I Love the ’80s was a ten-hour VH-1 series that waxed nostalgic for all things pop culture in the decade, and a new five-hour documentary strives to do the same thing with the sci-fi genre movies of the decade as its focus. In Search of Tomorrow: A Journey Through ’80s Sci-Fi Cinema is the result of a crowd-sourced project, now available for pre-order exclusively at the project’s website here. It is one of several projects we’ve seen like it over the years, the best being Must-See Sci-Fi (reviewed here), Turner Classic Movies’ guide to 50 significant science fiction movies, and James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction (reviewed here), a book and series which gives insight into the genre’s most significant creations via interviews with the directors that made them. In Search of Tomorrow features only a handful of A-listers in its interviews–the advertised top talent being Peter Weller, Billy Dee Williams, Dee Wallace, and Nicholas Meyer. It pulls together a group of the few remaining actors, visual effects artists, and other creators behind the scenes who fans of the genre probably haven’t seen in decades (yes, it’s been more than 30 years since the 1980s). Writer/director David Weiner focuses on a swath of 54 movies that reflects the best–and the worst–of the decade.
Two episodes in, and you’ll probably get drawn into at least three of the characters in the story. Four episodes in, you’re thinking about who is going to to make it to the second season and how quick they can get that filmed and released. Directed by Shinsuke Sato, Haro Aso’s popular manga series comes alive in Alice in Borderland, the live-action dystopian, Japanese noir-meets-steampunk thrill ride streaming now on Netflix. Doomsday, Tokyo-style, is surprisingly violent, surprisingly thought-provoking, as a city finds itself mostly vacated (as in The Quiet Earth and 28 Days Later) and the remaining citizens must fight for their lives The Running Man-style or they’ll get zapped and killed The War of the Worlds-style. Clever casting of characters introduces looks of action heroes from all sorts of Japanese video games, manga, and anime, all living (many briefly) in a world loosely pulled from Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland. A gamer-themed series on the heels of the popular Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, the result is a very different story allowing the audience to try to solve clues along with the players on the screen–what I was hoping for when I first heard about the book Ready Player One.
Using a meticulously designed new robot from Weta Workshop, the Australian science fiction movie I Am Motherhas all the components of a good story steeped in the classic sci-fi of the 1950s. It takes place on Earth after an apocalypse that could easily be interwoven into the Cyberdyne/Genisys destruction from the Terminator series, and has that futurism straight out of a Philip K. Dick short story. What’s left are robots running everything, some on the surface, but one in particular inhabits what looks like a space station buried beneath the planet’s surface. This robot is called Mother, voiced seamlessly by X-Men series co-star and Australian actor Rose Byrne. She has preserved several of the last bits of humanity–embryos–in order to repopulate the species via rapid-growth technology. The production, the design, the light-up props, and the pacing all create the right framework for a significant sci-fi film. Unfortunately the story is single-threaded, building opportunities for subplots that get left ignored, much like January’s direct-to-Netflix sci-fi release Io.
The build-up is nicely rendered by first-time movie director and script writer Grant Sputore. The common theme of this genre, as much sci-fi horror as merely sci-fi, is “things aren’t what they seem.” Or maybe they are. The audience sees Mother raise a single child from the bank of embryos stowed on the facility, a girl known simply as Daughter, played first by young Tahlia Sturzaker, then for the bulk of the movie by Clara Rugaard, both giving fine performances. We believe the humans are long gone outside, until a woman arrives, played by two-time Best Actress Academy Award winner Hilary Swank. She’s been shot, and whether she was shot by humans or robots becomes a mystery for Daughter to solve. Both Swank and Rugaard look so much alike, their likeness simply must be a plot point: Are they related, and if so, how? Sisters? Clones? Same hair color and length, eyes, bone structure. Was Swank’s lost human a former captive in the underground bunker? How many times has Mother created Daughters or Sons? How many years from Armageddon is this story really happening? It’s the answers–or lack thereof–to these questions, and the ultimate payoff Sputore delivers that doesn’t match the rest of the film.
Part of the legitimacy of the film as something more than mainstream popular sci-fi is the amazing body movement work of Luke Hawker acting inside the robot suit he helped design and build with the Weta team. How rare is it that the designer of the tech is also the actor, who is featured in 90% of the scenes of the film? The added surprise is this was not a CGI motion capture process, but a practical effect that had to be created with real-world materials. There is some actual chemistry between Daughter and Mother, and Mother is a pretty great mother to see in action. It’s like watching young Will Robinson interact with his Robot in Lost in Space. Add to the believable robot the cold and lonely tenor of the film and you have something like New Zealand’s low budget 1985 sci-fi marvel The Quiet Earth.
The entire world stops, like something out of the 1980s sci-fi classic film The Quiet Earth, only this time all of the people are frozen in place, in an instant, wherever they stood or whatever they were doing. But one computer technician was experiencing an electrical jolt as it happened, and he may be the only person on Earth who can unfreeze people back to normal. That’s the set-up for the first issue of the new Image Comics/Top Cow series The Freeze.
This tale of an arriving apocalypse is not like the standard fare of the trope. Those typical end of the world supernatural events you might find, fire and brimstone, nuclear devastation, zombie plagues, and the like, yield to a simple global event of unknown cause, a bit like the vanishing people at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. Airplanes keep flying until they fall from the sky, cars smash into each other–it’s the opposite of The Day the Earth Stood Still, instead the day the people stood still. The first issue introduces the main character, Ray, and those around him as he stumbles into one of them, and he learns his simple touch is enough to fully revive them one at a time. Where can we go from there, since one man can’t literally touch everyone on the planet?
The Freeze is a creator-owned series from writer Dan Wickline (30 Days of Night) and artist Phillip Sevy (Tomb Raider). The first issue provides a glimpse at the direction of the story, as Ray becomes the part of a squad that selectively is unfreezing individuals. But for what purpose?
