It’s the culmination of five intertwined movies across four franchises, and it still seems like it’s just getting started. The Avengers manages to take the best elements of the Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, and Thor titles and...
In 2000, Koushun Takami and Masayuki Taguchi created a manga called Battle Royale, which was later adapted into a film by the same name. This was a brutal comic about a group of school children forced to fight to the death in an...
John Carter is a prime example of a film made to be a blockbuster rather than a compelling or involving experience. It has all the surface elements a blockbuster should have: a hero, a “save the world” plot, an attractive woman who...
We're almost there, and hopefully you've already bought most of the presents you plan to give over this holiday season. Realistically, though, who's actually done shopping already? If you're looking for that last-second piece of perfection for...
This Thursday, November 17, I will be a guest speaker in a roundtable discussion at Georgia Tech's "The Shape of Things to Come" sci-fi symposium. The symposium is a free-to-attend, one-day event and is focused on the scholarly discussion of...
You can’t blame the makers of modern-day visceral thrillers and action films for turning to special effects in order to outdo those that came before them. As filmmaking technology advances, it is the natural course for a type of entertainment...
It feels like it's been years since I began writing it, but in reality it has been just slightly more than one. Sci-Fi Movie Freak, my book about science fiction cinema (and my first ever book to...
The Thing is essentially both a prequel and a remake of the 1982 film of the same title, directed by John Carpenter. When you make a movie like this -- especially one based off such a geek-loved film as Carpenter's -- you have to be...
So often we speak of marketing departments ruining movies. They see a fad, want to profit from it, and churn out a derivative film to snag some of the money waiting to be spent on said fad. Other times they take a genuinely good story, alter it...
Germs may be the most prevalent nasty things that we, for the most part, don’t think about. That is, of course, because they are invisible. But what if something were to force you to consider the germs on everything you touched? Throw your...
