Wednesdays at 9pm from Wednesday 7th April on Alibi

Brand new and exclusive to crime drama channel Alibi (sky 132, virgin 130), hit US police drama Castle stars Nathan Fillion (Desperate Housewives, Firefly, Serenity) as Richard Castle, a famous mystery novelist who helps the NYPD homicide department solve crimes. Launching on Alibi on Wednesday 7th April (Wednesdays at 9pm) Castle follows the relationship between the wise cracking crime writer and Kate Beckett, the feisty NYPD Detective (Stana Katic).

Richard “Rick” Castle and Detective Kate Beckett first cross paths when Castle is investigated by the NYPD when a murder victim matches the description of a victim in one of his best-selling novels. At the time of the investigation Castle is suffering a bad case of writer’s block. Inspired by his run-in with the beautiful Beckett and through his connections with the Mayor he gets permission to hang out as a consultant at the precinct to do research for his next book. Beckett is initially horrified by the idea of castle tagging along but as time progresses a chalk-and-cheese crime-solving duo are born.

Castle mixes classic amateur sleuthing and Moonlighting-style sexual chemistry with slick, 21st century police procedural drama.

To find out more about the show, or watch exciting clips click here.
You can also find exclusive information on Facebook.

Or check out these links:

Episode 1 clip

Stana Katic interview

Nathan Fillion interview

Bower soon finds another man called Payton (Dennis Quaid), who has also just awoken from deed sleep and finds himself equally disorientated. Bower looks to reboot the ship’s vital systems and reach other areas as Payton guides him from the relative safety of ship’s control room, but Bower soon loses contact when he comes across some horribly mutated on-board hostiles.

The mutants are a sort of cross between the Reavers in Firefly/Serenity and the creatures from The Descent. Not just for their look but for the crude weapons that they weild. As they close in on Bower he finds himself a stun-gun, the meatiest weapon we see in the entire movie (which is actually kind of cool, and boosts the ’survival’/grab-whatever-one-can element).

As time goes on we discover (along with the characters, who are only just remembering), that the space ship Elysium is a ’sleeper’ ship on a one-way ride to a planet named Tanis. Tanis is a world much like our own which will sustain life following Earth’s massive overpopulation. To go on explaining would be to ruin the story.

Watch the Pandorum trailer:

I think the movie would have benefited from more believable and varied characters, for example the idealised girl Nadia who saves Bower early on and has learnt martial arts in five months, no mean feat provided we are to believe that before she was just a worker in the ship’s bio lab. It isn’t difficult to recognise the people involved with the Resident Evil flicks helped make this, the whole Nadia and the random Asian martial arts god (don’t ask) who turn up reek of Resi’s Alice and numerous other slightly one-dimensional heroines from the last ten or so years of cinema.

According to the FAQ on IMDB, Pandorum is the first part of a planned trilogy, and though critics attacked it pretty badly the general public seem to have enjoyed it quite a bit more. I think it is in danger of becoming another so-so Resident Evil/Chronicles of Riddick-esque franchise. Pandorum isn’t a great movie, but provides us with a decent and entertaining space-horror. For all its faults there are some decent plot ideas and If executed with a steady hand, there could yet be room for an interesting sequel.

If you like the sound of Pandorum, you may also like the movies:
Event Horizon (1997)
Sunshine (2007)
Serenity (2005)
Firefly (2002)
Pitch Black (2000)
The Descent (2005)

Or if you’re into computer games:
Dead Space (2008)

Some related posts:
the Perfect spacecraft
Here’s my post ‘The Top Villains of the ’00s’ in which Ben Foster and The Operative from Serenity feature
Danny Boyle: filmography to date

I watched a nice little film called Kinky Boots earlier, staring Chiwetel Ejiofor. No, I don’t know how to say that either but he’s very talented (see this, Serenity or Dirty Pretty Things if you don’t believe me). He’s also very diverse. Here’s a little ditty featured in the movie:

Also, the piano player knows what you did last summer!

Sunshine's Icarus II

Spaceships must look cool

All good sci-fi spaceships should look memorable. Take the Imperial Star Destroyers or the Falcon in Star Wars. They are instantly recognizable for their shape and detail and that’s why we love them. Other less well known films like Event Horizon and Sunshine both have awesome looking spaceships, the former of which was based on Notre Dame cathedral (perfect for the eerie subject matter of the film).

