When I read Michael Crichton’s 2002 killer-nanotech novel, Prey, I thought it would make a great movie. Now that I’ve seen Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall, featuring a similar villainous swarm, I second-guess my decision.

Ten years ago, while arguing over Toto lyrics, Space Shuttle astronaut Brian Harper (The Conjuring patriarch Patrick Wilson, born to look the part) lost a fellow crew member to an attacking cloud of sentient particles that put the “AI” in “hentai.” Now a disgraced former space cowboy and current deadbeat dad, Harper gets a shot at redemption when British and bearded conspiracy theorist KC Houseman (John Bradley, 2018’s Patient Zero) notices something NASA has not: The nanotech has forced the moon’s orbit outta whack!

Corralling Harper’s former partner (a wasted Halle Berry, Catwoman), they embark on a world-saving mission: Nuke the nanotech. All they need is a Space Shuttle; good thing a decommissioned one sits in an abandoned museum, if you don’t mind “FUCK THE MOON” graffitied on the fuselage. They don’t.

As stupid as all of this is, Moonfall is fairly watchable in its first hour, wringing a money shot out of the orbital shift triggering an L.A. flood. The second hour — the one in space — is where the movie becomes one big Moonfail. Emmerich sends our heroic trio into the moon’s craters, where what they find makes Mission to Mars’ much-derided “PowerPoint” climax look distinguished by comparison. Emmerich stretches his reveal into full-blown prequel potential with unneeded mythology that unspools like Stargate fanfic.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, family members in Colorado flee inbred rednecks in a chase sequence so overblown, it’s remarkable F9 hadn’t already laid claim.

Hoping to relive his box-office glory days of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, Emmerich recycles every page from his playbook: fractured family drama, meteorological porn, a melting-pot cast, regular-dude heroics, unspeakable dialogue (“I’m an astronaut, not a soldier!”) and, of course, upturned U.S. monuments. It’s all too much and yet not enough. —Rod Lott

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Vincenzo Natali’s minimalist sci-fi cult hit, 1997’s Cube, had such a killer concept — people wake in an apparently escape-free maze of cubes, many of which are booby-trapped — it didn’t need repeating. Proving lightning doesn’t strike twice, the Natali-less Cube 2: Hypercube simply tried to do the same thing again, leading to disappointment. Turns out, you can’t follow Cube.

So for Cube Zero, writer/director/producer Ernie Barbarash (Stir of Echoes 2: The Homecoming) goes backward and behind the scenes. As a prequel, it’s only partly concerned with an all-new group of anonymous, amnesiac prisoners trying to navigate through the high-tech hell without being burned, chopped, melted or turned into ground beef. Instead, the focus is on the cube’s employees who carry out orders from management they know will cause harm to the maze dwellers without knowing the “why.”

One technician (Zachary Bennett, The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day) starts to question his job and the morals behind it — and hey, what took ya so long? After believing one attractive participant (Stephanie Moore, Urban Legends: Final Cut) is there entirely against her will, he takes an extreme measure that seems out of character, but action is action.

Even with a one-eyed supporting character who’s way over the top and a last-minute plot twist that veers toward the silly, Cube Zero emerges as a much better series entry than Cube 2 could ever dream of. It’s also notably gorier than either of its predecessors, and builds upon the mythology without getting caught in the abstraction of it all. Now, whether the original film needed further explanation … —Rod Lott

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When Okja premiered in 2017 on Netflix, many people maintained it’s about a girl and a “big pig”. However, I remembered a touching fable (foibles?) about a girl and a hippo-dog-elephant-pig. But I digress …

In an ideal farm in South Korea, young girl Mija (An Seo Hyun) cares for Okja, a wholesome hippo-dog-elephant-pig; he is taken to the big city, much like Babe: Pig in the City. But unlike Babe: Pig in the City, Okja is instead populated with pro-animal terrorists, pro-animal reality hosts and pro-animal factory farms.

Directed by the renowned Bong Joon Ho (Parasite), the film is notable for the extreme moments of scat jokes. But poop aside, it makes a children’s film in its own image. Also, the cast of Tilda Swinton, Paul Dano and Jake Gyllenhaal are playing to their characterized strengths — usually by stupid accents, but still.

What truly makes Okja a great film — which in turn makes Okja, a peaceful hippo-dog-elephant-pig, and how he is used — are the foot solders of this corporation, giving Okja a large boot to the head. It truly is unsettling about animal rights and how far we’d go.

