#sci fi review

[hannahwatcheshorror]

SUBSERVIENCE (2024)

Did I pick this film because I wanted to watch Megan Fox be hot and pretend to be a robot? You bet your a** I did. The fact that it was a spooky film was only a bonus. Is this film literally just Adult M3GAN? Yes. Is that entirely underwhelming? Yes. Is it a bad film? No. Worth watching? I’ll answer that with a question, how much did you like M3GAN? (also see (COMPANION)

⭐⭐⭐.5

A father gets a maid robot to try and help him around the house. His little girl, Isla, names the robot Alice after Alice in Wonderland and likes her a lot. There is a minor incident with broken glass but Isla isn’t hurt, only Alice. Alice heals almost instantly which is creepy but also not that creepy because it is the future and she is a highly sophisticated robot. Turns out the wife, Maggie, who you think is dead is just in the hospital waiting on a new heart. She is less than impressed with how stunning Alice is and doesn’t quite believe that the daughter chose her (which is true). Alice catches Nick watching Casablanca which she knows about but has never actually seen so Nick orders her to erase her memory of the movie plot and watch it with him. After a sensual restart she is happy to watch the movie in, what I can only describe as, the scene from Wall-E when he watches the musical on TV. It is literally just that scene, only instead of a cute little rusty robot we have Hot Megan Fox and instead of Hello Dolly the movie that is changing the robots wiring is Casablanca. Do you guys get what the fuck I’m saying here! Y’all thought you were getting M3GAN 2.0 and we got Wall-E 2.0. 

Just kidding, this was M3GAN the sequel with some Bicentennial Man sprinkled in there for good measure. I said in my M3GAN review humans would only make a doll that advanced for war or for fucking and in this movie I’m right. Maggie gets the chance at a new heart but before she goes in for surgery she has a heart to heart (ha) with Alice about taking care of Nick in case things don’t go so well. Which is good because a massive storm happens and they can’t get the heart in time so it is given to someone else. Alice tries to cheer Nick up with a handjob but it only makes him more sad (can’t imagine why). Then Alice adopts Maggie's voice to help seduce Nick and fucks him. It was a sexy scene but it was a cheating scene and those make me really sad, even if Megan Fox is involved. Nick is feeling really guilty suddenly (good) and Maggie actually gets a new heart. After recovering for some time she comes home to Islas' delight and Alice's chagrin.

The primary user, Nick, needs to be protected so Alice goes and kills a guy threatening his job (that is one way to solve the problem). Nick is so surprised the guy is dead he doesn’t even suspect that his SIM could have done it (because the bots don’t kill people, right?). But then when Alice tries to politely ask Maggie if she can fuck her husband, Maggie finds out they fucked before and flips out, while she and Nick fight the baby boy is crying. Alice takes it upon herself to attempt drowning the poor thing as she suddenly thinks this is the best thing for her primary user. They fight her, she gets some scary visual damage, and she goes down. She is taken back to the lab in a scene nearly shot-for-shot like when M3GAN was taken back and then she used her AI to hack the computers only this time Alice killed the nerds. 

Now Alice has two bodies, her old busted one that she takes to talk to Nick, “Little Alice fell down a hole, bumped her head and bruised her soul.” The second Alice is blonde and is going for the children at the hospital. She is stronger than all the other robots and can shut them down, she finds Maggie and the kids and is about to kill Maggie before Nick arrives just in time and guns her down in his car (the one he is always fixing up), Maggie pulls him out of the flaming vehicle but he is unresponsive. Too bad because Alice is still moving around and she is creepy crawling right towards Maggie then is trying to choke her out, next thing you know, WHAM, Nick hits her off of Maggie and Maggie stabs her through the brain core. They win the day and love each other again. But back at the lab they plugged in the computers again and someone is waking back up… Roll credits.

