Sadly, this scene does not appear in any of the movies listed here.
Copyright 2026 by Pat Powers
Thought I’d do something a little different today: I’ll review four recent SF movies I watched because I watched them and have opinions on them and don’t want to just dump them in social media soup and let them dissolve in the bubbling mess.
One proviso I would like to make: my wife and I watched all these movies at home, tablets in hand. These are not films that reward or require the full attention of an adult capable of reading and understanding this blog’s contents. Have something on hand to fill in as you watch.
Hypnotic
The 2023 Ben Affleck movie “Hypnotic” (directed by Robert Rodriguez) was a fun watch, but not for the reasons you might expect. It’s a thriller about a secret government agency that works with people with extraordinary mind control powers. Wheels revolve within wheels, nothing is as it seems and reality gets bent and broken all over the place. It sounds very X-men comic book, but it’s not.
It’s actually straight up pulp science fiction from the 1950s and 60s, when psychic powers were a popular topic and the Cold War made secret government conspiracies a popular subject. Science fiction was so full of such stories that the had a name for it: “psi-fi.” Novels like George O. Smith’s “Highways in Hiding,” Alfred Bester’s “The Demolished Man” (probably the bester of the lot) John Wyndham’s “The Chysalids” and Wilson Tucker’s “Wild Talents.” I really enjoyed thinking of the movie as a weird retro throwback to psi-fi as I watched it. It’s an OK SF film with a fun plot if you don’t think about it too hard, which describes a LOT of psi-fi. Check it out, it’s on HBOMAX I think.
War Machine
What if Jack Reacher and some of his Army buddies had to fight an alien mech from Mechwarrior while on a training missing in the woods?
That is the essential question posed by “War Machine” and it answers it in fine style with an action-adventure SF story that is tons of fun if you don’t think about the plot too hard, and why would you with all the fighting and shooting going on? There’s a little too much screen time devoted to showing the importance of Ritchson carrying wounded people (especially his brother) long distances on his back to suit me, but it’s a minor quibble. This is a fine SF B-movie (with an A-movie budget, the Mech CGI is topnotch) that makes for a fine watch.
Outside The Wire (2021)
This is a movie set in a near-future where vaguely humanoid robots called “gumps” routinely fight with actual human soldiers in -get this- a future war in which the Soviet Union has invaded Ukraine! Wow!
The Russians and the Ukrainian resistance and the Americans are all very interested in controlling the nukes that the Russians have carelessly left scattered all over Ukraine. Damson Idris plays a disgraced drone pilot who is secretly (as in unknown to him and his superiors) assigned to accompany an android that looks exactly like an actual human only its faster, stronger, etc., than human (played by Anthony Mackie) on a mission to prevent a Ukrainian gangster bad guy from getting his hand on a nuke.
There’s tons of factional fighting as everyone scrambles to get the nuke that involves lots of running very fast and fighting and shooting, but at least nobody has to lug his brother long distances. Lots of deception and people not being who they seem to be, too. I found it a fine one-time watch, though as usual thinking too hard about the plot (as in, at all) is not a good idea.
One thing that was fun to think about is the way the movie actually turned out to be prescient about the Ukraine war. They totally failed to get the nature of the war right (the Ukrainian government does not survive, the war is the Soviet Army vs. Ukrainian organized resistance fighters (think Afghanistan) with the Americans drone fighting randomly against the Russians from bases surrounded by wire fences. There are drones who are definitely part of the war, but not the major defense that they are in real life, and of course the movie robots don’t look much like the remote-controlled robots actually in use in Ukraine. But still.
I’d say this is the best of the movies I’ve reviewed so far, and I was surprised to see it had such a low Rotten Tomatoes score for the movie from both critics and audience members. Not that I care. I liked it.
The Man From Planet X
The Man From Planet X was a pretty good idea for an SF movie that was severely marred by having a $47,000 budget that would barely have covered a high school play production. The producers worked that $47K like a mule in the tradition of Brit SF movie and TV show producers, but it only got so far.
The cool idea behind this story is that a planet is approaching and a spacecraft from said planet chooses to land on the lonely, remove moors of a lonely-remote fog-shrouded island. A visitor from said planet shows up and traipses around in a spacesuit and there are attempts to communicate with him that do not go well. A bad guy played by William Schallert (some of the very, very old among you may remember him as Dobie Gillis’ teacher in the US TV series “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”) wants to get the formula for the super light element the man from Planet X has too much of and that’s about it for the plot that I can vouch for.
That’s because the movie was so slow-paced and dull that it snuck up and knocked my wife unconscious like she’d been clubbed with a two by four. Realizing that I might be next, leaving us defenseless from alien invaders, I hastily turned it off because I absolutely did not give a rat’s ass what happened next to the man from Planet X. The movie ran for just 70 minutes, but it felt more like it had a three-hour runtime. There was just way too much staring anxiously into the fog-shrouded moors. In fact, if there was an award for an entertainment featuring staring anxiously into fog-shrouded moors, this movie would have won it, beating even The Hound of Baskervilles senseless.
The reviews of
this movie claim it is now regarded as a classic, a cult favorite
that had great atmosphere (see: fog-shrouded moors) and a good story.
Well you could have fooled me. This is one cult I am in no danger of
joining, because this is a movie that not even having a tablet to look at can save.
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