the m0vie blog

The X-Files – Conduit (Review)

Posted on October 4, 2013 by Darren

The X-Files is somewhat fascinating as a historical artifact, a prism through which the viewer might explore the United States in that gap of time between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror. The show serves as something of a travelogue through the American subconscious, a vehicle for the nation’s fear and anxieties. It might be quaint now to look back on the show’s depiction of mobile phones and the internet, but The X-Files offers a snapshot of an America just on the cusp of that technological revolution, when there were still dark shadows and corners of the continent to be probed and explored.

One of the more interesting aspects of The X-Files is the way that it deals with faith in the nineties. Scully’s attempts to reconcile her religious beliefs with a rational approach to the universe are surprisingly insightful and nuanced, but Mulder’s belief system also offers a vehicle to explore the form that faith might take. “I want to believe,” Mulder confesses at the end of Conduit, with the iconic poster turning the sentiment into a motto. It doesn’t matter that Mulder chooses to invest his faith in aliens or conspiracies, The X-Files is still an exploration of what faith meant in the nineties.

Why is Mulder so driven?

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: chris carter, Christian Right, Cold War, Dana Scully, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Fox Mulder, gillian anderson, Gulf War, IDW Publishing, mulder, Mulder & Scully, scully, United States, world war ii, x-files | 3 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Whispers (Review)

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Darren

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is twenty years old this year. To celebrate, I’m taking a look at the first and second seasons. Check back daily for the latest review or retrospective.

You could make a credible argument that each of the first three Star Trek shows beautifully encapsulated their time and place. The original show was the very embodiment of the sixties zeitgeist, providing a channel for commentary and insight into counter-culture and the Vietnam War, and an outlet for various fixations and phobias. Star Trek: The Next Generation was a show that spoke to a version of America which was emerging from the Cold War, a clean and sterile morning for a new America.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was positioned somewhat strangely, as the idealism and enthusiasm of the early nineties gave way to paranoia and insecurity. If the hyperreal technicolour production values of the original Star Trek spoke to the energy and enthusiasm sixties, then the drab grey Orwellian design of Deep Space Nine was a reflection of the late nineties.

Whispers is really the first time that the show has pushed its sense of paranoia to the fore, and it confirms that Deep Space Nine will be a show of its time, anchored in the nineties.

It’s all a bit askew…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Cold War, cynicism, deep space nine, games, Lance Parkin, Next Generation, O'BRIEN, Philip K. Dick, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: the next generation, StarTrek, Ted Kaczynski, x-files | 12 Comments »

The X-Files – Squeeze (Review)

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Darren

Squeeze is the first “monster of the week” episode of The X-Files, and also the first episode that wasn’t written by creator Chris Carter. Instead, Squeeze came from the word processors of James Wong and Glen Morgan. Wong and Morgan would become a hugely influential (if not always successful) writing duo during the nineties. They’d write some of the best scripts for The X-Files, but they’d also leave (briefly) to run their own short-lived science-fiction drama in Space: Above & Beyond.

After Fox cancelled that show, the pair would briefly return to The X-Files before taking over Chris Carter’s other Fox drama Millennium, for that show’s second season. I’d argue that Wong and Morgan’s Millennium was one of the most inventive and insane seasons of television produced by any network in the nineties, and it’s a shame that Carter would have to re-assume the reins for the show’s third and final season. After that, the pair found considerable success creating the Final Destination film series.

However, all of that was in the future, but you can clearly see their creative talent at work here. Squeeze isn’t just the first episode of The X-Files unrelated to the show’s alien mythology, it is also one of the most memorable episodes ever written, creating a monster so iconic that he would wind up bookending the first season when he returned in Tooms.

Eye see you…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: chris carter, Dana Scully, Deep Throat, Federal Bureau of Investigation, final destination, Fox Mulder, Glen Morgan, H. H. Holmes, hannibal lecter, IDW Publishing, Jim Wong, Leonardo diCaprio, Tooms, x-files | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Runner Runner

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Darren

Runner Runner feels like it should be a lot more fun than it winds up being. For a film about gambling, it lays the cards on the table pretty quickly. It’s a story about an ambitious young man who is offered wealth and success, only to eventually discover that the price is nothing less than his soul. As such, our plucky young hero has to keep all the plates spinning as the walls close in around him, trying to keep his head above water and the wolves from his door. There are, of course, other clichés I can throw in there, but these will do for now.

