ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

If you're not a member of All Sci-Fi, registration is easy. Just use the registration password, which is —

gort



Attention members! If you've forgotten your password, just email me at Brucecook1@yahoo.com.
____________________________________________________________________

A dream is wish that the heart makes — according Cinderealla. But that’s not quite true in the first movie listed below.

Becoming an astronaut takes years of training — unless you get lucky and the shuttle launches by accident.

Someday we’ll have robot policemen, and crime will become a thing of the past! Or not . . .
____________________________________________________________________

Dreamscape (1984)

____________
__________________

An innovative sci-fi thriller, if a bit outdated by today's standards. The main premise has to do with entering another person's dream and interacting with that person in the dream, affecting the dream if you have to. The film also combines this with political thriller aspects and though this stuff is on the simplistic side, it does blend well together, against the odds.



The main character is Alex (Quaid), a genius-level but immature young man who has squandered his psychic talent (telepathy, even some telekinesis, though he never shows this off) on activities like betting at the horse races. He's drawn back into some interesting experiments by his former mentor (Von Sydow), who has developed a process by which telepathic people can enter the dreams of voluntary patients. Unfortunately, the project is actually overseen by a sinister government man (Plummer), head of a covert organization of "guys which even the CIA are afraid of" (the one who states this is a writer played by George Wendt, patterned on guys like Stephen King; his research into all this does not end well for him).

_____

Kate Capshaw plays Von Sydow's assistant; she and Quaid's Alex quickly develop a mutual attraction, though she resists this. There is an opportunity here for very erotic moments as the two interact in a dream world, but it stays rather mild (a slightly more risque version exists in foreign editions of the film).

Eddie Albert is the President; he has nightmares about a nuclear holocaust. These and other scenes in a dreamworld were very effective back in the eighties and some of them still hold up very well, especially the nightmarish, surreal sequence during a journey through a young boy's nightmare. All the scenes in a post-holocaust landscape still carry some resonance; and even the lighter scenes, like one at the top of a skyscraper, involving a fear of falling, still work well.

David Patrick Kelly, always playing a psychotic and/or scumbag during this decade-long period, plays one here - the dark version of Alex.

Some of the political elements in the film are now somewhat amusing, as we have the luxury of looking back from 25 years later. The film first came out in the middle of the Reagan era; Albert plays a more liberal version of Reagan and a much more guilt-ridden one, a more acceptable version of the tougher real-life person to those on the left. In the eighties, most on the left feared that Reagan would thrust the world into a nuclear war with his policies (we all know now how the eighties ended).



This perceived dark side of the Reagan administration is represented by Plummer's government man, a far right extremist who cannot abide a possible nuclear disarmament approach. He is the evil, while a liberal version of Reagan becomes the good. The thriller aspects do work, however. If a 'shadow ops' government needed the perfect assassins, this 'entering dreams' technique would be the best way to go; this makes perfect sense within the context of the film's plot.

Personally, I would designate Dreamscape a B+ picture (just my own label) — not in terms of quality but as compared to a 'B' picture or an A picture. Quaid & Capshaw were the brand new (if untested) stars of the time - Quaid coming off of The Right Stuff (1983) and Capshaw from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984).

In many ways, this is an ideal ensemble cast. It was sort of a casting coup in getting Plummer, Von Sydow and Albert for their key roles. They probably had bigger careers in the seventies but were still potent. Combine all that with the character actors here, like Kelly, and this is what probably makes the film above average and pretty memorable.

BoG's Score: 7.5 out of 10



BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
____________________________________________________________________

SpaceCamp (1986)

____
_______________

SpaceCamp refers to a science camp for teens that had been set up 4 years prior to the start of this film (based on a real camp in Alabama).

The camp focuses on NASA space technology and runs during the summers. Obviously, this description means it's more of an educational camp than the standard summer camps where kids run around on the grass and play.

Supposedly, these are all kids who are brighter than the norm.

Kate Capshaw stars as an actual astronaut, though she had just been passed up for a space mission and is kind of stuck instructing at this camp with her husband, played by Tom Skerritt.

_________________Space Camp (1986) part 1


__________

This film is geared towards the younger viewer — I think obviously — since many adult viewers would not find it very interesting to watch a bunch of teens and their escapades.

