Proxima is the second feature length movie by independent Spanish film maker Carlos Atanes. Both Proxima and his first film, FAQ (2004), have done the rounds of the independent film festivals and garnered much praise and many awards. Filmed in digital video HDV these are small-budget movies, but don't be put off by that: Atanes’ writing more than makes up for the limitations and constraints imposed by a small budget. Science fiction is the genre of ideas, but increasingly it is to independent film makers such as Atanes that we must turn for novelty and intelligence (and if any better proof were needed for this, you couldn't go past Shyamalan's latest and most abysmal offering, The Happening, which is utterly devoid of novelty and intelligence in spite of its large budget!).

We were fortunate to get hold of a review copy of this movie last year - if you didn't get to see it at one of the festivals, the good news is that it's now available on DVD (Region 0, PAL or NTSC) and can be purchased directly from the Proxima website. The DVD includes a 52 minute making of documentary.

You can read our review of Proxima here.  

For those of us who think of Philip K. Dick as the most important and influential writer of science fiction in the twentieth century, one of the more exciting movie projects announced last year was The Owl in Daylight, a biopic that promises to interweave an account of Dick’s life with elements of his fiction. Starring Paul Giamatti in the role of Phil Dick and with a screenplay by Tony Grisoni this project has a lot of credibility. Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) would seem to be a good choice to capture Dick’s complex life and ideas.

There is, of course, a quite different perspective on this project: how do Phil's family and friends feel about it? These are not distant spectators, and they aren’t characters in the story of his life, but participants with their own lives, and while some are clearly supportive, one at least has reservations. In an SFFMedia exclusive, Tessa Dick, Phil’s wife until 1977, revealed her concerns.

“This biopic promises to present another fantasy of drug-induced paranoia sprinkled with peppery females who drag the great author down into the gutter," she said.

"Philip K. Dick spent months working out the plots for his novels, and the fastest he ever typed one out was one week. The typing, however, is not the writing. He agonized over every detail of every character and the events through which his protagonist must struggle. Someone reminded me that I was interviewed for this film about a year ago, but that conversation was so brief and so directed that they learned very little. The interviewer simply wanted to confirm his own theories, not to gather facts. I shudder at the thought of such a complex personality, as Phil really was, being condensed and portrayed as a caricature of himself.”

The Happening is awful. The writer and director of the science fiction and fantasy classics Unbreakable and The Sixth Sense, along with the enjoyable Signs and The Village, has hit rock bottom. With plot holes as wide as the Grand Canyon, acting that is disturbingly bad, miscast actors and scenes of supposed horror that are incredibly funny rather than disturbing, M. Night Shyamalan’s touch appears to have deserted him entirely.

A reviewer who read the original shooting script called it dreadful, but the actual movie is so much worse. After walking out of the cinema I felt I’d witnessed an excellent director artistically implode. What was he thinking? What was the studio thinking? Did anyone edit the script? Did anyone notice how bad the performances were and try to correct them?

The dialogue is clunky, obvious and at times ridiculous. The story’s premise that “the trees are out to get us”, causing everyone to commit suicide, never gets off the ground (or makes much sense either). Everyone keeps saying “it’s happening” every three minutes and there is so much plot exposition you wonder if the actors mistook the scene descriptions for dialogue.

Mark Walberg as a teacher just doesn’t work. His opening class room dialogue where he asks his students “where could the bees have possibility gone?” is so kooky and unbelievable I got the impression he was supposed to be playing a teacher on the edge of some type of nervous breakdown.

Bad news for fans of Battlestar Galactica: the rest of Season 4 will not be shown until early 2009. At a special screening in Los Angeles Executive Producer Ron Moore said the remaining Season 4 episodes will be shown in the first quarter of next year.

Apparently the delay is due to post production work on the series, as well as production and scheduling competition from new shows and sports programs at the end of this year.

"Realistically,” Moore said, “there's no way to get back on the air faster."

