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"Contact" is a beautiful story, about how a young astronomer is driven by her own painful past to embark on a voyage of discovery: Discovery about the universe, and discovery about herself.

The astronomer, Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway, was always fascinated--even driven--to make contact with beings in the universe, ever since as a young child she desperately tried--without success--to contact the spirits of her own beloved but recently deceased parents via a ham radio set. Ever since, she's wanted to know just who or what is out there. She begs for research funds and time slots on radio telescopes, hoping to detect some message from space.

She meets a young religious leader, Palmer Joss, who has wondered about the same questions. He found his answers in God; while Ellie, dissatisfied with that, keeps looking for scientific answers. They have a close but questioning relationship, symbolizing how scientific cosmology and religion may be driven by similar impulses but come up with different answers.

Suddenly an alien message from space is received on Ellie's radio telescopes. Washington DC tasks Ellie with the job of decoding the message. That starts Ellie on a path of learning and discovery of which she could never have dreamed. What happens to her, and what she finds, certainly made me think, long after the movie had concluded.

Many have compared "Contact" to "2001: A Space Odyssey." But the big difference is the personal treatment in "Contact." In "2001," it was all about the voyage of discovery of the human race; the characters were flat and one-dimensional. In "Contact," how scientific discovery changes Ellie Arroway personally, is just as important.

The only significant gripe I have with this movie is the Forrest Gump-like splicing of actual footage of President Clinton and some other celebrities of the 1990s into some of the scenes. Sagan's novel, on which the movie is based, had a totally fictional U.S. President to make the executive decisions. The movie would have been better that way; because now that Clinton has been out of office for 11 years, the movie wouldn't appear a bit dated.

But if you can look past that one flaw, the rest of the movie is definitely well worth watching. And its message is worth pondering.

The Earth's climate is heating up--and humans have to figure out how to cope with it.

The movie was made in 1960, at the height of the Cold War--so in the movie, nuclear weapons, rather than greenhouse gases, are the culprit. But most of what you see transpiring could happen just as easily as the greenhouse effect increases. (Someone could really do a superb remake of this movie today, blaming CO2 instead of nukes.) In this movie, there are no jaw-dropping special effects, just ordinary folks struggling to cope with the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. As seen through the eyes of newspaper reporters, who report the facts to their readers--and try to figure out what it all means.

A taut script, excellent acting, taut direction, good characterizations, and docudrama-like realism all keep the tension at a high level.

I wanted very much to love this show. I'm mathematically inclined, and I was glad to see a show that tried to show young viewers how math could solve so many real-world problems.

Unfortunately, my enjoyment of the show was spoiled by several of its elements:

The "background" music is too persistent and way too loud, often drowning out the dialogue.

Diane Farr mumbles and slurs her lines, to the point that some of her lines are just incomprehensible. Combined with the overly loud music drowning out all the dialogue, this is a show I must watch with closed-captioning, so I can read what she's supposed to be saying.

The character relationships are just not interesting enough. How many times can we watch Charlie Eppes kvetching about his dad or arguing with his dad. Don Eppes, the FBI agent, is a more interesting character, suggesting that the writers have a better idea how to portray an FBI agent as a dimensional character than they do a mathematician.

And worst of all, some (but by no means all) of the "math breakthroughs" that Charlie Eppes is supposed to be making, are just exercises in logic that any good sleuth familiar with modern computer graphics and map displays could invent.

The premise of a wormhole that can take the Sliders to any alternate reality was terrific. No limit to the number of possible stories.

What wasn't terrific is the cliché of what happened once the Sliders got there--even in the generally heralded Season 1.

A typical episode: The Sliders land on some new world. Initially things don't look so bad to them. But soon they find out that The World Isn't That Great After All. They end up running afoul of some Bad Guys (seems that they just can't stop meeting up with Bad Guys), who want them killed. So they escape, flee, and manage to slide out of there Just In Time before they're killed. It seems like the last third of nearly every episode is about the Sliders Chased By The Bad Guys. Evidently with very few exceptions, the only way to motivate the Sliders to slide again was to have them Chased By Bad Guys.

