Film Review: Westworld (1973)

Science fiction as a genre has always revolved around writers wrestling with cultural dilemmas, and few have been as compelling as robots. Are they going to obsolete humans? Is their dogged tenacity going to outstrip human potential? Are we going to be able to keep control? From horror tinged films like the chilling The Forbin Project to the more recent I, Robot to the apocryphal The Terminator series, robots are bad news for us humans….Read More

Review: Jurassic World

It’s impossible to talk about dinosaur movies without mentioning the ground-breaking 1993 film Jurassic Park, a fun, exciting summer blockbuster about a mad scientist who extracts dinosaur DNA from mosquitoes trapped in amber and then creates a theme park around the resurrected beasts. Based on one of the many books written by the remarkably prolific Michael Crichton, it remains one of director Steven Spielberg’s best movies. Two decades after the Park’s disastrous shutdown, a new dinosaur-themed amusement park called…Read More

Review: The Andromeda Strain

Almost from the very dawn of cinema, movies have been wrestling with the question of what life from other planets might be like. Go back to 1902 and one of the very first films made — Le Voyage dans la Lune, by George Melies — portrays inhabitants of the moon, Selenites, as evil, dangerous creatures, all in its short 14 minutes running time.   The entire alien invasion theme was driven to new heights when our fear…Read More