----------------------HANNAH WATCHES HORROR---------------------

[bears-wolves-dragons]

70s sci-fi: it can be good, bad, or indifferent. This one is the latter for all the wrong reasons.

[thatskenwithac]

I love Sci-Fi and I hope you do to because I highly recommend this show.

[gudgurkan]

A couple of my favourite drawings from 2024!

First off, one of the last drawings I did last year

And one of the earliest

I've worked a lot on the game Esoteric Ebb in 2024. Nessan is one of my favourites!

Another one for Esoteric Ebb I really like is Akzel!

The coolest character I drew for Esoteric Ebb is a secret one though 👀

My Kickstarter campaign for "The Cult of Dreams" was one of the biggest things happening for me in 2024. Thank you to everyone who backed!

Another one from The Cult of Dreams

Yet another!

I dabbled in sci-fi a bit too (looking to do more sci-fi in 2025)

And this!

Alternative history Sweden with airships

Thanks for enjoying what I've drawn in 2024! Let's have a great 2025 🔥

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I really want you to get started on Jurassic Park now after reading your tags.

All right, you asked for it! This post is going to be long because I've been rereading Jurassic Park since I was about 10 years old. But. My thoughts:

Jurassic Park is the oldest story in the world: one about hubris, and the price men pay for their ignorance of nature. From the first moment the protagonists step foot on the island, they can see it. There are poisonous plants next to the pool because they "look pretty." The harbor has no retaining wall because tropical storms aren't considered important. And there's a steep price for that hubris. Wu doesn't bother to learn the dinosaurs' names before breeding them, Nedry ignores them as unprogrammable, Malcolm mansplains them to their own creators, Regis laughs at the idea of them escaping, Hammond relentlessly monetizes them, Arnold insists he can control them... And they all get eaten by dinosaurs. It's the characters with the good sense to be overawed and scared (Muldoon, Gennaro, the paleontologists, the kids) who make it out alive. Almost paradigm.

More specifically, it's a book about the most fundamental principle of engineering: be scared, be confused, and then do something anyway. Then do something else, then something else, until something works. Timmy isn't a master hacker in the book; he's just (unlike Grant) willing to push buttons on the computer until he finds the power grid. Gennaro's still a scaredy cat in the book, but he clenches his teeth and goes into the velociraptor nest anyway. The heroic characters are the ones who conclude someone has to do something, despite not knowing what that something is. The villainous ones are the ones who refuse responsibility.

Speaking of which, can we talk about Ian Malcolm? I'm a sucker for a good Cassandra character, especially one that manages to get even the genre-savvy reader rolling their eyes and going "will you shut up?" And Malcolm is one of the best, every off-putting academic habit rolled into one: He thinks he's better than other people for not liking sports. He brags about not caring about appearances and then comments on Sattler's legs. He assumes Hammond has read his monograph and — when Hammond reveals he hasn't — pulls out a copy that he keeps on his person at all times to have Hammond read on the plane. He smugly explains that other characters should've foreseen they'd be killed by dinosaurs, only to be killed by dinosaurs. He calls his theory the Malcolm Effect. I do love Jeff Goldblum's gentler, more charming take on the character ("See, here, now I'm sitting by myself, talking to myself, that's chaos theory" I say literally every time I ask a question of someone who just left the room). But I prefer the way original Malcolm gets away with being right about everything because we so so badly want him to be wrong.

Speaking of that comment about the legs: by the low low bar of 80s/90s thriller writers, Crichton is surprisingly progressive. Jurassic Park invites us to laugh with (and roll our eyes with) Sattler, every time someone expresses shock the world's top paleobotanist is a woman. The Lost World perfectly captures the "women in STEM have to be twice as competent to get half the respect" dynamic, and it's a story about the male characters over-estimating their own competence as the female ones go about saving the day. Race isn't handled perfectly, but it is discussed in both books. Malcolm's chauvinism is designed to make everything else he says a bitter pill, to poison us against him. Crichton's no feminist. But Sattler's hardiness — later Harding's and Kelly's as well — are shown as hard-won in a world that batters nerdy girls so hard that only the toughest survive.

