At $6.5 billion in sales, Halo, the 77th biggest media franchise, is nothing to sneeze at. So what took the video game franchise so long to make it to a major live-action production? It was just stuck in development stages. But for both those who never played the games and those who have, Halo is now a live-action series joining sci-fi’s Star Trek franchise on Paramount+. The series opener is full of all the pew-pew action you’d expect of a first-person shooter game. Neither a continuation, adaptation, or prequel to the games, the show is meant to be a standalone world. It’s Lost in Space meets Ender’s Game and Star Wars: The Clone Wars, with similar plotting to Dune and Gears of War, a non-human threat like Ender’s Game and Starship Troopers, a 26th century mad scientist’s super squad with Edge of Tomorrow armor and guys in them that talk and stomp around like Jayne in Firefly.
Fortunately the pilot comes together like the short mini-series that touched off the successful Battlestar Galactica reboot. Yes, this is a military sci-fi genre series to check out, and one you’ll likely return for next week.
Surprisingly great, surprisingly real, and surprisingly… current? Sony Pictures Animation, the studio that brought you Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse brings its latest and greatest animated film to Netflix this weekend. It’s The Mitchells vs. The Machines–a sci-fi, apocalypse, coming of age, story about a weird family that ends up being the last family on the planet to be exterminated from the planet by the very technologies humans are so addicted to. Gravity Falls creators Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe wrote and directed this story, a visually stunning spectacle reflecting life as we knew it in 2020… and may know it again, with contributions by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (both known for the LEGO movies and Into the Spider-verse). The themes are influenced by Tron and Tron: Legacy,National Lampoon’s Vacation, and the Terminator movies, leaning hard on the plot of Terminator: Genisys. It’s loud, colorful, crazy, and it gets family relationships just right, at least of the 21st century variety. It’s also the movie I was hoping for with The Incredibles 2.
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.
Well it’s been one long year, with plenty to do and see, plenty of good and not-so-good to read and watch, and as with last year we’re certain we reviewed more content this year than ever before. This year was a big year for borgs in TV and film, so we had some difficult decisions to make. All year long we sifted through all that Hollywood had to offer and honed in on the genre TV, films, comics, and other books we thought were worth examining. We went back and looked at it all and pulled together our picks for our annual Best of the Best list.
Today we reveal the entire list–the best genre content of 2015–with our top categories Best Sci-Fi Fix, Best Fantasy Fix, Best Superhero Fix, Best Animated Fix, and Best Borg selected regardless of medium. A dozen properties garnered multiple mentions.
We hope you agree with many of these great creations of the entertainment industries, and wish everyone a great 2016!
Best Sci-Fi Fix – Killjoys (Syfy). Surprised? Killjoys pulled together great worldbuilding, characters and actors in a year of a dozen new sci-fi shows to provide us the closest thing to the next Firefly we’ve seen in a long time.
Best Fantasy Fix – Galavant (ABC); Runner-up The Librarians (TNT). It aired early in 2015 but nothing surpassed Galavant’s medieval high adventure and all-out Princess Bride-style fun.
Best Superhero Fix –The Flash (CW). Of all the Marvel movies and TV series from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to Agent Carter and from Arrow to Supergirl, nothing had us coming back for more each week like the superhero world in The Flash.
Best Animated Fix – Star Wars Rebels (DisneyXD). Compare it to Star Wars: The Force Awakens and see if you think this animated Star Wars galaxy had an even better story and characterization, along with the return of its own group of original trilogy actors, compelling visuals and rousing music.
Best Borg – Pops (Arnold Schwarzenegger) from Terminator Genisys(Paramount). Schwarzenegger created yet another borg that could stand up against his prior successful characters from the series. A cool, moving character in a big year for borgs on screen!
Best Borg Movie – Ex Machina (DNA Films). Incredible storytelling and a small cast of talented actors provided a classic science fiction story and Oscar-worthy film about our favorite subject.