"We don't have a locked in schedule yet," said NBC Universal executive Bonnie Hammer. "We just know that it's always better to leave the fans just titillated a little bit, but it will definitely be back."

This is annoying news. The midseason finale and the episodes leading up to it have been excellent. What has happened on Earth? Who is the final cylon? And most importantly, how will they wrap up the series?

I guess we’ll have to wait and see. The final episodes of Season 4 are being filmed now.

Early previews of Battlestar Galactica Season 4

Battlestar Galactica ends with Season 4

Battlestar Galactica spin-off series Caprica in 2010?

Forget Reepicheep, the swashbuckling mouse: if anyone put in a valiant effort during The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, it was me. I wanted to enjoy this movie, I gave it my best shot, and I failed. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (2005), director Andrew Adamson's first go at bringing Narnia to the big screen, was good fun and my expectation of the sequel wasn’t unrealistic. Many of the elements that worked in the first movie are present in Prince Caspian and there’s more than enough novelty in the sequel to justify its existence (which is more than can be said for many sequels), so I’ve been puzzling over why enjoyment eluded me. We can’t keep blaming Peter Jackson for setting the benchmark so high that all fantasy movies these days are left floundering in the wake of his Lord of the Rings trilogy. No, in the end, blame lies with Adamson's movie itself, and with C.S. Lewis’ novel.

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe ends with the return of Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy to England after many years ruling Narnia. As adults they step through the wardrobe only to find themselves children once more: time flows differently in Narnia and only moments have passed in England. One year later they are called back to Narnia and discover that 1300 years have passed in their absence. Everything has changed and for the worst. A human race called the Telmarines has colonised the land and ruthlessly banished the Narnia of old to the borders of memory where it is little more than the stuff of myth and legend. Young Prince Caspian is rightful heir to the Telmarine throne but his Uncle Miraz has other plans and with the birth of a son, Caspian is an obstacle to be removed. Caspian flees, discovers that the mythological Narnians do exist and are in need of a leader to help them reclaim their place in the world. As the enemy of their enemy (and a Son of Adam too - any human will do when it comes to talking beasts) Caspian might just be the one. But they are no match for Miraz and in a moment of desperation Caspian sounds Queen Susan’s magic horn, calling the four Kings and Queens of old back to the land and together they rise up against the Telmarine oppressors.

I've just finished reading William Gibson's latest novel Spook Country, a fragmented, leisurely paced, ultimately unsatisfying intelligence thriller about a group of disparate characters searching for a mysterious cargo container from Iraq. While it does feature present day virtual reality technology and GPS, there's not an ounce of real science fiction in it - no matter what William Gibson would have you believe.

"Personally I think that contemporary reality is sufficiently science fiction for me," Gibson told Reuters when asked why his last two books, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, had moved away from science fiction. "Some critics are already maintaining that science fiction is a sort of historical category and it is not possible any more," he said.

In an earlier interview with CNN in 1997 he was more direct in expressing his belief that science fiction is already with us:

"I actually feel that science fiction's best use today is the exploration of contemporary reality rather than any attempt to predict where we are going… Earth is the alien planet now."

So the man who coined the phrase "Cyberspace" appears to believe that present day reality is so much like science fiction already that writing about the present is the same as writing science fiction?

If Walt Disney Animation Studios was ever going to adapt a Philip K. Dick story for the big screen, it was going to be The King of the Elves. Though not the only fantasy Dick wrote, it is very Disney friendly. A digital 3-D animation, King of the Elves will be the Studio’s 50^th feature. The team responsible for Brother Bear, producer Chuck Williams, and directors Aaron Blaise and Robert Walker, are helming the project. Wallace Wolodarsky wrote the screenplay (he wrote and produced some 50 episodes of The Simpsons), and David Arquette is the only cast announcement so far.

