HurtLocker Tagged Articles at Cinematical

A few months ago, I saw two new sci-fi movies at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and now both are in limited release: Duncan Jones's Moon (21 screens) and Aristomenis Tsirbas' Battle for Terra (2 screens). And it got me thinking. These two movies couldn't be more different, and the main distinction between them is this. Moon is sci-fi based on an actual sci-fi idea. That means that science actually figures into the fiction somewhere. And Battle for Terra is the perfect example of a war film decorated with sci-fi trimmings; its big "twist" is that the humans are the bad guys and the aliens are the good guys, but aside from that the story unfolds exactly like a regular war film. The aliens, spaceships and other gizmos don't really figure into the major themes or plot.

It got me thinking about how many science fiction movies are really just war movies in disguise. (The current Terminator Salvation is another one.) It's very easy to transform the combatants of a war to alien races and make the cause of the war something fictitious, like the "spice" in Dune (1984). It's much easier to explain why people are fighting over that powerful stuff than why they're fighting over differences in religions or beliefs. And it's much nicer to justify battling alien invaders than it is to justify humans fighting humans. Frankly, I'm all for this little bit of deception, provided the sci-fi movies have three things. Battle for Terra has none of them.

Many of this year's foreign and indie releases showed up on some of the more obscure top ten lists of 2008, and will no doubt be rolling out across the country in various irregular patterns all year long. For example, Steven Soderbergh's Che turned up on more than half a dozen lists that I saw (including our own James Rocchi's), yet most people haven't seen it yet. I have seen it, and I doubt it'll be sticking around long, though I greatly admire it. It's a deliberate attempt to subvert the current biopic formula, and though it's somewhat cold and ultimately a bit one-sided, it's also endlessly mesmerizing. Silent Light, the newest drama by the great and peculiar Mexican director Carlos Reygadas (Battle in Heaven) is also due to show up this month. Matteo Garrone's Italian gangster movie Gomorrah and Steve McQueen's British based-on-a-true-story drama Hunger have also placed well on several top ten and awards lists, and will be turning up in February and March.

The two-time Cannes champs Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have a new one, Lorna's Silence, which I haven't seen, but that has a very nice poster. (It's supposed to be coming around in June.) And James Gray (The Yards, We Own the Night), who for some mysterious reason is quite beloved in France, opened his new film, Two Lovers -- starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Joaquin Phoenix -- there to great acclaim. It's due here in February. And one of my contacts tells me that Roy Andersson's outstanding deadpan Swedish comedy You, the Living, which I saw early in 2008, will finally open to theaters sometime in 2009. I'm still waiting for a release date for Kathryn Bigelow's war film Hurt Locker, but it has enough buzz that I'm not worried. I'm a little more concerned about John Woo's Chinese epic Red Cliff, which will hopefully return that master to his former glory; so far there's no U.S. release date -- and no indication that the entire, uncut film will make it over here.