Movie
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The word disaster, meaning misfortune or catastrophe, is derived from the French désastre and the Italian disastro and literally means “no-star” or bad omen. Such a star also appears in Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic film Melancholia. On the one hand, Melancholia is not actually a star, but turns out to be a vagabond planet, i.e.
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Shortly after The Life of Chuck, another Stephen King adaptation has now hit the cinemas, but at just the right time. Although King’s novel The Long Walk was published back in 1979, at a time when the Vietnam War was still raging, its theme has become relevant to European audiences once again. Director Francis Lawrence
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What responsibility does future knowledge entail? And isn’t knowing the future already a contradiction in terms? Steven Spielberg explores these questions in his film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story Minority Report (1956). And comes to a very intuitive – perhaps too intuitive – conclusion. In my review of Terry Gilliam’s 12 monkeys, I
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Ratings generally have a very limited informative value, as the very attempt to translate the quality of a film into a quantitative scale entails an enormous reduction in complexity. The Zero Thereom, Terry Gilliam’s crowning finale of his Orwellian triptych, has not received the best ratings on internet rating platforms, but is more relevant than
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In a totalitarian society, laughter is sometimes a liberating, even rebellious act. If the satirical exaggeration made the depressing setting of Terry Gilliam’s first dystopia Brazil bearable, 12 monkeys, the second film in the so-called Orwellian triptych, is surprisingly humourless for a director who grew up in the Monty Python comedy troupe. This may be
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Someone must have slandered Mr. Buttle, for one day, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. The story could be told from the perspective of the innocent family man who, due to a printing error, is mistaken for a terrorist named Tuttle, captured, tortured and killed. A bureaucratic error for which the inconspicuous
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More glass domes! While the iconic building form in dystopian science fiction often serves as a prison for totalitarian control societies (see Logan’s Run), Douglas Trumbull’s 1972 film Silent Running follows a much older tradition. His domes are greenhouses like those in Victorian England, in which the splendor of plants in distant lands had to
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Logan is running. He is in a hurry. Holding his hand is a pretty lady whose name doesn’t matter, because her only function in the entire film is to like the sandman at her side – not the fairy tale character of course; the sandmen form a police unit in the film, whose main task
Dennis Biba 