Of course, it’s all undone by the time you crave a steak, but at least you know you tried. —Louis Fowler

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Jerry Jameson is the Michael Corleone of made-for-TV disaster movies. He’d directed about a half-dozen before graduating to the big-screen reins of Airport ’77 and Raise the Titanic (a disaster movie in reverse?). Just when he thought he was done with uh-oh flicks for the tube, they pulled him back in. Arguably the biggest is Starflight One, also known by the unimaginative, kindergartener-workshopped title Starflight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land. It may as well have been called Airport ’83: In Space.

On the eve of the maiden voyage of Starflight One, the world’s first hypersonic transport plane, designer Josh Gilliam (Hal Linden, TV’s Barney Miller) doesn’t think it’s ready to fly. But because stocks are more valuable than humans, the cantankerous CEO (Ray Milland, Mayday at 40,000 Feet!) refuses to delay launch. So up, up, up it goes, with Lee Majors (TV’s The Six Million Dollar Man) starring as the pilot, with Lauren Hutton (Viva Knievel!) playing the publicist intimately familiar with his cockpit.

Wouldn’t you know it? Things go wrong, kicking the $50 million craft out of Earth’s orbit and gaining a hole in its cargo hold, placing all 60-some-odd passengers in mortal danger. To account for the loss of gravity, string is strung down the aisle for people to hold onto! But how to solve the problem of precious air hissing away by the second? The crew simply calls the Space Shuttle Columbia (R.I.P.) to drive on over, pick up Gilliam (transferred by floating coffin, no less) and take him back to man the ground-control computers. After that, the shuttle returns to fetch the passengers from Starflight One via a snake-like chute whose insides look like a Fantastic Voyage through the esophagus.

Sizewise, Hutton’s celebrated space between her two front teeth doth not compare to any gap of logic among the dozens present in Starflight One. Curiously, in look and feel and theme, the film is like a no-jokes retread of Airplane II: The Sequel, as if one of the Starflight producers — for sake of argument, let’s say Henry Winkler — saw the comedy the year before and said, “Ayyyyyyy! Let’s do that, but serious. And with chintzier cheeseball effects.”

Also aboard this interminable, star-studded teleturkey are future Oscar nominee Tess Harper as Majors’ too-mousy wife, future Weekend at Bernie’s corpse Terry Kiser as an asshole, future Elm Street teen-dream slayer Robert Englund and future insufferable evangelical Kirk Cameron. Thoughts and prayers. —Rod Lott

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Unrelated to his 1970 featurette of the same name, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future posits a time in which “surgery is the new sex” amid human evolution’s next giant leap.

Starring in his fourth Cronenberg film, Viggo Mortensen plays Saul Tenser, a man whose body grows new organs. His blood and guts make the ideal canvas for performance artist Caprice (Léa Seydoux, No Time to Die), who tattoos these organs and, in full view of spectators, removes them via remote-controlled device of crab leg-like bony things tipped with scalpel blades. It slices, it dices, responding to Caprice’s every push of a gamepad, which looks not unlike a frog and strongly recalls the director’s 1999 effort, eXistenZ. As Tenser and others undergo the procedures, they moan in orgasmic ecstasy — and with an acceptable amount of camp — at each cut.

Enter Kristen Stewart (2019’s Charlie’s Angels) as part of a shadowy organization that registers people’s organs, Scott Speedman (The Strangers) as the father of a kid who eats plastic, and the foregone conclusion that Cronenberg is not operating in accessibility mode à la A History of Violence, his first collaboration with Mortensen, the DiCaprio to his Scorsese. Did I mention the dancer (Tassos Karahalios) with several dozen ears and a sewn-shut mouth and eyes?

As par for Cronenberg’s course, Crimes of the Future finds him bringing an inherently intriguing premise full of Big, Intellectual Ideas. What ultimately keeps this film from success is how less-than-fully fleshed-out the speculative execution seems, in part due to an overly talky script. The auteur’s unmistakable and unmatched eye for set design, however, is present and alert, from a pulsating umbilical bed to a tooth-laden feeding chair with herky-jerky moves like the 4D motion seats at your local multiplex — you know, the theater chain likely not playing this movie.

Intentional or not, this is Cronenberg as close to alienating the mainstream as possible. I say “close” only because at no point does a character sexually penetrate an open wound — and certainly not for a lack of opportunity. That’s too bad, because Crimes of the Future could use a car Crash or four. —Rod Lott

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