Why can't the Sliders land someplace where they're not in any physical danger, but they just are appalled by the customs or the society or something there? Why can't there be alternate worlds which are truly so nice and tempting that the Sliders are tempted to stay there, rather than return home to their friends and families? And have to make a difficult choice between love of their families on Earth Prime vs. a life in paradise on Paradise-Earth? The writers had an opportunity to do that with the Season 1 episode "Luck of the Draw." The episode would have been fine if Wade and Rembrandt each fell in love with a lottery winner, and tried to save the two winners before they were killed. It wasn't necessary to put Wade and Rembrandt in physical danger themselves. Doing so just added to the feeling that all episodes had to end with The Sliders Escaping From Mortal Danger.

Other sci-fi series--Star Trek included--showed more creativity here. Besides all the episodes where Our Heroes Are In Mortal Danger, there were plenty of other episodes where Our Heroes had important decisions to make or an important problem to solve, or they tried to interact with local inhabitants and failed, or they were tempted to stay there and decided not to, etc. But all this seems beyond the reach of Sliders' writers.

The best part of "Knowing" was the first part: In 1959, a schoolgirl seems to be hearing voices. They command her to ask her teacher to create a time capsule (good thing the school principal said yes), and to write down a series of numbers and put them into the time capsule (good thing the teacher said yes). This part is creepy, gripping, and suspenseful--we're waiting to find out what this all means, and what happens when the time capsule is eventually unearthed.

Fast forward to 2009, when it's unearthed. A schoolboy gets a hold of the numbers. His astrophysicist father (played by Nicholas Cage) figures out what the numbers mean--they're references to all the disasters that will have taken place since 1959. Too bad this list of disasters didn't include the second half of this movie.

Because as the plot moves forward past this point, it gets extremely jumbled, with plot elements that are introduced and seem important (like the camera keeps focusing on them), but are never explained. There are too many plot holes to list here. And the connection between the sci-fi elements and the obvious Christianity allusions seems weak; it's as if the producers started out with a straightforward sci-fi/thriller plot, and then decided to overlay Christianity on top of it.

Also, the plot seems far too derivative; it is reminiscent of "The DaVinci Code," "Signs," and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," with even some "Chariots of the Gods" stuff thrown in.

The acting is mediocre; Nicolas Cage seems miscast as the astrophysicist plunged into mysticism and horror; and there isn't much chemistry between the characters.

All in all, "Knowing" was a disappointment. It's as if the producers had exactly one good idea--the premise of the numbers placed by the schoolgirl in the time capsule--but didn't know quite what to do with it.

This movie is unusual for its absence of the usual Abbott & Costello routines and shtick. Instead, it has a genuinely engrossing plot, good acting, a few scary moments, and even decent special effects.

The story opens in 1780. Lou Costello plays Horatio Prim, a Revolutionary War tinker loyal to the Revolutionary cause; and Bud Abbott plays Cuthbert Greenway, a butler who has wronged him. Mr. Prim and a friend, equally patriotic Melody Allen (played by the delightful Marjorie Main) are mistaken for traitors by General Washington's army and killed. They return as ghosts, cursed to walk the earth near where they were shot, unless they can find some evidence to prove their innocence of the charge of treason.

Centuries pass without any success, and now it's 1946. A new family has built a house on the premises, including Dr. Ralph Greenway (also played by Bud Abbott), a descendant of the original Cuthbert Greenway. Mr. Prim and Ms. Allen try to enlist their aid in finding evidence to prove their own innocence--and free them to go to heaven.

Except for those aforementioned scary moments, the movie is warm and even touching rather than good for belly laughs, with a cute twist at the very end that will leave you smiling.

Scott Carey, a formerly healthy man, happily married, contracts a strange debilitating illness. He becomes increasingly disabled; what he could do yesterday, he can't do today; and what he can do today, he may not be able to do tomorrow. The doctors try everything in their power to cure him, but fail. Carey becomes increasingly bitter and angry, yelling at his wife; even going outside the marriage for female companionship. Yet, in the end, as the illness progresses and Carey approaches possible oblivion, comes a quiet acceptance--and an existential insight as to his own place and purpose in the Universe.

This story could have been about any life-threatening disabling illness: Cancer, Lou Gehrig's disease, any. But the SF part is that the "disability" here is tiny size--Carey continues to shrink away, day by day, till he's only the size of an insect.