Best Borg TV Series – Humans (AMC). On television the most in-depth look at life as a borg and among borgs has never been portrayed more dramatically than on this year’s surprise sci-fi hit series from AMC.
Best Kickass Genre TV Heroine – Liv Moore (Rose McIver), iZombie(CW); Honorable Mentions: Dutch (Hannah John-Kamen), Killjoys (Syfy); Helena (Tatiana Maslany), Orphan Black (BBC)
Want to know who we picked for best villain and best comic books of the year? Take a look after the cut…
After climbing over our 1.4 millionth site visit at borg.com this month, it’s time to update the borg.com Hall of Fame, with borg in genre fiction from past, present, and future, and from all media. Click here for our “About” page if you need a refresher on what makes a borg a borg.
These new inductees are primarily new additions to the world of fiction this year, but many were borgs we overlooked in prior years. A few may or may not be borg, depending on your point of view. Robots or androids that look perfectly human, for example, that have organic looking material but may not have actual living tissue are not technically cyborgs.
So here is Round 3, the 2015 borg.com Hall of Fame honorees, in no particular order:
Alicia Vikander’s Ava and Sonoya Mizumo’s Kyoko from this year’s critically acclaimed movie Ex Machina were stunning additions to the world of borg. Clearly robots with artificial intelligence but they make our list with what appeared to us to be some kind of replicated organic skin.
AMC’s new TV series Humans introduced the “synths,” robotic servants that permeated the modern world. Five of these had something more than the others, the best of these being Gemma Chan’s synth Anita, and whether you count only these five or all of them as borg, we think they fit right into our Hall of Fame.
Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road was one of the year’s biggest hits, with Furiosa on many critic’s lists of kick-ass heroines in 2015. Her mechanical prosthetic arm provides her entry ticket into our list of 2015 borgs.
In this year’s Disney adventure movie Tomorrowland, the girl Athena (Raffey Cassidy)reveals herself o be an “audio-animatronic robot,” but she looks entirely borg to us. Plenty more borg are featured in the film, including the proprietors of the toy shop who are out to keep the secrets of Tomorrowland from humanity.
Few sci-fi films are as revered as James Cameron’s Terminator and Terminator II: Judgment Day. Judgment Day is regarded by many as one of the greatest sequels to any movie ever made. Both films made American Film Institute lists and are the kind of movies we can watch hundreds of times and still keep enjoying them. Two sequels followed, no longer under the direction of Cameron, Terminator III: Rise of the Machines, a worthy but lesser sequel reviewed at borg.comhere, and the far, far lesser Terminator: Salvation. So coming into the fourth sequel this past summer with the opening of director Alan Taylor’s Terminator Genisys, expectations by many were low. But fans of sci-fi and borgs knew a winner when they saw it.
Somehow Terminator Genisys manages to be not only good, but great, and not only that, it manages to equal the punch and excitement of both Terminator and Terminator II. A pretty big feat that holds its own even off the big screen on the newly released 3D Blu-ray, DVD, and Ultraviolet releases available this month.
That’s right, if you love the universe of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sometimes villain, sometimes hero Terminator T-800, you’re going to love this film, which is not only loyal to James Cameron’s originals, it flat-out amps up the sci-fi and takes every element that made the earlier films great and expands them into new, exciting places. This includes time travel, big action, story twists, casting, acting, and all the cybernetic tech you could hope for. Adhering to a carefully laid out plan covering two parallel timelines (that we know of), we revisit the first Terminator trip to 1984 and learn about two other time jumps that illustrate Kyle Reese’s important line from the first movie: “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” In fact in Reese’s first conversation with Sarah he made the same point, calling her future “one possible future.” These seeds planted in the original allow this new story to take off.
How do you like your post-apocalyptic nightmare? Hot or cold?
