Blade Runner 2049 is visually extraordinary and narratively inert. Denis Villeneuve and Roger Deakins built some of the most stunning images in recent science fiction cinema, the orange desolation of post-collapse Las Vegas, the grey protein farms extending to the…
The original Terminator is a good film that time has treated unevenly. The effects that were groundbreaking in 1984 show their age in ways that occasional.
The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells' series adapted for Apple TV+, follows a SecUnit: a part-human, part-machine construct that has quietly hacked its own governor module and would prefer to watch serialized television than interact with the humans it's contracted to…
The theatrical cut of Blade Runner, with Deckard's voiceover narration intact, is the correct version of this film. That position is unfashionable.
From inside the book, these are the right criticisms. The short version: Villeneuve made two visually extraordinary films that get many of the big things right and a handful of things badly wrong.
By the standards that matter, world building, political complexity, character depth, physical realism, sustained narrative tension, nothing else in the genre comes close. Then Amazon bought it, and the same show with largely the same cast and creative team produced…
Battlefield Earth is the most comprehensively failed film in science fiction history. This isn't hyperbole or enthusiasm for the negative, it's an honest.
Waterworld had one genuine asset going in: a production design concept that was visually striking and physically coherent. A world covered in water would.
Armageddon is Michael Bay's most complete expression of Michael Bay: maximum volume, minimum coherence, emotional manipulation deployed at maximum intensi. The scientific inaccuracies in Armageddon are not the casual inaccuracies of a film that chose story over accuracy.
The Butterfly Effect has a disturbing premise, childhood trauma so embedded in a group of people that any attempt to fix one person's damage creates worse damage elsewhere, and squanders it through arbitrarily defined mechanics, darkness deployed for shock instead…
Prometheus wastes one of the most visually gifted directors in contemporary cinema on a script that requires its characters to be catastrophically stupid. These are supposedly the best scientists humanity could assemble for a trillion-dollar mission to find humanity's creators.
Planet of the Apes has one of the great endings in science fiction cinema and earns its place in the conversation entirely on the basis of that ending. The Statue of Liberty rising from the sand is the genre's most…
The craft notes in these reviews come from the same eye Richard Lowe brings to books. He has authored 113+ books and ghostwritten 54+ more across fiction, memoir, and nonfiction. If you want a book that respects the reader the way the best films do, start with a conversation.
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