To the '90s and Beyond! Film Podcast

Keanu Reeves stars as Thomas Anderson, aka Neo.  Neo works for a large software company, but is a computer hacker on the side, and quite a good one at that, selling off information for a price to anyone who might want it.  That is until one day his world is rocked when he is shown that the world of 1999 isn’t reality, but actually a computer simulation designed to lull humans into a feeling of complacency while their actual bodies are being harvested and used as batteries for the artificial intelligence they helped create.  A mysterious man named Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) believes Neo is “The One” who will save all humanity, as foretold to him by The Oracle, so he shows Neo the truth about his surroundings and trains him in the ways of The Matrix in the hope that humanity can prevail against the machines.

Rufus Sewell stars as John Murdoch, who wakes up one day with amnesia in an non-descript hotel room with a butchered woman, immediately having to go on the run as the prime suspect in a series of murders of prostitutes around the city — but he can’t remember if he did it.  In addition to the police force, Murdoch is also hotly pursued by a shifty psychologist named Dr. Shreber (Kiefer Sutherland), a tenacious detective, Frank Bumstead (WIlliam Hurt), a woman claiming to be his philandering wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly), and a spate of pale and creepy-looking, trenchcoated Nosferatus (or so they appear), who are looking for Murdoch because he seems to possess abilities above and beyond what normal men have, which makes him a danger to them.  As Murdoch seeks to get to the bottom of who he is and what’s going on, he discovers that there’s an even bigger mystery, which is who everyone else is, what kind of city they all reside in, why is it being controlled by these shady creatures who seem otherworldly, and just why does it always seem to be nighttime?

This Japanese remake of the 1997 Canadian thriller depicts several strangers awakening in a prison of cubic cells, some of them booby-trapped, not knowing how they got there or why. The prisoners must use their combined skills if they are to escape alive.

A group of strangers awakens with very little memory of who they are and finds that they have been involuntarily placed in a maze containing deadly traps. Meanwhile, a young technician watching over the Cube grows appalled at what he sees and endeavors to rescue a woman he finds a connection to who is trapped within.

In this follow-up to the 1997 futuristic cult thriller, Cube, another group of strangers find themselves transported into a maze of cube rooms for unknown reasons as they try to make their escape.

Without knowing how they got there or why they were there, several strangers awaken in a maze of cube-like rooms, some of them containing deadly booby traps. There’s tough cop Quentin (Maurice Dean Wint), doctor Holloway (Nicky Guadagni), young math whiz Leaven (Nicole de Boer), escape artist Rennes (Wayne Robson), autistic savant Kazan (Andrew Miller) and architect Worth (David Hewlett). The cube inhabitants must rely on each other’s strengths if they are to have any chance to escape.

The remains of a crashed spaceship, over three centuries old, is found on the ocean floor somewhere in the South Pacific, and a psychologist and his crew of scientists are selected to investigate. On board the ship, they encounter a strange spherical object, and after one of them enters the sphere, strange and not-too-pleasant things begin happening to them.

In the year 2047, a crew of American astronauts is sent to Neptune to try to save the crew and ship called the Event Horizon, which had mysteriously disappeared several years before. They find the Event Horizon but what they find inside is something more than they expected. Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill star in this Paul W.S. Anderson sci-fi/horror mesh.

Jodie Foster stars as scientist Ellie Arroway, who has dedicated her life to searching for possible intelligent lifeforms outside of Earth and our solar system.  An orphan from an early age, her faith in God has wavered since the days of trying to futilely contact her mother in heaven through the radio, replaced by a firm belief in science and facts as the pinnacle of what’s true and right. While her faith that we are not alone in the universe is unwavering, as a scientist, she won’t rest until she has absolute proof. Scanning the skies for radio waves of intelligent extraterrestrial origin, she and her team at SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) wait diligently for a message.  That day finally arrives when they pick up a repeating signal emanating from Vega, a star system 26 light-years away.   As the scientists work diligently to try to decode the message, the Earth erupts in a series of science vs. religion debates on what this all means, and who should be the one who represents our interests should we come face to face with the originator of the message.

During a burial dig early in the 20th century, a stargate is found but the technology didn’t exist to understand the complicated mechanism. Fast forward to the 1990s, and experiments have begun again, this time enlisting the services of Dr. Daniel Jackson (James Spader), a professor of Ancient Egypt who believes that man could not possibly have been responsible for the civilization which existed over 5000 years ago. The stargate is operated which is a gateway to another world on the other end of the galaxy. Jackson and a troop of soldiers are sent there to investigate and find a civilization similar to that found in Ancient Egypt. Kurt Russell, Jaye Davidson, and Mili Avital co-star in this Roland Emmerich/Dean Devlin film.