Chris Pratt movies are a thing now just like Tom Cruise movies and Mark Wahlberg movies. The latest Chris Pratt movie is The Tomorrow War, which just arrived this past weekend on Amazon Prime. It’s every bit a vehicle for Pratt and could star nobody else. Like the Jurassic World movies, Passengers, and even The Magnificent Seven remake, Pratt is a unique casting decision but evidently studio execs keep going for his “aw, shucks” brand of characters. In The Tomorrow War, Pratt plays a biology teacher dad turned rescuer of mankind named Dan Forester. Forester is nearly impossible to distinguish from Pratt’s dinosaur confronting character in Jurassic World. Pratt plays that bit of a dope you can’t imagine actually doing any of the things his character encounters, so you may need to be a Pratt fan or simply be grateful it’s a free action movie and not mind you’re getting what you paid for. Either way, there are worse direct-to-TV movies out there, but as the alien invasion genre goes, don’t expect to count The Tomorrow War high on your list.
Zack Snyder finally did it. Despite taking on a heist movie and a zombie picture in a major action movie, he wrote a script and delivered the type of action blockbuster he has not yet been able to create. Army of the Dead is his first movie to get it right, a load of tropes, a mash-up of genre ideas, a tightly written story with a great cast, and wall-to-wall fun. Not a comedy like Shaun of the Dead or iZombie,Army of the Dead features the right amount of humor for this story, while incorporating all the expectations of any fan of the father of the genre, George A. Romero. Rivaling the incredible action and effects in 6 Underground, it also rises to become one of Netflix’s most promising productions.
It’s been another long year of great entertainment. It’s time for the seventh annual round of new honorees for the borg Hall of Fame. We have several honorees from 2019 films and television, plus you’ll find some from the past, and a peek at some from the future – 28 new borgs or updated variants in all, bringing the borg Hall of Fame total to 221.
You can always check out the updated borg Hall of Fame on our home page under “Know your borg.”
Some reminders about criteria. Borgs have technology integrated with biology. Wearing a technology-powered suit alone doesn’t qualify a new member. Tony Stark aka Iron Man was named an honoree because the Arc Reactor kept him alive, not because of his incredible tech armor. The new Spider-Man suit worn by Tom Holland is similar to Tony’s, but it’s not integrated with Peter Parker’s biology. Similarly Peni Parker, seen outside her high-tech SP//dr suit in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Black Manta from Aquaman are merely wearing tech suits. We’d love a reason for a Mandalorian to make the cut, like Boba Fett, or Jango Fett, or the new Mandalorian from the series, since nobody has more intriguing armor. Maybe the second season coming next fall will give us something new to ponder.
Also, if the creators tell us the characters are merely robots, automatons, or androids, we take their word for it. Again, integration is key, but in the Hall, once a member, always a member.
A new cyborg, old heroes, a new fate, and another revised timeline. It must be a new Terminator movie. If you’re in the mood for science fiction nostalgia with a new twist this month, Terminator: Dark Fate is still in theaters and it’s one of those films meant for a big screen. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s also coming to all home video and streaming formats next month and is now available for pre-order here at Amazon. Featuring the return of two of science fiction’s greatest movie icons, Arnold Schwarzenegger′s original cyborg Terminator and the woman who would save 3 billion lives, Linda Hamilton′s Sarah Connor, Terminator: Dark Fateis a worthy addition to one of sci-fi’s biggest and best franchises up there with Doctor Who, Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, Alien, Star Trek, and Predator.
It turns out skipping over the third (Terminator: Rise of the Machines), fourth (Terminator: Salvation), and fifth (Terminator: Genisys) movies didn’t really matter all that much. Skynet kept sending Terminators back in time, and when a new hero sees another new hero in the future, you get the feeling the timeline has been visited and revisited many more times. In many ways it’s ideal for a series–you’ll never really arrive at an ending. When the timeline is revised again in a spectacular opening that de-ages Schwarzenegger and Hamilton (the best de-aging CGI on film this year), you just jump on and enjoy the ride. We meet a new time traveler named Grace, played by Blade Runner 2049’sMackenzie Davis, a tough, tall-statured cybernetic human who returns to the present to save a young Mexican woman named Dani (played by Natalia Reyes), who has a potentially important future. Dani is pursued by yet another updated Terminator, an REV-9 model played by Gabriel Luna(Ghost Rider in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D), who can split into two and reabsorb himself Robert Patrick/T2-style to and from a metalized slime state.
