The View From The Mountain

3 Body Problem , Netflix’s latest TV series, is loosely based on the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, by Chinese author Liu Cixin (who also wrote the book The Wandering Earth ). Simply put, it’s an alien invasion story, but one that’s a lot more sophisticated than your average ‘pew-pew-pew’ cliché-fest. For one thing, this series begins in the 1960s, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, which was the nationwide purge instigated within China by then-Chairman Mao to keep himself in power. A young woman named Ye Wenjie arises from the chaos to become a central figure in the overall story. The 3 Body Problem of this series’ name refers to a far-flung solar system that has three suns. Any planet within this tri-sun system would have a hard time of it, taking turns orbiting one belligerent sun after another, and it just so happens that the aliens who set their eyes on invading Earth--known as the San-Ti--come from this embattled world.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter literally takes a chapter from Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula . This chapter in the legendary novel that details Dracula’s arrival in England via a sailing ship named the Demeter is pretty scarily effective. It shows the ship beaching itself on the shores of England, with its crew all dead--and, with Dracula apparently on the loose ashore. It creates a dreadful, ominous tone that informs the rest of the story. And I haven’t given anything away by revealing the ending, because the film itself opens on that very same scene: the Demeter beached on the rocks, with the police and locals gathering around the stricken ship and discovering its horrors. This opening serves as a framing device for the rest of the film, which is told in flashback. But while that chapter shows what happened after the voyage, The Last Voyage of the Demeter attempts to fill in the gaps of the voyage itself. Or, at least it tries to. Horror fans--both fa

The Creator was directed by Gareth Edwards, who also directed the superb Monsters ; the somewhat annoying 2014 Godzilla (which was pretty good--when you could actually SEE the Big G), and the excellent Star Wars film Rogue One . The Creator takes place midway through the 21st century, when the United States suffers a devastating blow when Los Angeles is destroyed by a nuclear weapon that was set off by an Artificial Intelligence. This prompts the US and its western allies to ban all AI worldwide. When New Asia, a newly formed state in Southeast Asia, refuses to cease using AI, along with its robotic constructs, this creates a war between them and the United States. In 2070, Sergeant Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) of the US Army, goes into New Asia with a commando force to destroy a special weapon that had been created by the enemy forces. He’s also looking to see if he can find his wife, whom he thought had died five years before, but is now seen to be alive a