Neil Blomkamp’s Newest Sci-Fi Venture: Oats Studios

When Ridley Scott decided to take back the reins of his Alien franchise and helm Alien: Covenant, the news was met with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Although some were delighted to have the director of the original

Exploring Wonder Woman’s Success.

Wonder Woman’s a hit, it’s official. A superhero movie’s second weekend box office performance is arguably the real measure of it’s success; on opening night, the feverish fanatics will be queuing up regardless. For example, DC’s tentpole outing, Batman v Superman, had the biggest second weekend box office drop-off of a modern superhero flick, mainly due to it being an incoherent, miserable mess; the die-har

How Postmodernism Challenges Notions of Fantasy and The Real in Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum

‘But even then, I think I understood that mother had been born again, into that other world. A world of fathomless signs and portents. Of magic and terror. And mysterious symbols.’

– Amadeus Arkham, Arkham Asylum (1989)

Game of Thrones: ‘Machiavelli meets magic’.

Niccolo Machiavelli was an Italian diplomat born in 1469. He is most famous for authoring The Prince which was published in 1532. From The Prince, the term ‘Machiavellian’ comes: a strategic term that requires one to separate morals from politics. The Prince is an instructional text on how to perpetuate power, although there are several interpretations

10 Reasons Alien: Covenant Was Better Than The Original

10 reasons Alien: Covenant was better than Alien.

Did you recently see Alien: Covenant, the sequel to 2012 sci-fi hit Prometheus? Was it a laughable disappointment? Do you think everyone involved should hang their heads in shame? Boy, are you wrong!!! Alien: Covenant ‘brought terror back to the franchise’ and ‘was the sequel the fans deserve’. Scroll down for a run down of all the reasons Covenant was in fact better than the original.

Psychoanalysis in Film

Psychoanalysis entered into film theory in the 1970s with Laura Mulvey’s seminal paper Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema (1975). Initially, Psychoanalysis and its core concepts: the id (the primal, impulsive and selfish part of the psyche), the ego (the realistic mediator between id and super-ego) and the super-ego (the moral conscience) were established by Sigmund Freud (Freud, 1921).

Ideology in Film

 

Hawkes argues that a person is a reflection of their environment and that their ‘personality’ is a composite of stimuli such as images and attitudes accumulated throughout life (Hawkes, 1996); the sum of this accumulation constitutes any one person’s ideology. Ideology can be a set of beliefs for exa

Alien: Covenant. Nothing new?

The latest trailer for Alien: Covenant has been released and seems to epitomise the ‘soft reboot’. A soft reboot is technically a sequel to an existing franchise, usually a successful one, that functions as a reboot without departing completely from the original timeline. It re-introduces a franchise to a new younger audience and establishes new main characters and story. At the same time it re-treads iconic moments for older fans. A soft reboot is the cinematic equivalent of having your cake and eating it by drawing from the original as much or as little as it likes. The most successful soft reboots have perhaps been Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Jurassic World.

Logan Marks a New Age of Superhero Film

Hugh Jackman’s seventh outing as Marvel’s cigar-chomping, claw-wielding mutant takes place in the near future. The remaining mutants are few and the landscapes are as bleak as our protagonists outlook. Logan is a tired limo driver, caring for Professor X (Sir Patrick Stewart) who’s mind grows unstable, to the point where it is considered a weapon of mass destruction. When a young mutant is thru

Determining the validity of a research project: Batman and his villains.

This was a 2nd year university project researching a possible 3rd year dissertation project.

Pilot Project
How Do Batman’s Villains Reflect Aspects of His Own Psyche?