This weekend was incredibly hot! I don't mean that in a Paris Hilton slang kind of way either. It as 100+ degrees all day and even the air conditioned mall was warm. With this kind of weather, my wife and I decided to stay in the house a lot where we could sit and be hot as opposed to the melting-point-of-iron kind of hot outside. With not much on tv, I watched two movies I never had any intention of seeing: I Robot and Serenity.
When I was a kid, I was a Sci -Fi loving geek. I grew up on Star Trek and obsessed on Star Wars throughout 1977. I built Devils Tower out of anything I could get my hands on and taught myself that five note keyboard lick from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Moonraker used to be my favorite James Bond movie and I bought issues of Starlog magazine whenever I could.
After about 1980, my interest in Sci-Fi waned though I still had a mild interest. I think it was the point where they started giving names to Star Wars characters that would only appear for five seconds in the background that I started to feel it was just becoming too much.
Star Trek the next generation didn't help. Don't get me wrong, it was a good show but the technobabble about made up technology drove me nuts. Where Kirk would simply beam down, overthrow a native government and blow up an evil computer, the next generation talked everything out. The next generation couldn't solve a problem unless it involved rerouting power through a complex grid of engine diagnostic charts while rewriting computer code to use the deflector dish to create an energy field to offset the radiation of the week. It got so bad, I started to believe their toilets were routed through the warp engines to create a dyson sphere around their crap.
But, I wanted to veg out and the best thing on was I Robot with Will Smith. I watched Hitch earlier in the week and enjoyed it, so I thought I would watch I Robot. It was OK. The movie was about a future where robots are mass produced to be the servants of mankind. What would be the moral implications of creating a race of slaves? At what point does machinery become a life form? Why does everyone in the future drive Audis? These questions and more are hazily explored between Will Smith fighting off CGI robots and wise cracking to anyone who will listen.
The storyline was about the possible threat of computers and robots who are planning to take over the world, but it really was just a run of the mill action movie. Taken on those terms, it wasn't bad. The movie looked expensive and well produced, all of the actors hit their marks and say their lines well. Not bad, but not great.
The other movie I saw was Serenity, a movie that followed a cult tv show called Firefly from Fox. I never watched Firefly when it was on tv. The more critics and Fox tried to convince me to watch it, the more I resisted. But, with the movie on and nothing else to see I finally checked it out.
I've got to admit, I might have missed something by not watching that show. Serenity, a movie about a rag tag group of mercenaries on a tore up ship, had personalilty, action and fun. It was B movie schlock that walked the fine line between fantasy and parody. The characters are memorable, like the captain who talks like he's in an old western, the supersweet engineer, the cocky lunkheaded muscle and the zen pilot with his soldier wife. They cruise through a future that is oppressed by an Empire, in this case the Alliance. When the Serenity crew's doctor takes his sister away from the Alliance, they end up fighting the evil government and evil marauders named Reavers.
The crew faces adversity with cynical, sarcastic asides and determination which gave the show a bit of style. The movie (and I assume the show) gave a lot of time for humor amid the grim surroundings of these outsiders. It reminded me a lot of the type of show or movie I would have liked a lot as a kid, only without the bad aftertaste (I tried to watch an old episode of Thunderbirds recently...I can't believe how badly Supermarionation has aged!). This movie wasn't the greatest thing ever, but it did capture my attention to the point I may check out the series. Some of the story and settings were obviously borrowed from other sources, but the film was fun enough that I didn't care. This was a good popcorn flick, I recommend it.
Live Long and Proper people! Seacrest...out!
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