Review: Ad Astra

An astronaut must travel on a secret mission to the edge of the Solar System in a bid to save all life as we know it, and perhaps reunite with his estranged father in the process. “Space” movies often fall into two categories, each category with a spectrum with two extremes on either end. The…

Review: First Man

First Man is one small step for cinema, but one giant leap for 2018. Engineer and pilot Neil Armstrong goes through the trials and tribulations required before one of the biggest challenges in human history: a manned mission to the Moon. To be candid, I am a sucker for space movies. So even if First…

Review: Life

A competent claustrophobic sci-fi horror, but it does require a lot of suspension of disbelief to enjoy. A damaged reconnaissance probe returning from Mars returns to the orbital station above Earth so that scientists on board can study what it brought back. But to their surprise and initial joy, the probe brought back signs of…

Review: Alien – Covenant

Director Ridley Scott returns to the franchise he created, and boy howdy has he forgotten how to build suspense. The colony ship Covenant, housing over 2,000 people in suspended animation, experiences technical difficulties in its long voyage and at the same time, detects another habitable world and a strange signal originating from it. Looking at a…

Review: Apollo 13

From expert director Ron Howard comes perhaps the defining space exploration film; rooted by true events Apollo 13 still stands as a testimony to what humanity could be. Shortly after the amazing success of the Apollo 11 lunar landing that saw Neil Armstrong walk on The Moon, Apollo 13’s mission was to repeat the performance….

Review: Interstellar (2D)

Interstellar‘s beauty is skin deep: at its best it is inspiring and gorgeous to look at; at its worst it can be cliched and paradoxically lacking in explanation. Planet Earth is dying. The land is turning into a dustbowl and little to no life or vegetation can survive the dust storms that ravage the surface….

Review: Gravity (3D)

As the film is quick to remind us: Life in space is impossible, and never has this been more apparent than in the new film by Alfonso Cuaron (director of Children of Men). During repair work on the Hubble space telescope, a massive debris field destroys most of the repair team’s operation. Incredibly isolated and…

Saga Review: Star Trek

Set phasers to kill, this saga review is the biggest yet (a record not likely to be broken for a while!) with all eleven current Star Trek films! While I am not a raging Trekkie, I certainly know a fair amount about the universe; I never watched the 60s Original Series (and I still haven’t,…