The set-piece battles: Carey vs. cat, Carey vs. spider--are of course what sold the movie. And they are beautifully done. But it's the philosophical dimension, watching a man struggling to cope with this medical catastrophe that has befallen him--that sets this SF movie above most others.

The only negative note was that the interaction of Scott with his new female friend was, frankly, unrealistic. She was supposed to be a midget, but female midgets just don't have the same figure as a life-sized actress playing a midget inside a giant set. It would also have been nice to let the romantic angle develop a bit more--just to the kissing stage. Even in the 1950s, you could show a married man having an affair.

It's episodes like this that remind us that Rod Serling was able to produce terrific fantasy and science fiction without fantastically expensive special effects and elaborate sets. Just a poignant yet intriguing script and great acting by some of Hollywood's biggest stars (Cliff Robertson in this case).

That's all it took to produce this terrific time-travel story of the meeting of two eras, when Chris Horn (Cliff Robertson), a wagon master heading west in 1847 with his wife and desperately ill son, accidentally stumbles into the year 1961. Horn's initial shock at the changes wrought in America in over a hundred years, soon turns to a determination to use the medical advances of the 20th century to save his son's life, back in the 19th century.

Not till "Network" did any movie skewer modern entertainment as well as "The Tenth Victim." It actually predicted the modern fad of reality TV, long before anyone ever heard that term.

"The Tenth Victim" is about what we would now call a futuristic reality show: Human "hunters" are assigned human "victims" to murder. The victims must find a way to turn the tables on their hunters and kill them instead. And whoever achieves ten successful kills in a row wins the grand prize of $1 million, and becomes an instant celebrity.

A Huntress, Caroline (played by the delectable Ursula Andress), decides to make some extra money by even doing a product placement for some tea company in her next kill. Her assigned Victim is played well as a cynical fatalist by Marcello Mastroianni. But complications ensue when they get to know each other better.

And now, after single-elimination shows like "Survivor" and "Amazing Race" and "Fear Factor," this entire concept doesn't sound as bizarre as it did back in 1965. We've almost caught up to it.

Viva Laughlin is fun to watch, but only in the same way that the movie "Plan 9 From Outer Space" is fun to watch: It's such a train wreck, you can have fun seeing how bad it gets: The premise is uninteresting. The characters are uninteresting. Most of the musical numbers are lamely choreographed without flair or style. The dialogue is hilariously bad, replete with clichés and bizarre mixed metaphors.

The one bright note (pun intended) in Viva Laughlin is Hugh Jackman's delightfully cheesy interpretation of a gangster-businessman and his rendition of "Sympathy for the Devil." Unfortunately, that character is not a regular character so he would not appear that often.

The other major actors are just awful--and so is the show.

How does a movie like "Battlefield Earth" ever get made? With the huge production crew that a big-budget motion picture has, how is it that not one person on the production crew dared to warn the director what a disaster was unfolding? How did the director, Roger Christian, keep a straight face as he directed the actors to mumble the inane dialogue and emote as badly as a high-school play? Didn't anyone on the set--the script supervisor, the assistant director, somebody--burst out laughing? As director, Roger Christian had the authority to alter individual "clinkers" in the script that didn't seem right; why didn't he? "Battlefield Earth" may be a dud of a movie, but it stands as one of the best examples of "groupthink" that Hollywood production crews have ever produced.

"Capricorn One" is a clever but flawed paranoia-type thriller.

In the movie, NASA attempts to fake the first manned mission to Mars with the "cooperation" of the three astronauts. The astronauts discover they are to be killed as part of the hoax. (The space hardware is all Apollo stuff, which is obviously implying that the Apollo moon landings were faked, as conspiracy theorists have alleged ever since.) There are some good performance here, by Hal Holbrook as the desperate NASA administrator, Sam Waterston as an astronaut with a desperate sense of humor, and Telly Savalas as a wild but skilled airplane pilot.

If you can look past all the contrived scenes and plot holes, you'll be fascinated by Peter Hyams' conception of how such a space landing could be faked, and how the deception might be unraveled. It's only in the last part of the movie that I lost interest. The helicopter chase scene is fun, but you know how it's going to turn out so there was no real suspense there.