This month brings the release of Max: Max Fury Road on 3D Blu-ray, standard Blu-ray, digital HD Ultraviolet, and DVD. We reviewed the 3D Blu-ray and found it to be one of the best of the converted 3D Blu-rays to come to Blu-ray from a pure quality of film standpoint. Story aside, 3D fans will have plenty of in-your-face explosions and old school 3D gags, like a steering wheel flashing out of the screen and into your lap, as well as other unexpected oddities–and a whole lot of bleak, ugly, and sand, in perfect clarity.
Nine behind-the-scenes featurettes accompany the home release, including Maximum Fury: Filming Fury Road, Mad Max: Fury on Four Wheels, The Road Warriors: Max and Furiosa, The Tools of the Wasteland, The Five Wives: So Shiny, So Chrome, Fury Road: Crash & Smash, I Am A Milker, Turn Every Grain Of Sand!, and Let’s Do This.
If you haven’t seen Mad Max: Fury Road, trust your instincts and skip this one. If Fury Road is for you, you would have seen it in the theater already. As post-apocalyptic storytelling is concerned, Fury Road is thin and uninspired. As world-building goes, Fury Road adds nothing to the mythos in the original Mad Max and Road Warrior. It is less silly than Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, but Fury Road cries out for humor, or any other pleasantness of the third film in the series. When humor arrives it is absurd (the lead bad guy takes along a turbo-charged guitarist and over-sized timpani band) and reminds us we’re well outside the realm of any possible future reality. How did these repulsive creatures become leaders so soon after the downfall of today’s reality? How was a religion based on cars so quick to arrive in the same lifetime let alone the few years since the young star was a police officer in today’s world? The number of unanswered questions are endless. Writer/director George Miller, who directed each entry in the series, would have done better directing someone else’s story. This is definitely a “story” in need of a backstory, which is available in prequel comic books for those wanting to delve further into the “revisited” Mad Max universe.
Miller’s success is his ability to nicely copy the cinematography from epic scenery-laden films like those of the great John Ford–the technical production is top-notch (Oscar winner John Seale will likely net another Oscar nod for his efforts here). But Fury Road is nothing but a Western updated for an ugly future, one long “cowboy and Indians” race to escape the Indians, and one shorter race back to the fort again, and a B-Western at that. Sure, spiked and retooled 1960s and 1970s cars are inexplicably swapped for horses, but plenty of stuntwork is piled on as with the old Westerns. We see some similarities: instead of wise old men mentoring John Wayne how to avoid the noose, here it’s wise old women helping to save the day at film’s end. Miller’s other success is his selection of Tom Holkenborg aka Junkie XL to compose the film score–this is a rousing, pulse-pounding score worthy of a much better film.
Ever thought about checking out what is in those monthly surprise boxes that have become more and more popular in the past few years? Some of our friends have been buying Loot Crate and Nerd Block for several months, and when our friends at Wizard World dropped us a note about their new Comic Con Box we decided it was time to check these out. We got in on the first three Wizard World Comic Con Boxes and three boxes from Loot Crate (we haven’t checked out any other companies’ boxes yet). So what did we learn?
Loot Crates run about $20 including shipping per month per box, and Comic Con Boxes roughly $37 including shipping. Each contain coupon opportunities, some with downloads, app opportunities, and similar items in addition to the main draw of the boxes–the shirts, comics, and collectibles. You can sign up for one or multiple months and can terminate membership so long as you do so before the next box ships. Customer service for these is very easy-going and helpful to explain if you think you messed up your ordering. Themes are pre-announced, so you can skip months with themes that don’t interest you.
The companies each insert random bonus items in boxes and have a deluxe box opportunity worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars that some lucky subscriber will get. And if you film your “unboxing” and upload it to YouTube you can be eligible for other prizes, and other contests are also available throughout the year. We didn’t get the big prize pack in our three months of boxes but did get a good bonus item in one box and in another we got a 1 of 2 variant that ended up being a rare insert. The bonus item came with a Comic Con Box, and it was an authenticated, personally autographed photo of actress Karen Gillan in her Nebula garb from Guardians of the Galaxy. Her autograph can sell for $70-$85 so this was the big win of all the boxes. A close second was a Greg Horn rare variant cover for the recent issue of Wolverine #1 also in a Comic Con Box. It also was selling online for around $70-$85.
