9

At a glance, it's hard to figure out what 9 is all about. There are ragdolls fighting in a post-apocalyptic landscape, but beyond that the trailers don't convey much. It probably didn't help that 9 was released amidst a swirl of movies with "nine" in the title.

9 takes place in a steampunk cross between Terminator and Little Big Planet, where the soulless Fabrication Machine known as BRAIN has destroyed all of humanity in an alternate history version of World War II. 9 is a Tim Burton tale of good and evil, as evidenced by the soft cloth of the "stitchpunk"-style green-eyed homunculi and the soulless red eye of BRAIN (Binary Reactive Artificially-Intelligent Neurocircuit). Similar to the premise of the sci-fi flop Virus, BRAIN sees everything as raw material, including organic remains. It fashions a series of increasingly lethal scouts, all with the sole purpose of absorbing and retrieving the souls of the heroic homunculi.

These poor little dolls are in for a world of hurt. Not much larger than a human hand, they embody all the traditional survivalist tropes of the post-apocalyptic genre: the power hungry leader (1), the befuddled but kind scientist (2), the innocents (3 and 4), the apprentice (5), the crazy prophet (6), the tough chick (7), the muscle (8), and of course or titular hero (9) who bucks the system. In this little slice of hell, the homunculi battle for both dominance and survival.

But really this is about fights between little stitch dolls and cyborgs. And what fights they are! There's the Cat Beast, the Winged Beast, and the Seamstress, and of course the BRAIN itself. The battles are as much symbolic as they are exciting, contrasting human vs. machine, soul vs. soulless, emotion vs. logic.

There are problems however. The biggest issue being that 9 is as much responsible for the plight of the homunculi as he is the solution. There are twists along the way, but the emotional heft lent to the struggle of these human-analogues is weakly supported by its simplistic setting. Because the ending is largely open to interpretation, a viewer's level of satisfaction depends on his perspective on evolution, faith, and the meaning of floating green dots in a drop of water. 9 is more metaphor than movie and certainly not for children, but it's a story worth watching.

The Book of Eli

The Book of Eli is a vastly underappreciated film that mixes martial arts swordsmanship, a post-apocalyptic setting, and a biblical narrative.

A war, over thirty years ago, killed off many people in the United States. Others were blinded from the blast. This creates an interesting disparity between those over thirty years of age who received an education and those under thirty who know nothing of the modern world (at one point, one of the thugs asks, "What's a television?").

This is an unpleasant world. Cannibalistic brigands ambush unwary travelers, identifiable by their shaking hands. Water is at a premium. Batteries are hard to find. The Book of Eli makes it clear that there's no currency, only barter.

Roaming the land is Eli (a subdued Denzel Washington), carrying a book with a cross on it. This book is greatly desired by Carnegie (a greasy Gary Oldman), who is also old enough to remember the power such a tome can have over the people. While Eli has been wandering for thirty years in pursuit of such a destination, Carnegie has been sending illiterate henchmen to retrieve every book he can find. The encounter between the two has all the fire and brimstone of a battle between heaven and hell.

Thrown into the mix is Solara (played beautifully by Mila Kunis, who finally sheds her trademark accent), a young, attractive girl who has grown up under Carnegie's protection but, as she flowers into womanhood, is about to become a bargaining chip, a piece of meat, and a lure. When there's no one left to protect her, she becomes a wanderer in Eli's footsteps.

From a religious point of view, it's educational to understand who Eli was in the Bible. In the Bible, Eli's children are cursed for behaving wickedly, a parallel for the war that destroyed civilization in the movie. God's curse assures that all men will "die by the sword" – in the movie Eli expertly cuts a bloody swath through his enemies with his machete. In the Bible, it was the job of Eli's sons to guard the Ark of the Covenant – the pact God made with man – just as Eli guards the holy book in the movie.

There's a twist ending that's not a twist of all if you read up about Eli in the Bible. But don't – watch the movie, then do some research, then watch the movie again. Like Eli, the experience will be rather eye-opening.

Moon

Judging from the advertisements, Moon seemed to be about a man going slowly insane on, well, the moon. I assumed it was more of a movie like Event Horizon, where a lonely person stumbles on some mind-blasting truth. Fortunately, I was wrong.

Actually, that's an accurate description of the film – it's jut that the mind-blasting truth is eminently relatable and human. Moon's a lot more complicated than it looks.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the sole inhabitant of a moon base dedicated to mining Helium-3 for Lunar Industries. His companion is GERTY (Kevin Spacey), a ceiling-hung robot that expresses itself through emoticons. For three years, Sam has overseen the various mining robots, worked on his wooden models, talked to his plants, and longed to be reunited with his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott) and daughter Eve (Rosie Shaw). With his time up, he's ready to go home. The catch is that Sam perceives everything through a filtered lens – even his transmissions to Earth are delayed. Sam isn't just alone for three months; he's alone without any synchronous human contact.

Red herrings abound. It's easy to focus on the HAL-like robot GERTY, a major character and foil for Sam. How can you trust something that sounds so benign as Kevin Spacey? Ironically, GERTY is one of the most human characters on the base.

Moon's twist isn't in the revelation of The Truth, but in its implications. Moon questions who Sam is, what he represents, and what makes him – and us – human. We are, the director seems to say, defined by our memories, and that's enough to fuel us in our daily grind. Sam is every worker who has been at it for years, always waiting for the next big break, the next reorganization, the next lotto ticket that will get him out of the crappy dead end job. It's a lot like Memento, high praise for a film that cost just $5 million to produce.

The fun is in watching Sam deal with the truth of his situation and how he rises above it (or succumbs to it). Moon is littered with clues, making it worth another view. This is a tightly crafted, smart film that takes a single science fiction element and explores it thoroughly.

Waxwork II: Lost in Time

Quick, what movie features a murderous disembodied hand, zombies, buckets of blood, possession, projectile organs, time travel, and Bruce Campbell getting tortured? No, not Evil Dead II…Waxwork II: Lost in Time!

Picking up immediately where the first Waxwork left off, Mark Loftmore (still Zach Galligan) and Sarah Brightman (replaced by the considerably hotter Monika Schnarre) attempt to return to their normal lives. Sarah creeps back to her abusive stepfather's home where he berates her for ruining her dress. After she goes to bed, the zombie hand (also from the first film) murders the abusive stepfather because…let's face it, he had it coming.

In the typical Waxwork aside into "that makes perfect sense" territory, Sarah is blamed for her stepfather's murder, claims about murderous zombie hands not withstanding. She will likely be condemned to death unless she can prove her innocence. And that's where any semblance of realism ends, because Sarah and Mark concoct a scheme to find ANOTHER zombie hand by traveling backwards in time through a magic mirror. Because of course, that's where zombie hands hang out, right?

Waxwork II is of course not about time travel at all. It's about whatever the director (Anthony Hickox) feels like parodying, beginning with Frankenstein, alternating between Alien and The Haunting, and then throwing in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Godzilla, Jack the Ripper, Nosferatu, and Dawn of the Dead for good measure. And oh yes, a long fantasy sequence that has nothing to do with anything.

Waxwork II establishes a couple of things: They are NOT time traveling, but more dimension traveling, or perhaps film hopping. Mark and Sarah have stumbled into the world of Cartagra, "God's video game," as Sir Wilfred explains – in the form of a crow (it's complicated). Cartagra is a universe where good and evil duke it out for supremacy, apparently in the form of movie plots. Mark and Sarah are now Time Warriors, inhabiting the protagonist roles of each movie and ensuring the good guys win. Or something like that.

It is also a different form of dimension hopping than the pocket dimensions seen in the first movie. When Mark, facing down Igor the hunchback, attempts to disbelieve, he gets socked in the face for his trouble.

It's clear that Hickox a real fondness for all things Evil Dead and for swashbuckling romance. He has his cake and eats it too here (like he did in the first film) by including a long fantasy sequence involving what must be the first sword fight across movie genres. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

FRANKENSTEIN: Mark manifests as the butler, while Sarah is Frankenstein's wife. They are caught in the moment when villagers are about to set the place on fire. It takes awhile for Sarah to remember her true nature, during which time Mark battles it out with Dr. Frankenstein, Frankenstein's Monster, Igor, and angry villagers. Using a weird compass he found amongst his uncle's belongings, Mark can usually find the exit out of each movie by running in that direction, regardless of all apparent obstacles. Once he figures this out, Mark and Sarah are split up as they escape…

THE HAUNTING: Filmed in black and white, it's clear Hickox is a fan of The Haunting. And so is Marina Sirtis, collecting a paycheck. But the biggest winner here is Bruce Campbell in a hilarious series of slapstick. This is the funniest part of the movie. It's also the most overt homage to Evil Dead.

ALIEN: Sarah has taken on the role of Ripley. She faces down a giant Alien-rip-off – literally, the Aliens look terrible, with huge, lumbering heads. The Facehugger-equivalents are much more disturbing, with tentacles probing orifices. This scene drags on far too long, seeking to emulate the terrible silences and long pauses in Alien. Fortunately, Mark shows up and ends the madness just in time.

RANDOM FANTASY SETTING: Hickox may be a fan of horror movies, but what he really wants to do is write a swashbuckling romance. So stuck in the middle of the rest of the horror homage is this sloppy collection of Monty Python jokes, subpar special effects, and confusing elements. The best part is George (Michael Des Barres), a powdered, effeminate dandy who isn't afraid to murder people with a garrote. There are some laugh-out-loud jokes here, but they don't save the piece. Oh and David Carradine (?). There's also the aforementioned appearance of the talking crow, which is in fact Sir Wilfred reincarnated. His appearance presages a huge exposition dump explaining Cartagra. No matter, all is forgiven as Mark engages in a no-holds-barred sword fight with the villain, Scarabis (Alexander Godunoy) across the universe. In no particular order, their cross-dimensional brawl leads them to…

GODZILLA: A giant, poorly made puppet. The most hilarious part being that Mark is badly dubbed in English.