Spaceships must look credible

Spaceships will most probably never fly the way they do in the movies in our lifetimes. There are many technical factors that stop us from zapping through the cosmos at light speed. Nevertheless, as with most fiction, things should at least look and feel credible and spaceships should look like they could fly and be practical enough to house and sustain a crew. Movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Serenity and its TV series Firefly and Sunshine do well in showing the functional interiors of spaceships and their passengers living within them.

An intelligent ship/ship’s computer/robot/voice

Ship’s computers are cool. Think HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In fact there must be countless films and stories that have such a character and often they employ a soothing woman’s voice. Like HAL, A.I. characters are interesting because there’s always the opportunity for them to go rogue and turn on their masters and crew. Even if they don’t, it’s nice to have the option!

the Event Horizon

A cool and unpredictable crew

In the TV series Firefly we are introduced to a diverse crew all with different pasts and unique outlooks. In Star Wars a farming boy called Luke, a reclusive old Jedi name Ben, two lovable rogues Han and Chewbacca and the galactic princess Leia are thrown together to travel in the Falcon. While I love Danny Boyle films I just couldn’t get into the characters in Sunshine as there just didn’t seem to be much to the characters to get into. There was none of the likeable chemistry prevalent in his other films like Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, so when everything went tits up I didn’t much care. For this reason the Sunshine experience left me feeling cold, despite the awesome special effects and beautifully crafted spaceship. Also because the film I’d been to see in the cinema about a week before had been Rocky Balboa, which left me feeling so uplifted that I wanted to jump over park benches there and then (and it was late on a school night when I came out of the cinema).

Sterile and busy interiors with nice features

Sterile whites are a given. Nice and clean is the name of the game. On the other hand busy is also good. Sunshine’s Icarus or Firefly’s Serenity? both fit the mission and the crew like a glove. Points of interest can also come in the form of cool looking ship hearts/cores, like the one in the Death Star and Event Horizon.

Sunshine's gold spacesuit

An oxygen garden

Sunshine, for all its faults had the marvellous “oxygen garden”. This was an actual garden inside the spaceship used to produce oxygen for the crew to sustain them on their long voyage to reboot the sun. Apart from looking pretty and breaking up the monotony of the usual spaceship interiors, it actually had a practical use. Silent Running, a cult 70s sci-fi film (and indeed an influence for Sunshine) focused on a similar domed garden in space after all plant life on Earth had been destroyed. Orders to destroy the dome were defied by the ship’s botanist who chose instead to save the last surviving dome at any cost.

A dangerous cargo

Serenity and Firefly have the Tams who are wanted the galaxy over, Sunshine and Event Horizon have their dangerous interlopers and the former has an actual stellar bomb as its payload. Alien has its …well, Alien. We’re talking about dangerous cargo and being stuck in claustrophobic places in the darkness of space. Something threatening onboard always works well to introduce a spot of tension.

Weapons and speed/travel

While not essential, weapons mounted on spaceships are always good. For one thing they allow the crew to initiate or defend themselves during exciting space dogfights. Speed, notably light speed, enables the spaceship to travel fast (but even with light speed, it would take us 4.3 years to get to Proxima Centauri, our nearest star). Other theoretical means of space travel include the wormhole and having a good old sleep in cryogenics (used in the Alien franchise quite a bit) until you reach your destination. It’s a lot more complicated than all that though, so you might want to read a book on space travel or earn a degree in something science-y to learn more.

Spacesuit-clad crew of Event Horizon

Trophies and trinkets

Predators like their trophies and …erm, well I actually don’t know why I put this heading up, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a few trophies and past exploits scattered around the ship now would it?

A rich history

“It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs,” boasts Han Solo of the Millennium Falcon. As soon as we board the ship alongside our heroes we realise the Falcon is another character in the story. A quite different spaceship is the Event Horizon, which while splendid is also rather scary and its history is told through a number of horrific incidents prior to the film’s climax.

Quagga

I’m sure these points are just the top of the iceberg, so please reply to add some of your own if you think of any.

