The Tomorrow War

I put this on for background noise, but it sucked me in. Anything with time-travel and dystopian futures is always worth a look, and it has some interesting sci-fi mumbo jumbo. It very much reminds me of Edge of Tomorrow, which also features vicious alien invaders. Instead of the death-loop form of time-travel, this movie features a parallel back-and-forth sort of time travel. They can wormhole from the 2022 present into the 2051 war, but always pushing forward in time. It makes more sense if you watch it though.

In regards to my other thread, they think we can manage wormhole time-travel tech in 29 years? It's still cool though. A better wormhole movie than that weird bookcase wormhole shit in Interstellar. I'll never understand that.

The Future Years of Classic Sci-Fi

Some of the genre's best movies would take place in some arbitrary future date. 1997 was a common year in a slew of titles, such as Terminator, 12 Monkeys, and of course... Escape from New York. That one (released 1981) depicts a what-if scenario 16 years from itself. Could New York City really turn to shit like that in 16 years? I'm sure it seemed somewhat believable to those watching it in its first run. 16 years from now, could Manhattan still become a prison island?



"Look, I am not stupid, you know. They cannot make things like that yet."

"Not yet. Not for about 40 years."


Did T1 set itself too early? With this particular story, it needs to be contained within a range of years relative to the immediate Connor family. That's how we get that grandfather paradox plot, but did they think we would get that advanced in but four decades?

When people would see T1, they might ponder if we could have destroyed ourselves that bad by 2029. We still aren't there yet, but we missed Judgment Day altogether. When T2 came out, it gave us that specific August 29th, 1997 date to look forward to. There might have been some concern during those 6 years that movie would prove itself true or not. I mean, those movies were so bad-ass, it definitely seemed possible. Fortunately, we averted that Judgment Day, but it'll always live on as a useless piece of trivia in ol' brain.

It's those future 2020s dates when the machines we all know and love came to be. Our level of robotics is still very early in its development. We have some that can maintain balance, but nothing could be described as being as convincing as an 800 series. Nothing that can pretend it's a human, but that's a very good thing. A boring thing, but a good thing for our safety as a species.



Blade Runner is also a hoot, because they thought 37 years from 1982 could have flying cars, offworld mining, and replicants. Both this movie and Back to the Future 2 thought the 2010s would have us in hover cars, but our development of technological innovation got stunted there somewhere down the line. We didn't keep up the trend of upping ourselves and we're not mining offworlds or even doing any cool space shit.

BttF2 also thought we'd have a lot of Jaws sequels, but there wasn't even ONE after that movie. It's as if that joke put an end to that franchise once and for all. And the Cubs came close to winning that 2015 game, but they let us ALL down, and now none of that movie's predictions are right. Fuck baseball.


Here's a fun one though: Soylent Green predicted that 2022 would have 40 million people in NYC. The current population is like... 8.4 or something? But come mid-November, the world will be at that 8 billion population. We were half that in the 70s. Stupid humans, breeding like Mexicans^{bunny rabbits}...



Any thoughts on future years that happened differently?

Or a better question would be... are there any future date predictions in movies that actually came true?

Remember Blind-Buys?

In the ancient days of pre-streaming, it wasn't so easy to watch that somewhat obscure movie you yearned and pined to see. If it wasn't on tv, and it wasn't at the video store, you had to physically buy the damn thing, usually at that higher OOP cost. Online ordering made things easier, but you could never be sure of the disc and case condition, even if it's marked "Like New". There were a lot of drawbacks and concerns to those blind-buys, so you knew you were taking a risk.

I could blind-buy something from Anchor Bay, Blue Underground, and Shriek Show with confidence, but I've definitely made a few mistakes. Mostly early in my dvd-buying days, so I learned how to better my judgment. When I was young and hungry for collecting, money was more of an issue, so these purchases had more of an impact. Now, they really mean nothing since you can watch all the rarities for free on Tubi. It's bittersweet, but I guess that means that the older generations made it happen by creating/reviving the demand for it.

What were your best and worst blind-buys? Based on your ratio of wins to losses, could you trust your own judgment as to what you knew you would like?

Last Night in SOHO (2021)

I saw this. I was waffling for awhile on whether to give it a shot. On the one hand, it looked like a chick flick. On the other hand, hey, it's Edgar Wright! You can't go wrong with Edgar Wright. On the third hand (yes, I'm an alien, just deal with it) Anya Taylor-Joy looked like quite the babe in some of the trailers and reviews I saw... that was probably what made me decide to watch it, I don't even remember.

Anyway... it definitely has its moments! Possibly the most important thing, that I should say right away, is that I do not think this is Edgar Wright's finest hour. He did a respectable job with it, and it certainly could have been worse, but I personally would not say that it is up to his usual standards. I expect more from Edgar Wright, frankly.

