Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

 "Ghost in the machine..."

Let's admit it: this isn't exactly the greatest film ever made. But it's a fascinating one. 

This is the most cyberpunk film I've ever seen, from a time when cyberpunk was, at a stretch, still pretty much a thing in its original form, and it's helmed by a director best known for making the music videos for R.E.M, which in itself is pleasingly '90s. Even better, it's an adaptation of a William Gibson short story (I've read it, but we're talking thirty odd years...) with a screenplay by Gibson himself.

It's not exactly great, despite all that- it lacks a certain sparkle in dialogue, direction and performance (although Henry Rollins is great) and, given the cast, I suspect that last flaw is down to the director. Yet this isn't by any means a bad film either, simply promising but flawed. And it shows, perhaps, that the script is by a novelist who isn't used to writing for the screen.

Yet it's fascinating to see this imagined cyberpunk future of 2021 (there's a pandemic!), with corporate rule enforced by Yakuza, intelligent savant dolphins (shades of Halo Jones there), and, er, VCRs! The internet is shown with trippy visuals and imagined in such a quaint, 90s, virtual reality way. It's all so... cyberpunk.

Yet the ideas are often great. Uploading extra memory capacity to one's brain. An electronic virus. A cyborg preacher. This is a flawed film, but I'm glad it exists: a film that is the cinematic epitome of cyberpunk itself.

Aquaman (2018)

”Show off... I could have just peed on it."

Unusually for a superhero movie, I'm going in blind. For once I know pretty much naff all about the superhero in question and his supporting cast. What I do know, though, is that DC Universe movies, to the extent that's still a thing, have been decidedly mixed. Fortunately, the gods be praised, this is a Wonder Woman and not a Justice League.

Some of the typical DC sins are found here as well, mind; CGI abounds and, certainly, it makes for a visually impressive and rather awesome set of scenes in Atlantis with Atlanteans riding sharks and giant turtles as beasts of burden, but we also get CGI countryside, de-wrinkled faces and all sorts of unnecessary nonsense.

I know nothing of DC’s Atlantis (I’m a Sub-Mariner kind of guy) but we get a real exploration of its history, fantastic though it seems- an ancient technological civilisation (are they Minoans? Is Atlantis in the Med? They seem a bit Greek to me, culturally) which sank because of hubris and where there are now various different kingdoms which are disunited and where, in spite of only a few thousand years presumably passing, people have evolved very differently- one kingdom is of met-people.

In spite of visually following the unfortunate DC house style, though, this film is warm and human, and solidly entertaining. It helps that Jason Momoa’s Aquaman is likeable- humble, bloke USA and fun-loving, a hero you could have a pint with. And the plot is a solid little quest narrative as Aquaman follows a series of tasks to retain a weapon which can be lifted only by the one true king and which shows his right to rule- no surprise he happens to be called Arthur. He also knows his early Roman history, which is a plus.

The cast is superb, too, although the appearance of Amber Heard leads to the same awkwardness as appearances by Johnny Depp- one of them is a domestic abuser, and we know not which. But it’s great to see the great Dolph Lundgren, Willem Dafoe, and even Nicole Kidman is actually pretty good. This is a good old-fashioned blockbuster, and fun with it.

The Punisher (1989)

"Who sent you?"

"Batman!"

I was pleasantly surprised by this film, I have to say. Not that it's any good, of course; it's a trashy '80s action film starring Dolph Lundgren and is neither big nor clever. What it is, though, is highly entertaining in all it's glorious trashiness throughout. A melodrama may be all it is, but it works.

The film starts with a crude but efficient combination of set piece and exposition which introduces us to Frank Castle, what he does and his backstory. The character isn't very deep, so an actor like Lundgren is all that's required and, moreover, the opening set piece features a doomed baddie who is portrayed with enormous quantities of ham. But the film soon settles down into it's entertaining Mafia vs Yakuza plot, with a bit of buddy buddy cop stuff thrown in there too. The film is well enough shot in its Australian locations and Jeroen Krabbe is also good enough as the mob boss forced to work with Castle. Even the child actors are mostly adequate.

It's all very late '80s, of course, from the music to the hardline attitude to crime, and one thing that really dates it is the subtext (probably not intentional; the film isn't that clever) of Japan gradually overtaking the USA economically, as everyone seemed to think was happening at the time. There's lots of martial arts action, with even the opening titles looking a bit like a martial arts film.

