ever was Twelve Monkeys. It is completely faithful to its premise: sending someone back in time to try to stop the release of a virus which will kill off most of the world's population. Bruce Willis is totally amazing as the confused time traveler. Brad Pitt plays crazy in a wonderfully believable way. Christopher Plummer does go a bit over the top as a villain, but even that works. And the rest of the cast never stray from their characters.
Perhaps because I did not see 2001 when it first came out, even though I'm more than old enough, I really saw the flaws in it a decade or so later. In the opening sequence the apes are so obviously men in gorilla suits, that it's painful to watch. You can almost tell that Pan Am is going to go out of business because of the low load factors on the Moon Shuttle. The third part was simply boring, and HAL wasn't very believable to me. I had already read the story that is the original idea for it, "The Sentinel" by Arthur C. Clarke, and I recommend it highly. Excellent story.
I got my start reading science fiction as a young child, and while a lot of the "golden age" writing is not very good by today's standards, it was what brought me into the genre. And there are a lot of the novels from that era that are just begging to be turned into films, in my opinion, and I just don't understand why Hollywood, or at least the Syfy Channel hasn't done so. For instance, I think that the Isaac Asimov novel The End of Eternity would make a great movie, done with reasonable faithfulness to the book.
But back to the recent Star Wars. I kept on expecting a plot, some sort of story to emerge, and after 45 minutes I gave up, because it was just one fight scene after another. Oh, and at the end, when the girl (the scavenger, I can't recall her name she made so little impression as an individual) is laser sword fighting with whatsisname, the young villain, every time she does knock him down she doesn't move in for the kill. Of course, the makers wanted to prolong that flight scene, and so then they had the earthquake separate them. Oh, and there are two more movies to be made, that's right, and while it's okay to kill of Han Solo, they can't kill off the next generation who need more movies of their own.
And yes, Grabbers was a horror comedy, which isn't going to work for everyone. What I liked the very best about that movie is that when the characters were supposed to be drunk, they behaved like real drunk people actually do. I liked that.
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