As such, Runner Runner isn’t about originality or insight, borrowing heavily from far better character studies and morality plays – even the casting of Justin Timberlake as a nerdy internet-savvy college student feels like a riff on his role in The Social Network. Runner Runner is all about the execution of these familiar high concepts and plot points. Unfortunately, the movie never seems too invested in its stakes, or too engaged with the game it is playing. When the chips are down, Runner Runner can nothing but fold.

I want to believe this is the same look Ben Affleck had when reading the internet’s response to Batffleck…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Affleck, ben affleck, Costa Rica, Federal Bureau of Investigation, film, Gambling, Gemma Arterton, Justin Timberlake, Online gambling, Runner Runner, Social Network, Timberlake, United States | 6 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Armageddon Game (Review)

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Darren

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is twenty years old this year. To celebrate, I’m taking a look at the first and second seasons. Check back daily for the latest review or retrospective.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a fairly generic “could have happened on any Star Trek“ episode of Deep Space Nine. So it’s a lot easier to forgive Armageddon Game its simplicity and lack of nuance. This isn’t a story specific to Deep Space Nine. The basic concept could – rather easily – have been tailored to fit Star Trek: The Next Generation or even Star Trek: Voyager, with two crew members on the run for their lives on an alien world.

Armageddon Game is another story idea from Morgan Grendel, a writer who tends towards extremes. The Inner Light remains one of the best episodes of Star Trek ever produced. The Passenger ranks among the worst episodes of Deep Space Nine ever to make it to the screen. Armageddon Game sits somewhere in the middle.

Talk about chemistry…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Armageddon Game, Bajoran, Bashir, deep space nine, games, Ira Steven Behr, Julian Bashir, O'BRIEN, science fiction, Star Trek Games, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: deep space nine, StarTrek, video games | Leave a comment »

Watch! The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug Trailer!

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Darren

The latest trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug has arrived on-line. Check it out below. While I’ll concede that The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was over-long and quite padded, I enjoyed it more than most. Part of that is down to Martin Freeman’s charisma, but also in the way that Jackson seems to relish the relatively lower stakes of this story. (Musical dish-cleaning sequence anyone?) I’ll admit that I’m curious to see what Jackson’s second installment holds in store. That said, the trailer does seem to suggest quite a lot of superfluous material – a Legolas romantic subplot? really? – but it also teases Benedict Cumberbatch as a flame-throwing pun-wielding dragon. So it’s safe to say the jury’s still out.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Benedict Cumberbatch, Evangeline Lilly, Hobbit, Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, ian mckellen, Martin Freeman, peter jackson, Smaug | Leave a comment »

The X-Files – Deep Throat (Review)

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Darren

Deep Throat was filmed in August 1993, more than a year after the production of The Pilot in March 1993. In a way, Deep Throat feels like the first proper episode of the show’s first season, even carrying the production number 1×01. It cements a lot of the themes and ideas suggested in The Pilot, more firmly establishing arcs and characters. Indeed, The Pilot ended with a glimpse at the massive government conspiracy surrounding encounters with alien life forms, but Deep Throat serves to demonstrate just how deep that conspiracy goes.

The episode builds on countless ideas and conspiracy theories, delving into the popular suggestion that the United States military has been reverse-engineering alien technology for its own purposes. This suggests that Mulder isn’t just dealing with modern interactions between aliens and humanity, he’s digging into something that is rooted far deeper. As the eponymous informant teases him at the end of the episode, “Mr. Mulder, they’ve been here for a very long time.”

The truth is up there…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: All the President's Men, Barry Sussman, Bob Woodward, Central Intelligence Agency, Deep Throat, Erlenmeyer Flask, Fox Mulder, James Franco, Jerry Hardin, Lone Gunmen, mulder, New Mexico, nixon, Paranormal, richard nixon, roswell, scully, Seth Green, United States, Washington Post, Watergate Scandal, white house, X-File, x-files | 5 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Alternate (Review)

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Darren

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is twenty years old this year. To celebrate, I’m taking a look at the first and second seasons. Check back daily for the latest review or retrospective.

