Next week another of the onslaught of banked Ryan Reynolds movies (see Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, Red Notice, Free Guy, and the forthcoming Spirited, Deadpool 3, Dragon’s Lair, and Clue) is coming to Netflix (which, since 6 Underground, feels like the Ryan Reynolds channel). His new movie is The Adam Project, a family, coming of age, sci-fi movie (with lightsabers) that looks in every way like an update to the Bruce Willis underrated coming of age-meets-midlife crisis classic from 2000, The Kid.
Yes, Ryan Reynolds’ character (Adam) meets a younger version of himself, and you can just hear the whisper from Peter Pan warning us all not to grow up. Or will it be more like Bruce Willis meeting young Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys or Bruce Willis meeting young Bruce Willis in Looper? What’s the deal with Bruce Willis meeting himself in movies, anyway?
Check out the trailer below with Ryan Reynolds starring in The Adam Project:
If you have been watching closely, you may notice that streaming platforms, pay channels, and cable networks rely on hit movies for the bulk of their replays. Try to find some of your favorites outside the mainstream on Netflix, for example, and you’re likely to find mostly films made since streaming itself started to be a thing. Starz has been one monthly pay channel option that is slowly bringing back more obscure films from the past 50 years, films like Outland and Wolfen. Another you may have missed is Let Me Infrom a decade ago, another of those rare genre-bending films that–if you’re lucky enough to just stumble across it–is the kind of film to remind you why you love genre films. It stars twelve-year-old actors Chloe Grace Moretz and Kodi Smit-McPhee in powerful breakout performances, the same year Moretz would deliver one of the big screen’s best superheroine performances as the cute but foul-mouthed Hit Girl in the movie Kick-Ass with Nicolas Cage, and just after Smit-McPhee would co-star in the dystopian film The Road with Viggo Mortenson.
Is it horror, an early 1980s coming-of-age tale, a love story, crime-suspense, a story of an abusive father, or something more (as Starlord might say, “a bit of both”?). If you enjoy not knowing what genre of film you’re jumping into, this is for you. Like Midnight Special, Skeleton Key, 12 Monkeys, and The Others, much of the film will creep by before you even have any certainty as to what is “really” going on. Writer-director Matt Reeves, who brought audiences the Cloverfield series and the latest Planet of the Apes movies and is working on The Batman for 2021, mixes some truly dramatic moments into Let Me In, while also adding the next must-watch for coming of age movies, suspense-thrillers, horror, and romance. Just as James Mangold delivered a father-daughter love story in Logan, Reeves puts his own stamp on a compelling tale of a boy and the girl next door.
The clues Reeves delivers along the way will be more obvious to some than others. Donnie Darko, Fargo, Logan, The Outsiders–Don’t be surprised if Reeves’ deftly drawn scenes evoke feelings from all sorts of big films. Disturbing, poignant, triumphant, chilling. You might even get twisted into feeling a certain sympathy for one of the film’s creepier characters. A police detective played by Elias Koteas(Shooter, Zodiac, Gattaca) will have you think you’re following Mark Ruffalo’s character in another Zodiac movie.
Let’s cut to the chase: Daniel Godfrey’s new novel The Synapse Sequence is not just the leading contender for the best science fiction novel of 2018, it’s the most absorbing, riveting, and thrilling science fiction novel I’ve read since I was first blown away by Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park in 1990. Hyperbole? Maybe just a little, but when you are reading a new book and you’re taken aback by the twists, turns, and surprises as this book provides, it’s a bit like walking out of a big rock concert, wanting everyone else to witness what you just experienced. Godfrey is relatively new to the genre, with two solid sci-fi books behind him, New Pompeii (reviewed here) and Empire of Time (reviewed here). But this story is a completely different take on science fiction, and so deftly written, smartly paced, and completely believable in its speculative reach, Godfrey is worth comparison to some of the greats in the genre for it.