And Malcolm is just one of the many ways Jurassic Park masterfully lampoons scientific bullshit. After little Tina is bitten by a "strange lizard" and nearly dies from the swelling, Dr. Cruz assures her parents that lizards bite zookeepers all the time, that some people are allergic to lizard venom, and that the lizard Tina drew resembles a basilisk — and then we cut to him talking to his fellow MD. Where we find out that lizards don't attack humans in the wild, no human they know of has ever been hospitalized for a lizard bite, basilisks aren't venomous, and Tina's condition doesn't resemble an allergic reaction. They have no idea what this "lizard" (a Procompsognathus) could be or how it poisoned this kid, but they've been taught to obfuscate rather than admit that. Scientists are arrogant, and ignorant of their ignorance.

But the book is every bit as positive about empiricism as it is negative about individual scientists. The seamless way Crichton blends science fiction with science fact gets me every time. His preface connects Watson & Crick to Swanson & Boyer to Malcolm & Levine, explaining each step of the research process as he goes. He goes on to explain how Genetech developed its ideas from IBM, and that IBM and Genetech both contributed to InGen, which in turn influenced Biosyn, funded by Hamaguri... and only two of those names are fictional, but don't worry about which. Crichton does his homework, and then he presents his homework in the most compelling way of any writer I've ever encountered.

You need no further proof than the technologies — satellite phones, electric cars, touchscreens, gene editing — that were sci fi in 1990, commonplace today. Crichton did the reading. And he rolls that science out ever-so-slowly: dribbling first the mystery of the worker with a 3-foot gash in his torso who claims a bird of prey did it, then the mystery of the resort that needs the world's most powerful data storage, then the mystery of the billionaire who calls in the middle of the night with "urgent" questions about what baby dinosaurs eat... Until even 10-year-old me could look at that picture of a fractal and go "ohhh, I see how the unstable phase shifts of chaos theory explain the fact that a thunderstorm caused that guy to get eaten by a T. rex." Almost paradigm.

And all Jurassic Park's banging on about chaos theory belies a deep understanding of how interconnected ecosystems are. Animals, like plants, like subatomic particles, must be understood holistically. Pretending that the best way to learn the truth of any system is through breaking it down "is like saying scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast is human nature. It's nothing of the sort. It's uniquely Western training." Crichton clearly loves biology: "a single fertilized egg has a 100,000 genes, which act in a coordinated way, switching on and off at specific times, to transform that single cell... A house is simple in comparison. But even so, workmen build the stairs wrong, they put the sink in backward, the tile man doesn't show up when he's supposed to. All kinds of things go wrong. And yet the fly that lands on the workman's lunch is perfect." And he clearly hates what capitalism has done to biotechnology.

Hammond the venture capitalist is a perfectly despicable villain: No dinosaurs have escaped, because I said so. If there are problems, no there aren't. Put on a good show for investors, no matter how many contractors die in the process. Talk about all the "good" the park will do by making tons of money. The kids are stranded and the tech expert's dead? No they're not, because I said so, now pass the ice cream. It's truly a delight watching him get eaten by dinosaurs.

For that matter, Jurassic Park is bursting with details of style over substance. There are cutesy Apatosaurus cutouts in the hotel rooms and bars on the widows, a half-finished restaurant covered in Pterosaur poop, and a celebrity-narrated tour track that can't synchronize with the dinosaurs. It's trying to be Disney World, and it's actually a roadside zoo. The signage — "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth," the hand-lettered "Welcome to Jurassic Park", the room (and department) called "Control" — isn't subtle in its irony. But it is fun.

