weekend watchlist: a sci-fi mood piece of eeriness, ookiness, and dread
Plus a snarky heist, a two-century-old energy crisis, and more. (First published August 27th, 2022, on Substack and Patreon.)
Moby-Dick
Serenity movie review: gonna need a bigger nope
Accidental hilarity turns ugly in this baffling exercise in genre-hopping that thinks it justifies its Hollywood-typical adolescent-boy attitudes about women, sex, violence, and morality. It does not.
The Meg movie review: shark lark
Jason Statham versus a giant prehistoric shark. It’s never less — yet also never more — than you expect, and never more suspenseful or scary than it is cheesy. But whatev. Go, and enjoy.
Kong: Skull Island movie review: ape-ocalypse now
Boiled down to its bonkers essence, Skull Island is a Vietnam war movie with monsters, a retro analog vibe, and a dash of both Moby-Dick and The X-Files.
In the Heart of the Sea movie review: here be monsters (and whales)
Solid, old-school man-versus-nature adventure melodrama, with a simmering green awareness; rollicking, smart, breathtaking, and sobering.
trailer break: ‘Age of the Dragons’
It’s Moby Dick. On land. With dragons. What could go wrong?
The Omega Code (review)
Maybe you’ve heard of The Omega Code. This is the ‘Christian thriller’ that shocked Hollywood last year by breaking into the box office top 10, if only momentarily, playing on only a handful screens across the Bible Belt. Why Hollywood was shocked is a bit of a mystery: The independently produced The Omega Code is illogical, anti-intellectual, tedious, and absurd, but no more so than any given Adam Sandler movie. Why should religious folks be any more discriminating than the vast secular majority? A real shock would be if, say, The Insider was such a blockbuster that Mattel cashed in with Jeffrey Wigand inaction figures.
