ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Do enjoying traveling, seeing new places, and meeting new people?

The movies below describe journeys through time, space, and . . . dirt!

Who could ask for more!
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Back to the Future trilogy

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_______________ Back to the Future 3 - Trailer


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At the end of Part II, Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) was in his DeLorean, floating above Marty (Michael J.Fox), when the auto time machine was struck by lightning, zapping it out of existence — out of 1955, that is.

It turns out, Doc & the DeLorean were zapped back to 1885. So, how is Marty going to follow him there? In the DeLorean, of course (think about it long enuff, you'll figure it out). The doc has set himself up as a blacksmith and did not expect Marty to follow him there, but Marty noticed a gravestone which revealed that Doc was gonna get shot in the back over 80 bucks by the local Mad Dog Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson, hamming it up as a filthy bank robber & depraved killer).



Marty and Doc encounter and must surmount familiar problems: there's no more fuel in the DeLorean so the only possible way to get the car to 88 mph in this era is to push it with a train.

But, there is one unfamiliar wrinkle in time — Doc falls in love with the newly-arrived schoolteacher (Mary Steenburgen) and the feeling is mutual. Can Doc leave her? Should he take her with him?

In the end, he decides to tell her the truth . . . and she naturally becomes highly skeptical (Steenburgen must have felt some deja vu in light of her role a decade earlier in Time After Time). In addition, Marty — dubbing himself Clint Eastwood — is scheduled to be in a gunfight with Tannen in a couple of days.



All this is no doubt entertaining but, by this point, a decided staleness had settled on the trilogy. The repetitive motifs, such as Marty waking up as Lea Thompson hovers over him, by this point had reached the realm of been-there-done-that.

In addition, Fox and Thompson playing Marty's great, great grandparents is a stretch even for such a film series — Thompson as Marty's great, great grandmother makes no sense (Thompson as Marty's mom married into the family — she was not a McFly).

But, other characters are also played by actors who are playing 19th-century incarnations of their 1955 & 1985 characters, so the trilogy really just devolved into an absurd counterpart of the original, much more elegant 1985 film. Marty's use of the Eastwood name seemed out of whack, as well, though the script managed a clever joke copying A Fistful of Dollars to thwart Tannen.



Back to the Trivia:

Doc Brown of this film and this old west time frame appeared much later in cameo and as an unofficial follow-up/joke in Seth McFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014), which could be looked on as an unofficial sequel moment of Doc Brown's later adventures in time travel.

BoG's Score: 7 out of 10


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
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[url= https://www.allsci-fi.com/viewtopic.php?p=27325&highlight=#27325] Star Trek: The Final Frontier (1989) [/url]

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_______ Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (Trailer)

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You know a Star Trek film has some problems when the episode of the original series it calls to mind is The Way to Eden, the one with the space hippies seeking their own version of a planetary Eden.

This 5th Trek film also has similarities to the episode Who Mourns for Adonais?, another example of confronting a false deity, and even though that episode is not one of the better ones, it's still more effective than this film. That's rather sad. One might say, this was the turkey of Star Trek films.



This film looks exciting based on a summary and stills, but a lot of things went wrong it seems. The film has good intentions; it seeks to return to Trek's potent theme of exploration, of seeking answers on more than just the physical level, after a trilogy of films which stressed space battles, chasing about, and future politics.

However, first-time director Shatner and the writers seem to have no understanding of the concepts presented, or even of the general Trek universe. The first half of the film seems influenced by Shatner having watched too many action movies taking place in the desert; he appears hellbent on transplanting scenes from Lawrence of Arabia into the Trek worlds.




Some of the problems with this film were actually caused by Paramount, such as insisting on funny scenes to capture the success of the 4th film, The Voyage Home (1986).

But Shatner, trying to better Nimoy's directing jobs, was in charge and cannot be held as blameless. Overall, Shatner's approach is best described as flippant; he sets up scenes well, then throws them away with ludicrous turns of the plot. An early example is the sequence in Yosemite National Park, which begins fine, a sense of adventure even as the heroes are on shore leave. All of a sudden, we see Spock become Superman, zooming to the rescue of Kirk, now Lois Lane. No one paused to think or challenge Shatner with the opinion that it just plain looks silly.