The basic concept behind the Mars landing hoax was the use of state-of-the-art (by 1970s standards) special effects to fool the whole world into accepting the "landing" as real. Today's SFX are so much more sophisticated that things that we really do take for granted as true might indeed be faked. All of which brings to mind Pontius Pilate's famous question: "What is truth?"

A flawed but intriguing character study of two of the most extraordinary individuals of our modern technological era.

The movie is historically inaccurate. Nevertheless, it manages to capture the essence of how much of modern computing came to be: the cluelessness of Xerox about what its own computer scientists were doing; Steve Jobs' artistic vision at Apple; and Bill Gates' ruthless business practices at Microsoft. And you will be fascinated by how these men got where they are today.

The movie isn't very kind to either Jobs or Gates, emphasizing their negative qualities. Steve Jobs is presented as a visionary, but also as a slavedriver and someone who refuses to accept that he's the illegitimate father of a young girl.

Gates is portrayed in an even less flattering way--as some kind of outright sociopath who is driven to destroy all those who try to do business with him. Still, as long as you recognize that the portrayals are negatively slanted, you will be rewarded by witnessing the interplay among the famous triangle: Adele Goldberg (not explicitly named in the movie), the leader of Xerox's research team; Steve Jobs, who ripped her off and incorporated those technologies in the new Macintosh; and Bill Gates, who ripped off Jobs and incorporated those technologies in the newer Windows product.

The movie does suffer from several historical inaccuracies. I believe that at least some of those inaccuracies were deliberate--attempts to oversimplify the historical record in order to shorten the length of the movie. For example, the movie makes it appear that Apple's first attempt at a computer with a modern graphical user interface--the Lisa--was a tremendous success, when in fact it was a commercial failure. But portraying it as a success made it simpler to explain why Bill Gates got interested in dealing with Apple at that time.

While the movie is long, it would have been even better as a two-day or three-day miniseries. That would have enabled some of the historical record to be explored at greater depth, eliminating the need for this deliberate vast oversimplification.

"The Great Escape" is an engrossing, well-acted, and fairly accurate portrayal of the famous escape of some 76 Allied POWs from a German Stalag during World War II. You get to see the intricate detail of the escape operation--and you also get to witness its bittersweet aftermath.

Good, often understated, ensemble acting by what was for the 1960's an all-star cast, adds further to the sense of realism. In particular, Donald Pleasance poignantly plays a POW who gives his all to make the mass escape succeed, but then realizes he can't go himself because he's going blind.

But "The Great Escape" is more than just an exciting adventure story. It also reminds us of several important things about the human condition: Human beings need to be free, as much as they need food and water. And they will struggle against enormous odds to gain their freedom. But freedom never comes cheap. The Allied POWs succeed in breaking out of the Stalag and dashing across Germany, in hopes of reaching a neutral country. But, as it turns out, at a very high price.

"Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" had the difficult job of finally--finally--ending the adventures of the original crew of the Enterprise from The Original Series, in a way that doesn't leave its many fans disappointed. And overall, the movie succeeds well at this.

The plot is a VERY obvious allegory of the ending of the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union.

*** WARNING: SPOILERS START HERE. ***

Praxis (Chernobyl), a key Klingon energy facility, is destroyed. The Klingon economy is badly hurt and its leader, Gorkon (Gorbachev), decides to make peace with the Federation. But a vocal minority of folks on both sides are unhappy with this, due to habit, distrust, suspicion, and outright prejudice.

Unknown assailants attempt to assassinate Gorkon. Kirk and McCoy are blamed by the Klingons, arrested, and exiled to Rura Penthe, a frozen, forbidding wasteland (Siberia). Kirk and McCoy must escape, figure out who is really behind the plot, and stop them before they finally succeed in murdering Gorkon.

This "whodunit," while darker in tone than previous Star Treks, is both engrossing and suspenseful. Each of the famous characters has a decent part in this movie as a fitting end to their playing these roles. The characters have grown more and are more multi-dimensional than they ever were in the past. Kirk is old now, and his years of battling the Klingons and losing his son have made him bitter and prejudiced toward them. Sulu shows he's capable of commanding a starship now.

Where the movie loses points, is in continuity with previous Star Trek. Star Trek always had to strike a balance between inventive new plots but still remaining faithful to the basic concepts and characterizations that had already been established--something Nicholas Meyer never cared much about. Showing treacherous Vulcans, Federation officers who are racially prejudiced toward Klingons, and Spock mind-melding a captive against her will (a kind of mental rape) were inconsistent with everything in previous Star Trek. Given that this was to be the last feature of The Original Series crew, this was not a great time to introduce such major departures.