JACK THE RIPPER: Okay, not really a movie per se. Poor Jack gets kicked into…

NOSFERATU: Silent and with intertitles, Hickox nails the entire feel of a silent movie. And we get to see Nosferatu gnash his teeth after The Ripper.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS: Sarah takes a sneak peak at people running from a train. And alien pods.

DAWN OF THE DEAD: 1970s style attire, a funky beat, and a bunch of people bristling with guns shooting at zombies in a mall. It also conveniently provides a disembodied zombie hand, that flimsy "evidence" our heroes were looking for.

The swordfight ends back in Fantasy-land, but only one person can go back through the portal. Mark pushes Sarah through.

Sarah, with evidence of a zombie hand CLEARLY confirming her innocence, receives a note from Mark in the "past", attempting to establish that he was indeed time traveling. Yeah, right.

And the lovers are reunited. Eventually. The End.

Cue a gonzo song about the film, complete with rap lyrics that narrate the entire ridiculous story and 1980s style dancers.

Less horror and more a tribute to films Hickox happens to like, Waxwork II never seems to make up its mind as to what film it wants to be when it grows up. But that's part of its charm.

Avatar

Judging from the name, you might think Avatar is about a young martial artist reincarnated in a series of spiritual warriors destined to save a world of kung fu magic. But that's a different movie. You might also think that Avatar is like Gamer and Surrogates, where a three-dimensional character acts on behalf of a real person in a virtual world. That's not Avatar either.

Avatar is everything James Cameron learned in Aliens and his undersea documentaries rolled into one.

On the one side we have an above-land version of all those beautiful underwater documentaries. The land is truly alien, colorful glow in the dark flora and plenty of six-limbed fauna. Inhabiting this land are the Na'vi, giant blue-skinned cat people with tails and neural fibers in their always-plaited hair braids. These blue critters most certainly didn't come from one of Cameron's documentaries. More likely, they came from a lot of furry art on the Internet – there's no discernible reason for how the Na'vi, who are surprisingly humanoid, evolved from anything else on the planet (remember those six-limbed monstrosities?). They look like they were completely made up. The weird neural fibers sticking out of their hair doesn't make much sense either, but Cameron's much more interested in the special effects of the IMAX experience, so whenever you start asking questions like this—

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On the other side we have the United States Colonial Marines, embodied in this film by ex-Marines who are now working for profit. Their job: safeguard and if necessary cleanse Pandora for its precious metals. Specifically, "Unobtainium."

Now ya see, the term "unobtainium" is a joke. It's a reference to an exotic material in a plot to make some other plot-moving element work. Without it, the plot doesn't move forward. But Cameron, who is at this point demonstrating an interesting disdain for his audience, makes it clear that it's not important what the hell Unobtainium does. What matters is that people will kill for it. If that doesn't make sense to you, then why are you wearing funny glasses in a movie theater anyway?

The Marines are decked out with actual mechs (just like in Aliens), heavy weapons (just like in Aliens), flamethrowers (just like in Aliens) and oh yeah, Michelle Rodriguez as a snarky pilot…just like in…oh you get the idea. The Marines are led by the best character in the movie, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang).

He's so badass…
* he kicks open an airlock door, braving Pandora's lethal atmosphere just to shoot somebody.
* he jumps out of an exploding ship while piloting a mech with one hand.
* he would rather die in one-on-one knife combat with a Na'vi than give up.

In short, Quaritch makes the movie. I would watch an entire film of him kicking alien butt any day.

On the side of the aliens we have Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a former Marine who has lost the use of his legs. He's replacing his brother, who died in a mugging, and because of their shared genetic ancestry Sully is uniquely suited to pilot an avatar – a Na'vi body, basically. So Sully gets shipped for FIVE YEARS across the universe to Pandora and promptly gets lost. Why doesn't this incredibly expensive avatar have some sort of tracking mechanism built into it?

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I'm not sure why Worthington keeps getting these lead roles. It's not that he's a bad actor; it's just that he's terrible at disguising his Australian accent in roles that either obfuscates where he comes from or where he's not playing an Australian. Sigourney Weaver is radiant here, but her character is largely wasted. In fact, the movie is stuffed with so many characters that it's a relief when Cameron finally starts killing a few off.

Oh yeah, the killing. See, the Na'vi preach a love for all forms of life. When they kill a beast, they thank it for giving up its spirit, etc. etc. If you've ever seen any movie about noble Native Americans, Avatar hits all the important points. But apparently, this doesn't apply to greedy Marines, even those just doing their job in a war. Instead of allowing some moral ambiguity, Cameron makes it pretty clear who the bad guys are. He's also quite good at telegraphing exactly what will happen by foreshadowing certain events with a sledgehammer to your forehead. Every single plant and animal that appears in the movie has an important role later.

But you might not care about all that. Avatar's graphics are incredible. The Na'vi are giant, living, breathing beings. The bizarre life forms are terrifying precisely because they're so lifelike. The special effects are unparalleled. As for the plot…

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Planet 51

When my wife and I went to see Planet 51, it was a Sunday night in the pouring rain. We were the only people in the theater. And that was apt, because we're probably the only adults who actually bothered to see the movie and got all the jokes.

On Planet 51, things are looking up for Lem (Justin Long), an aspiring assistant manager for the local planetarium. He just got the job and he's about to ask out the girl next door, Neera (Jessica Biel). Until an "alien" shows up. And that alien is Captain Charles (Chuck) T. Baker (Dwayne Johnson), a human astronaut.

Chuck, you see, has landed on a planet he thought was uninhabited. His job was to plant a flag, play a few rounds of interplanetary golf, and then get back to his ship and report home. But all those plans are threatened by the military that wants to dissect him, embodied by the sinister General Grawl (Gary Oldman) and the resident mad scientist Professor Kipple (John Cleese).

On the one hand, Planet 51 wants to entertain the kiddies. It features a computer-rendered world full of lush retro-futuristic landscapes rendered through a 1950s lens. It has rocket ships, aliens both benign and belligerent, and not one but TWO cute dogs-that-aren't-dog characters.

On the other hand, Planet 51 wants to be an action homage to the sci-fi of yesteryear. It features characters smooching, gunfire, 50s-style nostalgia, 50s-style paranoia, and references to genitalia.

The problem is that Chuck's kind of a jerk. Put in the role of the kindly extraterrestrial, Chuck can't pull it off – he's not above intimidating people, playing into their worst fears, lying to get what he wants, and his cries of "not having the right stuff" are hard to believe given that he's, ya know, an ASTRONAUT. Lem spends most of the movie whining about not getting the girl, Chuck spends most of the movie whining about not getting home, and the only reason the plot moves forward at all is because Rover (one of the two aforementioned "dogs") saves the day.

In fact, Rover steals the show. Cleverly designed to look like a cross between the Mars rover and a dog, Rover propels the plot on his tiny wheels alone. If the movie was more about Rover and got rid of Chuck, it would have been a much more entertaining film.

Instead, Planet 51 teeters between tedious characters arguing, simplistic moralizing (Lem explains to the General that he's "afraid of the unknown." Really?), and lame side plots that are just mean-spirited (two citizens have their brains removed…hilarious!).

If you're a twelve-year-old boy who happens to remember 1950s science fiction movies, E.T., Populuxe architecture, Aliens, and The Right Stuff, then this movie's for you. But since the odds of that happening are about as realistic as a planet full of half-dressed English-speaking aliens, adults will likely find Planet 51 too childish and the shout-outs to older sci-fi will go over the kids' heads.

Godzilla 2000

I was a big Godzilla fan in the 80s, when the Monster Movie of the Week seemed to play every hour of every day of the week. Although I can't precisely remember every monster and every battle, I fondly remember "Godzy" (as my mom would call him, both of my parents are sci-fi fans) beating the rubbery stuffing out of his opponents. Sometimes he had allies (Rodan), sometimes he had recurring enemies (King Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla) and sometimes he just blew stuff up a lot.

Appreciating a Godzilla movie requires the viewer to adjust his expectations. Godzilla movies aren't about great acting, linear plots, or special effects. The Japanese movie industry understands its audience--if you're going to buy into a gigantic atomic-breathing humanoid lizard, pretty much anything goes. "Anything" includes robots, aliens, robots built by aliens, size-shifting robots (Jet Jaguar ROCKS!) and tiny singing faeries. And don't forget the giant moth.

Trying to make the Godzillaverse make sense is a huge mistake, as evidenced by the failure of the American version of Godzilla in theaters. There's nothing quite like creating a titanic lizard and then not giving him atomic breath because "that just wouldn't make sense." Godzilla 2000 is the Toho studio's response to the American movie. Which is to say it is both better and worse.

By the time we get to Godzilla 2000, the big lug has been around long enough to create two rival investigating forces. On the good guy side we have the Godzilla Prediction Network (GPN) led by Shinoda (Takehiro Murata) and his daughter Io (Mayu Suzuki). The GPN team (if you can call them that) is accompanied by Yuki (Naomi Nishida), who is trying to get a good picture of Godzilla for the local newspaper. Ironically, nobody can get a good close-up of Godzilla because he emits enough radiation to ruin photography. Which really does make one wonder...shouldn't just being in proximity to Godzilla fry every human being in a hundred mile radius?