What makes a great entry in a Terminator movie, or for that matter, any movie? That right combination of humor and action. For me in these films it’s how they use Schwarzenegger′s strengths as an actor. So the weakest film was where he was absent from acting (governing California)–during Terminator: Salvation–which was also the film with no humor, darker than the others, entirely set in the grim post-apocalypse future. I prefer Arnold as the Terminator, since no matter who is writing for him he delivers the best lines–writers always seem to know exactly how to get the best from him. So long as Arnold is around, we’ll have a Terminator franchise, and after that, who cares about the series anymore? Deadpool director Tim Miller combining with producer James Cameron to bring these actors and characters back together in Terminator: Dark Fate was always going to be a great idea.
It’s been 35 years since we first heard the message from Kyle Reese given to Sarah Connor, “There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.” Producer James Cameron is back in the franchise for the first time since Terminator 2, with Tim Miller (Deadpool) directing the November release Terminator: Dark Fate. This time we’re told audiences are supposed to ignore everything that came after Terminator 2, and substitute this next chapter, similar to the “picture hopping” the Halloween movie franchise has become known for. The original Sarah Connor is back with Linda Hamilton reprising her role also like Jamie Lee Curtis has done for Halloween. (Although this is only Hamilton’s third movie as Connor, compared to Curtis logging four leading performances as Halloween’s Laurie Strode plus two more in the works–not that we’re keeping score).
The CGI-heavy action sequences we’ve seen so far look closer to the original film The Terminator than Cameron’s groundbreaking effects on Terminator 2: Judgment Day–we’re not sure that is what audiences were hoping for. Newcomer to the series Mackenzie Davis is “almost human,” and Gabriel Luna plays a villain, making them the faces of the next Terminators, following in the footsteps of Jason Patrick, Kristanna Loken, Byung-Hun Lee, and Jason Clarke. And, best of all, Arnold Schwarzenegger will be back, as promised. Although it’s difficult not to cringe when Hamilton says she hasn’t seen Davis’s kind of Terminator before, since audiences have, with Loken’s great Terminatrix in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
Wouldn’t it be great if they just brought back Michael Biehn as a parallel timeline Kyle Reese? The studio has announced Edward Furlong returning as John Connor, so anything is possible with Cameron and Miller here.
First here’s the new poster, followed by the brand new trailer just released, and seven additional teaser reels released yesterday, August 29, the franchise’s “Judgment Day”–
When you’re discussing Sylvester Stallone, a discussion of Arnold Schwarzenegger won’t be too far behind. Both reigned as the box office action heroes of the 1980s and 1990s, with Sly always a bit behind Arnold. I was pleasantly surprised in 2013 when Arnold returned to acting in his first lead performance in a decade as a past-his-prime sheriff of a sleepy southwest town in the sleeper action movie The Last Stand. It could have been worked into a sequel from all sorts of his past works, but it was a re-introduction of what the action hero looks like in his 60s, and the result should be fun for any fan of the arguably the biggest movie star Hollywood has seen. Unlike Arnold, Stallone never took a break to try another career. He’s been in essence a working actor since he created Rocky in 1976. He also seemed to try to reach beyond celebrity star status to the more dramatic in James Mangold’s Cop Land, which could have easily earned him an Oscar nod.
In Stallone’s sixth return to his Rocky Balboa character in Creed, Stallone’s performance again was something that pushed the action norm to something different, like Cop Land. And like Arnold’s The Last Stand, audiences saw what this action hero looks like in an acclaimed movie in his 60s. Stallone has had a great career, with three major franchises under his belt in Rocky, Rambo, and The Expendables. And soon his fifth foray into the character of John Rambo will reveal the action hero in his 70s. John Wayne, the prior decades’ version of Arnold and Sly, made several action films in his 60s, but never made any films in his 70s, and here is Stallone on his second major franchise film in his 70s. Take a look at the first trailer for his next film, Rambo: Last Blood, below.
