Before 2020 if you were pondering the form of a coming apocalypse, odds are it would look something more like the trailer for Greenland than wearing a mask and staying at home. Thanks to Hollywood the next big-budget, CGI spectacle that may or may not make it to movie theater screens taps into the disaster genre yet again. A stuntman-turned writer-director of movies like Angel Has Fallen, Ric Roman Waugh directs Greenland, which will not only have you asking “why that title for this movie?” but why do we keep returning to the disaster movie altogether. It stars recent go-to disaster thriller guy Gerard Butler, whose secret service agent character has headlined three movies in the “Fallen” series, plus there are a few other favorite actors of genre TV and film involved. Check out the first trailer for Greenland below.
Our borg.comBest of 2017 list continues today with the best in television. If you missed it, check out our review of the Best Movies of 2017 here and the Kick-Ass Heroines of 2017 yesterday here.
Without further ado, this year’s Best in Television:
Best Borg TV Series, Best TV Borg – Humans (AMC). From the awakenings in the first episode of season 2, AMC’s Humans kicked in full throttle as the borg show to watch this year. Continuing to explore what it means to be real and addressing the desire and need to overcome oppression, the show took ideas from Frankenstein and THX-1138 and everything in between to show us realities of life as a borg as it took the world from robotic cyborgs to sentience. And this year’s best borg goes to all the Synths on the series, as each showed a different side to what a world full of cyborgs might be like.
Best Sci-fi TV Series, Best Soundtrack for TV – The Orville(Fox). The Orville expanded on elements from across all sci-fi, like space battle sequences and planet flyovers using Star Wars-inspired camera angles (including real model ships, not just CGI), completely new and unique aliens (the only thing close to these can be found in Doctor Who), and a fantastic, triumphant musical score from Bruce Broughton. A visually gorgeous show that took itself seriously more than trying to mock anything that came before it. The science fiction series we’ve been waiting for since Star Trek Voyager ended.
Best Fantasy TV Series – Wynonna Earp (Syfy). Wynonna Earp’s second season proved the first wasn’t a fluke. The sharp-tongued, swaggering, tough-as-nails gunfighter, her sister, the sheriff, and the ghost of Doc Holliday added some new team members and some great supernatural villains, providing a series we couldn’t wait to get back to each week. Wynonna’s handling of the Revenants and a transport back in time was even more fun while she managed her pregnancy.
Best Retro TV Series – Stranger Things (Netflix). The only question after binge-watching the second season of Stranger Things was struggling to decide whether it was better than the first. It had the same look and feel of its first season, but somehow the characterization was really amped up, the action more exciting, and the tension pretty much perfect. Stranger Things really had it all–stars of our favorite 1980s movies, throwback references to video games, music, fashions, and the obscure like no other show–and with a second season that eclipsed the first, it proved it is the real deal.
After the cut, come back for more of our Best in Television 2017, including our pick for Best TV Series:
That week is here–All the lead-in built up by Marvel’s host of television series created for Netflix finally comes together this weekend. Marvel’s Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist become The Defenders. Netflix has released a final trailer leading up to the series premiere.
We’ve learned in the past few years that combining your A-league superheroes doesn’t guarantee a successful cinematic experience. How much better than the theatrical Avengers and Justice Leaguers was the B-league team that comprised the Guardians of the Galaxy? How about the strange success in Deadpool of partnering Colossus, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, and Deadpool?
So far we’ve loved most of what we’ve seen Marvel put together for Netflix. Luke Cage earned several of our “Best of Television” categories last year here at borg.com. The core of its new team-up of all the Netflix Marvel superhero stories is a classic Marvel comic book team-up: Power Man and Iron Fist. It’s amazing that this team-up has the potential to gain some real traction 40 years later. And you can’t get much more nostalgic for 1970s comic books than the late, great Steve Gerber run on The Defenders. So put together Luke “Power Man” Cage, Daredevil, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones, and add in Elodie Yung as Elektra, and give us a villain played by sci-fi queen Sigourney Weaver, and a supporting cast including the incomparable Scott Glenn, and a triple threat of actresses known for their badass roles: Rosario Dawson, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Simone Missick? What’s not to like? We asked it earlier with the first previews for the series: Can The Defenders be the best team-up on-screen yet?
Check out this final trailer for Marvel’s The Defenders:
Everyone keeps trying to stage the best team-up. And we’re all for it. Who is the best? That depends on what you like in a team-up. Marvel’s Avengers? Marvel’s X-Men? DC’s Legends of Tomorrow? DC’s Justice League? DC’s Justice League Dark? What about a smaller group, like, say, made of only two superheroes? Think back to DC Comics’ The Brave and the Bold, bringing together monthly a duet of every A-league and B-league hero you can think of.
We’ve learned in the past few years that combining your A-league superheroes doesn’t guarantee a successful cinematic experience. How much better than the theatrical Avengers and Justice Leaguers was the B-league team that comprised the Guardians of the Galaxy? How about the strange success of partnering Colossus, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, and Deadpool?
