Apple TV Is The Place For Top Quality Sci-Fi

Callum Turner stars in the cyberpunk series adapted from William Gibson's genre-defining 1984 novel. Streaming on Apple TV on January 22.

Based on the best-selling novel by Blake Crouch, Dark Matter is a story of the road not taken. In season one, the series followed Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton), a physicist, professor and family man who — one night while walking home on the streets of Chicago — is abducted into an alternate version of his life.

Wonder quickly turns to nightmare when he tries to return to his reality amid the mind-bending landscape of lives he could have lived.

Season two picks up with the Dessens as they settle into a quiet life in a world that finally seems safe until the unimaginable forces them to run once again.

Dark Matter Season 2 — August 28 on Apple TV.

ONE PRIME TO RULE THEM ALL

Knowing full-well that it's my 60th birthday in November, Prime Video has just released trailers for two franchise shows dropping that month that are right in my wheelhouse: one a returning fantasy series, the other a new sci-fi spin-off from a great couple of movies.

BLADE RUNNER 2099

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER, SEASON THREE

Rings of Power continues to chart the rise of Sauron in Middle-Earth, starting November 11, while all eight episodes of Blade Runner 2099 will drop on November 25.

Coincidentally, both shows have popular roleplaying games based on them, published by Free League.

Little-Known Stop-Motion Monster Movies

Rare VHS oddities. Forgotten fantasy films. Handmade monsters hiding in places you’d never expect.

Today we’re digging into some obscure and little-seen movies that delivered surprisingly great stop-motion creatures, from demonic vultures and clay dinosaurs to cyberpunk war machines and prehistoric monsters.

Thanks to the excellent SirBootis Flicks channel for this selection.

Bringing Judge Dredd To Life

I've recently rewatched both cinematic efforts at bringing 2000AD's legendary lawman Judge Dredd to the big screen and I have to say my opinion on both remains unchanged.

Each movie - 1995's Judge Dredd with Sylvester Stallone in the title role and 2012's Dredd, starring Karl Urban - gets some things right, but also gets an awful lot wrong in its attempted adaptation.

Take Judge Dredd: the first eight minutes - the fly-through of a comic accurate Mega-City One and the Block War - are near perfect... right up until Stallone’s Dredd rolls up and slurs out “I am the law”.

In fact, things don’t really go off the rails until a quarter of an hour in and Dredd takes off his helmet - taking with it any credibility the film might have had.

So much thought has gone into the staging, the look, the costuming, and other characters (The Angel Gang and the A.B.C. Warrior are wonderful, for instance) that it blows my mind that that attention to detail was lost completely in the actual script and the all-important depiction of Dredd himself.

Meanwhile in the more recent attempt (which I can't help but think pandered more to those members of the Dredd fanbase who perhaps don't see the satire in the character), while it may have nailed things with Urban as Dredd (never taking his helmet off, of course) and Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), it totally screwed the pooch with its version of Mega-City One.

While Stallone's claustrophobic, future city not only looks like The Big Meg seen in the comics, as well as bearing a passing resemblance to the Los Angeles of Blade Runner and Coruscant in Star Wars: Revenge of The Sith, the city we see in the 2012 movie could be almost any contemporary city (with a handful of high-rise "blocks" CGI-ed in for good measure).

Judge Dredd's Mega-City One

Dredd's Mega-City One

Its roads are empty and buildings are spaced far apart. Even the civilian costumes and vehicles are just lifted from everyday 21st Century life, with no attempt to "sci-fi" them up.

The Judges all get nice paramilitary outfits, that bear a passing resemblance to the source material, but it's Stallone's movie that actually gives us "proper" Judges' uniforms.

There's no denying that Dredd is the better movie of the two, but its blatant disregard for so much of what makes Judge Dredd 'Judge Dredd' is grating.

Mega-City One and its inhabitants are as crucial to the verisimilitude of a Judge Dredd movie as the portrayal of Joseph Dredd himself, so what we really need is someone with the design chops of the team that built the world of Judge Dredd to work with actors who understand the material (as we saw in Dredd).

With the Judge Dredd: Mega-City One TV series - that was announced in 2017 - apparently, disappointingly, mired in development hell (I believe the big issue is financing, but don't quote me on that), it looks as though the best adaptations of the Dredd are still coming from unofficial/fan sources such as the incredible Judge Minty, from 2014 (see below), and this short animation, from 2019:

Look at the promising depiction of MC1 in this poster for the proposed TV series

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

For me, like many sci-fi fans I imagine, the original Blade Runner is one of those films as near to perfect as we can hope for... so I wasn't that sure it really needed a sequel.

After Denis Villeneuve's almost three-hour magnum opus had washed over me I still wasn't wholly convinced that we needed a Blade Runner sequel, nevertheless, Blade Runner 2049 is a mighty impressive piece of work.

While it may lack the finesse and subtlety of the original, it has an interesting and challenging story to tell, woven around the spine of a techno-noir thriller.

Ryan Gosling stars as K, a replicant blade runner whose job is to 'retire' rogue replicants (artificial life forms created as a 'slave' class to do the jobs humans didn't want to or couldn't do).

What should have been a routine case leads K to discover a hidden box, which contains clues to a shocking revelation that will "break the world".

Soon, he is following a trail of breadcrumbs, pursued by shady forces, and on the hunt for long-vanished blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) and maybe answers to questions he has about his own creation.

Blade Runner 2049 does an amazing job of extrapolating forward 30 years the technology we were shown in the first movie, rather than simply splicing in whatever shiny effects the computers of 2017 can create, compared to the film-making tools of 1982.

This allows for creative use of holographic technology (such as K's beautiful 'girlfriend' Joi, played by Ana de Armas, and cameo appearances from Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and Frank Sinatra) while still relying on print photography to play a major role.

Villeneuve's mastery of Hampton Fancher and Michael Green's smart screenplay means the 164 minute film never drags; nothing feels like padding, even when we are simply revelling in the mise-en-scene (which is almost as beautiful as the original, but not quite) and cyberpunk atmosphere rather than cracking on with solving the mystery.

Had this, somehow, been a standalone movie, it would have been churlish to pick holes in its splendour, but Blade Runner 2049 will always be compared to its predecessor and always comes up that tiniest smidgen short (none of the villains, for instance, are as rounded and interesting as Roy Batty; there are no speeches quite as magnificent as "tears in rain" etc).

That said, aided no doubt by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch's soundtrack that strikingly evokes Vangelis along with plenty of visual nods to the original, Blade Runner 2049 is an amazingly absorbing film that does a damn fine job of entertaining its audience.