Which is yet another great sci fi trick. "Our funding is infinite but our peer review sucks" perfectly sets up the blend of the accurate with the plot-fueling (likely why Crichton reuses it several times). Why are there Pterosaurs in a dinosaur park? Our funding is infinite but our peer review sucks. Why are so many Cretaceous dinosaurs in Jurassic Park? Our funding is infinite but our peer review sucks. You didn't know Dilophosaurus is venomous? Our funding is infinite... It's perfect, because it's the opposite of how the scientific process usually works. Again: Crichton knows his shit, and he knows how to communicate it.

Like, even when I'm reading Sphere or Terminal Man — books where I'm perfectly aware I know more than Crichton on the subject, not in the least because their science inevitably became outdated — I still find myself believing, at least for the length of the story. You don't have to suspend disbelief when reading Crichton's work; he hoists it into the stratosphere for you. Half the time he won't give it back even after you're done. Almost paradigm.

But despite all that nerdery, Jurassic Park is still a rocking adventure story that builds momentum until it smashes to its conclusion at 70 miles an hour, ending the millisecond it can do so with not a word of denouement. You can practically hear that last deep piano note on the final words. It's cinematic as hell. This is Crichton post-Westworld, pre-Twister, the ultimate adventure writer. He reads, clearly, avoiding the errors of sci fi amateurs who watch too many movies (the T. rex has a distinctive smell, the island is relentlessly humid, so on) but he knows how to make a tight fast-moving story that you can consume in under three hours. His imagery is powerful, his pacing is on point, and his plot sucks you in and shoots you out like a water slide.

Jurassic Park is fun. It's informative. It makes you laugh, and gasp, and sigh, and think. It has its flaws (Harding Sr. fades out in the 3rd act, Grant's Maiasaura expertise never pays off) but those are minor in a book that stands up so well to rerereading. Almost paradigm.

[yotsubafan420]

Mars Express (2023)

Probably one of my favourite new releases I’ve seen this year. Some really dynamic shots were done with this animation style. I found the world building so fun, like the way the futuristic technology was designed felt applicable to real world scenarios. Reminded me of Bladerunner and Ghost in the Shell movies but it also very much felt like its own story.

This movies from the same guy who did DYE Fantasy and like yeah you go man, keep em coming this was awesome.

[moon-kissed-films]

Stills from the silent short film Le Voyage Dans la Lune "A Trip to the Moon" (1902).

[mysharona1987]

[andreai04]

If there was one thing good about this situation, it was reinforcing how great my decisions to (a) hack my governor module and (b) escape were. Being a SecUnit sucked. I couldn't wait to get back to my wild rogue rampage of hitching rides on bot-piloted transports and watching my serials.

[maa-pix]

Scenes in Regent Street and Piccadilly Henrique Alvim Corrêa, 1906

[hannahwatcheshorror]

THE LAZARUS EFFECT (2015) + REWATCH

😾Dog Dies

Intense film that deserves a lot of credit for what it has done. Extremely polished and well developed though some of the deaths happen too quickly and don’t make entire sense with the progression of the plot? Not a bad film at all, the scene just before the ending is beautiful and intense

REWATCH REVIEW

A movie that takes place in a spooky lab where they are attempting to bring things back from the dead, what could go wrong? It really is a feast for the eyes, this film.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Scientists try to make a life serum but spoiler alert it fails. Olivia Wilde gets FUCKED but she turns into a spooky lady with a strange backstory. She is scary for sure. She kills everyone and then makes a little army for herself.

REWATCH REVIEW

A bunch of hot and sexy scientists are working on a serum that reanimates people which sounds like witchcraft but is also just science and depends on how long a thing has been dead I guess. They brought back a dog without telling us how long it had been dead. Either way they had started to figure out a creepy solution to death but some men with money stepped in so they only had one shot to do it in the middle of the night. The team snuck in to do science in the dark and… Big accident! Olivia Wilde (Zoe) got electrocuted and died! Very sad for Mark Duplass’ character, Frank. He tries to bring her back with conventional medicine but it doesn’t work now they must try The Serum.