The bad guys consist of the Crisis Control Intelligence (CCI) agency, led by Katagiri (Hiroshi Abe). The two groups have a bit of history: Shinoda used to work for the CCI before he left due to their "violent tendencies." Where GPN seeks to examine and understand Godzilla for the good of mankind, the CCI wants to blow him up into big, radioactive chunks.

Much of the movie centers on this philosophical argument as to how to treat Godzilla. It's pretty clear that Godzilla doesn't care either way, as he comes rampaging ashore in a quest to find Japan's power sources. Why? Because in a not very subtle way, Godzilla is a parallel for the dangers of atomic weapons. At least he was, when Godzilla first graced the screen. Godzilla is the result of our warmongering and he retaliates with a vengeance by attacking atomic plants.

The CCI takes the direct approach, accepting any human casualties that might be necessary to take Godzilla head on. Tanks, mines, armor-piercing missiles...none of it works, because Godzilla regenerates at incredibly high speed. That little tidbit of information greatly interests the GPN, who names Godzilla's DNA (Regenerator-1) and seeks to use it to save humanity. Well, maybe eventually. In another movie.

The unearthing of a meteorite by the CCI eventually interrupts Godzilla's rampage. Sure enough, the meterorite, which is millions of years old, awakens when touched by light. And that meteor is in reality an alien spacecraft with DNA mimicking capabilities. It immediately makes a beeline for Godzilla.

This alien being/ship is known as Orga, and it goes through several phases. First it starts out as a particularly feminine looking saucer. Then it transforms, for about thirty seconds, into a large jellyfish. This scene is so short and irrelevant to the movie that it seems like something was cut. Finally, Orga turns into a big guy in a rubber suit. And then we're back to the Godzilla movies from the 80s, where guys in suits slap each other silly until one of them falls down.

Godzilla has been redesigned for this film to make him look more feral looking. For the most part, it works. His dorsal spikes are particularly vicious, his fangs jut out over his lips, and his eyes are perpetually fixed in a cruel glare. Orga, on the other hand, looks ridiculous. He's a big, floppy-fisted monster with barely enough motion to move his gigantic oversized claws.

I never appreciated the physical acting required for Godzilla. When it's a rubber suit, the emotion that can be conveyed must be over-the-top pantomiming. This actor doesn't have it.

Godzilla has arms. Past Godzilla movies have made sure Godzilla ripped things apart with his claws, mauled his opponents, or twitched in agitation. This version of Godzilla doesn't have much to do but sort of wave his arms around slightly. It makes him look pretty foolish when he's trying to be scary or in pain.

The other problem, and this is a big one, is how Godzilla uses his breath weapon. In other Godzilla movies, he reared backwards and you got the sense that breathing atomic fire took a lot of effort. When the flames blew out of his mouth, it seemed like a true exhalation of atomic destruction. In this movie, Godzilla looks vaguely constipated, waves his head about, and then the flames sort of fall out of his mouth.

Throughout the first half of the movie there is some amusing dialogue (or at least, amusing translations), some real moments of tension, and a lot of human stupidity. During the second half, the humans stand around and watch the city get blown up real good.

Of all the characters, Katagiri steals the show. When staring down Godzilla eye-to-eye, Katagiri simply lights a cigarette and says "I've never been this close to Godzilla before." But as well all know, nobody stares Godzilla in the eye and walks away without glowing.

The movie spirals into bizarre territory at the end, with Orga trying to absorb Godzilla, who strangely complies (there's a whole Orga/female Godzilla/male thing going on too, ICK). Scientists spout about Regenerator-1 genes, military generals philosophize about aliens from outer space, and Shinoda tells his daughter in a voice over about how Godzilla keeps protecting humanity because there's a little bit of him in all of us...

Meanwhile, in the background, Godzilla sets the entire city ablaze with his radioactive breath.

This movie is more like two movies, bridging the original Godzilla film with the later Monsterama battles that Godzilla has become known for. In fact, it's more a homage to all the Godzilla films that went before. All in all, a worthy successor to the Godzilla series and certainly more respectful of its origins than the American version.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

The original movie version of The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of my father's all time favorite movies. A science fiction classic that permanently embedded the catch phrase "klaatu barada nikto" into the geek lexicon, the first film was a parable about the Cold War. Both the producer and director were criticized for the liberal themes of the film, which promoted world peace and a draw down of military hostilities. The "standing still" of the world was a reference to all electrical systems on Earth freezing for a half hour, with the exception of critical systems. In short, the movie's message was thought provoking, intended to begin a discussion about American policies.

The remake is no different (spoiler alerts abound). This new version features a hostile military led by Regina Jackson (the stalwart Kathy Bates), the monotone human-like alien (Keanu Reeves as Klaatu), an aggrieved scientist widow (the beautiful Jennifer Connelly) and her angry son (played by Jaden Smith). This new version pokes viewers with a stick: the Benson patriarch died in Iraq; the president's response to an alien invasion is openly hostile; and the Message is no longer about the Cold War but Global Warming. In other words: the movie's message is thought provoking, intended to begin a discussion about American policies.

But is it a good movie? Overall, the film bulks up special effects, smoothes over some of the rough edges from the original, and does its best to translate the original to modern sensibilities. GORT now stands for Genetically Organized Robot Technology, is a giant nanotechnology war machine, and the descending globes of light are arks to save the Earth. The computer graphics are outstanding.

The acting, not so much. Reeves sleepwalks through his role, which, while not inappropriate, doesn't stretch his acting chops either. Klaatu is suitably creepy as a blank-faced drone, but difficult to sympathize with as he becomes more human. Connelly has little to do besides plead at the camera with her eyes. Smith comes off as recalcitrant and unlikable, a weakness in the child actor who represents the sum of humanity's relationship. The sole stand out is John Cleese as Professor Karl Barnhardt, projecting a level of warmth and kindness that's we rarely see on screen. If I had to pick a person to argue for humanity's survival, Cleese would be an excellent choice.

The ending feels sloppy. GORT transforms from a giant robot (scary!) to a hissing swarm of metal locusts (biblical, but not as scary). The biblical parallels continue with Klaatu's birth and sacrifice, but the film seems conflicted as to how to wrap things up. The movie concludes with the Earth standing still, permanently – hospital machines and airplanes be damned.

Whether or not you agree with the movie's tenets is moot. If you're nodding your head or rolling your eyes then this version, like the original before it, did its job. But in comparison, the original has better acting and a tighter plot.

Moterhship Zeta

There were two places I absolutely had to visit in Fallout 3: Dogmeat and the crashed spacecraft. With the new downloadable content, Mothership Zeta, what was once a visit to a spooky alien craft turns into a full-fledged abduction scenario.

After being beamed up by into a saucer, the player is subjected to a disturbing sequence in which the aliens conduct experiments with painful probes. You wake up naked in a holding cell with another abductee, Somah, and have to fight your way to freedom.

Like The Pitt and Operation: Anchorage, this content is an entirely self-contained environment. You're in a spacecraft, after all. The green men, with their guardian drones, pack personal force fields and painful disintegrators that make the weapon you found on the dead alien in Fallout 3 look like a pop gun.

Leading the way through the labyrinthine architecture is Sally, a little girl who is small enough to traverse the ductwork. With a nod to Newt from the movie Aliens, she is at turns annoying (not all of her advice is sound) and helpful. You eventually are joined by other abductees awoken from cryo-sleep, including a samurai, a cowboy, and a medic abducted from Operation: Anchorage.

Like Operation: Anchorage, Mothership Zeta forces cocky players to change their tactics. The aliens are physically weaker but they make up for it with powerful weapons and armor. They come in groups of three or more and attack in enclosed spaces. Mothership Zeta is no cakewalk.

Along the way, the aliens plans are revealed. Creepy tapes of abductees being interviewed and experimented are littered throughout the ship. At one point, the player must conduct a spacewalk – although there's not much of a challenge in doing so. The finale is suitably climactic as you attempt to command the ship to fire on another UFO while fending off wave after wave of angry aliens. The win is hard-earned.

Mothership Zeta provides a few items that will be valuable back on Earth: biogel (heals hundreds of hit points), a disintegrator (inflicts massive amounts of damage in a single shot), and the energy ball-bouncing drone cannon (acts as a grenade but is very imprecise). When I returned to the regular Fallout 3 game, I used the drone cannon to devastating effect, especially because you can bounce the shots around corners.

Motership Zeta isn't for everyone. The foes are a bit repetitive, and listening to the alien chatter (they don't speak English, natch) gets old fast. More often than not I had to resort to bashing their big green heads in with a shock baton – ugly work, as the aliens squeal with every hit. But for fans of 50s science fiction, little green men, and Mars Attacks, this is a must buy.

Titus Crow, Volume 2: The Clock of Dreams; Spawn of the Winds

After having slogged through Volume One of the Titus Crow series, complete with lisping dragons, green haired space princesses, and a narrative riddled with ellipses, I steeled myself for Volume Two. With the prototypical pulp hero Titus Crow and his trusty sidekick Henri de Marginy cleaning the clocks (pun intended) of the Cthulhu Cycle Deities (CCD, ugh), there wasn't much left for them to do. But like every good epic series, when the heroes become gods among men in the mortal realm…they leave the mortal realm behind to find adventure.

The Clock of Dreams begins with a rather peculiar scenario: Crow and Tiania have been captured in the Dreamlands. How this happened is hand waved; basically, Crow and Tiana are drugged and enslaved by the Men of Leng. Given that Crow is a cyborg that is highly resistant to damage, it seems unlikely that poisoning him would work…but perhaps that's because this is the Dreamlands and not Earth's reality.