So far we’ve loved most of what we’ve seen Marvel put together for Netflix. Luke Cage earned several of our “Best of Television” categories last year here at borg.com. The core of its new team-up of all the Netflix Marvel superhero stories, is a classic Marvel comic book team-up: Power Man and Iron Fist. It’s amazing that this team-up has the potential to gain some real traction 40 years later. And you can’t get much more nostalgic for 1970s comic books than the late, great Steve Gerber run on The Defenders. So put together Luke “Power Man” Cage, Daredevil, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones, and add in Elektra, and give us a villain played by Sigourney Weaver, and a supporting cast including Scott Glenn, Rosario Dawson, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Simone Missick? What’s not to like? Can The Defenders be the best team-up on the screen yet?
Check out this trailer for Marvel’s The Defenders:
Marvel’s The Defenders begins streaming on Netflix this summer.
Zack Snyder. He’s the director of the acclaimed movie adaptation of comic books 300 and Watchmen. With those two movies he showed through his own unique style–adhering to Frank Miller’s panel work for 300, amplifying Dave Gibbon’s powerful images in his Watchmen–that he knows how to make comic book movies. So how could he have fallen so flat with Man of Steel (reviewed previously here at borg.com)? Snyder makes big movies but you can’t depend on his name to know what you’re going to get when you plop down the price of a ticket. When you hear about a movie advertised as Sucker Punch was, it’s easy to skip over it especially because he both wrote and directed the movie. Released in 2011, Sucker Punch is now available On Demand. Is it worth checking out?
Sucker Punch was only marketed as a movie featuring ass-kicking female characters in video game situations. Yet the story is grounded in some serious issues. It follows two tracks: first, a young woman only referred to as Baby Doll (played by Emily Browning) being abused by her step-father is sent to an “insane asylum,” and second, that woman enters into a fantasy world to survive and avoid being lobotomized by the doctor on staff (played by Mad Men’s Jon Hamm). If you give Snyder the benefit of the doubt, you can buy into the fantasy word elements. Baby Doll’s fantasy world consists of the stuff of David Carradine’s Kung Fu series, first person video games, and even The Lord of the Rings. Led by her own inner mentor, played superbly by Scott Glenn (Silverado, The Right Stuff, Backdraft), Baby Doll takes a team of four inmates–real-world accomplices–on Dungeons & Dragons type missions to capture key totems that Glenn’s character advises will help her break out of the asylum in the real world. In one scene they pilot a World War II B-25 plane, in another they attempt to slay a dragon, and another they are battling robot drones. And it all is woven with classic rock and pop songs.
A powerhouse performance can be found with Jena Malone (Donnie Darko, Into the Wild) as Rocket, the most complex of the inmates, as well as Abbie Cornish (RoboCop), who plays her sister and fellow inmate Sweet Pea. These two characters pretty much equal the military badass male action scenes of films like Alien and Predator. If Snyder had stuck to making a purely fantasy movie, he would have knocked this one out of the park with these actresses and his supernatural world. But his major miss is the real world depicted in Sucker Punch.
The CW Network revealed Brandon Routh’s latest supersuit–for his role as The Atom, Ray Palmer’s alter ego from the DC Universe playing out this month Wednesday nights on Arrow. Unlike the classic Captain America-esque suit, this live-action version has more in common with the classic Marvel Ant-Man garb. It’s a cool outfit and seems to fit his role on the show, much different than anything else seen in the series so far. We’re sure Routh, awesome as Superman and everything else he tries, will make it work.
Check it out:
Look for Routh in the supersuit for the first time on the February 25, 2015, episode of Arrow. He’ll then be in a team-up with Grant Gustin’s running man on a future episode of The Flash with the most comic book title yet: “All-Star Team-Up.”
Netflix has also released the first full trailer for its new series, Daredevil. So far it looks like it could be as good as Ben Affleck’s movie version (good or bad, depending on whether you liked that effort or not). Check it out for yourself, after the break:
If only it wasn’t another incarnation of Hannibal Lecter.
In hindsight the Academy Awards sweep of Silence of the Lambs at the 1992 Oscar ceremony seems very strange. A win for a horror movie about a cannibal that took best film, best director for Jonathan Demme, best actor for Anthony Hopkins as the villain Lecter, best actress for Jodie Foster, and best writing for Ted Tally’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel–it was pretty much unheard of. The actual antagonist in the film was far creepier than Hopkins’ Lecter, played by Ted Levine, who would go on to star as the far kinder cop in Monk. The Hunt for Red October and Silverado star Scott Glenn also had a key role in the film as an FBI director.
One explanation for the Oscar wins was that the events were preceded by actual cannibalism in the news and as sometimes happens Oscar nods to movies reflecting life. The other is that it was a pretty bad year for movies, with Lambs facing off against the underwhelming JFK, Bugsy, and The Prince of Tides (it beat one acclaimed film, the bigger box office draw for the year, the successful animated Disney film Beauty and the Beast). It also beat out two of the best sci-fi films of all time: Terminator 2 and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Yet which of these are the only films that stand up to repeated viewings today? Not Lambs or Tides or Bugsy or JFK, but the now classic genre films Terminator,Trek VI, and Beast.
