I liked the beginning of the story, the driven cop chasing the bad guy to the ends. Ended up being a little sentimental for my liking.
In the Shadow of the Moon (2019)
Trailer: BBC: War of the Worlds
If this is any good, and it certainly has promise, I predict a new trend of period science fiction stories.
Spiders can fly hundreds of miles using electricity
This is an intriguing piece of science, from Ed Yong in The Atlantic, that started the what-ifs in my head going.
I don’t think it’s enough to be a film, unless it’s some kind of superhero movie. It makes me think Magneto-Spider-Man. What if Magneto was female and has an affair with Spider-Man, and they had a child. It could be the child’s genesis story.
If expanded out I can imagine a world populated by warring clans of superheroes, the magnetics and the spiders. A spider finds love in the arms of a magnetic, Capulet versus Montague style.
Alternatively it would make a great piece on a science programme or one of those Be Amazed style videos.
Scientists read ancient sealed documents without opening them
Scientists in Switzerland can now read fragile documents without opening them. The Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), uses X-ray tomography to scan an entire book, page by page, without even touching it.
This is definitely a great subject for a documentary. The only thing I would say is we need to find something explosive. The technique is fascinating, but it needs to offer an insight into a document that changes our understanding of the world.
Annihilation (2018)
I know I’ve seen this film before. I watched it last year but much of what I saw this time felt new. It puts me in mind of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979). This is less, a musing on our insignificance, more of an invasion story, but it shares something of Stalker’s pace, and a little of its melancholia. Much better than I first remember it.
Tate Modern: Aldo Tambellini
Vice (2018)
This might be one of the most interesting and insightful political films I’ve seen in a while. It feels both pertinent, prescient, and entirely relevant when viewed concurrently with the current politics situation. Despite being about recent American political history, it feels as if we could be talking about the current political situation in the UK. Definitely worth a watch.
Darrin // Nightingale 