The first half of the novel involves de Marginy's quest to find Crow in the Dreamlands. Once there, Crow takes up the second half as he seeks to rescue Tiania. What's interesting is that Clock of Dreams is one of the first to posit that Cthulhu's dream sendings actually infect the Dreamlands. Here, great nightmarish factories corrupt the land, guarded by three foul guardians: the worm-like Flyer, its tentacle-armed Rider, and a three-legged Runner. Overseeing the entire operation is a deathly titanic Keeper, who in turn servers Nyarlathotep.

Overall, this is book is an improvement over the first volume, if only because there's more for Titus to do. Unlike the previous books, it's told in the present tense, which lends much urgency to the narrative. There's plenty of combat, skullduggery, and a hilarious moment where the only way de Marginy can return to the Dreamlands is to get roaring drunk. With guest appearances by Randolph Carter and King Kuranes, flying airships, and shields that shoot laser beams, this is pulp Cthulhu at its wackiest. But it's juicy and satisfying, especially when Nyarlathotep shows up at the end to put our heroes in their place.

Spawn of the Winds, on the other hand, is a different breed of pulp. Crow and de Marginy are nowhere to be found in this book; its inclusion is primarily because of Ithaqua, who is assigned a peculiar set of personality traits here. Ithaqua, you see, lusts after human women (as all pulp villains inevitably do) because he seeks to spawn terrible progeny who will walk among the winds with him. The winds, as defined by Lumley, are the spaces between worlds, and occasionally Ithaqua kidnaps people and carries them across dimensions to the world of Borea.

Borea is a wind-swept frozen world filled with every snow land cliché imaginable: Vikings, Eskimos, white wolves, polar bears, ski-boats, and lots and lots of snow. I kept waiting for Santa Claus to show up. Ithaqua's penchant for turning people into wendigos is turned on its ear here – instead, Ithaqua alters the physiology of those whom he traps on Borea so that they are immune to the cold.

The protagonist is an American named Hank Silberhutte, a member of the Wilmarth Foundation out to avenge his cousin, whom he believes was killed by Ithaqua. Silberhutte is a Texan, which of course means he can punch anybody's lights out who dares mess with him. He is also a powerful psychic, capable of linking with Juanita Alvarez, a telepathic receiver and our narrator, across the gulfs of space.

Tagging along is Silberhutte's companions, Paul White (an oracle known as "hunchman"), Dick Selway, Jimmy Franklin, and Silberhutte's hot little sister Tracy. A fateful encounter with Ithaqua ends with Selway dead and the others changed. Only Tracy, holding onto her star stones, remains unaffected.

Awakening on Borea, a brutal war of attrition ensues between worshippers of the Wind Walker who want nothing more than to sacrifice Tracy to Ithaqua (she's a "damned good-looking girl" says Silberhutte). Leading the opposition is Armandra, Woman of the Winds and daughter of Ithaqua. She's basically Storm with wind powers. She flies about the wastes, her flame-red hair whipping behind her, with skin as pale as snow and eyes as stormy as a winter…you get the idea.

Silberhutte falls madly in love with her, both physically and psychically, and their escalating relationship only complicates the war between the two factions. If Armandra dares intervene directly with her wind powers, Ithaqua joins the fray as well. And yet Armandra refuses to let any harm come to Silberhutte, who also wants to join the fight as the macho leader of his Eskimo warriors. It's all very primal.

Unlike the other books in the Crow series, this is a lusty, gun-toting, fist-swinging, princess rescuing, rip-roaring yarn that chews up scenery like a bad actor in a Shakespearean play. It doesn't always make sense, but it's a heck of a lot of fun to read.

The Pitt

Part of the genius of Fallout 3 is that it mixes 1950s sensibilities with post-apocalyptic atrocities, striking the perfect balance between humor and horror. With the Pitt, the balance definitely shifts towards the nihilistic, more The Road and Swan Song and less Beyond Thunderdome.

Like Operation: Anchorage, the player enters former Pittsburgh stripped bare of weapons and armor. He is pretending to be a slave. Mingling among the slaves, the player must fight his way through The Hole, a series of arena battles against increasingly difficult foes. My high-level character tore right through them in record time.

Surviving multiple rounds in The Hole grants an audience with Ashur, the head slaver and a former Brother of Steel. Indeed, this title may be more apt, because Ashur has created a bustling economy using Pittsburgh's steel mill to churn out weapons and armor.

It soon becomes clear that things are a little less black-and-white than in the rest of the Fallout wasteland. With the population largely sterile due to the Troglodyte Degeneration Contagion, Ashur settled on slave labor as a short-term solution to his manpower difficulties. Those who are tough enough ascend to join the slavers in bullying slaves and raiding other communities. The twist-ending requires a sadistic choice with no real winners or losers. It's as grim as it sounds.

Also like Operation: Anchorage, The Pitt provides one of the best melee weapons: The Mauler. An auto-blocking, persistent damage-inflicting beast of a weapon, The Mauler gets blood and guts everywhere, but then, killin's messy work.

That pretty much sums up The Pitt too. I felt a little dirty after playing it.

Operation: Anchorage

Operation: Anchorage was the first downloadable content available for Fallout 3. Fallout is far too complex a game to explain here; suffice it to say that the paranoia and jingoistic patriotism of the 1950s became a permanent way of life due to the escalation of nuclear war between communist forces and America. Operation: Anchorage fills in the back story of the game by thrusting the player into a pivotal moment in Fallout's history: the liberation of Alaska from communist China.

Because this downloadable content is part of the Fallout universe, it's a game within a game. Brotherhood of Steel outcasts need your help to reach a stash of pre-war technology in a bunker (dangling the promise of loot at the end of the simulation). But getting in requires a user with a Pip-Boy interface – an interface only the player possesses -- to successfully complete the virtual simulation.

This isn't really an addition to Fallout so much as it's a complete mini-game more in the vein of the Tom Clancy sneak-and-shoot games. The mission involves a series of escalated attacks against Chinese forces in a windswept arctic climate. There are soldiers that can be commanded to fight on your behalf, enabling some rudimentary squad tactics. There are no mutations and therefore no mutants, no irradiated wasteland and thus no radiation concerns, and only the equipment Anchorage supplies you. In short, it's a completely different game with a similar interface.

Even ammunition and healing are doled out in unlimited dispensers, just like a virtual game. There's no scavenging; corpses fizzle out in virtual sparks and there are no crates that can be opened. In short, this is Fallout stripped down to sneaking and shooting.

And sneaking is critical here. It was a shock for my 20th-level Fallout character, stripped of his huge arsenal of drugs and equipment, to be regularly outmatched by sharpshooters who often had a tactical advantage. In fact, all of the opponents are considerably more difficult, including the invisible Crimson Dragoons. I faced down several threats by staying near a health dispenser and clicking it every few rounds as I was pounded by Dragoon fire. There were several points in the game where I died multiple times using the brute force approach, eventually forced to sneak my way through much of the content. In short, Operation: Anchorage gave me a good dose of humility.

The conclusion involves a final push against Chinese forces. Judicious use of a high Speech skill ended the battle quickly with minimal bloodshed. I didn't even bother to use any of my squad. But it was all worth it. What lies in the vault is some of the sweetest weapons and armor this side of the apocalypse…and a good measure of skullduggery to boot.

Anchorage provides two items that will change your Fallout 3 experience. The first is the Winterized T-51b Power Armor. One of the most powerful armors in the game (DR 45), it never gets damaged. The other standout item is the Gauss Rifle, which has a scope, uses microfusion cells, and causes creatures to be knocked down for four seconds on a critical hit.

Words can't properly express how satisfying it is to hit a Deathclaw full in the face and watch it go flying off a cliff. Those four seconds can be a lifetime on a battlefield, bestowing a critical combat advantage to the player's companions who continue to pound away at the prone target; players using VATS and the right perks can knock an opponent around like a hockey puck.

Operation Anchorage isn't like the rest of Fallout 3 and that might be a turn off for some. But the Gauss Rifle and Power Armor make it all worth it.

Surrogates

Let's get a couple of things straight: Surrogates is not a bad movie. It is not anything like Gamer, and yet Rotten Tomatoes has a spread of under 10 points between the two. This is a crying shame. With Gamer and Surrogates coming out within months of each other, it's almost like Hollywood wanted desperately to make a Second Life movie but realized too late that Second Life is no longer cool.

Surrogates has a lot in common with I, Robot and yes, Gamer. Implausibly, the world is dominated by remote-controlled robots, a parallel to Internet avatars. Thanks to these robots, known as surrogates, crime is unheard of and the dream of a utopian society beckons. Of course, not everyone is okay with the status quo, including a radical group known as the Dreads. The Dreads are the underclass, people who don't believe in a robot-filled reality. Everyone else has become shut-ins, hiding in their bedrooms in their pajamas, living life through perpetually beautiful twenty-something robots.

FBI agent Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) and his partner Jennifer Peters (Radha Mitchell) investigate a pair of murders in which the operators died too. There's just one problem: there are safeguards to protect operators from being harmed by the death of their surrogates. If word got out that surrogates were not immortal, the social fabric of modern society would fall apart.

On screen, the surrogates are disturbingly perfect. Their teeth is pearly white, their eyes without any hint of veins, their stubble-free skin cheeks are as rosy as a newborn's. The robots (and thus, the actors portraying them) only move their heads when they talk, even when angry. Sights and sounds are softly muted. Until the real world hits and Greer is forced to come out of his shell.

