The few people who saw Equilibrium in theaters openly compared it to The Matrix, as if that were the first action film to feature martial arts, guys dressed in black or thumping techno music. Although Christian Bale’s blank-faced performance does suggest an ace Keanu Reeves impression, Ultraviolet director Kurt Wimmer’s film really owes more debt to dusty books with numbers in their titles — namely, George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

The Dark Knight himself, Bale stars as John Preston, a “cleric,” which is a fancy-sounding term for a futuristic government/sentry/cop type charged with finding and burning anything that allows people to experience emotions. All feelings have been outlawed, see; the powers that be keep the public pacified and zombie-faced through daily injections of a sedative.

But when Preston accidentally breaks his dose and can’t get another, he begins to question his ways, allegiance and life. Heck, he even begins to feel and sniff Emily Watson’s red ribbon when no one’s looking.

If it sounds all thinky-schminky, well, yeah, it is. But it’s not bogged down in Matrix-type explanations that are so wordy, they cease to be explanations at all. The high points are the action scenes, in which Bale engages in a kind of turbo-charged gunplay we hadn’t seen before (at least at the time). He’s also skilled with the sword, neatly slicing off Taye Diggs’ face toward the end.

While not great, it’s certainly better than either The Matrix Reloaded or The Matrix Revolutions, which alone should make it worth a rental. —Rod Lott

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Reptilian is South Korea’s needless attempt at creating a Godzilla-esque franchise like Japan, with a little all-American Independence Day thrown in for foul measure.

The derivative monster in question begins the movie as a mere dinosaur fossil, before he’s awakened by an electromagnetic force from an alien spaceship. Then he’s a living, fire-breathing killing machine, and dubbed something that sounds like “Young Gary” by the pesky humans. (It’s really Yonggarry, the original, overseas title.)

The aliens are some of the cheapest-looking the decade produced (they speak English, yet their mouths never move), and Young Gary isn’t any better. Since he’s entirely a CGI creation, he’s entirely phony-looking the duration of the movie. Because director Hyung-rae Shim (Dragon Wars: D-War) and his fellow crew members were bankrupt in the idea department, a second Young Gary emerges from the ground at the end, only so the two can battle each other.

The terribly bad acting — with terribly bad dialogue to match — keeps Reptilian from being a total snoozer. At one point, someone exclaims, “Compared to this guy, Godzilla is a pussy!” That’s untrue. —Rod Lott

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Those toothy, rolling fuzzballs are back … and in space! Although they did the galaxy-quest thing well before Jason Voorhees, Pinhead or even the Leprechaun went into orbit, they certainly didn’t do it better.

Headed home from Saturn, members of a spaceship crew — played by Brad Dourif (Child’s Play), Eric DaRe (TV’s Twin Peaks) and a certainly now-ashamed Angela Bassett (Strange Days), among others — must fight for their lives when their craft becomes overrun by the exceedingly puppet-like varmints of the title. Said critters accidentally are freed from their eggs when a guy gets mad after Bassett punches him for walking in on her in the shower, so he shoots the eggs with an energy blast. It happens.

Directed by Rupert Harvey — who produced the 1986 original and 1991’s Critters 3, the inauspicious film debut of Leonardo DiCaprio — Critters 4 desperately would like to emulate Ridley Scott’s Alien. The problem with this goal is that Harvey’s monsters are silly, not scary, and yet Critters 4 isn’t spoofy.

But it is very cheap and very stupid, and at no time does anyone help Bassett get her groove back. The apex of humor comes at the end when the credits assure us that no critters were harmed in the making of the movie. Ooh, stop it! My sides are splittin’! —Rod Lott

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Originally one-third of Miramax’s aborted sci-fi anthology Alien Love Triangle, director Gary Fleder’s Impostor clearly should have stayed that way instead of being expanded into a full-length movie. As a half-hour short (which the DVD allows you to see), it’s nice and compact in a perfectly acceptable Twilight Zone-ish way. But multiply that by three, and it only succeeds in not succeeding.

The elfin-faced Gary Sinise (TV’s CSI: NY) stars as Spencer, a weapons designer some 75 years into the future. One day at work, he’s arrested by military man Hathaway (Vincent D’Onofrio, Full Metal Jacket) and assumed to be an android with a bomb in his heart, intended to assassinate a government official.

So is he or isn’t he? Even Spence doesn’t know for sure, but he spends the rest of the movie running and trying to clear his name, making Impostor an uneasy mix of The Fugitive and Minority Report, which, like this, was based on a Philip K. Dick short story.

Somehow, the film seems to progress at half the speed of its on-the-lam main character. This is because it’s padded with repetitious scenes, needless subplots and just plain ol’ drawn-out sequences. Sinise’s miscasting doesn’t help matters; he’s about the most unappealing action hero modern cinema could think up. —Rod Lott

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Even as a kid, I knew Krull to be a weird and not altogether successful amalgam of Star Wars, Excalibur, The Lord of the Rings, Clash of the Titans, Dragonslayer and many, many others. Peter Yates’ film follows the standard adventure template set out by its betters: Take some reasonably attractive and devastatingly dull people, throw in an incomprehensible evil only they can stop, mix with secondary actors far more charismatic than the leads, and stir. It doesn’t really matter that it feels like the people behind the camera are making it all up as they go along, as long as something is always happening.

And what happens offers its share of pleasures, if you can fight your way past a few substandard effects and the pale-white blandness of leads Ken Marshall and Lysette Anthony. Past that, Krull offers:
• bizarre Stormtrooper/alien hybrids conquering a pseudo-feudal kingdom with laser muskets;
• invaluable character actor Freddie Jones (Dune) as the movie’s Obi-Wan;
• fierce-yet-lovable highwaymen (including Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane!);
• a wimpy-yet-lovable shape-shifting magician;
• a towering-yet-lovable cyclops;
• the glave, a legendary weapon that actually has very little purpose, but is kinda cool;
• and the crystal spider, terrifying and not-at-all-lovable. It’s one of the last true examples of Ray Harryhausen-esque stop-motion monsters and cinema’s last great giant spider until Shelob replaced it in my nightmares.

If nothing else, I would love Krull just for its part in one of my favorite geek jokes of all time, a quick visual gag on TV’s American Dad: a close-up of Wizards and Shut-Ins magazine, the cover proudly proclaiming, “500 Reasons Why Krull is Better than Sex!”

Better than sex Krull ain’t. But it’s far preferable to more modern, but far less fun adventure epics like Dungeons & Dragons and Eragon. Those movies were craven attempts at pandering to a fan base, whereas Krull, for all its numerous faults, at least tries to have some fun. —Corey Redekop

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