falconarian Reviews

Futurestates: Advantageous (2012) Season 3, Episode 1

A great short - as a think piece and as an entertaining dystopian but realistic sci-fi film

[7 April 2012]

Excellent - very compact yet filled with meaty material feeding deep reflection on some of our greatest social issues today (but projected decades into the future). It was meaty enough that the film felt considerably longer than its actual 21 minutes (in a good way, not as something you want to end sooner :) Left me hungry for a continuation!

Fascinating way to envision today's social issues and trends - projecting them decades into possible future states. This episode dives deeply into the possible future of equality issues - gender, single mothers, economic, racial, generational, age, access to educational and employment opportunities, access to new technologies and treatments, ...

For a low budget short, this film has remarkable directing, acting, and production quality. Highly recommended as a "think piece" that is also entertaining as a dystopian but realistic short sci-fi flick.

Skyline (2010)

Worst 2010 film I've seen

[23 March 2012]

I'm not qualified to rate this as THE worst film of 2010 (nor is anyone else who hasn't seen most of them, which is almost no one). But I can say that this is the worst film I'VE SEEN from 2010.

I'm been an ultra sci-fi fan for over 55 years, so I know and love the genre to the max. As sci-fi, this plot is worse than what I could have written in 5th grade!!! I'm not that much of a horror fan, so someone who is into that genre would be better qualified to rate it. But I think this is more horror than sci-fi, actually you could class it as "horrible sci-fi" LOL!

Not only is the premise on which the plot is built terrible, but the film doesn't even stay true to what I could surmise is the weak core theme of the film (I won't give it away since I know there are many people who loved this film - fine with me, whatever turns you on!).

Not only is the plot bad but I found myself disliking every character in the film, not necessarily because of the acting, which wasn't great but it was better than the plot and script. They were just plain obnoxious, so I wasn't unhappy to watch them grabbed by the aliens one-by-one. I started cheering for the aliens half-way through, because this was so bad that I wanted them to end my misery by taking me too. :) I hung in there hoping it would get better, after reading about how many people loved it.

Sci-fi is, by definition, supposed to be based on science (thus the term, right?). The alien "science" portrayed is not only simplistic, it's not consistent. Sci-fi is supposed to establish some type of baseline science on which it's based, where it's extraterrestrial, paranormal, bacteriological, etc. The aliens' science in this film is almost incomprehensible - it just doesn't hold together technologically or biologically. For example: At one point, the characters talk about escaping by boat because there are no alien craft over the water. I expected they would follow thru on that to give us some clue of alien strengths and weaknesses. But we never hear about it again. The list of such inconsistencies goes on and on and on...

I would not recommend this film to any serious sci-fi fan. But to those who love schlocky horror films, talk to your friends and it's likely that if they liked it, so will you. That's not a judgment on my part since I like certain kinds of schlocky films, but not in my #1 fav genre. That's sacred to me :)