Willis' skill playing a sad sack and a scruffy loner are on full display here. Surrogates is as much about the increasing isolation of technology as it is about the wreckage of a marriage. As the stakes get higher, the movie becomes about the broken relationship between a husband and wife who were disconnected from each other long before surrogates were invented.

If along the way it happens to involve some amazing special effects and a lot of cool action sequences, that's not such a bad thing.

Gamer

Dear Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor,

We appreciate your recent attempt to create a movie that would appeal to gamers by naming it after us. Really, we do. But now that we've stopped throwing up from all the motion sickness and our pupils have finally refocused from the flash cuts, we thought you might appreciate some tips to help you farm XP faster.

Stop with the static: Seriously guys. Stop it. Apparently in your version of the future all video games have terrible reception. We have lag, we have crashes, we have all kinds of problems, but the one problem we do not have is static. That's because our video games are not television screens. You'll also notice that our television do not have static either, and haven't had static for about a decade since they invented this thing called cable. Look it up.

Speaking of Kable: Cable is the name of a time-traveling cyborg in the Marvel Universe. Kable is the name somebody thinks gamers think is cool. Nobody thinks Kable is cool. Nobody believes Kable is the best killer in the gaming universe. You didn't even use 133t speak, so…fail.

Making Michael C. Hall an evil genius is…a stroke of genius. Go Dexter!

Stop with the red/blue colors: Ludacris is cool and all, but even his cyber cred is sorely tested by a blurry 3-D image on screen.

The teabagging gag was funny.

Your jump cuts suck: We notice when you replace rapid jump cuts with actual fight choreography. It's the movie equivalent of shouting and pointing, "LOOK! A KITTY!" every time a fight starts. You just look stupid and we feel embarrassed for you.

Dancing convicts are hilarious. Dancing to a Frank Sinatra song is vaguely creepy. But still hilarious.

Why is there still lag in the future? Bad guys can control other human beings by changing their brain cells into [INSERT STUPID MADE UP NAME] but we haven't solved lag? Is this future made of stupid?

Evil Villain Tip #58: Next time around, you might want to consider not making the guy who holds your deepest, darkest secret an international broadcast superstar.

Don't insult us: No offense, but portraying the gaming universe as nothing but "deviants and murderers" doesn't really make us want to watch your movie. Yes, the Internet has a dark side. But since you called the movie "Gamer" and not "All Gamers Are Disgusting Fat Perverted Slobs Who Watch Porn All Day," we'll assume you actually want us to buy a ticket. Please consider this the next time you name a movie after us.

And finally…

Thank you for killing John Leguizamo: That's not a tip. But thank you.

We hope that these tips prove useful the next time you level up as directors and writers. Incidentally, multiclassing as both might not be such a good idea.

District 9

While searching for alien encounter videos, I discovered a little clip titled "Alive in Jo'burg" on YouTube by Neill Blomkamp. Fortunately for us, Blomkamp's ill-fated Halo movie was delayed, so he went back to his roots with the film that started it all: District 9.

If you've seen Alive in Jo'burg you know much of what's going on in District 9 (this review contains spoilers!). In essence, a giant alien saucer lands on Earth and its citizens are repatriated in Johannesburg. However, the aliens are ugly, uncivilized squid-like monstrosities and thus integration attempts (when they happen at all) go poorly. The movie begins with a battle with a telekinetic mech and ends with riots in the streets.

District 9 adds meat to the bones of this highly original film. The aliens are no longer blurry actors in masks but crustacean-like beasts in fully-realized CGI. The ship and the conflict in Johannesburg is still a major plot point, but it is explored through Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley). Wikus is a bigoted but cheerful company man who just happens to be married to the daughter of the head of Multi-National United (MNU). He documents the task of relocating the "prawns" (a racial slur for the aliens) to a concentration camp through video, with frequent asides asking the producer to remove particularly embarrassing shots in editing.

In this tightly scripted film, every detail is important: the fact that the aliens have powerful weapons technology only they can use; that the Nigerians take advantage of the prawns by selling them prostitution (and all that implies) and cans of cat food in exchange for said weapons; and that the Nigerians believe they can acquire the power of a prawn through cannibalism.

Blomkamp quickly achieves a sense of rising dread through documentary-style clips where various experts expound on "what Wikus did." The special effects used in creating the prawn are a critical part of making them utterly alien. This is counterbalanced by a horrifying scene where Wikus destroys prawn eggs by setting them ablaze, comparing the popping sound of the roasting babies to popcorn. As a new parent, when Wikus threatens a young prawn, I flinched. And just like that, I was now on the side of the aliens.

An important but unlikely plot twist brings Wikus around to the alien side of life. Betrayed by his company and his father-in-law, he has no choice but to work with Christopher Johnson, an alien who knows more than he lets on. Together, they unveil the depth of corruption in both the squalid slums of Johannesburg and the clean corporate offices of MNU. No organization or race walks out of this film unscathed.

Combining elements of Alien Nation and Enemy Mine, District 9 adroitly balances political commentary on apartheid with Peter Jackson-ian levels of violence. The movie ends with more questions than answers and the certainty of a sequel. I can't wait!

Ball Peen Hammer

Ball Peen Hammer was never meant to be a comic. It's clear, from the claustrophobic setting of a basement and a clock tower to the long silences and close-up panels of characters' expressions, that this graphic novel is a parable. The post-apocalyptic world outside is a foil to reinforce the claustrophobia and paranoia of those two little rooms. This review contains spoilers.

Ball Peen Hammer is about three art forms: music, writing, and acting. Welton is a musician, Underjohn is a writer, Exley is an actress. All three are part of a commune of artists who have seen been scattered from the Undertunnels by the Syndicate, an oppressive regime of gas-mask wearing soldiers. Adam Rapp, a novelist and playwright himself, is merciless in his critique of these three pathetic creatures. Welton is a shiftless guitarist, never leaving the basement and playing the same song over and over about a woman he loved – but is too frightened to try to find her or save himself. Underjohn is immune to the plague but returns to Welton's basement to write about his experience, cataloguing the slow death of the bleak world around him. Exley insists on wearing her little black dress and up-do hairstyle even in the middle of a city besieged by acid rain and wild dogs.

Ball Peen Hammer is about love lost. Welton, who fell in love with Exley, is paralyzed by the experience, stuck in a perpetual state of yearning for a moment he can never reclaim. Underjohn was in love with a man who died from the plague, but never expressed his affection for him before he passed. Exley carries Welton's child and in her journey to find him regresses to acting – as a mother, as a teacher – to Horlick, a thirteen-year-old street kid who lives in the clock tower with his older brother, Dennis.

Ball Peen Hammer is about filling holes. There are emotional holes in all of the characters, but there are also physical holes: the Collector, who slides in and out of manhole covers to ring bells, repair lights, and tattoo numbers; Horlick, who reenacts American Pie with a melon; Welton, who can never get his toilet to flush; Underjohn, who fled the underground commune after it was filled with concrete by the Syndicate.

Ball Peen Hammer is about the loss of innocence. There are sacks in the basement. Underjohn discovers later that he's a Sacker, whose job is to use a ball peen hammer to fill those sacks. Welton, a Dragger, is haunted by the ghosts of those he helped drag into the basement. Exley inserts herself into a family that doesn't want her. And Horlick pretends he is much tougher than he lets on.

Ball Peen Hammer is not a glimpse into a larger world, part of a running series, the beginning of a comic book franchise, a happy story, a quick read, or meant to be understood literally. It is Rapp's No Exit, banished to comic form because nobody's going to want to see a play that revolves around killing kids with a hammer.

Star Trek

The original Star Trek series took time to establish itself as the premiere franchise it is today. The movies steadily improved the characters and special effects, building on a large canon of established Trek lore. The best movies gleefully embraced this rich history; the failures ignored or contradicted it. Star Trek is simply too big to reinvent, and J.J. Abrams knows it. So he did the next best thing by tweaking the established universe of Star Trek just enough to carve out his own little patch for the movie.

This is the beginning of Star Trek re-imagined as a futuristic Earth that incorporates the go-go 60s with iPod style. We see Kirk as a kid on the farm, Spock struggling with his half-Vulcan nature and Bones becoming a crotchety windbag—which, it becomes quickly apparent, he always was. We witness Kirk’s solution to the Kobiyashi Maru, Spock’s acceptance to Starfleet, and the construction of the Enterprise. In short, this is a true and proper launch of a Star Trek movie, from the beginning, so that all those non-Trekkies won’t feel like they missed out…

But if you are a non-Trekkie, you missed out. There are so many nods to Trek lore that my head nearly exploded. SPOILER RED ALERT.

Sulu fences! There’s a splash of light over the captain’s eyes when he sits on the bridge, just like the original series. Red shirts die! The same sounds beep and bleep in the background, from the sensors to the transporters. There are several Wrath of Khan references, from Spock’s famous last words to creepy worms that take control of your brain. There’s even old-style Romulans and Klingons. Fans worried that Abrams was going to remake the series in such a way as to make it unrecognizable can rest easy; this is the Star Trek we know and love, dusted off and buffed to a 21st century shine.

The plot involves time travel, a guest cameo, and references to the central conceit of the series: Spock follows the rules, Bones doesn’t, and Kirk floats above it all, waffling between the two ideologies and blazing his own path as his ego suits him. The movie has no qualms about portraying Kirk as a womanizing jerk or using him as the butt of some hilarious slapstick. It also isn’t afraid to push the envelope with the aliens, going beyond makeup to ensure they’re just unnerving enough for you to notice them even if the rest of the crew doesn’t. This is more than just a new Star Trek, it’s Star Trek done right with a bigger budget.