Overall: 7/10

"Deal Of The Century" was director William Friedkin's attempt to create a "black comedy" satirizing the armaments industry, in much the same way as Stanley Kubrick satirized the nuclear balance of power in "Dr. Strangelove." Unfortunately, it falls short of that ambitious goal.

The movie concerns an arms dealer, Eddie Muntz (Chevy Chase), who gets an opportunity to take over the sale of an ultra-advanced pilotless combat aircraft to a dumb South American dictator when the original salesperson dies unexpectedly.

Friedkin clearly thought he was making a great movie here, in the way he diligently employed many of the same elements as "Strangelove": verisimilitude in the names of arms companies and weapon systems, blatant phallic symbolism, sex-obsessed characters, sight gags, and a basically bizarre, unreal plot.

Unfortunately, all Friedkin ends up doing is showing that he is no Kubrick (at least not after "The French Connection" anyway), Chevy Chase is no Peter Sellers, and in general those associated with this movie just aren't in the same league as those who made "Strangelove." Many of the lines and sight gags just aren't that funny, and the satirical point about the armaments industry gets lost in a meandering plot with an irrelevant subplot about Muntz' romance with the dead salesman's widow (Sigourney Weaver). An actual romance tended to dilute the satirical effectiveness of the sexual obsessions of the major characters.

"Strategic Air Command" is a look at the 1950's, when the needs of the Cold War caused America to begin rearming after having nearly disarmed itself following World War II.

With his trademark sincerity, James Stewart plays Lt. Col. Holland, a former Air Force officer and now ballplayer who is recalled to duty as the new Strategic Air Command expands its might. June Allyson plays Sally, his devoted wife. Together they and the other families of SAC have to cope with the strains that SAC missions put on their personal lives.

The stresses that SAC duty put on families is true enough. But as movie drama it's all written in a way that's utterly trite and predictable. You can practically guess in advance the main set-pieces: Sally is going to become pregnant and have to deal with it without her husband around, Holland is going to get into some life-threatening situations and be thinking of his wife all the while, but he'll be rescued in the end, and so on.

What nearly makes up for a trite plot, however, is the spectacular aerial photography of the two "actors" that truly steal the show: SAC's B-36 Peacemaker bomber, and its state-of-the-art (at the time!) medium jet bomber, the B-47. The B-36, a huge flying battleship with six prop engines plus four jet engines, and a crew of maybe 15, is beautifully photographed in flight, with an accompanying musical score. For today's younger generation who are used to today's ultra-modern planes, the movie is worth seeing for its loving last look at a generation of impressive aircraft that never saw combat, and hence aren't as well known as both their predecessors and successors that did serve in war.

"Space Patrol" (a.k.a. "Planet Patrol" for U.S. release) was a children's cartoon show with puppet marionettes. The concept was an interplanetary organization of men and women from Earth, Mars and Venus, patrolling the Solar System to maintain the peace in the year 2100.

What distinguished this series from others of its ilk was the thought that went into it. The characters had real personalities. The futuristic Headquarters City was well done despite the cheap budget, with individual personal vehicles traveling thru transparent tubes to be automatically guided to their final destination. The spaceship wasn't the usual rocket ship, but something innovative: a "Galasphere" that looked vaguely like a kid's gyroscope toy, that made weird humming sounds as it sailed thru space. (Those humming sounds became the theme song for the TV series.)

The plots and sets were surprisingly dark for a children's show, in the style of "Outer Limits." One plot concerned aliens from Neptune (I think) conspiring to take over the minds of Earthlings and eventually "conquer the Earth leaders". Another dealt with a plot to subvert Earth's currency by counterfeiting huge quantities of Earth money. Even the backdrops were dark--the sky over the Headquarters City was usually dark, dreary overcast rather than bright and sunny.

Could have been a great show with a bigger budget.

You know that a monster movie stinks when the monster finally appears and it's the worst thing in the movie.

