In the movie it’s the future (2054) and we now see Washington D.C. where a system known as pre-crime is born. Pre-Crime is a new law system where people known as pre-cognitive are used as machines which can foretell the future and predict a major crime. Tom Cruise plays John Anderton, one of the best officers who bust the people who commit the pre-crimes. The system is perfect, flawless and it does the job… but what happens when the system turns on you? Now, accused of killing a man in thirty-six hours he doesn’t know, he is now on the run from his own task force and a Government official (Colin Farrell) who wants him at all costs.
Tag Archives: Science Fiction
Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams (2002)
After a raid by armed soldiers during a party with the world’s top agents and their kids, Juni Cortez (Daryl Sabara), the youngest of the Cortez spy family is accused of stealing the high powered super weapon The Transmooker Device. Now Carmen (Alexa Vega) and Juni Cortez must travel to the island of lost dreams and face off against monsters, soldiers, and rival agents Girti (Emily Osment) and Gary Giggles and find the real transmooker device before the evil Donnagon (Mike Judge) gets a hold of it and prove Juni’s innocence. But their parents and meddlesome grandparents are on the hunt for the kids before they’re killed. I tend to easily grow tired of family movies if they’re either too hokey or corny; most of the time, they’re both.
Below (2002)
“Below” has the potential to become a truly incredible and claustrophobic horror flick, but never follows through with one genre focus. Despite being inaccurately profiled as an underwater monster flick, this is not. This is a horror film that has a story and uses it throughout the film most of the time. We get the sense that Twohy wants to push this movie to the limits but eases up in the last minutes and tends to resort to old horror clichés like the complete silence and trash that falls out of a closet, scaring the audience, and the inevitable fright pop-up of a character with a sharp booming soundtrack in the background. Director David Twohy takes this cast of characters and stores them in this small submarine letting them fend for themselves.
The Powerpuff Girls Movie (2002)
Based on the hit animated action cartoon from The Cartoon Network in America, Professor Utonium is the focus of this feature as we delve into his life and learn how he created the disc-eyed crime-fighting tots Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup. Along with their origin finally being told, we also learn how they accepted their superpowers and learned how to use them for good. Alongside the Girls, an evil is looming in the darkness, an evil mastermind genius chimp named Mojo Jojo, who uses the girls’ naiveté for his evil master plan.
Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
Michael J. Fox voices the character of Milo Thatch, an archaeologist who in his field is considered to be eccentric by his colleagues. Milo believes that the lost city of Atlantis is under water and he wants to retrieve the Shepard’s Journal, a book that proves to be a map to finding Atlantis. No one wants to provide the funding for his proposed expedition, until one night he’s taken to an eccentric old millionaire who wants to help him. He gives Milo the Shepard’s journal and tells him that his grandfather once wanted to explore Atlantis. So, Milo is then taken to a shipyard where he meets a team of explorers who are going along with him. All seems well, but after a while, Milo begins to suspect they have ulterior motives.
Donnie Darko (2001)
Over the past two years, “Donnie Darko” has slowly managed to achieve an underground cult status among movie lovers and horror lovers, so when I was able to grab hold of this, I had to check it out. Jake Gyllenhaal, independent actor for critically acclaimed films such as “Moonlight Mile”, and “The Good Girl” stars as the anti-social delusional boy known as “Donnie Darko”. Instantly, the movie begins with a mystery: we see Darko lying along a road looking out upon the city and so forth a voice tells the prophecy to him about the end of the world occurring in 28 days. Throughout the entire film, a demonic spirits in the form of a rabbit begins telling him these omens, and thought Donnie struggles to fight it, can’t escape the messages.
28 Days Later (2003)
Occasionally within the throes of watered down horror movies, a director comes along and decides to completely re-write the way horror is done. Danny Boyle is one of those people who will undoubtedly change horror movies. The movie constantly changes into pastels of moods within its canvas setting constantly going from light moods, ala the shopping scene, instantly cranking up the tension. He can leave us smiling with delight and in a split second leave us biting our nails and cringing in our seats. Boyles relies a lot on isolation to scare us, showing massively long scenes of lonely landscapes forcing us to feel even more terror and insecurity.
After animal rights terrorists invade a science lab, they begin breaking monkey’s free from their cages despite the frantic warnings from a scientist and are violently attacked by the apes that tear them apart and infect them. 28 days later, a man awakes from a coma in a hospital bed to discover a desolate and trashed hospital before him. He begins to inspect the marvel before him as the entire city of Britain is empty with no one in sight. He stumbles upon survivors that save him and tell him a virus has broken free on the general population and mankind as he knows it ceases to exist. The results of the virus are the infected. People that growl with beaming red eyes that kill anything in their path and infect others by tearing them apart or vomiting blood on them. It only takes twenty seconds to become one, so they waste no time disposing of their friends.
They stumble upon father and daughter survivors who decide to travel a military base where they supposedly have everything under control, but what they will find is not what they will expect. Boyle dares to break the mold of the horror genre by masterfully giving us a range of moods and colors, and terrifying sequences non-stop. Writers Boyle and Garland actually gives us characters we can care about and the director helps us by exploring the psychological effects this horror is having on them. We see Jim, the coma patient, have dreams that he is alone and deserted; we can see the desperation within the father’s eyes, and the torment in the daughter’s. These are actually characters that we feel bad for and within a split second Boyle takes them away from us. Characters in this movie come and go and Boyle snatches them without hesitation. Boyle often drops the characters off in small cramped dark places making the audience even more nervous and more anxious as we know terror is looming but we can do nothing about it.
The infected are horrifying as they stare with beaming red eyes and bloody faces and growl aloud; they can run and jump and dash and never stop. While “28 Days Later” is horror first and foremost it’s also more of a commentary on humanity and how we never really learn from our mistakes. We watch four people forced to live and exist in a world without order, a world with carnage, a world not very different from ours. This forces them act upon themselves and begs the questions: In a world without order, how do you achieve it? Who decides what life should be like, and is it all ultimately futile? This shows what humans do when there’s no structure or basis for order and basically take it upon themselves to do it with unsuccessful results. Danny Boyle is a genius director and might as well have re-invented the horror genre. Bravo Mr. Boyle, bravo.