There are some flaws. The villain is one dimensional. Uhura’s headstrong personality has to carry the burden of embodying all females in Trek, which begins to grate. Winona Ryder (age 38) seems to have wandered onto the set to play Spock’s (Zachary Quinto, age 32) mother. And an uncharacteristically vengeful tactics from the good guys at the end of the movie borders on “ludicrous speed.”

But you know what? I forgive all that. This movie made Trek worth watching all over again and reminded us why it’s okay to travel through time and space, encounter green alien hotties, and bed them. Because it’s FUN.

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Remember the old Journey to the Center of the Earth movie, with the optically enlarged lizards presented as dinosaurs (colloquially termed "slurpasaurs")? That was what passed for a nifty special effect in 1959. Today it's 3-D effects.

Of course, audiences of today are far too sophisticated to fall for lizards with horns and fins glued to them; in the age of movies like Jurassic Park, only a digitally animated Gigantosaurus will do.

This latest incarnation of Journey is surprisingly true to its roots: Trevor Anderson (Brendan Fraser) is an absent-minded volcanologist who is spending ten days with his nephew, Sean (Josh Hutcherson). Trevor's brother and Sean's father Max disappeared a decade before looking for the center of the Earth. Max left behind sensors that detect geological shifts in the Earth's crust and a cryptic series of notes in a Jules Verne novel (guess which one?). When one of the sensors fails in Iceland, Trevor decides to go on an adventure in 1950s fashion, bringing along his plucky nephew for the ride.

Accompanying Trevor and Sean is the fetching Hannah Ásgeirsson (Antia Briem), the daughter of another volcanologist and the only person with any spelunking skill whatsoever. While checking on the device, lightning strikes, our heroes dive for cover, and from there it's a lot of falling, screaming, and running.

This is a 3-D movie, which means that at various times and for no reason whatsoever, something flies straight at the screen. Since you will likely not have invested in the expensive 3-D glasses and you may not have even had the good sense to rent the 3-D version, this makes the movie seem even dumber than it is.

The other surprise is that despite the dinosaurs and the hottie, this movie is aimed at a younger set. The dialogue isn't very good, although Fraser does his best. Sean is meant to be a wisecracking preteen modern hero, but he reverts quickly to type. Scenes that are meant to be scary are played up for laughs: giant venus flytraps get pummeled in wrestling-style fashion, flying killer fish get batted away like softball practice, and there's a long and pointless mine cart sequence whose sole purpose is to show off the 3-D effects of the glasses you didn't buy.

Did I mention the irritating glow-in-the-dark mascot? There's a bird. It follows Sean around. Only he can understand it. And it glows in the dark.

Ultimately, Journey is more an amusement park ride than it is an actual movie. Because amusement park standards are much more family-friendly, Journey to the Center of the Earth is heavy on the Journey, light in the Center.

Pi

When my parents came to visit to celebrate my father's birthday, my wife rented Pi, an "indie sci-fi" film as described by Netflix. When I used those two words to describe the movie, he said, "oh great, I've never seen an Indian science fiction movie!"

Pi was not made by Indians. And it's not really a science fiction movie. It's more of a weird fiction movie, extrapolating a single idea and obsessing over it. Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) is a brilliant, eccentric mathematician who is convinced he can apply the laws of mathematics to nature, and by proxy, the stock market. Since the stock market is a reflection of humanity, which is a reflection of nature, he believes there is a pattern that can be mathematically predicted. Predict the stock market and get rich, right?

From the beginning, we're never sure why Max wants so badly to pursue this path to power. Is he sick of being poor? Perhaps it's to succeed where his mentor, Sol Robenson (Mark Margolis), failed. Sol's stroke stopped him from puzzling out of the answer, which is precisely 216 characters long.

And so we have two philosophies that are actually one and the same: that mathematics of sufficient scope IS nature. Or in other words, the entire universe could be predicted if we just had enough computing power to handle it. Which could be interpreted as the definition of God. This dichotomy manifests as the Kabbalist Lenny Meyer (Ben Shenkman) on one side and the corporate goon Marcy Dawson (Pamela Hart) on the other. Meyer seeks to reclaim the connection with the heavens through the Tetragrammaton, the name of God, and he believes it's 216 characters long. Dawson just wants Max to figure out the secret of the stock market, presumably to make a lot of money. It's the old religion vs. science debate.

The stark black and white film further delineates Pi's either/or approach. It's so washed out that it begins to induce the migraines Max experiences as he gets ever closer to the truth. Aronofsky is a master of translating human misery through visceral images, and the whip-snapshot sequences of Requiem for a Dream's drug addiction are in full evidence here. Even the soundtrack sounds similar, which plucks at the nerve endings in your gums with ever-increasing urgency.

Pi isn't a bad film, but it's intellectually challenging. There's precious little science in Pi, or valid mathematics, or even an accurate portrayal of Kabablism. It uses artistic license to make its point -- that the nature of God is beyond human ken - and ultimately beats the viewer over the head with it in the end. Literally.

Gears of War 2

I've beaten the campaign mode of Gears of War 2 (GOW2) on hardcore and I play multiplayer regularly on Wednesday nights (friend Talien if you're interested). I switched from our Halo 3 weekly games, so I will use that as a point of comparison.

The campaign is great. GOW2 fixed a lot of things you wanted to do before, like taking on a chainsaw with another chainsaw, holding someone hostage, fighting Reavers and even Brumaks, drive tanks, and more. More importantly, Dom's quest to find his wife adds pathos to a brutally violent game - pathos, I might add, that was so heavily hyped in Halo's campaign but never really pulled off. That's the difference between having a faceless protagonist and a character that's fleshed out through flashbacks. Through his heartbreaking quest to find his wife, Dom comes to life. It reminds us of the human cost of war, and helps take the edge off the endless macho posturing of four hugely juiced combat gorillas in armor.

There's also some weird plot involving Lambent Locusts, a revolution, an awfully humanoid-looking hottie of a Locust queen, Marcus Fenix's father, a computer gone mad, and the sinking of Jacinto. Mind you, I thought we were supposed to save Jacinto, not sink it; once it becomes clear that it would hurt the Locusts more by destroying it, the COGs seem to do the job on behalf of the bad guys. But those are minor quibbles and more than made up for the fact that the action is relentless, a pace difficult to keep up even in first-person shooters.

There are flaws in the campaign. If I never play another rail game again in a multiplayer, I would be happy. GOW2 also forces some button-mashing battles that are very different from the normal run-and-gun tactics that are part-and-parcel of the rest of the game. From a cinematic perspective this is great; from someone who just likes to shoot stuff, it can get frustrating.

The multiplayer is where GOW2 really excels. It's like a bloodstained Santa showed up and gave us everything we ever wanted that was missing in GOW. Want to be able to play with up to ten people? Check. Want to be able to just fight wave after wave of Horde cooperatively? Check. Want to play against computer-controlled opponents in multiplayer until you can fill the slots? Check, baby!

Unlike Halo 3, GOW2 feels like a vastly improved version of the original. It takes everything you loved about GOW and amps it up to 11. If you love first-person shooters, if you like team multiplayer games, or if you're just addicted to the gruesome implications of combining a chainsaw with a machinegun ... this game's for you.

Futurama: Bender's Game

I'm the target audience for Bender's Game. A lifelong gamer of over two decades (yeeck, I'm getting old), I also know and love the book by Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game. With the title alone, the Futurama writing staff is clearly letting me know this is the movie for me.

Bender's Game starts promising, with jokes about the rising cost of fuel prices. There's also a sly joke about Leela's anger issues, which are controlled by a shock collar. A shock collar Leela starts to find ... titillating. Just when things get interesting and this plot point could turn into something awkward and funny, it's dropped.

Bender discovers that he has no imagination and, aggravated that he can't participate in a game of Dungeons & Dragons, flips out Mazes & Monsters-style, renaming himself Titanius and wandering the sewers. He then gets sent to the HAL institute, Arkham Asylum for robots. This plot point is pursued to a point and then dropped.

Meanwhile, Mom (that's her name) has been controlling dark matter prices for years, but there is a means of invalidating her stranglehold on fuel prices. Professor Farnsworth accidentally invented "anti-backwards matter" which, should it ever encounter dark matter, would render dark matter useless. It just so happens that this anti-backwards matter is a 12-sided die. Hilarious, right?

As our lovable misfits build towards a confrontation with Mom and her Killbot goons, reality shifts and suddenly everyone's in a parallel fantasy dimension. And then we get, in descending order of comedic value: D&D jokes, Greek myth jokes, Lord of the Rings jokes, Star Wars jokes, Call of Cthulhu jokes, and did I mention the Lord of the Rings jokes?

There's actually more interesting material on the extras, covering all the allusions to D&D that have appeared in Futurama and confirming that the guys who write the show are hopeless geeks themselves. Unfortunately, they're not really boosting their own geek cred with this movie.

Look, I love Futurama and I love D&D. But this movie is all over the place, using tired, easy jokes for fantasy. I always identified Futurama as a series of in-jokes for sci-fi and tech geeks, which is a much broader category than fantasy gamers. The bizarre diversion into the fantasy realm isn't well thought out, isn't particularly funny, and not all that interesting.

Sorry guys. This is one D&D adventure that doesn't give out nearly as much XP as it should.

Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs

I was already unhappy with the first Futurama movie, so I didn't have much hope for the second. I was surprised to see that this installment of Futurama is actually two awkward subplots mashed together: Lovecraftian horror for the first half, and a meditation on religion on the second half.