Stallone’s John Rambo could have taken a more dramatic turn when introduced in 1982 in First Blood, but instead the movie opted to be another blood and guts revenge story, the kind that Chuck Norris would later be known for. Followed by more forgettable films Rambo: First Blood Part IIin 1985, Rambo IIIin 1988, and Rambo ten years later in 2008, the franchise keeps returning because audiences keep going back for more. His fans could easily have figured that, as with his sixth Rocky movie, Rocky Balboa, his 2008 film in this franchise, Rambo, was going to be his last. But this is the era of 1980s nostalgia, thanks to binge-watching television shows on Netflix and the throwback elements celebrated in the streaming provider’s series Stranger Things. So now is the time movies like Creed can happen. And another Rambo. Check out the first trailer below for Rambo: Last Blood:
In 1984 The Terminator introduced us to Linda Hamilton′s young Sarah Connor and her first encounter with Arnold Schwarzenegger′s now classic T-800 “Terminator” cyborg. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, director James Cameron amped up Hamilton’s role, resulting in arguably the best female character in all of science fiction movies (in a close heat with Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley in Aliens, also from Cameron), while making Arnold’s T-800 a good guy. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, we watched Sarah’s son John Connor (played by Nick Stahl) and his future wife (played by Claire Danes) as they approached Judgment Day–the day of the technological apocalpyse. In the fourth film Terminator: Salvation, audiences saw an older John Connor (Christian Bale) fighting the machines after the series’ Judgment Day, along with a young Kyle Reese played by Anton Yelchin, recounting the origins of the T-800 Arnold would embody later in the timeline. With Terminator: Genisys, John (next played by Jason Clarke) and Kyle (played by Jai Courtney) arrive at the future point where humans travel back in time to prevent Skynet, and in that timeline John encounters his own problems, and Kyle returns to a modified version of the past where Sarah (played by Solo: A Star Wars Story and Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke) is working with a T-800 (again played by Arnold, and again as a good guy) to prevent the Skynet future apocalypse from happening.
Welcome to the day after Judgment Day.
It’s now 35 years since we first heard the message from Kyle Reese given to Sarah Connor, “There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.” Producer James Cameron is back, with Tim Miller(Deadpool) directing the autumn theatrical release Terminator: Dark Fate. This time we’re told audiences are supposed to ignore everything that came after Terminator 2, and substitute this next chapter, similar to the “picture hopping” the Halloween movie franchise has become known for. The original Sarah Connor is back battling a Terminator. Newcomer to the series, Mackenzie Davis is one, “almost human.” And Gabriel Luna plays another, making them the faces of the next Terminators, following in the footsteps of Arnold, JasonPatrick, KristannaLoken, Byung-HunLee, and Jason Clarke.
Check out this new poster for the film and the first trailer for the sixth Terminator flick, Terminator: Dark Fate:
It’s a twofold celebration: It’s not only the 80th anniversary of the first appearance of Batman, it’s also the 30th anniversary of director Tim Burton’s visionary film, 1989’s Batman, starring Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, and Kim Basinger. On this year’s Free Comic Book Day, May 4, Fathom Events has pulled together the first of the four original Warner Brothers Batman movies: Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns, and Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. The four Bat-films will screen over four days as part of Fathom Events’ Batman 80th anniversary marathon.
My sister and I saw Batman on its opening night in June 1989, and stayed in our seats to watch it again. The crowd erupted at every scene that revealed something iconic from the comics, but nothing compared to the ovation with the first appearance of the new Batmobile. The excitement makes sense–audiences hadn’t been dazzled with superheroes on the screen in this way since Christopher Reeve appeared in 1977’s Superman, more than a decade before. On the heels of Frank Miller’s success with the surprisingly dark and gritty four-issue mini-series The Dark Knight Returns in 1986, it was still a surprise when audiences got their first glimpses at Burton’s similarly dark, Gothic vision for the film. His choice of then comedic actor Michael Keaton for Bruce Wayne and Batman drew the same kind of ire as any outside-the-box announcement today. But Keaton was trying to show he had a different side, as demonstrated by his recent dark and outrageous role in Beetlejuice followed by his dramatic film Clean and Sober. As for Jack Nicholson, everyone just wanted to seem him play the role his smile was made for, as the crazed, maniacal, murderous jokester The Joker.
So if you missed them the first time, you get Danny Elfman′s defining theme, plus Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, and George Clooney as Batman, Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl, Chris O’Donnell as Robin, plus an arsenal of villains: Jack Nicholson as The Joker plus Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, Danny DeVito as The Penguin, Jim Carrey as The Riddler, Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face, Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze. And all four movies have in common Michael Gough as Alfred and Pat Hingle as Commissioner Gordon.
It’s that time of year again, time to take a look forward at what movies should be on your radar for 2019. Are you going to see them all? Heck no. These are the genre films we think borg readers will want to know about to make their own checklists for the coming year–and they are only the films we know about so far. We pulled 78 of the hundreds of films that have been finalized or are in varying stages of final production, slated for next year’s movie calendar.
What looks to top the list for most fanboys and fangirls? The last of the nine films in theStar Wars saga. Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, and Spider-Man: Far From Home.Shazam!is DC’s contribution. Quentin Tarantino returns to movies to direct Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Martin Scorsese is back with an all-star cast in The Irishman (on Netflix). M. Night Shyamalan finishes his dark superhero trilogy with Glass. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton return in Terminator. Jordan Peele is back with another horror film with Us.