Essentially they tried to do a British remake of "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" with a worse monster and worse monster special effects. Until the monster finally does its first attack before the camera, this movie wasn't too bad. The acting by Gene Evans and Andre Morell is actually better than many of the performances in "20,000 Fathoms." The first scenes in the movie were scripted well.

But then the monster finally does its first big attack, on the ferry boat. And you can see it's just a lifeless rubber model with a head and heck that don't flex and water that just drips off the thing stupidly.

Besides, this monster, unlike Godzilla and the Rhedosaurus from "20,000 Fathoms," has no redeeming characterization or charm whatsoever. It isn't even particularly scary. It's just a big clumsy Brachiosaurus that galumphs around, emits deadly radiation, and knocks over stuff.

Skip this movie and see "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" instead if you haven't seen it yet--or haven't seen it lately.

"Time after Time" is a clever battle of wits between Jack the Ripper, who has used H.G. Wells' time machine to escape to the year 1979, and H.G. Wells, who steps into the machine to get to 1979 too, and chase after the Ripper. (This kind of brain-to-brain combat between two very special people is a theme that Nicholas Meyer will return to in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.")

Particularly interesting is how Jack the Ripper, an evil serial killer, finds himself completely at home in the year 1979, while H.G. Wells, with his idealistic dreams of a perfectible society, is completely out of place in our modern era.

Malcolm McDowell is believable yet comical as the intellectual Wells, almost bird-like in his quick, darting movements. David Warner is adequate as Jack the Ripper, but you don't get enough of a feeling of the Ripper's insanity and evil. Mary Steenburgen, as Wells' newfound love interest in 1979, acts well enough, but she delivers some of her lines unconvincingly.

The lush Miklos Rosza score is a treat.

Worth seeing.

"Kronos" is about a robot emissary (which Earth scientists name Kronos), sent by aliens to Earth. It lands on the coast of Mexico and goes on a rampage. The aliens have exhausted energy supplies on their own planet (which it is correctly noted may well happen here before too long), and so they sent Kronos to Earth to suck up energy from our remaining energy resources. Unknowingly, Earth counterattacks with weapons like an H-bomb, but Kronos greedily absorbs all that energy and just gets stronger and hungrier for more.

At this point, you just have to put aside the immediate obvious objection that there is far more energy in any star in the galaxy than in all the power plants on Earth, and the aliens should have just harvested energy from them.

If you can forget all that, what is left is an enjoyable typical 1950's B-movie, with what I consider to be some decent special effects for the time (except for the obvious cartoon animations of Kronos' march). Jeff Morrow, one of the better B-movie actors, delivers a decent performance as a scientist. Despite its low budget, the movie tries hard to be an early techno-thriller, replete with what was state-of-the-art technology for its time--B-47 jet bombers, missiles with nuclear warheads, computers, etc. And that also makes it a cut above the usual sci-fi B-movie of the 1950's.

For its time, "Fantastic Voyage" was an innovative concept: a miniaturized atomic submarine goes on a voyage of exploration and rescue thru the human body itself. They are saving the scientist whose body they are traveling thru, by reaching his brain and curing an inoperable blood clot there.

Unfortunately, beyond this promising start, the movie has little else to recommend it. You are supposed to sit there awed by the depiction of the voyage thru familiar organs of the body: heart, lung, inner ear, etc. So they have all these adventures along the way and eventually accomplish their mission. End of story. Big deal.

The special effects are dated. But is it fair to criticize a 37-year-old movie for dated effects, given how FX technology continually advances? It depends.

There are movies that are even older whose effects have held up much better--especially "Forbidden Planet" (1956). And classics like "The Day The Earth Stood Still" (1951) remain charmers today despite effects that had quickly become dated.

The reason is that such sci-fi movies were more than just a special-effects extravaganza. They had engrossing, imaginative scripts, interesting characters, and something significant to say. The special effects supported the scripts, rather than the effects carrying the movie.

"Fantastic Voyage" was one of the movies that started us down this trend of weak sci-fi scripts masked by stunning effects. That's risky because as the effects inevitably become dated, the movies no longer seem worth seeing.

I wanted very much to like this movie. Especially since I had loved the Crichton novel--I think it was Crichton's most vivid and engrossing novel until "Jurassic Park". And the movie tried hard to stick to the scientific realism of the novel which helped make the novel so engrossing.