I like Snake too, a much needed comedy character and someone there to remind us of the extremely dodgy ethics of vigilante murder and how it's victims are not only the guilty; the film is hardly philosophical but it avoids presenting the Punisher as a hero, and I like that. The film is what it is, but for me it was both enjoyable and, ignoring small details, a more or less faithful rendering of the comic book character. This is more worth watching than you probably thought.

Masters of the Universe (1987)

"I don't like adventures!"

This is one of my absolute favourite rubbish films. Oh, it's rubbish alright. Eternia looks like a cheap set indoors and like Southern California outdoors, but despite this they had to save money by setting it on Earth, which I imagine would be much cheaper. Skeletor's mask looks rubbish, and poor old Frank Langella gets hilariously clichéd lines such as "A curious quartet" and "Gildor, you minute minion". What's an actor to do but ham it up? As for Dolph Lundgren's performance as He-Man… well, the credits show that he needed both a speech coach and a drama coach. 'Nuff said.

I love it, though. It wears its rubbishness with pride, and is full of dialogue that can only be deliberately hammy. The music is so very, very '80s, and so are the hairstyles. It even has James Tolkan in it, the chap who plays Mr Strickland in the Back to the Future trilogy, and he's one of my favourite actors. In fact, he's probably the best thing about this film.

Still… this is a commercial tie-in to the Masters of the Universe cartoon and toys, so we'd best talk about those. It's all pretty much a formative part of my childhood since the age of five, and I can still remember a disturbingly large number of character names. One of them was called Fisto. Hur Hur. Although I'm not sure what the relevance of the phrase "Masters of the Universe" was. It was all just a load of cynical marketing, of course, but we '80s kids lapped it up. The cartoon, which mostly only featured the same few characters, was a good laugh in spite of the recycled animation and plots, partly because of the deeply silly moral homily at the end of each episode. The backgrounds always looked fantastic, almost as druggy as the plot, and set up a very specific visual aesthetic that anchored this odd mix of sci-fi and fantasy.

This film is not exactly a faithful representation, which should come as no surprise; why should Hollywood creative types slavishly adhere to the rules laid down by a range of toys? Anyway, lots of the characters would be impossible to render well in live action on an obviously limited budget; look how rubbish Skeletor looks. I'm sort of glad they didn't try to do an Orko.

The whole aesthetic is different from the cartoon- very much a mix of the standard Hollywood '80s sci-fi and standard Hollywood fantasy. The overall effect is something much darker and less trippy which makes you much more aware of the inherent silliness of names such as "He-Man and "Evil-Lyn" than would have otherwise been the case. Orko is replaced by Gwildor who, as a fairly standard '80s Hollywood fantasy dwarf, is far more budget friendly. And Billy Barty is the second best thing about this film.

Oddly enough, it seems the director, Gary Goddard, was heavily inspired by Jack Kirby's New Gods stuff for DC. I've not read much of that, but I can see how that would have affected the aesthetic and how Skeletor would presumably be a sort of Darkseid figure. More obvious, though, are the suspiciously large number of, er, "homages" to the Star Wars trilogy. Let's look at them, Shall we?

·         Skeletor is accompanied by a load of black, armoured troops that seem suspiciously close to being stormtroopers.

·         The scene with Skeletor inspecting the bounty hunters is suspiciously close to the similar scene in The Empire Strikes Back. Just using the word "mercenaries" instead of "bounty hunters" doesn't fool me, I'm afraid.

·         The final fight, with He-Man throwing Skeletor down a big hole and the camera following him down for a few feet, is suspiciously close to the climax of Return of the Jedi. Come to think of it, Skeletor looks an awful lot like the Emperor.

That's all coincidence, I'm sure. For the rest, though, we have a fairly standard adventure plot, with the Cosmic Key as our McGuffin. We have Julie (a young Courteney Cox with… interesting hair) and Kevin as our audience identification characters because, obviously, we couldn't possibly be expected to identify with aliens. We have a ridiculously square-jawed, goody-goody hero and a silly, moustache-twirling villain. We have a henchman being zapped to death for failure. We have a silly comedy dwarf. It's all very by-the-numbers, really, but fun, and crammed with action and adventure, up to and including an exploding microwave.

I'm not sure about the ending, though. If Julie and Kevin are a few months back in time, what happened to their earlier selves? Doesn't this create a time paradox so that none of this ever happened? Oh, and if the cosmic key can cause time travel then why didn't our heroes just go back in time and stop Skeletor from doing anything naughty in the first place? Probably best not to think too hard about such things…