I’ve recently had the chance to see two movies I had never seen, Judge Dredd (Danny Cannon, 1995) and Dredd (Pete Travis, 2012). They are both adaptations of the comic strip Judge Dredd, but they differ significantly from each other. Judge Dredd first appeared in 1977 in 2000 AD, a British weekly anthology comic, created by writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra. The strip was a reaction against both American superhero excess and the bleak prospects of late-20th-century urban life. The setting, Mega-City One, was a sprawling dystopian metropolis stretching along the American eastern seaboard, plagued by crime, unemployment,
Tag: scifi (Page 2 of 2)
My latest movie marathon was all about The Lost World. First I read the original novel by Conan Doyle (yes, the same guy who created Sherlock Holmes) and then watched six adaptations for the screen. At the end of the 19th century, Sir H. Rider Haggard was the king of stories about lost worlds, with books like The People of the Mist (about a lost tribe in Africa) and Heart of the World (about a lost Mayan city in Mexico). But the genre got it’s masterpiece in 1912, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle unleashed The Lost World. Explorers venturing to
I’ve recently bingewatched the many iterations of Lost in Space. The “castaway as hero” idea is surprisingly adaptable. It has been marooned on islands, stranded on planets, and even hurled across galaxies. As a concept, it all started with one resourceful guy: Robinson Crusoe and his tale of survival that kicked off a whole genre, sparked imitators and adaptations, and eventually landed an entire family Lost in Space. In 1719, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe hit the shelves, changing the literary world forever. Possibly inspired by the true story of Alexander Selkirk, a marooned Scottish sailor who survived alone on an
How many Terminator movies can you watch in a single day? Well, if you are a geek like me and happens to be stranded at home feeling a bit sick, you can watch all of them. At the time of this writing, there are only six Terminator movies out there, so I was able to fit the whole 722 minutes (that’s a bit over twelve hours) into my totally not busy schedule for the day. The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) started everything. A near-unstoppable cyborg assassin (Arnold Schwarzenegger), is sent from a future dominated by machines, to kill Sarah Connor