Movie #38: Cyborg 2

Welcome to Sci-Fi 100! 
100 Sci-Fi movies in 100 days!

"Cyborg 2" is a 1993 straight-to-video followup to the Jean Claude Van Damme flick "Cyborg." It has very little to do with the original other than the title and a few seconds of video clips of Van Damme from the first film, shown on a monitor that characters are watching. But this one does star a very hot and sexy 18-year-old Angelina Jolie in her first feature film. 

Angelina Joli as the cyborg "Cash."

The film is directed by Michael Schroeder and stars Angelina Jolie as the Cyborg, Elias Koteas, Billy Drago, and Jack Palance.
The movie is set in the year 2074 and is about a company that is making hot sexy cyborgs who can charm and seduce their way into a relationship with politicians, presidents, heads of foreign countries... and self-detonate during sex with these individuals, killing them. 

The perfect assassins. But something goes wrong... one cyborg, Angelina Jolie, has fallen in love with a human and doesn't want to die. She flees with the human and is chased across the wasteland by a cyborg hunter, played by Billy Drago,  who the company hires to kill them.

                    Click on the box above to see the trailer

The movie has some great action scenes and fight choreography  and you can see why Angelina Jolie was destined to become a Hollywood A-list celebrity... She pulls you in with her charm and beauty. She is the best part of the film.

The whole plot and story are pretty cheesy as is a lot of the dialogue, but its still a fun movie to watch and I bet Angelina Jolie wishes she could erase it from her past. LOL. Check it out.

- Patrick Shawn Bennett
Broadcasting from the land of robot love...

Movie #37: Cloud Atlas

Welcome to Sci-Fi 100! 
100 Sci-Fi movies in 100 days!

"Cloud Atlas" is a new movie from the Wachowski brothers who brought us "The Matrix" trilogy. Two of the storylines in the movie are sci-fi. 
This film is stuffed with A-listers like Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Hugh Grant and Susan Sarandon. What's amazing about this film is that each actor plays multiple roles. Tom Hanks and Halle Berry each played 6 different characters. The film tells 6 different tales spread out over various time periods from the past to the distant future and tells how our souls and actions all connect like ripples through time. 

         Click on the box above to watch the extended trailer.

The makeup is remarkable! Halle Berry even plays  a white woman in one of the stories and Hugo Weaving plays a woman nurse at a retirement home.  

The special effects in the sci-fi storylines are as good as it gets too. The movie has a little bit of something for everyone... drama, romance, action, fight scenes, mystery and sci-fi. The film jumps back in forth in time so that you see about 10 minutes of one story and it jumps to the next and then cycles back to the next 10 minutes of the first story. 

Its like watching 6 thirty minute stories in 3 hours but bouncing around back and forth between stories the whole time.
The movie was well shot, well acted, and the music, fx, and makeup were terrific. I enjoyed most of the stories but found myself somewhat bored with a couple of them. 

I think the film was too fluffy, preachy, and tied neatly with a bow in the end like a packaged deal... for my taste that is. I would rather have seen a full length movie set in the futuristic asian world that one of the stories was about.
Anyway, I enjoyed watching it once and it was fun just to spot all the different roles each actor played. 

Sometimes it was difficult to pick them out under the sometimes heavy fx makeup. Check it out for yourself and let me know you thoughts.

- Patrick Shawn Bennett
Broadcasting from within the cloud...