Sci-Fi / Fantasy

"Space...the final frontier. These are the continuing voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one man gone before!"

Of course, we never did get five years from that original show when it ended after just three years in 1969. The new film series has tried to fix that for us. The latest film picks up the five-year mission just after three years have gone by. It's a double homage to the original show.

“Does death only come for the wicked and leave the decent behind?”

Throughout its first five seasons, Game of Thrones has been relentlessly cruel to its viewers heroes in a way that shocked audiences and upended genre expectations. But as Thrones edges toward its conclusion — and as the TV adaptation becomes more unmoored than ever from the George R.R. Martin novels that inspired it — certain storytelling conventions seem to be inevitably taking over. I seriously doubt this saga will have a traditional “happy ending,” but season 6 is as close as the show has ever come to being a full-blown crowd-pleaser.

"Space... The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission, to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before."

Every Star Trek fan knows the words by heart. For 50 years they've heralded the promise of something special. From the television show that couldn't but did anyway to 12 feature films. Would #13 be the lucky one? The trailers left many of us worried that it would more than likely be unlucky.

“The countless lives we lost in the War Of '96 did not perish in vain. They inspire us to rise from the ashes as one people of one world. For 20 years the world has seen no armed conflict. Nations have put their petty differences aside. United, we rebuilt our families, our cities and our lives. The fusion of human and alien technology not only enabled us to defy gravity and travel at unimaginable speeds. It also made our planet finally safe again."

Not so fast there, cowboy. There would be no need for a sequel to the 1996 hit film Independence Day if the big bad aliens weren't coming back.

“Everything they've built will fall! And from the ashes of their world, we'll build a better one!”

Since Disney has taken over The Bullpen at Marvel, they have had an unprecedented run of successful comic book superhero films. During that same time DC/Warner has had trouble finding a direction for their cinematic universe. But the Marvel titles still in the hands of other studios haven’t shared in that run of good fortune. Sony finally had to relinquish control of Spider-Man, and Fox has followed disaster with disaster with The Fantastic Four. The single exception to that rule has been the Fox handling of The X-Men universe.

If you are looking for action and adventure, then you will not want to miss X-Men: First Class, a top-notch production that thrills.  The storyline under the able direction of Matthew Vaughn contains all the explosiveness you would expect from a prequel to Marvel Comics’ famous X-Men. It’s the beginning of the saga, and we find Magneto (Michael Fassbender) being haunted by the death of someone close him.  Escaping the clutches of the evil Nazi war criminal Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), Magneto meets Charles Xavier (James McAvoy).

“A creature that gestates inside a living human host…and has concentrated acid for blood.”

If you're a fan of sci-fi, horror, or action films, chances are you're also intimately familiar with the creature at the center of the Alien franchise. Ridley Scott's 1979 original is a masterpiece of space horror, so it would've been foolish for any follow-up to try and replicate the same formula. Instead, James Cameron's classic sequel succeeds by transplanting an entirely new genre into the series (Aliens is basically a war movie) while maintaining the sense of terror that made its predecessor a classic. You can get a fresh look for yourself now that Fox has released a 30th Anniversary Edition.

When it comes to titles from Blizzard Entertainment, I was always more into the Starcraft and Diablo franchises. I played World of Warcraft (WoW) for a small period of time when it became a popular MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), but my interest in the game quickly died. The aesthetics were a little too cartoony for my liking, plus, you paid for a subscription. Regardless, I am just one fan of Blizzard: WoW caught on like wildfire. I still know people who are playing the game to this day.

Growing up I was obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series; it was the Saturday morning cartoon I just couldn’t get enough of.  When I couldn’t watch the cartoon, I’d be playing with the toys and eventually the video game back in the original Nintendo console days.  So when the movies came out, my parents had no choice but to take me to see them.  Back in those days we had the turtles in rubber suits; as a kid the experience was fun but still just not as good as the cartoon.  As I got older, well, those original films seem to hold up less and less, and when the news came that an updated version of the film would be coming out I got a little excited, that is till I saw the trailer for the 2014 film.

"My name is Barry Allen, and I am the fastest man alive. When I was a child, I saw my mother killed by something impossible. My father went to prison for her murder. Then an accident made me the impossible, and I became the Flash. I used my powers to find the man responsible for my mother's death. I thought I would finally get justice for my family, but I failed. It's been six months since the Singularity. I'm on my own now. Decided it's better that way. Keeps the people I care about safe. There's only one thing I can do now. I run…" 

The Flash is CSI with a twist. Barry Allen (Gustin) is a police scientist working in the CSI lab of Central City.