On the Lovecraftian side, throw in tentacle attacks, slimy ancient gods from beyond time and space, and the nihilistic view that Heaven is a fabrication and you've got a pretty depressing, semi-creepy, not really all that funny first half. Bender finally makes good on his threat to destroy all humans, Fry conveniently forgets his entire relationship with Leela, the Robot Devil shows up for a one-note gag ... I could go on but I'll stop there.

Judging by the reviews so far, the second half went over a lot of peoples' heads. Yivo is a parody of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which is itself a parody of religion. Basically, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a mental construct posed to challenge the notion of a divine being; if you can disprove that the Spaghetti Monster was responsible you win the argument. "Win" being a pretty subjective word, as anyone knows who has argued about religion or politics.

As one big joke about relationships and religion, Beast With a Billion Backs works pretty well. But for reasons known only to the writers, the plot shambles forward well beyond the Big Revelation by Leela about Yivo, the aforementioned Spaghetti Monster. It's like the drunk guy at a party who tells a joke, discovers no one thinks it's funny, then tells it in a slightly different way that STILL doesn't make it funny. We get it: relationships with people can be just as ridiculous as relationships with God. But this is Futurama, and while I appreciate the depth of meaning the show strives for with this movie, it feels forced. A multitude of guest appearances doesn't make up for it.

Still, I can't be too harsh on Futurama. You won't find many animated shows that are willing to take on topics like relationships and religion at the same time, so Futurama gets points for trying. I just wish it didn't try so hard.

Futurama - Bender's Big Score

When Futurama first came out, I was convinced it would never last. Unlike the Simpsons, Futurama makes you feel a bit like a moron when you watch it, with perpetual in-jokes to science fiction and fact that you may only catch years later. To my delight, Futurama had a very successful run.

One of the last episodes involved the Robot Devil, a favorite character of mine, and the burgeoning romantic subplot between Fry and Leela. Fry, having traded his hands in for the Robot Devil's hands so that he could play the hypnoflute ultimately has to give the hands back and the episode ends with a sweet but sad little tune imagining Fry and Leela together. Filled with clever banter, excellent music and choreography, plot twists, and a bittersweet ending, this was Futurama at its finest.

Bender's Big Score is not Futurama at its finest. All of those plots have been discarded.

Mind you, it's not bad. It's just not fantastic. Bender's Big Score is a series of muddled plot points, pointless cameos, and a lot of "hey, look, we gave you what you wanted!" fan service. It's great to have a DVD comeback of a great show, but I expected better from a feature-length movie. I mean, Internet scams? That's so ten years ago!

That said, I'm a huge fan of Hypnotoad. Twenty minutes of Hypnotoad. TWENTY. MINUTES. That's right, twenty glorious minutes of HYPNOTOAD. ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!

So for that, it gets an extra star. But only because Hypnotoad compels me.

Mass Effect

When I first played Knights of the Old Republic (KOTR) I was enthralled. Here was a Star Wars game that was better than the latest Star Wars movies, full of engrossing characters, interesting plots, and aliens true to their roots from the Star Wars universe. At the time, one flaw popped up that really bothered my wife: talking to the aliens ad nauseum meant that certain sound bites were repeated by certain alien races over and over. So you had a lot of "ooka shishka jedi" stuff going on that, while it didn't bother me too much, certainly annoyed the heck out of anyone having to listen to it over and over as I talked to everything that was willing to carry on a conversation. Then I bought Jade Empire and to my horror, discovered that it was the exact same game engine. It's the same engine used for Mass Effect. And all that dialogue is starting to get old.

Allow me to deconstruct the myth that Mass Effect is a supreme role-playing game experience.

• SCIENCE-FICTION ROLE-PLAYING: PERFECTED. The setting is a combination of Star Wars' exotic worlds, Star Trek's ship interiors, and Babylon 5's battle to establish human dominance in an alien world. Mass Effect uses conversational pathing. Generally speaking, the top choice is positive, the middle choice is neutral, and the bottom choice is negative. So if you want to be a jerk, you can always pick the rude bottom choice, and if you want to be a nice guy, you can always pick the positive top choice. Or if you're in a hurry, you click the button and move to the next chat menu. This is not role-playing, it's a game of multiple choice, and the majority of the time the choices are obvious. This game has more in common with KOTR than the game engine. The customizability of equipment and characters, the level up system, it's all the same. So instead of the Force we have "biotics." You can also customize your character's appearance, which is neat. However, Xbox's new interactive menus allow the same thing - avatar customization. It hardly makes this a "perfect" role-playing game. The equipment improvements come down to: Fire Ammo IV and Laser Rifle VII. There is a whole pile of scrolling text you can read about the history of the weapon, but the short of it is VII is better than VI which is better than V. You could get those kinds of power ups in a game of Diablo.
• THE VASTNESS OF SPACE BECKONS. Like KOTR, you have a ship that you can fly all over the universe. This is like the world's worst sandbox - it's hard enough to figure out what to do and where to go in a small city. Yes, there's lots of content, but it's not necessarily relevant or interesting. Almost all the quests involve "go here, get widget, return it to me." Then there's the MAKO, a dune buggy-type roving cannon. Exploring the surface of worlds primarily involves shooting at giant crab things that you can run over. In this respect Mass Effect is reminiscent of the Final Fantasy games.
• LOSE YOURSELF IN A LIVING GALAXY. The graphics are amazing, the voice acting top notch, the character expressions just as nuanced as promised. It has Seth Green as a voice actor, which rocks. But for reasons I will never understand, there are long elevator sequences. In the world of science fiction, where ships can travel through space and alien races intermingle, we have not yet invented a means around elevators. EVERY time you get in an elevator, your characters freeze, face forward, and you listen to the sci-fi equivalent of elevator Muzak. The only thing you can do is spin the camera around the characters while they stand there. You can't reload, check equipment, or anything else. It's useless downtime. For some reason, the highly advanced civilizations still like to keep their belongings in boxes. The boxes can be hacked; I'm a sucker for these mini-games, so I confess I enjoyed them. But really, boxes? There might be other interesting ways of finding equipment, but since this is the same game engine as KOTR, boxes are everywhere. There is also the romantic subplot. This subplot involves choosing between a sexy blue alien (reminiscent of Zhaan from Farscape) and a pushy human racist woman. It's pretty clear which woman the game would like you to hook up with (or man, if you play a female character, but the alien female retains her faux gender). This is hardly a deep romantic plot, and the ruckus raised over the intimate scene between the two characters is unwarranted; it's far tamer than anything on the Internet. To save on memory, the majority of aliens are the same bodies duplicated multiple times, in the same way Star Trek tended to have every alien be humanoid since that meant less makeup was required. There are a lot of the blue female aliens throughout the game, and they all look similar. There's not a fat person among them. Even the ship's doctor, a much older woman, is a silver fox with the body of a twenty year old (where was the romantic subplot with HER?).
• LEAD YOUR SQUAD IN INTENSE, REAL-TIME COMBAT. Although your best bet in beating this game is as a soldier, Mass Effect is no Halo. The third person perspective is difficult to follow, especially when you fight many enemies at once. What this means is you're constantly pausing the game to give your squad commands, which completely ruins the "real-time" combat element. There isn't the nail-biting thrill of trying to reload a weapon perfectly like Gears of War, and the ability to use terrain as cover isn't nearly as smooth.
  

Mass Effect isn't a bad game by any means. The graphics are excellent and if you have the time, you can wander the world interrogating every single alien, reading and listening to every path of dialogue, and looting everything on every planet.

Mass Effect is ultimately a giant sandbox that's somewhat different from KOTR, only with none of the cachet of Star Wars. The main plot line, the one in which you save the universe, is a lot of fun and makes for an interesting game. But you'll have to sit through a lot of elevators to get there.

I Am Legend

I Am Legend, the novel, spawned the vampires-as-physical-phenomena genre. Vulnerabilities to religious icons were merely psychological holdovers from victims of a disease who believed they were vampires. But the thirst for blood was very real. It established the post-apocalyptic fear of contamination.

Since I Am Legend is a Will Smith vehicle, I figured it'd have some wisecracks, a lot of action, and Smith saving the day. So I was surprised to get exactly that - but not delivered in the way I expected.

I Am Legend is very much like a A Boy & His Dog in that our two protagonists are Robert Neville (Will Smith), a virologist responsible for finding a cure in New York City, and his dog Samantha, wandering a world gone mad. What's interesting about I Am Legend is the question posed by the title. Why is Neville a legend?

The most obvious answer is that Neville is immune to the disease that has converted 90 percent of humanity. As such, he believes he holds the cure within himself. In that regard, if Neville can succeed in stopping the plague, he will be a legend to all of humankind. But there's more to I Am Legend than that.

It's fitting that his companion is a dog. With only Sam as his companion, Neville is truly a legend; the only other living being idolizes Neville, just as dogs idolize their masters. Neville also creates a fictional community of people out of mannequins in a DVD rental store, where everybody knows his name. Neville is indeed a legend in his own mind.

There's also the possibility, posited in the original story, that Neville isn't famous as a savior, but infamous amongst the new breed of humanity as a mass murderer. In that regard Neville is legendary not because of whom he saves but whom he kills. Neville sacrifices countless of the infected in a quest for a cure, and in the process loses a little bit of his own humanity.

I Am Legend could easily have been an egotistical macho romp in a world gone mad in the vein of Mad Max. Instead, it is a thoughtful meditation on how communities define ourselves, even if your only friend is a dog. Although the director flinches at the uncompromising ending that could have been (and is on the two-disc special edition), I Am Legend is a serious entry in both science fiction movies and Will Smith's string of blockbusters.

