Fritz Lang & Thea von Harbou’s masterpiece. If you haven’t seen the most recent restoration, which restored broken or missing storylines, you need to see the movie again. This new, restored version is truely stunning to behold, and tells a complex and gripping tale.
The Man in the White Suit (1951)
This old Ealing comedy features Alec Guinness as an eccentric inventor of a spotless fabric. Very, very funny.
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Michael Rennie was ill, …
War of the Worlds (Geo. Pal, 1953)
The strange cross between flyng saucers and martian tripods works, and the story still works even transplanted to the US.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Who can forget the shot of the man, running down the road, trying to warn people?
Forbidden Planet (1956)
Robby the Robot! Shakespeare! Flying saucers!
The Time Machine (1960)
I admit it, I just loved the gorgeous design of this Time Machine.
Alphaville (1965) une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution Jean-Luc Godard film about a totalitarian city of the future. Very unsettling
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Kubrick captures the grandeur of space. Lots of fun watching the Star Wars generation puzzling over the apeman opening!
Charly (1968)
A very nice adaptation of the short story Flowers for Algernon
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
The Andromeda Strain (1971)
The clock is ticking as a bunch of scientists deal with an infestation from space.
Dark Star (1975)
I first saw this at Aussiecon, then screened it the following year in Adelaide. A funny and clever film about the mental hazards of deep space with a small crew.
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
a beautifully filmed version of Roadside Picnic, and a meditation on the sadness in the Russian soul. Possibly a tad too slow for modern audiences, but there’s actually a lot happening.
Alien (1979)
Ridley Scott, and Sigourney Weaver as Ripley!
Blade Runner (1982)
Ridley Scott’sbeautiful and intelligent adaptation of PK Dick’s Do Android’s dream of Electric Sheep? set a high standard for SF films.
Fifth Element (1997)
Luc Besson’s glorious space opera romp, beautiful to behold and fun to watch.
Dark City(1998)
Classic 1950s man into superman story. Filmed around Central Station in Sydney.
Minority Report (2002)
Spielbergfilm of another PK Dick story. Max von Sydow is excellent!
A Scanner Darkly (2006)
Richard Linklater doing SF! Based on the PK Dick story. Very interesting rotoscoping of the actors.
District 9 (2009)
Intelligent SF commenting on Apartheid and racism.
Inception (2010)
Entering people’s dreams to embed/steal ideas. The question is, how do you know when you’re awake? A nice caper involving layers of “reality”.
Attack the Block (2011)
Unlikely heroes save their block from alien invasion
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
– WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM)
This site is designed for members of Critical Mass to share news, reviews, and talks about SF, Fantasy and related works.
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Lucy Sussex will be in Adelaide for Writers’ Week, and she has kindly agreed to talk to Critical Mass. At the March 2nd meeting, she’ll be talking about The Mystery of the Hansom Cab. Or to be precise, she’ll be talking about her new book, Blockbuster!: Fergus Hume and the Mystery of a Hansom Cab.
There are some nice visuals in this tale of alien invasion and deceit. Unfortunately, the story makes little if no sense.
Tom Cruise plays a drone repairman, who for some reason is house in a luxurious sky palace with his partner. He’s got a combination VTOL jet/bat cycle to play with, as he zooms over a planet devastated by loss of its moon, occupied by “scavs” (scavengers?) as the rest of the planet’s human population has scarpered to Titan (!!). In another ten days, the massive floating automated vacuum cleaners will have finished sucking up the planet’s oceans (did I mention the story makes no sense?) and he can retire to join the rest of his species on Titan.
Unsurprisingly, he seems reluctant to leave the planet of his birth.
Who is he? How did he get his maintenance job? Who is the strange woman in his dreams? He doesn’t know, because he’s been brain wiped (was he a criminal?) and shows little interest in discovering why the scavs are trying to kill him.
The drones are flexible, highly armed and fast. Strange ordinance for what appear to be just repair drones. And why are daily orders coming from a giant floating pyramid?
Given that Titan is a frozen moon, with its own supply of water, what logic is there in sucking up the earth’s oceans? (Aside from some nice shots of beached and rusting tankers.) If the floating vacuum cleaners are processing the seawater to generate energy, why not locate them on the seabed, or afloat? (not as spectacular visuals). Are these two really the only humans left on the planet?
The whole charade starts to unravel when a spacecraft crashlands in response to a signal beamed aloft by the scavs. The contents, several bodies in cryonic suspension, are almost all destroyed before our hero can salvage one, containing (surprise?) the woman from his dreams.
The rest of the film is taken up with gun battles, destruction and explosions, as our hero discovers what’s actually happening, and reacts accordingly.
We get some nice scenes with Morgan Friedman as we are fed the expository lump. And no, the real story doesn’t make much sense either.
But it is a visually stunning action film. And there’s an evil AI which pays visual homage to HAL (love those red rings around cameras). If you like Tom Cruise, see it on the big screen. I doubt it’ll be worth watching on DVD.
And no, there’s not enough of Morgan to make it worth seeing for him.
Biomes in Minecraft - here the swamp gives way to the desert.
Minecraft is due to be released in just a few weeks at a dedicated Minecraft convention in Las Vegas. However, even prior to the official release, the alpha, beta and pre-release beta versions have sold almost 4 million copies. This success is even more surprising when one considers that the game is written in Java, is still largely incomplete, has no clear goal, is buggy, employs low-resolution “blocky” graphics and textures, often requires players to sacrifice their work when new versions come out, and was initially developed by an independent programmer in his spare time.
