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Reviews
Spaceman (2024)
Hints of Swiss Army Man and Castaway ... with Nutella
No spoilers .... with Paul Dano involved, I couldn't help feeling this movie was influenced by Swiss Army Man. That's not a bad thing, however for Sci-Fi, it ventures into the meta-physical with an open-ended conclusion. Also, given Johan Renck's bio, you see influences of Tarkovsky's Solaris. Overall the movie is intriguing, but lacking scientific accuracy. That said, many people seem to have missed that CzechNet was using quantum entanglement to get around the limits of faster-than-light communications - something scientists have been working on - albeit without any success (you can entangle photons, you just can't measure their individual state without breaking their entanglement). Regardless, this was a respectable attempt to explain Jakub's real-time communications with Earth. Props to Adam Sandler for taking on this unlikely role and to Johan Renck for taking on this project after reading the the Jaroslav Kalfar's book and seeing his own life reflected in its main character. My favorite character was Isabela Rossellini's Commissioner Tuma because it's the first time I've ever seen my family name represented in any major production :)
Prey (2022)
Less techie, more raw human story (vs other Predator flix)
I enjoyed the film - and it appears to be culturally groundbreaking for a sci-fi movie.
My three criticisms were:
1. The mediocre wildlife CGI and Grizzly bears only having been native to southwest Colorado not known as Comanche territory.
2. The film location in Alberta doesn't really match the ambiance of any Comanche territory in the 1700s.
3. The portrayal of the French trappers and their treatment of the indigenous people they encountered.
The French were among the first* Europeans to settle in my home state of Colorado - the southeast quadrant would have been Comanche territory which would have been brighter and more like prairie than mountainous. It's been my understanding that the French treated Native Americans with more respect than their English counterparts - which made me wonder "could the English have been THAT much worse?"😆🤔😔. Realistically, it was NOT in their best interest to mistreat "Indians" when their small groups would have been surrounded by them (literally and figuratively). Perhaps the Raphael Adolini character was enough to make up for that (I don't know, since I'm not French or Comanche). I was glad to see the treatment of the Comanche as people with both good qualities and human flaws.
I'm looking forward to re-watching it in the Comanche dubbed version. Despite the historical inaccuracy of the the film's shooting location, Alberta is a lot like the Colorado High Country and the scenery is spectacular.
*You can read about the Colorado Oghams indicating _possible_ Scotch/Irish/Norse exploration of the Colorado Great Plains centuries earlier.