But, having said that... it is not a bad movie. It got me on the side of the protagonist, played by Thomasin McKenzie, very quickly. In fact, I kind of felt bad for her... the Anya Taylor-Joy character is SO glamorous and hot, especially at first. I felt like it was implied that the Thomasin M character was portrayed as becoming more attractive as she began to adapt the style and appearance of the Anya T-J character, and that bummed me out a bit. Thomasin M is cute! I felt like that kind of sucked, that they put her in that position, to have to act in such a way as to convince us that any attractiveness she might have came only from how well she emulated the appearance of Anya T-J's character. In fact, I'm not sure if I felt bad for Thomasin M's character, or Thomasin herself... anyway, whatever.

The idea is that TM's character is from a small, rural town in the UK (in Cornwall). She lives in our current time, but she LIVES internally in the London of the Swinging Sixties. Not necessarily the "swinging" part of that era, wink wink nudge nudge, more just the styles and fashions... she wants to study fashion, and she loves Audrey Hepburn. She seems nice, you root for her, and want her to be happy.

She gets accepted at a school of fashion design... something like that, some place where they design women's clothing. It is in London, so she gets to go live in London! She's all excited about that, so, watching it, we feel like "hey, good for her." But, when she gets there, it is kind of a mixed bag. London is exciting, but her roommate is a total... um... can we say CUNT on Trash Epics? Because, yah... The roommate actually has a little scene that I suspect Edgar Wright stole from Orgazmo, that awesome movie by the South Park guys. The Thomasin M character tells her the name of the rural town in Cornwall that she's from, and the roommate says "I'm sorry." Thomasin assumes the roommate didn't quite hear what she said, or perhaps was unfamiliar with the town, and starts to explain where it is, and the roommate says something like "oh, no, no, yeah, I know where it is, it's just... I mean... I'm sorry." There is a scene exactly like that in Orgazmo, where the main character's girlfriend tells some guy in a video store that she's from Utah, and he just looks so taken aback and unprepared to hear such a wretched reality be referred to, that all he can do is stutter helplessly and say, with great pity and compassion, "I'm sorry."

So, Thomasin... her character's name is Eloise, I'm sorry, I should have started saying that several paragraphs ago, Eloise decides to get her own apartment, so she doesn't have this beeyotch for a roommate. She takes a room in an apartment building run by this mysterious older lady, played by the great Diana Rigg. It's expensive as fuck, but she decides that somehow she'll make it work.... we've all been there, eh?!?

So she rents the room, and gets a job as a barmaid in a local bar, to pay the bills. The landlady asks for a lot of money up front, so she has to start working AND going to school right away, which is asking a lot of anyone... again, many of us have probably been there, or will be at some point. At the end of her days, she drags herself home, exhausted, falls asleep quickly, aaannnnnddddd.... wakes up in London in the Swinging Sixties!

It isn't completely clear at first exactly what is going on. Is she having dreams, or are they some kind of visions, or even astral time travel? It is hard to define. But whatever is going on, she starts to inhabit the body of the Anya T-J character, Sandie, every night, in her dreams. She usually seems to be just a passenger, although at times she seems to be able to assert herself in some ways. Anyway, she is back in the 60s in London, every night, and she wakes up in the mornings back in our time, apparently feeling well-rested, which I personally had a few problems with, but, never mind about that.

Things get complicated when the glamorous, beautiful Sandie's life takes a turn for the worse, and Eloise gets sort of dragged along for the horrors. Her dreams begin to be more like nightmares. She starts to feel a sense of responsibility for poor Sandie, and wants to help her. She tries to think of anything she can do in our time, to make sense of whatever happened back in the 60s, whch she still doesn't really understand, although she thinks she might understand it.

Anyway, I'll wreck it if I say too much more. It has some British actors from the 60s that some of us might enjoy seeing in this, like Terence Stamp, Diana Rigg, Rita Tushingham, and Margaret Nolan. Personally, I needed to look up what all those people were doing back in the 60s, but I know that some people know this stuff without having to look it up.

For me, it was like watching an Austin Powers movie that took a turn into a dark, seedy neighborhood. It had some fun parts, and Anya T-J is indeed a babe. But, again, as I said at the beginning... I expected something more from Edgar Wright. He usually packs so much interesting stuff into every minute of his movies. This movie was adequate, in my view, and it had its moments, and all the actors did a solid job. But still, I just wanted more of something or other, somehow.

So, there you have it, my two cents on Last Night in Soho.