Minecraft was developed by Markus Persson, better known to his followers as “Notch”. Notch had left his role with a game company to focus on independent game development, and had an idea for a game focused on building. Encountering the game InfiniMiner, Notch discovered the direction he wanted to take and started work in earnest. InfiniMiner was a mining game where the intent was for players to compete to find resources and bring them to the surface. But the payers went somewhere else: instead of competing to get resources and points, they started spending all of their time using the resources to construct in-game objects.
Zombie attack
Minecraft took this further. There are no points in Minecraft: just mining and building. The game places the player in a large procedurally generated world. Although deliberately blocky in design, the world is a mix of environments, including oceans, lakes and rivers, mountains and plains, and deserts and icy tundras. Populating this world is an unusual mix of creatures, from the mundane (pigs, cows and squid) to the violent (zombies, giant spiders and creepers). The more typical animals provide food and resources – from cows you can get beef, milk and leather; squid provide ink; sheep give wool; and chickens provide eggs, meat and feathers. The more aggressive inhabitants can also provide resources, but they are predominantly there to make your work a tad harder. (On the plus side, zombies and skeletons burn in sunlight, so they only present a threat at night or when you are in darkness, and spiders are non-aggressive during the day – although creepers, who explode when they get too close, are a constant threat). Along with the fauna is the flora, which includes grass, trees, flowers, mushrooms, bamboo, cacti and watermelons. These also provide much needed food and resources. But the point of the game isn’t the flora and fauna. They help to create a varied world, but the threats are easily overcome and the resources they provide are simple enough to come by. The really valuable stuff comes from the “mine” in Minecraft. Digging and exploring caves underground provides a wealth of useful ores, from rock and coal through to diamond and obsidian. By mining the world players are able to get the resources they need to build and survive.
This, of course, is where the “craft” comes into play. These resources can be used as they stand (cobblestone floors, wooden walls), or crafted into new things. For example, combine eight blocks of cobblestone in the correct fashion, and you’ve got a furnace. Toss in some iron ore and coal, and you have iron ingots. Take three iron ingots and add two sticks and you have an iron pickaxe: and with an iron pickaxe you can mine diamond, and with diamond you can make a diamond pickaxe. The diamond pickaxe can be used to mine obsidian, which in turn has some particular uses. The more you dig and explore, the more raw materials you get, and the greater the opportunities you have to combine them into something interesting. From chests and beds, through to castles suspended in the air, powered mine carts running along iron tracks, and virtual circuitry – including logic circuits to build computers and music sequencers within the game. When complete, you can share your designs through videos, by building them on multiplayer servers, or just through screenshots and shared save files.
For a while I foolishly found the success of the game curious – why, I wondered, would people be so devoted to a game that has no goal? It seems that I’m an idiot. I spent my younger years dedicated to Lego, and, like Minecraft, that has also no goal beyond the fun of creating. Thinking about it, there is nothing new or unusual about playing building games. It is simply that I forgot, somewhere along the line, that I can have fun without high resolution graphics and complex targeted gameplay. Fortunately Nothch didn’t forget. And fortunately, my children have discovered it as well.
A village from Minecraft 1.9
That said, Minecraft is a wonderful sandbox, but it has never been perfect, and I think it is reasonable to question whether or not the direction it is heading in is a wise one. Minecraft has been developed using an iterative model. Every so often Notch and his team would release a new version of the game, from the early alpha releases, through the on going beta versions, and more recently they started dropping buggy “pre-release betas” onto the market. Each version contains new features and modified functionality: for example, 1.8 beta introduced ravines, villages and strongholds, whilst the 1.9 pre-releases populated the village and introduced enchantments. To a large extent this has been working, but it relies heavily on the goodwill of the consumers (which, I should say, has been in abundance), and I fear that the increasing complexity may loose the enjoyable simplicity seen in the earlier versions. That second fear is something I see echoed in my son – he loves the game, and when he isn’t playing it he’s looking online to find out what is happening with the new releases, reading the Minecraft wiki, and watching every video he can get his hands on. Yet with each new version he expresses reservations, concerned that it won’t be as good as the old version was. So far that hasn’t happened, but it is an interesting aspect of the development model employed for the game.
It is also worth noting that the game has a rather idiosyncratic view of physics (and in particular gravity), but I suppose that can be seen as a feture as much as a a bug.
At any rate, I highly recommend Minecraft, and getting involved during the beta means that you will can get a copy a bit cheaper than when it is officially released. It is cross platform, relatively cheap, and it is genuinely enjoyable to play a game about building, exploring and avoiding zombies.
At Octacon 2011 atendees were invited to nominate up to three genre works that may not be known to all present. Thus we present the Octacon “List of Recommended (SF) Things”.
10am — 4pm, Saturday October 8th
at the SA Writers’ Centre, Second Floor, 187 Rundle St$10/5
The third in a series of small conventions, this one will look at various aspects of Joss Whedon’s creations.
Programme:
Registration from 9:30am
10am Welcome & Introductions
10:30am the Ethics of Dollhouse
11:15am Buffy season 8
12 noon Spike or Angel?
12:30ish Lunch/Quizzez/Film votes
1:20 Website Launch
1:30 Podcasting and other Audio
2:30 Galactic Empires: Firefly, Star Trek or Star Wars
3:15 Best SF films ever
3:45 Roundup & Close
We’ll look at Podcasting with special guests Gerri and Eugenia from Women talk Sci Fi, and Peter from 80 page Giant.
We’ll select the best SF/fantasy film ever from 100s of candidates, launch a new website and consider what’s new and exciting in the world of speculative fiction.
Interested? Then come along on Saturday!
Registration from 9:30am.
Critical Mass is on Wednesday, April 6th at the Writer’s Center.
If I can get my head around it, or, as this may prove impossible, if I can’t,
we’ll be talking about Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.
The Adelaide Fan Review 
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