Happy holidays to all! For sci-fi fans, there’s a lot to be happy about. First, the Doctor Who Christmas special airs tonight on BBC, The Return of Doctor Mysterio. Here’s a trailer.
Also, those pesky aliens are at it again.
Apparently, researchers from McGill University in Montreal have detected six new bursts of radio waves coming from the constellation Auriga, three billion light years away. This follows 11 previous bursts from the same location.
Of course, this is now raising the old argument about whether or not we should be contacting aliens in the first place, and whether or not they’d be friendly.
Personally, in addition to 2001: A Space Odyssey, I think two of the most intelligent films on this were Contact and, more recently, Arrival, both groundbreaking and thought-provoking films.
Speaking of films, I saw Passengers the other day, the new space adventure with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. Despite getting mixed reviews, I enjoyed it. I would sum it up as “Titanic in space.”
It’s a fun, exciting tale with plenty of visual spectacle that thrives on the performances of its two lead actors.
In essence, it was a space opera disaster film with lots of visual style and excitement, but centered mostly on the dramatic relationship between the two main characters. Of course, there were a couple of fun supporting roles from Michael Sheen and Laurence Fishburne as well.
The film poses the moral dilemma: What if you woke up totally alone on a spaceship because of a glitch, and it still had 90 more years to go before anyone else would awaken? If after a year alone, without a soul to talk to aside from an android bartender, would you finally break down and wake someone else if you could?
Well, Chris Pratt does, and it makes for some good drama. Then, to make matters worse, things start going wrong with the ship. Very wrong.
Sure there were some improbabilities, but it didn’t bother me, and I thought Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt did an impeccable job carrying pretty much the whole film. In fact, the film accomplishes what so many others do not. It makes you care about the characters.
I have no idea why the critics gave it mediocre reviews, but I suspect it’s because they don’t know how to just relax and watch an entertaining movie without analyzing the plausibilities to death.
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