Missing a Slew of Semi-Recent Science Fiction Movies — Which are Best?

My vote is for Surrogates (better than I thought it would be, but kind of a lame ending), Cowboys and Aliens (was awesome, and it has a super hot Olivia Wilde in it), Hunger Games (was definitely good but don’t invest yourself in the book series), Paul (hilarious), and MIB 3 (definitely a good addition to the franchise). Other than that, Splice is probably right up your alley.

Knowing was LAME. It’s ueber religious.

As said above, avoid ‘Repo Men’ as if your life depended on it. That is two hours of my life wasted.

‘Daybreakers’ is tolerable.

‘The Thing’ is good, although no where near as good as the first. There isn’t the same level as tension as in the first.

‘Chronicle’ was quite good actually. I would watch it again.

Chronicle is the one you should see that you missed. Most of the others that you missed I missed as well but Chronicle was surprisingly good. As a Seattlite I enjoyed the local references but I think you would like it even without the local boosterism.

The Adjustment Bureau was ok, I greatly enjoyed it but on reflection it starts to fall down. Again this is from the point of view of a SF/Fantasy reader since the 70s. To many movie goers the concepts were new, but for any genre reader it is just nice to see it on the screen.

Hunger Games was a decent movie, but the only the first book held my interest. My wife read the series so I don’t regret buying the ebooks.

The Knowing: pretty awful. My husband and I saw this to kill time before we met up with someone and we wished we could’ve switched to whatever else didn’t catch our eye. It didn’t know what it wanted to be: horror? disaster movie? something out of The Last Mimzy? Not worth it (and I agree, weirdly religious at the end).

Surrogates: decent. It was entertaining while we watched it, nothing really ‘wow’, but Willis is fun to watch if you like him.

The Adjustment Bureau: I liked the movie, I think it’s worth watching. It has the sort of concept that you just can tell is adapted from a novel (a short story actually), which I didn’t know before watching. The concept is fun and Damon and Blunt are good actors.

Cowboys and Aliens: good, not great. That sums up my thoughts on the movie. The effects were good as is the acting. The concept was intriguing, but nothing ever quite came together in a way that blew my mind. It was missing ‘something’.

Hanna: I really wanted to like Hanna and yet…the best I can say was it was different. Some choices with the cinematography during a sequence while she’s in some tunnels/underground/bunker and the accompanying soundtrack really gave me a headache in the theater. It has an odd, creepy quality to it.

I am Number Four: decent. We expected nothing out of the movie, and were pleasantly surprised to find it pretty decent. Is the story all that? No, but it was surprisingly fun and the end fights were entertaining.

The Hunger Games: good, solid movie. It’s not at the same level for me as say The Dark Knight trilogy or Th Avengers, but it’s good and keeps pretty close to the book. It was nice to see other pov around the Games that you don’t see in the book.

Hmm, I saw a lot more of these than I first thought.

I’ve seen a good number of these and enjoyed most of the ones that I saw.

Of these I’d recommend seeing the following (although my taste in movies is often different than the norm and I usually am I harsh critic to popular movies)

Gamer – Above average action flick worth seeing especially if you enjoy playing games such as Call of Duty or Gears of War. Very similar to Death Race if you saw that.

Hanna was quite good, although a bit odd at times. As Matthew said it does have credibility issues and can be artsy at times. I thoroughly enjoyed it though as I felt the development of the cold hearted Hanna and her father was superb throughout the movie.

Real Steel – I felt that this was one of the best movies of the year, sort of a Rocky meets Rock Em Sock Em Robots. Definatly a family film though, and as such some of the acting is lacking and the action could have definaltly been better but is still worth watching.

Dissapointing movies on your list include:

The Adjustment Bureau -Good premise but very slow. 5/10, 6/10 tops.

Cowboys and Aliens – I’ve never been a fan of Westerns, although the last half hour or so of the movie was surprisingly good. Overall I expected much more from a movie that had both Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig.

Hunger Games – Don’t get me wrong the books are great but I felt the director really missed the mark on this movie. I went into it without reading the books and often times the plot of the movie was very thin with events being very poorly developed (for example the relationship between Gale/Katniss was glossed over to the point where I didn’t recognize there was a love triangle until very late in the movie).

MiB3 – Not a bad flick by any means but not near as good as the first two. Very funny but the plot was sub-par.

Honestly not sure Syfy movies count. Seeing all the recent ones for laughs (mostly extremely obvious rip offs of recent films) and its quite clear they are purposefully bad.

I’m sure the reasoning is ‘to capture b-movie feel’ but ergh there are limits to deliberately being half arsed. Is it fair to compare a film thats basic main goal is in fact to be awful to dethrone Armageddon?

I think Real Steel is the film you should prioritize.

The “problem” with this movie is that they didn’t make it all about the fighting robots, but instead (made the mistake) of trying to inject a human story in there. One that didn’t get all treacly (if you think the story is following time-honored tropes – not).

It was certainly better than Cowboys vs Aliens (stupid name, stupid movie, nothing special, totally predictable); Apollo 18 was just plain stupid (want my money back stupid); The Thing was like reading a book report by a student who copied it off of the student whose report you just read. Unoriginal, relying on sfx too much, predictable. The Adjustment Bureau was ok – good acting and good direction. Problem is, it was based on a PKD story and the film DID NOT follow up on the questions raised by the conceit – not nearly enough anyway.
Mike – you’d be better off – and have a higher success rate of goodness by just imagining that they forgot how to make films sometime in the mid-60s to early 70s and stick to rewatching stuff from then and earlier.

David Greybeard, can I assume by your name that Rise of the Planet of the Apes rocked your world as much as it did mine?