s response.