The View From The Mountain

I was halfway through Avatar: Fire and Ash when a thought struck me: Did director James Cameron basically remake the Tarzan movies as a science fiction epic? I’m not suggesting that Cameron stole anything from Edgar Rice Burroughs. But the basic themes are present in both sagas. Young John Clayton is a nobleman who is left to fend for himself as a child in the jungles of Africa, only to become Tarzan, the Lord of the Jungle. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a disabled vet sent to Pandora, a moon in orbit of a Jupiter-like gas giant, where he becomes that planet’s version of the Lord of the Jungles, thanks to a technology that enables him to possess the body of a Na’vi, one of its native peoples. The Avatar saga is an otherworldly tale that chronicles the efforts of a low-tech society—the Na’vi—battling high-tech invaders—evil Earthlings—who try to possess the planet Pandora, much like how they have possessed the bodies of Na’vi clones. Although I wasn’t really a...

Film director Dan Trachtenberg, who revived the previously moribund Predator franchise with the surprise Hulu hit Prey , and then continued the Predator revival with the superb animated film Predator: Killer of Killers , continues to redefine the alien hunter/killers with his latest, Predator: Badlands . Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is a young Predator—whose race have been identified in this film for the first time as the Yautja—who has been considered the useless runt of his clan and is about to be killed because of it by his own father, until his brother saves him at the cost of his own life. Dek escapes in his brother’s spaceship to an alien world, where he must regain his status within his clan by bringing them the head of the Kalisk, a supreme apex predator who has never been defeated by any of the Yautja that were sent to hunt it. When he arrives (more like crash-lands) on the planet, Dek finds an unlikely ally in the form of Thia (Elle Fann...

When I was a kid, the original King Kong was a Thanksgiving Day staple in New York City. I visited my grandmother, who still lived in the City then, for turkey day. One of the local NYC channels would run King Kong , often with Mighty Joe Young , on the holiday. When the remake of King Kong , starring Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange, was released in 1976, I was taken to see it in the movie theater by my mother’s then-boyfriend. The three of us had plans to go Christmas shopping, but my mother had to work a night shift at her job in the city. It was her idea for us guys to see a movie to pass the time until she could meet up with us after work. It's hard to believe all of this took place almost fifty years ago now. I don’t remember the name of the NYC theater where I saw the ‘76 Kong , but it was very large and ornate, a real temple of the cinema. It was just too bad the movie didn’t match the majestic setting that I saw it in. I was eleven at the time, and was something o...

High fantasy films are becoming more numerous, thanks to vast improvements in special effect technology over the last twenty years. Aside from the big budget monsters, like The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter , more lower budgeted fantasy movies are being released than ever before. A recent release, A Knight's War , is one of the better of the lower budget titles. A Knight's War concerns itself with Bhodie (Jeremy Ninaber), a knight in the service of an ancient prophecy that heralds the arrival of the Chosen One (Kristen Kaster)--a sacred, red-haired woman who will lead the charge to rid the world of all evil. Yet when the Chosen One is captured by a cult that plans to sacrifice her, Bhodie and his brother William (Matthew Ninaber) assault their lair to rescue her. But viewers' expectations are upended for the first time in this smartly written film when the Chosen One is abruptly killed and physically sent to another mystical realm. Bhodie follo...

When I first heard about Unit 234 , I initially thought it was a war movie about an infamous unit that did war crimes. But then I saw the title referred to a unit in a storage facility. This storage facility is owned by a young woman named Laurie (Isabelle Fuhrman), who inherited it from her deceased parents. Laurie is settling in for an extremely rainy evening at work when she's visited by an older man named Jules (the always good Don Johnson), who claims to have lost his key to his storage unit, and he'd like for Laurie to give him another one. But when Laurie checks his account, she clearly sees that Jules isn't who he claims to be. And that's when the fun begins. I'm tempted to say that Unit 234 is another Die Hard ripoff, and it certainly fits into that sub genre of a hero battling villains in a specific and claustrophobic setting, but Unit 234 winds up being much better than most of the Die Hard wannabes. Don Johnson ( Miami Vice, A Boy and Hi...

The Running Man was another book written by Stephen King under the Richard Bachman name, like The Long Walk, which had also been released as a movie in the Fall of 2025. Like The Long Walk , The Running Man takes place in a dystopian future where the United States has become an authoritarian nightmare where the majority of the population is just barely struggling to survive. But there's a short cut to great wealth, and that's the Running Man, a reality TV show where contestants have to survive a crazed game where they must dodge trained killers who are sent out to get them. And if the contestants lose, they die. The Running Man was turned into a movie once before, back in 1987, directed by Paul Michael Glaser (who played Starsky on the 1970s cop show Starsky & Hutch). It starred Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead role as Ben Richards, a former police officer who has no choice but to join the show to stay alive after being framed. The '87 Running Man was...