Disney describes the story as a:

...fantastic and imaginative tale about an average man living in the Mississippi Delta, whose reluctant actions to help a desperate band of elves leads them to name him their new king. Joining the innocent and endangered elves as they attempt to escape from an evil and menacing troll, their unlikely new leader finds himself caught on a journey filled with unimaginable dangers and a chance to bring real meaning back to his own life.

In Dreamers of the Day Mary Doria Russell gives us the story of Agnes Shanklin, observer and unlikely participant in the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference which saw the modern Middle East take shape. If it is possible to pinpoint a moment in time from which to explain the conflicts now raging in the Middle East, it is this one. And if ever you need evidence that Russell is a master story teller, consider this: the narrative traces the threads of conflict in the region today to decisions made at the 1921 Conference, decisions by the Super Powers of the day (Britain and France) that reveal a startlingly familiar motivation, namely the desire to control the supply of oil. All of which is wrapped up in a compelling narrative about a woman’s mid life crisis!

So why is SFFMedia reviewing what appears to be historical fiction? One answer might be that Agnes is in fact a fictional character situated in a historical setting and for that reason the novel could very loosely be described as a historical fantasy. More relevantly however, Russell does employ the fantastic, although for a purely practical purpose: through a sleight of hand that I won’t give away, she allows her fictional narrator (born circa 1880) to recount her life and through observation compare her times to ours:

I suppose I ought to warn you at the outset that my present circumstances are puzzling, even to me. Nevertheless, I am sure of this much: my little story has become your history. You won’t really understand your times until you understand mine.

The French production company Celluloid Dreams has obtained the movie rights to Philip K. Dick's science fiction novel Ubik.

Ubik will join a growing list of Philip K. Dick novels and short stories that have been adapted into big screen movies (some badly, others brilliantly). Past movie adaptations include Blade Runner, Total Recall, Screamers, Imposter, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly.

While a movie version of Dick’s masterwork Ubik is excellent news for fans of quality science fiction, its themes of regression and restoration, death and decay, the real and unreal, are likely to present challenges for any director hoping to capture the novel's complexity.

First published in 1969, Ubik tells the story of Joe Chip, a debt-ridden technician for a telepathic organisation that employs people with the ability to block certain psychic powers so they can secure other people's privacy. The novel is set in a world where psychic phenomena are commonplace.

Glen Runciter, the head of this telepathic organisation, is assisted by his deceased wife Ella, who is kept in a state of "half-life", a form of cryonic suspension. Someone in "half-life” has limited consciousness and communication ability, which slowly fades over time. Glen Runciter’s main adversary, Ray Hollis, heads another organisation of psychics.

Jaded consumers and reviewers that we are at SFFMedia it’s not often that movie news gets the heart beating fast. Now and then it does, and it’s been racing since we learned of plans to bring Dan Simmons’ multi award winning Hyperion Cantos and Michael Moorcock’s Elric to the big screen. If you’re familiar with either of these icons of science fiction (Hyperion) and fantasy (Elric), you’ll probably understand our excitement.

Then again you might be terrified by the prospect of what Hollywood will do to them.

The Hugo Award winning Hyperion (1989) and its sequel Fall of Hyperion (1990) are intelligent, literary SF at its best. For sheer imaginative force and an abundance of literary and philosophical references Hyperion has few peers. Perhaps most notable of these nods to literature was Simmons use in Hyperion of the formal structure of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: in the far future a group of travellers are on pilgrimage to the Time Tombs of the planet Hyperion, where they will make a request of the mysterious and monstrous Shrike. The Shrike guards the Time Tombs and likes nothing more than to impale pilgrims on iron thorns on the Tree of Pain: only one pilgrim is ever spared and their request fulfilled. Within this framing story, each pilgrim tells their tale, adding something more to our understanding of why they have undertaken this seemingly suicidal pilgrimage. By the cliff-hanger ending of Hyperion we are left with more questions than answers, many of which are resolved in Fall of Hyperion. It is probably for this reason that the movie will attempt to cover both books.