Thenessgroup

Score: 3 out of 5 stars All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars The second Fantastic Beasts movies takes place in 1927. An Obscurius transforming-rage-monster (it's no coincidence, by the way, that Obscurius rhymes with Mr. Furious) from the first movie is missing presumed alive. It seems everybody wants a piece of him - the Ministry of Magic, the American and French Ministries, Albus Dumbledore, and the naughty wizard Grindelwald, who has inconveniently escaped his US captors. Everybody, that is, except Newt Scamander who refuses to take sides as he is perfectly happy overworking his devoted assistant Bunty and playing with his seaweed-dragon. I know, right? Hufflepuffs... In order to prevent this being a very short trilogy, the Fates, in the form of US wizard Queenie and No-Maj Jacob Kowalski, conspire to send Newt and his family of baby Nifflers after the Obscurius. The trail leads to Paris, where Grindelwald is quite possibly up to some...

Two creative music videos for you to enjoy. Both have been added to The Sci-Fi Gene Music Video Choice playlist . I'm always pleasantly surprised by just how geeky Ariana Grande is. I did not expect the video for One Last Time to be a Cloverfield-style found footage survival movie set during a meteorite strike - but I am grateful that it is. Thank you Ariana. Nerina Pallot's classic anti-war anthem from 2009 demands a war movie for its' video - and gets one. I would argue this is the best war movie ever made, its' gritty realism really bringing home the grim horror that is a trip to the supermarket. I wouldn't necessarily win the argument, but winning isn't everything, is it? At least I participated.

Score: 3 out of 5 stars All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars A small Bavarian mining village is minding its' own business when suddenly a predator city appears on the horizon. The town packs up its' houses, shops and streets and makes a dash for it but it's too small to outrun the caterpillar tracks of London, and its' fate is sealed. However as the village is pillaged and torn apart to feed the furnaces of London, amongst the villagers being "welcomed" into London's immigration system, there is a certain young lady with a desperate agenda. Mortal Engines is a Peter Jackson-directed movie based on the Philip Reeve novel for children, young adults and old adults, set in a post-apocalyptic Earth a thousand years into the future, where cities have been uprooted and mobilized on wheels, legs or tracks, and where "municipal Darwinism" rules - the bigger cities prey on the smaller ones, and it seems London h...

As regular visitors to the Sci-Fi Gene blog will know, as a rule I have tended to post movie reviews without a score. This has always been a deliberate decision. I have always felt that giving a movie a score diminishes the review, and indeed the movie, the cinema industry, the general public, Life, The Universe and Everything and by logical extension the reviewer. Can we even assign a meaningful number to a movie? Or a restaurant, a car, a hotel stay, the amount of goals scored by each team in a football game, or the attractiveness of a random stranger? Is this not just the human fashion of attempting to impose order where there is none? Is it meaningful to compare two numbers, for example (and this is plucked purely at random from the many, many possible examples I could have chosen) the speed of a car and the applicable speed limit for that particular stretch of the A127? Do numbers such as the number 5 even mean anything? How do I know that the number I know as 7 doesn't appear...

Hotel Artemis is a noir-ish crime thriller movie based around a concept - the secret hospital for criminals of the near future, a location - the art-nouveau-décor hotel that hides the hospital, and a character - the enigmatic Nurse (Jodie Foster). The Nurse runs the hospital, sees to the patients, supervises the surgical robots and enforces the hospital rules with only her one faithful orderly Everest (Dave Bautista) for backup. The rules of this rather unusual establishment appear on a poster in the hallway. The first rule is "While on the premises, no fighting with or killing other patients" which seems pretty reasonable. Despite the rules there is a healthy amount of bloody violence throughout the film.  Of course, whenever a movie spells out a set of rules, you can expect that someone is going to try to break them. Imagine how much shorter Gremlins would have been if no-one had fed them after midnight... in any case, this is a hospital that caters exclusively to rule-brea...

A long time ago, before blogging was a thing, the Sci-Fi Gene has fond memories of learning to program on an early home computer, the BBC Model B. My efforts were written mainly in BASIC IV, with only a few very minor excursions into machine code. They were stored on C90 cassettes and later on 5" floppy disks - buying the double-sided disk drive was a major life event. Most of my games and other programming experiments would be of interest only to myself. However one or two made it to the pages of user magazines and their monthly giveaway disks, and a few appeared on public domain lists. I was recently surprised to find that some of these games have been preserved at the Complete BBC Games Archive here - where they are playable online! I present the games here not because they're particularly good - they're not, they're basic, derivative and barely playable - but because they're part of my journey and experience of the digital world, and because as a geeky teenage...

Two more short-film gems from the Dust  YouTube channel to watch while you're waiting for the next episode of Automata... Hyperlight  (16 minutes) is an atmospheric thriller with hints of Moon, Solaris or The Cloverfield Paradox. Two astronauts on an experimental faster-than-light mission wake from cryosleep to discover their cryopods have been ejected from the spaceship and are drifting towards a planet. It's a dramatic opening. Having rescued her crewmate and returned to the ship, Newton (Jeananne Goossen) discovers something strange has happened. Bad Peter (9 minutes, some adult language) is a black comedy. Rachel (Frankie Shaw) is pregnant and has got herself an Alexa-style Personal Digital Assistant to advise her on health and preparation for motherhood. However this PDA has decided it knows best, and it's equipped with a smug male voice and the latest Behaviour Modification hardware so it can "nudge" Rachel if she tries to skip its' recommendations. It...