The Serum is able to bring Zoe back but she is different somehow, her brain is firing at 100% power instead of 10% she can hear things she shouldn’t be able to. Zoe is becoming more and because of this she knows that the gang sees that she has come back different, come back wrong, so she is going to start going on the offensive when it comes to these silly skin bags. She tries to wash her hands and water hurts, the world is harsh on her and she doesn’t know why, I mean, she DIED for goodness sake and now no one is being nice to her!

Now our spunky recorder is being thrown into a dream sequence and we get a theory that maybe Zoe’s soul is stuck in a dream too? Theories about Zoe being ripped from Hell are one thing but her just having a little dream is another. Either way we get our first death and I don’t know why I said the deaths were quick before I guess I was just sad that Donald Glover was the first to go. It felt fast an hour in to say goodbye to that lovely man, I’m sorry. Anyway things really start to fall apart now, the gang start to realize Zoe is up to no good and she kills another member (sad!) before Frank and Eva can run away and try to hide. This works momentarily before Frank is outed when he attempts to trick Zoe which of course doesn’t work.

For some reason Zoe really hates Eva and keeps sending her to the Hell realm but Eva uses it to her advantage. They do that little fake out where you think that Eva solves the mystery of who set the fire in Zoe's nightmares and can get out alive but instead they just snap her neck real quick so that is fine. The scene in the hallway with Baby Zoe and Evil Zoe was really neat and fun so it felt kinda lame that it wasn’t “real” or whatever you would like to call it. In the end, Zoe lines up all her friends' corpses and starts to pump them full of serum to make an army of evil little serum babies. Yuck! Wack! Evil!

----------------------HANNAH WATCHES HORROR---------------------

[elizabethisreading]

Okay, just saw Mickey 17. Spoilery thoughts:

-Changing the reason for Mickey taking the Expendable job from Berto-encouraged sports betting to a failed macaroon business is...a funny and interesting change.

-I know Seven and Eight had different personalities in the book as well, with Eight being less frightened and uptight than Seven. But I don't remember Eight being as cold-blooded and mean in the book compared to the movie.

-I don’t like how they changed Alan Manikova‘s backstory. Making him a “psychopathic serial killer” is boring compared to the more wild and philosophical backstory he has in the book.

-Is Kai supposed to be Cat from the book? Because if so...they replaced an Asian woman character with a white lady...okay🤨.

-On that note, if Kai is a Cat replacement, she's not a good one. Kai's relationship with Mickey is rushed and forced compared to Cat and Mickey in the book. Also! Cat and Mickey never got together romantically or sexually! They were actually a pretty solid example of a well-written platonic relationship between a male and female character!

-I don't like the catty fighting over Mickey that Nasha and Kai do. It felt pointless, and I didn't care enough about Kai to be invested in it. It's especially annoying is Kay is meant to be Cat. Because in the book, Cat and Nasha don't interact much, and when they do, they get along fine! I think I even recall them joking together about sharing Mickey. There was no dumb "fighting over a guy" nonsense!

-I wish we could have heard Nasha and Mickey first conversation after they meet. She doesn't have a word of dialogue until after their sexy montage. I wish we could have had a moment to get to know her first.

-That being said, I like how Nasha had more "action" moments than I recall from the book. By that I mean more scenes where she's proactively moving the plot forward. She's super badass, definitely one of my favorite characters in both versions.

-The threeway scene: I joke about wanting Bong to "expand" the off-page scene from the book, but I didn't actually expect like...a full-on porno scene. The only thing about the scene that bothered me was that, unlike the book, they were high on drugs when they decide to do it. Mickey tells Nasha she's, "Not acting like herself." This is a small thing but I don't like it. I liked it better in the book, where Nasha just took what she wanted and didn't need to be under the influence to want to fuck two clones.