But in the final analysis, I didn't like the movie all that much. Partly it has to do with the mediocre acting. Except for Kate Reid, the actors playing the other scientists seemed to be reading their lines as if they had never seen them before. Their voices often emphasized the wrong parts of sentences in a kind of sing-song, as if they didn't even know the significance of what they were saying.

The script made the characters (except for Dr. Leavitt) appear one-dimensional, rather than real people with interests, strengths, and flaws. So the actors probably had no idea what sorts of people they were supposed to be portraying. For example, in the novel, it's mentioned that Dr. Burton (renamed Dutton in the movie) has always been a bit accident-prone, which adds to the suspense when he is in contact with the disease organisms--will he accidentally release them? That fact isn't explained in the movie.

Partly it also has to do with the script's overall disappointing lack of suspense. In the novel, there are a number of scenes that make you increasingly scared that the disease might be spreading. For example, you learn early on that the President decided not to nuke the town of Piedmont after all, meaning the disease could spread from there. In the movie, you learn it much later and so you never got any sense of urgency to the investigation of the microbes. The final scenes (which I don't want to spoil) are supposed to be suspenseful and gripping, but you can easily guess how it's all going to come out.

Overall rating: B-. That's because I wanted so much to like it. Otherwise I would have given it a C+.

"The Cage" might have ended up as a TV-movie had NBC decided not to try again with a 2nd pilot and then go to series. If so, then "The Cage" would have been the best sci-fi movie since "Forbidden Planet" (to which it is clearly indebted)--all the more remarkable because it was made on a limited television budget and the poor facilities of Desilu Studios.

Yet Roddenberry's vision yielded a story that overcame the plastic and wooden sets and the hastily put together special effects, to give us our first look into his "Star Trek Universe"--a futuristic united Earth, which has finally been put right enabling mankind to set out for the stars.

We're so accustomed to that ST Universe by now, that we may forget how truly visionary it was for 1965: A giant warp-powered starship that looked truly futuristic and beautiful, not some cliche rocket shape. The bridge, the very model of a well-designed command center, to be eclipsed only by the sets of "2001: A Space Odyssey" three years later. The transporter. A female second-in-command and a mixed-gender crew. And most important of all, believable, multi-dimensional characters who are supported by all that futuristic technology and special effects, rather than playing second fiddle to them. Roddenberry's staunch insistence on believable characterization was what separated all the Star Trek series from any other sci-fi series--and is what has enabled the Star Trek franchise to last nearly 40 years.

While the Captain Pike character didn't survive into the second pilot or the series, it also represented a fascinating departure from the TV heroes of most past TV series--something you might see in a big-budget first-run movie rather than a TV pilot film. Pike is depressed and just plain burned out from the constant strain of command, and he is seriously contemplating resigning from Starfleet altogether because he just can't take it anymore. Like any harried, burned-out white-collar worker of today, he has unrealistic dreams of just going home at a young age to retire early, or maybe starting his own business, or anything to get him out of that captain's chair. The adventure he has in "The Cage" acts as his redemption, giving him a live demonstration of Dr. Boyce's statement that no matter how tempted a man may be to pack it in and give up on life, he must find a way to meet life on its own terms, not run from it and hide in daydreams of a life that in the end isn't really for him.

While the prices have gone up a lot, and some of the details have become dated, any homeowner who's struggled with problems of homeownership should get a lot of chuckles out of this movie. I know I did.

Mr. Blandings, a New York ad executive, decides to move his family to the Connecticut suburbs and build himself a nice house there. He gets into one hilarious jam after another, from mortgages to lawsuits to construction difficulties, as the costs and schedule of the construction keep escalating out of control. I thought that the funniest scenes were where Blandings hires a contractor to dig a well for water. They dig down hundreds of feet, but never find water. Yet only a short distance away, a few days later, the basement of his house-to-be floods!

Cary Grant and Myrna Loy give believable performances as the harried Blandings couple overwhelmed by problems they never imagined, and Melvyn Douglas is even better as Blanding's lawyer and family friend.

The only caveat is that social attitudes have changed a lot since 1948. Mrs. Blandings is portrayed as a bit of a naive dimbulb who has no idea how much additional trouble she's causing, and there's a black maid (horrors!). So don't watch this movie through the social lens of 2003, and you'll enjoy it all the more.