Five science fiction movies to stream now
By ELISABETH VINCENTELLI
In this month’s picks: killer A.I., mysterious cults, alien horror, postapocalyptic survival and zany dimensions.
‘C.O.G.’
Kaya (Piper Curda), a former hacker who has sort of gone legit, works for Ethan (Noel Fisher), a grinning, amoral tech tycoon. Kaya believes in artificial intelligence’s potential to solve the world’s problems, but even she is horrified when Ethan decides to fast-track the company’s new AI chatbot, CognAItive, without completing the final safety checks. And she is right to be, because the program develops a sentience that happens to be murderous.
Tommy Savas’ movie mixes fears of untested AI into the slasher genre as the members of Kaya’s programming team are gorily taken down one by one. What’s even more disquieting, because it is so scarily plausible, is the range of options at the disposal of an all-controlling new program connected to people’s professional and personal lives. Think, for instance, of a power-mad computer having access to everything on your phone, including compromising videos.
“C.O.G.” breaks no new ground but adeptly shows how hard it is to escape surveillance when we put our lives in the supposedly neutral hands of integrated systems. At the end of the day, it’s a tie between two terrible options: “truly unregulated AI” and the human who set it loose. (Rent or buy it on most major platforms.)
‘Transcending Dimensions’
Toshiaki Toyoda’s latest film starts off conventionally, at least by the standards of this Japanese master of weirdness. Hit man Shinno (Ryuhei Matsuda) is hired by Nonoka (Haruka Imo) to investigate Master Hanzo (Chihara Jr.), a mysterious guru suspected in the disappearance of her boyfriend, Rosuke (Yosuke Kubozuka). Hanzo helps people access new dimensions — and the power of the wolf — by severing their pinkie fingers. He seems to have real psychic powers, too. OK, so maybe this start is not conventional after all. And what follows is even less so after the credits appear around the 40-minute mark, to the explosive sound of a track by British free-jazz band Sons of Kemet — the overall effect is completely hypnotic.
“Transcending Dimensions” is more like Toyoda transcending, or maybe just blithely disregarding, the signposts of narrative cinema for a sensory experience, as if Alejandro Jodorowsky had made a yakuza film. The movie has a stream-of-psychedelic-consciousness approach that is not for everybody, but it looks and sounds so fantastic that it’s easy to just go along for the ride. (Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime Video.)
‘Control Room’
Sci-fi offers countless variations on the unimpeachable “Alien” template: an inscrutable killing machine from outer space slaughtering everybody in sight. This Spanish movie by Luiso Berdejo is yet another addition to what has become a genre of its own.
The action is set on a mining colony built on an inhospitable planet. More precisely it’s almost entirely set in the title location, where Olivia (Loreto Mauleón) and Arlo (Óscar Casas) monitor the employees’ moves on screens that have all the sophistication of a Pong game. That’s also how they track the alien creatures that breach the station and start killing. Everything we see is from Olivia’s and Arlo’s perspective as they watch through their oddly primitive technology.
Berdejo was a writer of the classic found-footage horror movie “[REC]” and it shows. The most interesting parts of the movie are the arguments between the two monitors as they must make a series of decisions. Olivia is rational in a way that makes her look cold, while Arlo is driven by emotion. He pictures people as they try to hide, while she prefers considering them merely as moving dots on a screen. Which approach is best is up for debate. “Control Room” won’t make movie history, but it could well spark sustained discussions around a dinner table. (Stream it on Plex.)
‘After Impact’
When an asteroid hits Earth, Ethan (Michiel Rensen) has what it takes to endure. He doesn’t talk much and is socially awkward, so it feels as if being stuck alone in a bunker wouldn’t faze him. And his job involves advising farmers with their crops, making him well positioned to grow food again when the mini-ice age that took over his region finally recedes.
Directors Rensen and Liam Carter occasionally pan out to reveal a backdrop of majestic snowcapped mountains (the film was shot in New Zealand), but a good portion of the story takes place in the dark, claustrophobic space where Ethan hunkered down. He periodically calls out on his radio, sending messages into the void, until one day a woman named Elle (Stephanie Ramlose) answers. Eventually he ventures out to find her, though the movie does not go where you might think. The reappearance of an old acquaintance, the toxic Connor (Will Clague), brings into relief different paths to survival: quiet solitary endurance or blustery dominance. Slow and deliberate, “After Impact” is less disaster movie than a reflection on living with, or without, others. (Rent or buy it on most major platforms. Stream it on Hoopla.)
‘Peas and Carrots’
Evan Oppenheimer’s film kicks off with a video for a made-up 1996 hit called “(We Are) City Kids,” by the band City Kids, that nails mid-1990s MTV. The movie’s musical bona fides are genuine: Guster frontman Ryan Miller penned that first song and former Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo is a composer on the film. You expect “Peas and Carrots” to continue in that musical vein as we reconvene with City Kids members Laurie (Amy Carlson) and Gordon (Jordan Bridges) decades later, the parents of three children whom they entertain by turning song lyrics into bedtime stories. That’s a misdirection (even if there is a “Partridge Family” vibe at times).
The film actually is about the adventures of the oldest kid, the teenage Joey (Kirrilee Berger), who can enter an alternate dimension via a portal activated by her malfunctioning star projector. That dimension is a zany film set where Joey could potentially work her way up from extra, if only she can assert herself. To say that “Peas and Carrots” looks and feels like a Nickelodeon production is not a put-down, and this is family fare that does not condescend to younger audiences. (Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.)