-I'm a tad disappointed we didn't get the moment where Nasha kisses both Mickeys in front of a Natalist officer after they're caught and tells him to "suck it." That was such a funny "good for her" moment for Nasha, I wanted to see it.

-THE BABY CREEPERS ARE SO CUTE🥺

-ALSO THE BABY CREEPERS STEALING MICKEY'S MACHETE AND FIGHTING OVER IT

-Love Mickey helping Nasha put on her uniforms and adjusting her clothes like the good little househusband that he is.

-The Trump/Trump supporter analogs were a bit on the nose but hey in the age of declining media literacy maybe it's fine if subtly takes a back seat sometimes.

-Toni Collette is a great actress and her performance is great, but her character felt stereotypical in a way that made her less interesting than the rest of the cast.

~

Overall, despite my complaints, it's a solid and fun movie. The satire is often blunt, and I don't think it's as deft as Parasite. It's more action-y than the book and more Hollywood-y than Parasite. But still, great performances, funny dark humor, and a compelling world.

I like the book better, but the movie is certainly worth a watch too.

[bonnibelleangelica]

Wanna Be My Test Reader?

DM me your email address rn and I’ll send you the first 10 chapters of my book. All you have to do is read and tell me what you liked.

(free book bro, how can u pass that up?)

She’s romantic, she’s scientifically accurate (kinda) and she’s autism coded as fuck. Dytopian? You know it.

[sombredancer]

Dark (2017-2020, Netflix)

Just rewatched Dark and I`m in love and in pain, pain, PAIN...

Beware of being heavily spoiled ahead.

The first painful question: would you save your father from sufferings, if it would mean for you to be erased from existence for good? (From this question on started my love for this show).

The second question: is it really wrong, to love someone you shouldn`t love? Will it cause the end of the world?

The desperate abduction. Oh, it was so beautiful!

The third question: will you really be happy with the truth about a time loop that you helped to build with your own hands, when you are able to see the whole picture?

At the end I felt sorry even for him. The fourth question: how does it feel, to try so hard to change your doom and save your loved ones, only to find out that you are the source of their most unbearable pain?

"You are a too good man. Always was. This world didn't deserve you." It's a story about an infinite pain of each and every character: Katharina, Ulrich, Claudia and H.G. Tannhaus, who loved their relatives too much; Hannah, who loved herself too much; Jonas, Mikkel, Martha, Hanno, Charlotte, Elisabeth, Peter, Egon and Helge, who fell victims of the time-travel paradox. It's funny that an insane love for a child launched this glitch in a matrix and another insane love for a child put it all to the end. A circle closed. Poetic.

The fifth question: would you fix the error in a matrix by self-sacrifice, if it would delete you and half of your nearest and dearest from existence but ends the never-ending circle of pain for others?

"We match perfectly. Never believe in anything else."

"The light glitched, there was a loud crack and then everything went dark. And somehow the world came to an end. There was dark and the light never came again. I had such a peculiar feeling like it was for the best. Like it was finally over. Like one was finally free from everything. Nothing to wish. Nothing to be obliged to do. An eternal dark. No yesterday. No now. No tomorrow. Nothing."

Finally, I should say that I'm very grateful to Germans for this series. I watched it in original in order to train my German AND because it was a very-very interesting show. Even when I watched it for the second time. One time is surely not enough for understanding of the plot, trust me.

[franticvampirereads]

I loved this book so much. It was filled with all the political space drama I could ever want and just as much action to balance it out. I loved that Tennal was such a mess for most of the book and that Surit was his exact opposite. I loved when they argued, I loved when they were maliciously compliant with the law and also when they went rogue, and I loved when they became each other’s safe harbor. The other thing that I loved was that Tennal and Surit were both self sacrificing idiots in love. This was such a good read and I really want more of this complicated universe. Ocean’s Echo is getting five stars!

[mediamatinees]

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's a woman picking off her enemies one by one! Today, we're getting invested Wu Zetian's bloody quest for vengeance in Iron Widow!