Today we finally got to see the second teaser trailer for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, based on the groundbreaking graphic novel Valerian & Laureline. This is the second major motion picture taking place fully in this universe (Fifth Element was the first), but you have seen scenes inspired by the series in other movies (including Star Wars, which took the cantina scene, Chewbacca, The Death Star, the Slave Leia outfit, and a whole lot more from it) and TV shows. It also had its own TV show in 2007 and 2008, but that is difficult to come by in North America. The new film will be on the big screen on July 21st, and I WILL be in the theater to see it!
Think Ground Hog Day meets American Pie and you will be somewhere in the ball park. Yet another variation of living the same day over and over again until you get it right, the time travel story Premature looks like it just might end up being silly fun. While the movie was built in 2014, it has been bouncing around on the indi circuit for a few years and is just now making its way into the public realm.
The one everybody knows about this week is Mad Max: Fury Road, yet another entry into the Mad Max apocalyptic franchise that began back in the late 70s. Like all the other films in this series, this one takes place in a desert, which Australia has a lot of. The filming location this time was the Namib Desert in Namibia, so I guess they decided the Australian deserts they did the first few films in just weren’t post-apocalyptic enough. Fewer people know about Time Lapse, a movie which has been racking up the awards on the Film Festival circuit for the last year, and is finally making it to some regular theaters. As near as I can figure it, this is a modern retelling of the 1960 Twilight Zone episode A Most Unusual Camera, where a camera that takes pictures of the future makes life in the present much more complicated (and possibly much shorter) then it would have otherwise been.
Project Almanac is about a group of friends who stumble across a time machine one of their parents were working on, and finish assembling it. It doesn’t take them long to realize this was a mistake. Alien Outpost is about a documentary crew following an elite unit of soldiers in the wake of an alien invasion. Hard to Be a God has group of scientists is sent to the planet Arkanar to help the local civilization. The movie is Russian, I have no idea why the official site I found for it is in Japan. At least the The Official Site of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the folks who wrote the story it is based on, is from there. In Legends from the Sky a Native American Veteran is looking for his missing grandfather after his land is taken over by an unknown federal organization looking for a UFO. Note that some of these are limited engagements and won’t be found in a lot of theaters.
The Australian film Predestination is based on the Robert A Heinlein story All You Zombies, and it will be on the big screen in some US major market theaters this Friday. It will also be available On Demand on most systems Friday, so if a theater near you isn’t showing it you can still get to watch it.
If you are looking for something different in the way of a Sci-Fi TV show, check out Time Taxi. It is a show about choices, and how sometimes when you make the wrong one you need a do-over. It is more philosophical and intellectual than the average US show, but that is part of what makes it worth watching.