How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion

When I was in second grade, I was asked to write down what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote "Robot Maker." That was before I discovered that robot making wasn't about design so much as it was about programming. And programming meant math. I'm an English major.

Decades later, I finally got the chance to purchase my very own robot: a Roomba. I fell in love with my little Roomba, Red, until it died on me and started backing up in circles. After months of tinkering with it, where I imagined myself to be the Robot Maker I always dreamed I could become, I gave up and threw Red in the garbage.

I feel guilty about that. I know, deep down, that the other Roombas are watching. They are planning their revenge. So I turned to How to Survive a Robot Uprising for the inevitable Roomba retaliation.

HTSARU is a handsomely crafted book, with bright pages and reddish-gold trim. It also has some huge pages of blank space in which there is neither text nor graphic, and in some cases the text seems to be awkwardly laid out.

This book isn't as polished Where's My Jetpack?. It veers from lecturing on the feasibility of robots doing particular ominous tasks (nanobots, robot swarms, giant robots) to how to survive the attack. The problem is that a lot of the advice is pretty standard stuff - I don't need a book to tell me to run away, hide behind objects, and listen for robot noises when the Roombas come looking for me.

There are two chief problems with this kind of humor: whereas say, a zombie guide wholeheartedly embraces the notion of zombies and what to do about them, HTSARU sticks to reality. And you know what? Reality's pretty boring. About the scariest robot out there are the ones currently used by the military to take out targets from a distance, and those aren't really robots at all but remote controlled drones. So no, the robot uprising isn't going to happen any time soon. Unless you count the Roombas.

The other problem is that the book tries to dispense advice on how to deal with robots. But if a robot uprising happened, which comes with quite a few assumptions (that we have that many robots, that we use them in everyday life, that they could actually pose a physical threat to us as opposed to say just not cleaning our rugs), then we'd probably be screwed within the first hour. It becomes sadly apparent that we DON'T have the ability to beat a robot. The best advice is to wait until the robots run out of power, unless they're solar-powered, in which case you have the Matrix-solution of nuking the sky. And if you go down that path, now we're back into the world of Make Believe, where we consider humanoid robots (Terminator) or squid robots (Matrix) or robot servants (I, Robot) taking over the world. Where is the plan to deal with a million carpet cleaning deathbots?

HTSARU awkwardly straddles the real and imaginary worlds of robots and tries to be humorous to boot. Because it never focuses on a particular kind of robot uprising, HTSARU has difficulty explaining what to do except in the most general terms. This makes the book only kinda-useful as a survival guide and only kinda-amusing as a humorous flight of fancy. I am still woefully unprepared for when Red enacts his revenge.

So if you see a little Roomba puttering down the street (or puttering in circles), think of me. Then run in the other direction.

Turok

Ever since I saw Jurassic Park, I had a newfound respect for Tyrannosaurus Rex. Forget dragons: a T-Rex is a terrifying killing machine, and Jurassic Park made it clear that you didn't just see one of these monsters coming, you actually felt its presence. Of course, my love for dinosaurs started well before that, back when I was in elementary school. What's sad is that I wanted dinosaur curtains, dinosaur bedspreads, dinosaur anything -- and back then there WERE no dinosaur-themed stuff for kids. Now my one-year-old wears a new dinosaur-themed outfit practically every day.

It's probably no surprise that I'm fond of Jurassic Fight Club, which matches two (or more) dinosaurs in tail-to-head combat. The speculation and history lessons are fun, but the actual computer graphic battles in all their bloody glory left me itching for something more. And that more is Turok.

Turok is a first-person shooter, but the thrill is in the use of the bow and the knife to silently take out your enemies. Dinosaur combat is less about shooting them and more about pressing the right combination of buttons to fend it off; the combination changes with each dinosaur attack, which keeps Turok fresh with sudden mini-games that are thrust suddenly upon you.

The other neat element is that dinosaurs are animals at heart. They run from explosions, sniff out prey, and can be lured into traps. My personal favorite: shooting a flare over a grenade, a dinosaur wanders over to sniff it and...BOOM! Instant meat shower! The dinosaurs are more forces of nature than enemies; there are plenty of opportunities to have shoot-outs with better-armed and armored opponents.

This is the first game to really do the T-Rex justice. Showdowns with this monster (which, I'm pleased to report, happen frequently) always end in horrible carnage. The great voice acting and slick script only add to the paranoid atmosphere. There's even a shout-out to Aliens, complete with flamethrowers and giant bugs.

Remember that scene in Predator, where the Native American, Billy, stays behind to take on the alien with jut a knife? His off-screen death was really lame. Turok's much better answer: Hell yeah, an Indian can take on a dinosaur...give him a knife, and he can stab a T-Rex to death with it!

Cloverfield

Like so many other monster fans, I was taken in by all the hype around Cloverfield. I incorrectly predicted the monster's appearance based on a sketch, I correctly predicted that the movie wasn't about Cthulhu or Voltron, and then my son was born and I forgot about movies for a year.

I finally saw it. And man is it good.

But you see, I'm a monster movie fan. Cloverfield's marketing was intentionally minimalist, relying on viral marketing instead. One of the dangers of viral marketing is that it's viral, and thus doesn't necessarily distinguish by target market. Indeed, the whole point of viral marketing is to get the word out to as many people as possible. And many of those people aren't monster movie fans.

Look. This is a monster movie. If you don't like the fact that attractive people run around screaming, maybe you shouldn't watch a movie about a giant monster. If you don't like the shaky cam effect, maybe the preview gave a hint that the movie wasn't for you. And if you don't like the unrealistic nature of characters running in high heels, people surviving horrible wounds, and the insane bravery/stupidity of the protagonist, perhaps you shouldn't see a movie about a giant monster that comes out of nowhere and rips the head off the Statue of Liberty.

The joke's on us: Cloverfield is a love story cloaked in a monster movie. It's about the lengths our hero is willing to go to save his true love, a girl he's only just recently met. In times of stress, our tenuous attachment to loved ones becomes all the more precious--if you lived in New York City during the 9/11 attacks, you knew that already.

Stripping away the complaints about the genre, as a monster movie Cloverfield knocks it out of the park. To Abrams' credit, it's just as scary as we feared. Only now we have real reason to fear the impact of a colossal assault on our city. The movie is filmed the way we experienced 9/11, and the floating papers and dust from the collapse of a building are a sign that we know exactly what a monstrous attack looks like.

When 9/11 happened, I walked home from work. I watched a cop stick his head out the driver's side window, so terrified of another attack from above that he was nearly drove off the road. Cloverfield invokes those fears: of confusion, of anarchy, of wanting to run but not knowing what's a safe place to run to anymore. It is a monster movie made when the charm of monster movies can no longer be appreciated by the audience - we now know that if a giant monster attacked New York, evacuations would clog the streets, people would be poisoned by the debris, stock markets would crash, and worse. It's not just about being afraid the monster will eat you.

Cloverfield has its giant monster and lets it eat too: it's an immediate physical threat and a mysterious menace, far more frightening than anything the Godzilla remake could muster. In the same way Godzilla evoked fears of the atom bomb, Cloverfield is 9/11 reimagined as a hideous, unexplained thing from beyond. The film is also fearless in facing the monster (literally) and reinforcing the helplessness we all felt in the face of such a huge disaster. Forget the boogeyman under your bed: it's hundreds of feet tall and smashing its way down your street.

For monster movie fans, it doesn't get any better than this.

Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived

When I was little, my uncle collected newspaper clippings of various articles about the American foray into space. Like my father, he was a big fan of science fiction, so it was only natural that he bequeathed his collection to me. And for a little while, I kept it up.

But eventually I got bored with it. For one, there wasn't anything new happening in space--certainly nothing on the scale of a lunar landing. For another, a lot of the optimistic predictions about space development weren't coming true and in fact were becoming something of a cliché. Where's My Jetpack? seemed like a response to that disillusionment, so I was glad I picked it up.

The book is well-illustrated with blue and white line art of various subjects. The cover is reflective, and the pages are trimmed with shiny blue material so that it sparkles when you look at the book from the side. It looks like a gimmicky-type of book, the kind that has no useful information in it but that you put on your bookshelf to make everyone think you're smart.

I'm pleased to report that Where's My Jetpack? actually has content in it worth reading. When it comes to science fiction and fact, I'm pretty well read. While I'm no engineer, I knew all about jetpacks, zeppelins, moving sidewalks, self-steering cars, flying cars, hoverboards, and teleportation. Fortunately, the author does too - and he nails each subject with just the right combination of humor and relevant information. Some of these topics are pretty esoteric -- for example, few people realize that we technically achieved teleportation years ago - but it's all here.

There's other stuff I didn't know about. Anti-sleeping pills are a new one. I haven't kept up on universal translators or food pills, and I didn't know the status of space elevators. I'm also mildly creeped out by a section on dolphin guides, wherein a woman built a house for her "dolphin companion" and the dolphin started exhibiting "courting behavior." Ick.

The fact that there's something in here for everyone makes the book worth the price. Although it's technically classified as humor, Where's My Jetpack? sometimes comes off as a little too eager to please, with jokes that are so topical the book will be horribly dated a decade out. Then again, the nature of the book probably guarantees it will be outdated anyway.

Although the jokes sometimes fall flat, Where's My Jetpack? is a breezy, educational read. If you're still wondering why there's no robots serving you, why you can't fly to your neighbor's house in style, or why you still have to sleep a few hours each night, Where's My Jetpack will gleefully tell you why.