The main group of kids are kind of a standard complement: the smart-ass (Tate Donovan), the eager-beaver smarty (Lea Thompson), the pretty flake (Kelly Preston), and the African American goofball (Larry Scott). There's also a younger member who belongs in the junior camp, but Capshaw allows him to stay for some reason, unless he messes up. He's played by a very young Joaquin Phoenix, then credited as Leaf Phoenix.

And a small robot, looking like a ball with legs on wheels.

_________________Space Camp (1986) part 2


__________

It's this small robot which veers the film into all-out sci-fi escapism — the robot is apparently possessed of a rudimentary AI and is given free reign to move about the camp and do whatever it wants.

It facilitates the actual launch of a space shuttle, with Capshaw and all the kids on-board, so that the robot's young friend can realize his dream of going into orbit. Though it sounds exciting, this launch was not planned, so the shuttle's occupants suddenly find themselves dealing with a life-or-death situation in orbit, something they weren't prepared for.

_________________Space Camp (1986) part 3


__________

This ends up like a juvenile version of the more serious 'crisis-in-orbit' film Marooned (1969).

Since this is geared towards a young crowd, it's a safe bet that everyone will come through all right (unlike the older film), but the story also makes sure that the youngsters are mostly sympathetic characters, so we care and get a bit concerned as they face the various life threatening problems, such as running out of air. There's some tension in the final act as we wonder how they will make it down.

_________________Space Camp (1986) part 4


__________

BoG's Score: 7 out of 10


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
____________________________________________________________________

Robocop (1987)

____________
______________

__________ RoboCop (1987) - Theatrical Trailer


__________

Robocop was director Paul Verhoeven's satiric contribution to the cyborg concept in sci-fi. In some indeterminate near future of Detroit, crime is worse than ever (a prevalent theme in eighties sci-fi, like Escape From New York).

The responsibility of law enforcement, including the actual police force, has been handed over to a corporation. After the test failure of a robotic enforcer, an ambitious young executive (Miguel Ferrer) develops the cyborg option — they just wait for the next cop casualty (played by Peter Weller) and transform him into the mostly-machine policeman, a police-borg.

The cyborg is a great success in the next few days, but his memory — supposedly wiped clean — begins to resurface.

This has its roots in Blade Runner, but it's a reversal of the premise. Writer Ed Neumeier got the idea from the earlier film, in which a human cop was chasing after androids or robots. In this one, Neumeier switched it to a robot or cyborg chasing after human criminals.



Verhoeven makes sure that we understand that much of this is not to be taken seriously. Besides the absurd commercials (which Verhoeven would return to in Starship Troopers), there's an early scene in which a young executive is accidentally and violently killed in a mishap, right there in the corporate offices. Afterwards, everyone behaves as if this is a weekly occurrence, just "life in the big city."

The drawbacks of corporatism are sharply drawn, to dark comic effect — everyone has become very callous in this near-future, almost inhumanly so. It offers an ironic counterpoint to the surfacing humanity of the cyborg.

Dan O'Herlihy plays the elder head of the corporation, while Ronny Cox (back soon in a similar role in Verhoeven's Total Recall) is the over-the-top devious President & no.2 of same. The darkness also extends to the brutal violence - some of this set new standards in cinematic violence, such as the gundown of Weller. The gang of crooks, led by the unusual bespectacled Kurtwood Smith, are extremely sadistic, but there's also something clownish about them.



Some of this betrays its low budget. You might notice a lackluster set design in some scenes during a 2nd viewing, but usually this moves along at such a rapid fire clip, so you won't pay attention to such detail.

There are also questionable plot turns; why would Weller and his partner (played by Nancy Allen) not wait for back-up when going to confront the much larger-numbered gang?

Allen's character is actually responsible for what happens to Weller due to her ineptness, but there's no sense of guilt later — it's a truly callous world.

Weller and Allen would return in the sequel a couple of years later, as would O'Herlihy. Verhoeven would not. There was a short TV series in 1994 and a remake arrived in 2014.

____________ ROBOCOP - Drug Factory Raid


__________

Robo-Trivia: Robocop has three prime directives, which seem like a direct steal from Asimov's famous 3 Laws of Robotics —
>>>>>>>>> Robocop's are programed to (1) Serve the public trust, (2) Protect the innocent, (3) Uphold the law.

BoG's Score: 8.5 out of 10



BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
[/b]
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)