Anna Glover is an investigator with an unfortunately troubled and public past for her conclusions in investigating an airplane crash. She lives in the somewhat distant future–bots serve man, taking on so many functions that personal freedom is limited. As told from the alternating viewpoint of Glover in the present and looking back on her life, future London is very familiar and steeped in the world that technology is building right now with so much of life absorbed into the digital world. When we meet our protagonist she is attempting to lie low conducting trials for a company with an emerging technology, a “synapse sequencer,” which allows a person to be tapped into the mind of another, like a witness to a crime, to experience vivid, shared memories as an observer. She meets with her boss inside this world, where he lives out most of his life, a life better than he would experience in the real world. The process requires the help of a monitor, and hers sees that she gets in and out of submersion safely. But we learn there are risks for anyone who participates in this intermingling of brain activity. If you’ve seen the 1980s sci-fi classic Dreamscape, the modern classic Source Code, the television series Stitchers, or the shared visions of iZombie, you’ll find no suspension of disbelief issue with the wild ride that awaits you. The method for the journey isn’t as elaborate (or glitch-filled) as Connie Willis’s elaborate time travel tech, but Godfrey provides enough to submerge us into the stress and angst of Glover as she takes journey after journey to learn the who and why of a case involving a boy in a coma and a missing girl.
You can’t predict where Godfrey will take Glover from chapter to chapter in The Synapse Sequence. Godfrey has been likened to an emerging Crichton, but Crichton rarely could craft as satisfying an ending as found here. The story embraces that speculative futurism like many a Philip K. Dick story (Paycheck,Total Recall/We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, and Minority Report for starters), while weaving in a plausible future from the seeds of new tech today. He combines the audacious duplicity of Vincent and Jerome in Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca with the foreboding and despair of The Man’s story in Chris Marker’s Le Jetée and Cole’s in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.
Terry Gilliam’s 1995 sci-fi thriller 12 Monkeys is every bit a genre classic. Starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, and Brad Pitt–each in one of their best film performances–Willis plays James Cole, a time traveler from the future, Stowe plays Kathryn Railly, a psychologist in the past, and Pitt, in a supporting actor Oscar-nominated performance, as a mental patient who masterminds a terrorist group called the Army of the 12 Monkeys, and is the son of the wealthy Dr. Goines, played by Christopher Plummer. So how about 12 Monkeys as a television series?
How would you approach it? Use the same world but send another group of people back to try to “prevent the future” by trying again to pinpoint the source of a virus that will destroy everyone? Or would you use the same characters?
In the January 2015 TV series 12 Monkeys, James Cole will return, played this time by Aaron Stanford, who played X-Men mutant Pyro in the Marvel Comics movie series. And this time Cassandra Railly (not Kathryn), played by Amanda Schull (Suits, Psych, Grimm) sends Cole back in time (is this Kathryn’s daughter? Coles’ daughter?) to meet with… Cassandra, to try to change the future. Character actor and guest actor of every other series on TV, Zeljko Ivanek (White Collar, Argo, House, M.D., Live Free or Die Hard, Lost, Bones, Homicide, Donnie Brasco, The X-Files, and Tex) will play a lead role as Leland, who is key to changing the future. Kirk Acevedo (Grimm, Fringe, Walking Dead, Rise.. and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) plays a friend of Cole.
Count it among the best performances of both Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, the 1995 Terry Gilliam modern sci-fi 12 Monkeys is the kind of brilliantly written, post-apocalyptic science fiction movie that would receive a best picture Oscar nod today with the Academy’s pool of 10 potential nominees. It’s serious, dramatic science fiction, not the typical stuff of your average Syfy Channel made for TV movie. But today the Syfy Channel announced it has ordered a pilot for a TV series based on the movie.
The movie 12 Monkeys followed an unstuck-in-time convict in the year 2035 named James Cole, played by Willis, who is repeatedly sent back into the past to uncover the source of a plague reputed to be spread by an “Army of the Twelve Monkeys”–a plague that will one day kill most of the population of Earth unless the scientists can stop the virus in its inception before it mutates. Unfortunately the future’s time travel technology is flawed, and Cole is shot farther back in time than planned, to 1990, where he is arrested and kept in a mental institution. Madeleine Stowe played a psychiatrist in the film and Brad Pitt a patient with Cole, making a sort of odd coupling like Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman in Papillon.