Blade Runner as a Series

For the longest time, Blade Runner 1982 was the only one of its kind. Of course, you'd get a new version every so often to keep you drooling, but it's still basically the same one movie. The movie invented the tech noir genre and made it great because of that beautifully brooding aesthetic and score. It's very noir, but in a futuristic setting. It offers some interesting questions on what it is to be human, and the cast rocks. It's a perfect movie, so it makes sense why sci-fi nerds love it so much. There really wasn't anything else like it.

Come along 2017 and a sequel hits. Did the original need a sequel? Not really. It's an open and shut story, but eventually, everything gets a sequel. So how do you compete with the original classic? Easy. Get the original gang back together and magic shit happens.

I rewatched 2049 since I must have been obliterated when I first watched and remembered nothing about it. But... I thought it was pretty great. It honors the original, but it also has its own flavor and does something new. Artsy, interesting tech themes, more good android/human philosophy, and some great (even tense) scenes. Ryan Gosling made good use of his emotions and lackthereof. Harrison Ford also had plenty of time to emote, so he got to do a bit more "acting" rather than merely rely on his bad-ass presence. For a sequel so late in the game, it had a lot to live up to. I think it did a good job.


It was around the development of Prometheus (2012) that Ridley Scott renewed his interest in sci-fi. He pushed the idea that Alien existed in the Blade Runner universe, which would put a lot of crazy thoughts into anybody's head. Of course, Blade Runner was also known to have Soldier (1998) as a sequel of sorts. Set in the same universe apparently, but not blatantly made mention of in any way. That one dealt with one of the off-world communities that Blade Runner's Los Angeles-centric stories only talk about. It's not a bad movie, so I don't mind this connection, but it seems rather erroneous. The Alien relation seems cool, but it doesn't strike me as definite. Especially when you throw in AvP stuff into the mix, which would then include Predator, so it gets a bit jarring. Either way, these are mostly theoretical connections. Unless the story is directly about Blade Runners, then it isn't part of the strict canon.

Amazon just announced that they're making a "Blade Runner: 2099" series. This is 50 years after Part 2, so none of our core characters should be alive at that point. (This is also the same year as a lot of Marvel comics based on future rehashes of popular characters, like "Spider-Man 2099").

So what kind of mind-blowing sci-fi can they pull? Haven't they covered all the good topics by now? Will I even care? I'm not sure I like the idea of something I love getting milked dry in an ongoing series. The first sequel came out about 35 years after the first. Is it too early to dive into that well again?

The People's Joker

This movie got pulled from TIFF for using DC characters, but there's perhaps some technicalities involved that will allow it to come out anyway? It looks like garbage. I want to see it.

Is Science Fiction always Fantasy?

You've all heard the expression of how magic is simply science we don't understand. Science is the study of something, and if you study fantasy, there must be a science to it, even if it's all theoretical. Fantasy runs on its own rules that often break our real-world physics, but they still have some rhyme or reason. Sci-Fi as a genre doesn't need to have the tropes that it's often known for, like space aliens and robots, but it's not unexpected in the genre if these things show up. Couldn't these things be present in the fantasy genre as well? Aren't they already present in the genre?

Sometimes, you'll see the two genres lumped together as "Sci-Fi & Fantasy". Amazon Prime does this, and if they can't figure out how the fuck to destinguish the two, then how do you distinguish the two?

Loab (terrifying AI-generated images)

Holy fuck, this is terrifying. I hope this link is clickable. If not, try googling Loab AI machine learning nightmares.... maybe try entering that into Google Images. I think there will be more and more images appearing online, in the near future, as they tweak the programming. I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about here, it just sounds reasonable to me. If I'm wrong, good. Anyway, here, try clicking on this: https://itsonlydark.substack.com/p/loab-explained

The vortex in Philadelphia Experiment

The experiment itself causes a vortex. A hole in the sky of sorts that sucks in air and acts as a bridge between the two times, 1943 and 1984. The visual of that hole in the sky sucking in the clouds and air around it is something that always intrigued me. Imagine how frightening it would be to see something like that in real life...

For a sci-fi theory, I always wondered about that hole. Was the 1984 hole sucking in air, only to send the air back to 1943? If so, would 1943 have more air in its atmosphere? And if so-so, would that extra air justify that the 1984 present doesn't have less air even after losing that air to the past, on account of all the extra air 1943 got from this very event? Does the amount of air stay exactly the same?

Is Mad Max "Sci-Fi"?

It counts for the challenge because IMDb says so, but forget what they say. Dystopian movies aren't always sci-fi, are they? Presented as what-if fantasies, but that doesn't make them part of the 'fantasy' genre. All movies aren't real, but they can't all be labeled as fantasy.

What about Max Max neccessitates the label of "Science Fiction"? What is scientific about the movie? Society does not have technology at this point. What do you say, mate?