Do you like sequels? This is your year. Another Men in Black, X-Men, Shaft, Happy Death Day, Lego Movie, Hellboy, John Wick, Kingsman, Jumanji, The Secret Life of Pets, How to Train Your Dragon, Fast and the Furious, Zombieland, Addams Family, Charlie’s Angels, Godzilla, Shaun the Sheep, Annabelle,and Stephen King’s It and Pet Sematary—Disney is trying to get you to move into your local theater with another Toy Story, Aladdin, Dumbo, Frozen, and Lion King–all in one year. Yep, lots and lots of sequels are coming.
Some films don’t have locked-in release dates yet. Amazon Prime and Netflix haven’t revealed dates for these 2019 releases:
Martin Scorcese’s The Irishman, a film about Jimmy Hoffa starring Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano, and Bobby Cannavale (Netflix)
The Kid, a Western biopic with Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Dane DeHaan, and Vincent D’Onofrio (Netflix)
The Man Who Killed Hitler Then Bigfoot, starring Sam Elliott (Netflix)
6 Underground, a Michael Bay film starring Ryan Reynolds, Ben Hardy, Dave Franco, and Mélanie Laurent (Netflix)
The Last Thing He Wanted, Dee Rees directs Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, Willem Dafoe, and Toby Jones; journalist quits newspaper job to become an arms dealer for a covert government agency (Netflix)
The Laundromat, Steven Soderbergh directs Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas, James Cromwell, about the Pentagon Papers (Netflix)
Radioactive, Rosamund Pike plays Marie Curie, with Anya Taylor-Joy (Amazon)
Some of these films will have revised release dates, or get pushed to 2020.
So grab your calendar and start making your plans–here are the movies you’ll want to see in 2019 (and many you might not):
January
Glass – Superhero, M. Night Shyamalan trilogy part 3, stars Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, James McAvoy; continues where Unbreakable and Split left off – January 18.
Serenity– Mystery/Thriller, stars Anne Hathaway, Jason Clarke, Djimon Hounsou, Jeremy Strong, Diane Lane; sorry, no relation to Firefly – January 25.
King of Thieves– Heist Comedy, stars Jim Broadbent, Tom Courtenay, Charlie Cox, Michael Gambon, and Ray Winstone – January 25.
Shane Black has finally delivered what fans of the Predator alien have been after since they first saw Arnold Schwarzenegger take the creature on in the original 1987 film that featured Black in an acting role as one of the marines. The movie The Predator, in theaters now, delivers exactly as promised. More Predators. Bigger and badder alien fight scenes. Great new sci-fi special effects tech. A wall-to-wall movie of rude jokes and one-liners. A squad of maladjusted, badass misfits in the realm of The Dirty Dozen (if every character was played as Telly Savalas’s character), only this time the squad isn’t recruited for a suicide mission to fight the bad guys. The surprise comes with an actual, serviceable plot that knocks the predecessor sequels out of the ranking (some elements… gasp… it even handles better than the original).
For diehard fans of the franchise who read the prequel novel (a great read we reviewed here earlier at borg) the movie lives up to the introduction provided in the book, which gave plenty of backstory for Sterling K. Brown’s pseudo-military leader Will Traeger–one of the movie’s key villains. Screenplay writers Shane Black and Fred Dekker include an ambitious, layered story with interesting subplots. One thread follows a boy played by played by Jacob Tremblay, the autistic son of star Boyd Holbrook’s tough Captain McKenna. The kid begins to play with what can only be described as “really cool alien tech” his dad sends him in the mail. Olivia Munn gets to play her most badass character yet, a biologist called in to work with the research group that has caught a Predator, being studied in a lab led by Jake Busey, who plays the son of the character his father Gary Busey played in Predator 2–Jake Busey offers a solid performance as a low-key scientist that could make it back for a future sequel. Another subplot follows the alien hunters as they each search for some secret objects. The ensemble ad hoc military unit that takes on the Predator includes a diverse team of actors pulling together a chaotic brand of chemistry: Trevante Rhoades, Thomas Jane, Augusto Aguilera, and Keegan-Michael Key. Another subplot sets up the next film nicely, a new phase for Predators this film only touches on.
The reason we see more than one kind of Predator is explained in the film, but each has incredible updated props and costumes, and the plot makes great use of both. It’s all loyal to the original. The best part of the 1987 film was the absence of the alien throughout the film, appearing sporadically, menacingly, like the shark in Jaws. We don’t see much more of the alien in this movie, but we get to see what he looks like head to toe in the lab, we get to see how his arm gauntlet and helmet work, and plenty of action scenes as in the original. One character even gets into the head of a Predator (sort of) to understand its technology and motivations.
