Word: fi
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Hints of yet another space odyssey appear at the finale and should be ignored. 2061 occasionally offers a challenging sci-fi aphorism -- "Only Time is universal; Night and Day are merely quaint local customs found on planets that tidal forces have not yet robbed of their rotation" -- but by now the mix of imagination and anachronism is wearing as thin as the oxygen layer on Mars...
INNERSPACE Sci-fi satires may finally be B.O. poison, but Director Joe Dante knows how to send the genre out (and up) in a blaze of tangled plots, visual bravura and comic-book savvy...
...WORST movie of all is the title piece, "Amazon Women on the Moon," a B-grade 1950s sci-fi disaster, whose plot can be deduced from its title. The film's accurate stone-age special effects (rockets hanging from wires, etc.) and sound problems are surpassed in ludicrousness only by the film's overt jingoism, sexism, materialism and xenophobia...
...Fujisawa Municipal Gymnasium (1982) exemplifies the impeccable craft of his best work since then. Like much Japanese architecture of the past 25 years, it has a sci-fi quality: one section of the building resembles some enormous otherworldly blimp, the other calls to mind a high-tech samurai helmet. But unlike the slicker gimmicky UFO architecture (Kurokawa's earlier work, for instance), Maki's gym is restrained and sober, a mature fantasy. The flawless, parabolic stainless-steel skin is 1.6 acres in size but just about one-sixtieth of an inch thick...
...just $13 million, Executive Producer Jon Davison (Airplane!) has put together a sci-fi fantasy with sleek, high-powered drive. And Paul Verhoeven, the Dutch director (Soldier of Orange) making his Hollywood debut, has polished the look of the film until it is seamless and pretty near soulless. Hubcaps slice off a speeding car like saw-toothed Frisbees, and gruesome death is just another way of saying "That's life." No wonder the film was almost rated X for violence; it is crazy in love with the imagination of disaster. It wants to caress the special effect...