Of the regular boxes we were most impressed with Loot Crate’s “Cyber” theme box. The exclusive Terminator Genisys half-scale skull was just dead-on for our love of sci-fi and borg tech. And that’s the thing about these boxes: The broader your interest in pop culture, the more value you’ll get for your dollar because each company varies the licenses/franchises in each box. You can easily add up the price of each item and tally more than the price of the box but ultimately it is your own taste that will be the judge of value. If you have a spouse or friends or kids to share with or friends to trade items with, or if you’re accustomed to selling on eBay, then it can be easy to make these boxes a “win”. Expect to see plenty of “trinkets” and the kind of swag you might find at San Diego Comic-Con plus a few higher valued items in each box.
So what exactly can you expect to find in the boxes?
Few sci-fi films are as revered as James Cameron’s Terminator and Terminator II: Judgment Day. Judgment Day is regarded by many as one of the greatest sequels to any movie ever made. Both films made American Film Institute lists and are the kind of movies we can watch hundreds of times and still keep enjoying them. Two sequels followed, no longer under the direction of Cameron, Terminator III: Rise of the Machines, a worthy but lesser sequel reviewed at borg.comhere, and the far, far lesser Terminator: Salvation. So coming into the fourth sequel this weekend with the opening of director Alan Taylor’s Terminator Genisys, expectations by many were low. So against that backdrop, and countless bashings by both national film critics and time travel aficionados, how really is this sequel?
Somehow Terminator Genisys manages to be not only good, but great, and not only that, it manages to equal the punch and excitement of both Terminator and Terminator II.
That’s right, if you love the universe of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sometimes villain, sometimes hero Terminator T-800, you’re going to love this film, which is not only loyal to James Cameron’s originals, it flat-out amps up the sci-fi and takes every element that made the earlier films great and expands them into new, exciting places. This includes time travel, big action, story twists, casting, acting, and all the cybernetic tech you could hope for. Adhering to a carefully laid out plan covering two parallel timelines (that we know of), we revisit the first Terminator trip to 1984 and learn about two other time jumps that illustrate Kyle Reese’s important line from the first movie: “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” In fact in Reese’s first conversation with Sarah he made the same point, calling her future “one possible future.” These seeds planted in the original allow this new story to take off.
You have Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day committed to memory. The fourth Terminator movie, Terminator Salvation, nearly turned you off on the franchise for good. But what you don’t remember is the last time Arnold Schwarzenegger really played the Terminator. That was the third film, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Back in 2003, our expectations were pretty high, just as they are for this week’s release of Terminator Genisys. Twelve years later and after the truly bad Terminator Salvation, you might find it better than you remember. If you want to get in prime Terminator mode with something different this week as you gear up for the latest effort, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines deserves a second look.
The story connects the dots between the past and future of the first two films. After Skynet failed to kill Sarah and John, it sends back yet another Terminator, the T-X, played by Kristanna Loken, to eliminate all of John Connor’s Resistance leaders, including his wife Kate, played by Claire Danes–who will one day be his second in command. The Resistance sends its own counter-attack into the past in the form of an outdated tech T-850, played by Schwarzenegger, and as with Terminator 2, Arnold is again the hero/protector. John Connor, played by the strangely cast Nick Stahl (he doesn’t look anything like John in T2), is living off the grid, but still the prize target, which the T-X encounters in a fated, self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts where John and Kate’s lives converge with the arrival of both the T-X and T-850.
We learn that Kate’s dad is a general in the military who is preparing to activate Skynet–and finally learn the reason why it was created, and how it all goes wrong–on the Judgment Day of the first sequel’s title.
