SARA STEWART AT NY POST FINDS 'A WHISPER OF QUARANTINE FAMILIARITY'
Remember when this year began and how those first ten days of January saw a plethora of articles looking at films set in 2020, and what those films envisioned for us this year? As it turns out, a lot can change in three months!
"Lots of us have been bingeing pandemic movies, understandably," Sara Stewart states at the start of a New York Post article today. "It’s perversely comforting to see that things could be worse. But what else, I wondered, did film envision for us in 2020, specifically? I looked at five sci-fi movies set this year (and available for rent on Amazon, among other platforms) to see if things were better or worse than the real deal."
Stewart begins with Doug Liman's Edge Of Tomorrow, in which "tentacled aliens have taken over huge swaths of the globe and humanity seems to be permanently at war with them. (So: worse?)"
Then she moves on to Mission To Mars:
Next up: “Mission to Mars,” from 2000. Director Brian De Palma was clearly overly optimistic about our space exploration capabilities. Or was he? Three characters have died 20 minutes in, and there’s a giant face on the surface of the red planet. Yikes. Here’s a whisper of quarantine familiarity as a rescue mission finds that a scraggly Don Cheadle’s been tending a greenhouse alone on Mars for a year. Some of us may find a whisper of relatability here. This is a very cheesy movie, but it’s got a great scene of Tim Robbins and Connie Nielsen dancing in zero gravity. Also, we meet a Martian relative. On balance: better.
The other three movies Stewart looks at are Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim ("depressing to see government officials on what appears to be a Zoom call in the year 2025. I’d have hoped we would have improved the format by then"), Reign Of Fire ("I think it’s fair to say fire-breathing reptiles annihilating our cities while our fate hangs in the balance of a shaved-headed, crazy-eyed Matthew McConaughey is worse than our current predicament"), and John Krasinski's A Quiet Place ("This is clearly worse than having to cover your lower face in public — although I bet 'a quiet place' is what every working-from-home parent is dreaming about right now").