The View From The Mountain

It’s not as terrible as some will have you think. It’s not great, either; far from it. Justice League is one of those films with a troubled production where the behind the scenes story is far more interesting than what happens onscreen. Justice League , as originally directed by Zack Snyder was to be the third installment in a superhero film series that began with Man Of Steel and continued onward with Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn Of Justice . But when Snyder left JL (for reasons I don’t wish to dredge up here), Joss Whedon, the writer/director of such TV series as Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Firefly , as well as the first two Avengers movies for Marvel, stepped in to do reshoots on JL . The edict from the studio was to make the tone of the film lighter than the darker take that Snyder had instilled in BvS . And the result is uneven, at best. Granted, Snyder’s take on Superman might have been too dark, and his Batman in BvS was portrayed as being an outright psychopath, but he did ...

Annihilation is based on the book of the same name by Jeff VanderMere, and it concerns a strange occurrence that takes place after a meteor strikes the Earth (in a coastal region of Florida). The area immediately surrounding the meteor strike zone starts changing in a weird way. The very landscape is mutating in an indescribable manner, and this new ground is covered by a large bubble-like dome that the scientists investigating it refer to as the Shimmer. Natalie Portman plays Lena, a biology professor at Johns Hopkins, and a former Army soldier, who lost her husband in a covert operation a year prior. When her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), abruptly returns to their house without explanation, and then falls ill, a bewildered Lena calls an ambulance. However, the ambulance carrying Kane to the hospital is diverted by a government SWAT team, and Lena awakens to find herself at Area X, the government research site set up on the border of the Shimmer. Driven to solve the mystery of what h...

I’m re-reviewing the Lost In Space reboot movie for two reasons: the first and main reason is that this year marks the twentieth anniversary of its release in theaters. The second reason is the upcoming premiere of the rebooted reboot of LIS on Netflix, which has got me thinking about this much maligned version. Based on the popular 1960s TV series by producer Irwin Allen (who also gave us Land of the Giants , Time Tunnel , and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea , among other flights of TV fancy), Lost in Space was--as its name implied--about a family getting lost in the vastness of space while on a mission to settle a far off planet. It’s based somewhat on Swiss Family Robinson , by Johann David Wyss, which was first published in 1812. That book has been turned into several films and a 1970s TV show over the years, but the original 1960s Lost In Space is the only project that gave the story an SF spin. The Robinsons in the 1960s series were portrayed as a warm and loving family unit...