Today I’ve also been reading my book on Space Travel (thanks again S!) which is helpful for details and ideas on how to get my new blog (one of two) “Nivellensem Dreams” off the ground. This’ll be, for lack of a better explanation, the diary of a spaceman. It’ll be Sci-fi in the vein of Firefly and its cinema follow-up Serenity (which if you haven’t seen, are bloody good!).

Hells bells, you may as well watch the film trailer. It’s so good it makes me want to watch the film again! Here you go:

- Yeah?! Hell yeah! Here’s a spot of Johnny Cash and Mama Cass to wind down with:

I’m so good to you.

“There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.”

Who can say they feel like that now? I don’t know, perhaps some people can. It’d be nice to feel like that. These days the creative floodgates are open, you can fly anywhere in the world and technology gives us the knowledge of the entire planet at our fingertips. Yet most things these days feel recycled, and we’re too P.C. for our own good.

Other times I think there’s a lot of good in the world, and while I’m still struggling to define what the “noughties” are all about (I hate this decade’s nickname by the way) there have been some really good films and iconic characters popping up in the last few years. Now that the nineties are looking and feeling richer and a little more historic, I expect in a few years I’ll also look back at the ’00s and see some sense of identity and nostalgia. At least that’s what I hope!

Here’s my list of five of cinema’s best villains from the last ten years. Feel free to comment and add your own in reply. I’d be interested – especially if you can suggest great villains in films I have yet to see! OK, here I go…

Top five villains of the ‘00s

The Pale Man, Pan's Labyrinth

5) The Pale Man (Doug Jones) – Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

I love old monster movies with stop-motion, and while I like some cgi, it can be and often is, overdone. I thought the nosferatu-esque Reavers in Blade 2 were cool, so when Pan’s Labyrinth popped up I went to see more Del Toro monsters. What I got was the Pale Man in one of the coolest, scariest and most well-executed sequences in modern cinema.

This horrible villain is cool because he’s basically a man in a suit playing an emaciated ghoul who eats children.

A mythology is created for him in mere seconds, and if you let him, he’ll stay with you long after the lights snuff out at night.

Anton Chigurh, No Country for Old Men

4) Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) – No Country For Old Men (2007)

Whatever you think of the ending, Chigurh is a damn scary villain. Sporting a questionable haircut and beefy custom-weapons, Chigurh is a cold-hearted killed played excellently by Bardem, who gives an equally brilliant performance as a charming paraplegic in The Sleep Inside.

Combo, This is England

3) Combo (Stephen Graham) – This is England (2006)

Combo exercises his demons in this beautifully crafted piece of cinema. Combo is an intense, misunderstood, uncontrollable monster who thinks he knows love.

Charlie, 3:10 to Yuma

2) Charlie Prince (Ben Foster) – 3:10 To Yuma (2007)

While 3:10 to Yuma focusses on the struggle between the outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) and out-of-pocket family man Dan Evans (Christian Bale), it is Charlie Prince that really shines as Wade’s second in command – a cold blooded mad-dog. While it is difficult to place why he makes such an excellent villain – is it his cold eyes and cool clothes, his uncaring mannerisms and his calm, nasal voice or all of the above? Charlie really brings with him a sense of impending doom, he is equal parts scary and unstoppable – a potent combo.

Joker, The Dark Knight

1) The Joker (Heath Ledger) – The Dark Knight (2008)

There’s little to say about the clown prince of crime apart from that he makes for a great villain. Ledger’s unique performance is both deeply disturbing and very funny. He’s both completely mad and logical. A super villain.

Other notable cinema villains in the past few years.

John, Saw

Jigsaw/John (Tobin Bell) – Saw (2004)

Even with three gun dots trained on his heart and cancer killing him, John Kramer still manages a mocking look.

The Operative, Serenity

The Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor) – Serenity (2005)

A well-spoken man of honour who is cool and calm. He knows exactly what he is – a monster.

Woo-jin Lee, OldBoy

Ji-tae Yu – OldBoy (2003)

Dae-su (Min-sik Choi) was a whisker away from getting his name up here as the film’s best anti-hero/villain, but the obsessive, homicidal Woo-jin Lee (Ji-tae Yu) stole it from under his nose.