Movies

There’s something peculiarly demoralizing about watching a movie desperate to be clever—a kind of Netflix-age puzzle box that delivers nothing but more boxes, and each lid is glued on with the icy sweat of someone who thinks the riddle is its own reward. Philip Koch’s “Brick” (and has a contemporary German film ever worn a lamer Anglo title with such self-importance?) throws its benighted cast through every doomsday apartment-escape cliché you can think of, as if J.G. Ballard and J.J. Abrams had teamed up for a group project and then swapped out their last pages for a tech manual, all in the forgotten hope of stealing a march on “Black Mirror.” If there’s a greater argument for the superiority of television’s brisk forty minutes over the joyless slog of a two-hour feature, I haven’t seen it.

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.

Remakes are Hollywood’s solution to not having an idea. But there’s a difference between creatively riffing on the bones of a classic and crawling out of the swamp with a sludge-soaked carcass, propping it up Weekend at Bernie’s-style, and calling it War of the Worlds. This “modernization”—a screenlife spectacle starring Ice Cube as the world’s most bored Department of Homeland Security desk jockey—isn’t so much an adaptation as it is an accidental satire of everything cheap and vacant in our streaming age. If the aliens had any taste, they’d have vaporized the production server before the rest of us were subjected to this deranged corporate sizzle-reel.

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.

If the original Jurassic Park was the cinematic equivalent of hearing Beethoven's Fifth for the first time, disruptive, awe-inspiring, and strangely primal, then this seventh fossilized entry, Jurassic World Rebirth, is what happens when you ask an algorithm to remix that symphony using only elevator chimes and the incessant crinkle of a Snickers wrapper. That wrapper, tossed by an over-caffeinated, under-written scientist in this film’s opening moments, is perhaps more memorable than anything that follows, a literal flake of trash that signals the lazy entropy setting in, not just in the movie’s security system, but in the script, direction, and spirit of this once vital franchise.

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.

Let us all give a moment of silence—not just for what once was the luminous Star Trek franchise, but for the unsuspecting audience, who, wandering into Section 31, finds themselves trapped in a malfunctioning holodeck, gasping for escape. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when corporate storytelling steers a beloved odyssey into the black hole of mediocrity, look no further: Section 31 is a galactic punchline with none of the set-up, and all the pratfall.

There are dreadful movies, there are glorious ones, and then there are those—like this laugh-riot of a mockbuster—that leap into the yawning abyss between, flailing their cardboard limbs, and come up gasping, ridiculous, and (miraculously!) alive. Planet Dune isn't just bad. It's an epic car crash, a filmic yard sale, a Walmart-brand space opera that dares—gallingly—to sidle up to the grandeur of Villeneuve’s Dune and ask, “Can I copy your homework?”

I went into Elevation knowing it would be bad—there’s something liberating in having your low expectations met so precisely, like watching a car accelerate off a cliff with immaculate predictability. George Nolfi’s latest exercise in post-apocalyptic hand-wringing arrives already embalmed, wheeling Anthony Mackie and Morena Baccarin out like two alluring mannequins about to be discarded. It is a feat to make actors this lively feel this bored; by the end, you could almost hear the cameraman nodding off.