Fiction WritingTwenty films set on cruise ships and ocean liners, from Titanic's class-divided sinking to Triangle of Sadness's savage yacht satire to The Love Boat's aspirational not-sinking. The ship is never just a ship. It's a floating world, a class system,…
Fiction WritingTwenty disaster films ranked by how well they use catastrophe as dramatic engine instead of spectacle substitute, from Jaws's implied shark to The Martian's optimistic problem-solving. What the best disaster films understand that the worst ones don't: the disaster reveals…
1980sThe production achievement of The Abyss is extraordinary even by Cameron's standards. The Deepcore rig is a superbly designed setting, confined, functional, full of the specific texture of working machinery that Cameron consistently brings to his industrial environments.
1980sThe film is thrilling on its surface and interesting underneath, which is rarer in the action genre than the genre's reputation suggests. This is not a film that accidentally achieved something.
1980sAliens earns its 8 by doing the one thing sequel filmmaking almost never manages: it doesn't compete with the original. Ridley Scott's Alien is a horror film about isolation and violation, one creature, confined space, systematic elimination of everything between…
1990sArmageddon 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.
1990sWaterworld had one genuine asset going in: a production design concept that was visually striking and physically coherent. A world covered in water would look exactly like this.
2010sInterstellar is a bad film that has convinced a large number of people it's a profound one. The misdirection is accomplished through scale: everything is so large, so loud, so visually ambitious, so heavily scored that the emptiness at the…
AmbiguityTwo wizards — father and son — meet in magical combat that neither can win and neither will abandon. Based on Metagaming's 1978 game Wizard.
EspionageIn a basement milonga during Argentina's Dirty War, a resistance courier dances tango with an intelligence operative who carries a list of seven people scheduled to disappear.
FictionThree generations of women tend a garden behind a house in Hiroshima, growing morning glories in soil that was sterilized by the atomic bomb and refused to stay dead.
FictionAn ice analyst survives a helicopter crash in the Arctic and discovers her employer delayed rescue for six hours to retrieve proprietary data from something anomalous beneath the ice.
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