Shatner extends this approach to his fellow actors. Yes — Doohan, Takei, Koenig and Nichols are given more to do than usual here, but the extra stuff usually involves them looking clownish; we're not laughing with them, as in the previous The Voyage Home, but at them. Sulu & Chekov lost in the woods, Uhura's 'erotic' dance, Scotty knocking himself out.

Was Shatner hinting that they were all acquiring senility by this point? And then there was all the business about nothing working on this new Enterprise. I guess Starfleet rushed in putting this NCC-1701-A ship together? Shatner is now ridiculing the ship, on top of everything else.



This isn't a total mess. A lot of the casual banter, mostly among the main trio (Kirk,Spock,McCoy) still works, a benefit of these actors having worked together for so long.

But the one who almost steals the movie is Luckinbill as the enigmatic Sybok, the emotional Vulcan who drives the plot. Most Trekkers are not fans of this strange character. In fact, Gene Roddenberry himself considered him as non-canon; the older brother to Spock, who was conceived by Sarek's earlier tryst with a Vulcan priestess.

It does sound like it's out of left field.

And, I would've liked more information about why Sybok behaves in such a non-Vulcan manner. But it's a charismatic performance and you kind of buy into the whole premise of his hypnotic power to gather his followers, including even key members of Kirk's crew.

The most powerful scene must be when Sybok uses his power on McCoy and we get a glimpse into what drove this character during the original series, including his often fatalistic approach to things.




The plot revolves around Sybok's plan to acquire a starship so that he can journey to a galactic barrier (similar to the one from the Where No Man Has Gone Before pilot episode) and pierce it to enter the galactic center and meet God. It's not very complicated. And they make it look easy enough so that almost anyone could zoom in over there.

Once there, they encounter a run-of-the-mill energy composed/manipulating alien — the kind they ran into every other week on the original series — and Sybok gets a cold splash of reality; yes, life is certainly not a dream.

Shatner is not able to tie the thought-provoking concepts together into some kind of cohesive whole, probably because he was more concerned with presenting an action picture. For him, it was more exciting to have his character climbing rocks or scrambling to avoid an angry alien than to attempt some metaphysical answers.

Oh, and this film ruined the song 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat' for me.



Blame was also placed on lack of money for better FX at the climax, but I really don't think that would have helped. The inclusion of more belligerent Klingons here is proof of that. Shatner took the unimpressive way Klingons were depicted in Star Trek III and presented them here in an even more brutishly clownish manner. The tough aliens are little more than an on-going joke in this film (Klaa! — the strongest Klingon around these here parts!). Of course, much of the film comes across as a parody, a joke.

This should have been the death-knell of the film series, but they managed to bring them all back together for a classy finish in the next one, The Undiscovered Country (1991).

BoG's Score: 5 out of 10



RiffTrax,with Mike Nelson, riffing on the 5th Trek film's early scene:

_________RiffTrax w/ Mike Nelson - Star Trek V


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BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
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Tremors (1990)

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________________ Tremors Official Trailer #1


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This is among a small group of favorites with me in a certain category — a couple of others are THE HIDDEN (1987) and NIGHT OF THE COMET (1984) — meaning . . . low budget sci-fi / horror films which transcended their own limitations.

Despite the small budget, this one consistently entertains to the very end. It takes place in and around the tiny town of Perfection, located in the middle of the desert and seemingly as far removed from the rest of civilization as is possible nowadays in the USA.

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Keven Bacon & Fred Ward play a couple of local handymen who have just made plans to move on when the . . . worms turn, so to speak. The two actors overplay it a bit, but it mostly works — these are very average guys caught in an 'Attack of the Monsters' situation.

Michael Gross and Reba McEntire almost steal the movie as a couple of survivalists who become very useful to the rest of the inhabitants of the town (population: about a dozen — I said it was tiny). The desert locations are a plus and the mixture of humor & action is very well done. Watch for a very young Ariana Richards, who would then play one of the kids in Jurassic Park (1993).


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Tremor Trivia: There was a direct-to-video sequel in 1996 — Tremors 2: Aftershocks — with Fred Ward starring, then another one in 2001 in which Michael Gross took center stage, then a prequel in 2003 and then a short TV series.

BoG's Score: 8 out of 10

______________ Tremors - Edgar on the Tower


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