Well, at least the second season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is experimental. It might not always pay-off, but there’s a clear sense that the show is trying new things, bending various genres to make them fit within the broad outline of a Star Trek show. Necessary Evil was a fascinating attempt to construct a noir episode, while Rivals was a less-than-successful sit-com in space. The Alternate is very much doing “Star Trek as monster movie”, which is surprisingly fun.

To be fair, it’s not a subgenre new to the franchise. Indeed, the first episode of the original show to air, The Man Trap, was essentially a monster horror in space. Still, The Alternate feels a bit more sinister and dark than anything that Star Trek: The Next Generation might attempt. (Schisms probably comes closest, but – even then – there’s no sense that the monsters are stalking the starship. They have to abduct their victims to experiment on them.)

More than that, though, The Alternate is also a fascinating exploration of Odo as a character, looking at the relationship that Odo has with his co-workers and how that is rooted in his relationship with the man who claims to be his “father.”

Melting! Melting! Oh what a world!

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Alternate, Bajoran, Benjamin Sisko, Cardassian, deep space nine, Ferengi, Ira Steven Behr, Jake Sisko, Kira Nerys, Man Trap, MORA, Odo, Quark, Recreation, Sisko, spock, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: deep space nine, StarTrek | 1 Comment »

The X-Files – Pilot (Review)

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Darren

The X-Files is twenty years old this year. To celebrate, I’ll be spending Month X looking back at the first season.

There was a time, around the third season, when The X-Files became the show. It had grown from the quirky newcomer of Fox’s prime time line-up, through its status as a cult hit, into a bona fides pop culture touchstone. Looking back now, twenty years after the show first began, it is something entirely different. It’s weird to look back over a long-running television, divorced from the immediacy of broadcast, a sort of “if I knew then what I know now…” sort of thing.

However, looking back at The X-Files, it’s more than just knowing how it ends. It’s more than just knowing about the show’s slow and drawn-out two-year death. It’s more than knowing that the conspiracy plotline kinda (but not quite entirely) makes sense, if you look at it the right way and don’t over-think it. Approaching The X-Files now, twenty years later, is more like opening an old tomb, unlocking a time capsule. The musky smell of the past seems to seep out of the television screen, transporting the viewer to a time that really isn’t that far away, but feels like centuries ago.

The X-Files is, undeniably, a pop culture artefact from the nineties, a show that seems to slot almost perfectly between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror. It’s an exploration of a version of America that simply doesn’t exist any longer, the long and silent pregnant pause where the United States was the world’s sole unchallenged superpower. The X-Files really embodied that period of time, much like 24 managed to channel the anger and the rage of the post-9/11 era into piece of the zeitgeist.

And, to be fair, you can sense that sort of nineties existential anxiety even as early as The Pilot.

Beam me up…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: Carter, chris carter, Clarice Starling, Dana Scully, fbi, Fox Mulder, Lambs, mulder, New England, Oregon, silence of the lambs, steven spielberg, twitter, United States, x-files | 8 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Rivals (Review)

Posted on September 30, 2013 by Darren

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is twenty years old this year. To celebrate, I’m taking a look at the first and second seasons. Check back daily for the latest review or retrospective.

Rivals doesn’t work. However, while the second season has produced a string of noble failures, Rivals fails for a very simple reason. It’s a comedy episode without any comedy. It’s a guest-star focused episode which centres on a hopelessly miscast Chris Sarandon. Sarandon is an Oscar-nominated actor, and he should be something of a casting coup for the show. This second season has already featured Louise Fletcher, Frank Langella and John Glover – so it seems fair to acknowledge that the casting people were on a bit of a roll.

However, due to a reheated script and Sarandon’s lack of interest or engagement, Rivals winds up feeling stale. There is potential here, but it’s squandered as the writers forget the first rule of a good comedy episode. They forgot to bring the laughs.