D Gary Grady

This was a Netflix find that proved to be not awful. Jonathan Silverman (mainly known for comedies such as Weekend at Bernie’s) works in the personnel department of an energy company headed by Martin Landau. He has a crush on one of the firm’s scientists, played by the lovely Helen Slater (Supergirl). One day he finally works up the nerve to talk to her, but a few hours later as everyone is leaving for the day she’s killed in a drive-by shooting.

The next morning at the office he’s shocked to see her alive and well, just like the day before. In fact, everything is just like the day before. He eventually realizes he’s stuck in a time loop, reliving the same day over and over again, with everything resetting at a minute past midnight and no one besides him aware it’s happening.

The made-for-TV movies was based — very, very loosely — on the Richard Lupoff story “12:01 PM” (originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction‘s December 1973 issue), in which the protagonist finds himself reliving the same 59 minutes over and over again. The story had been adapted much more faithfully in 1990 as a 25-minute episode of an anthology series on the Showtime network with Kurtwood Smith (the father on That 70s Show) as the star, and it was nominated for an Academy Award.

(Lupoff reportedly thought the makers of Groundhog Day had stolen his idea and for a while pursued a lawsuit along with Jonathan Heap, director of the 1990 adaptation, but they finally dropped it when prospects for success seemed slim.)

This adaptation, first broadcast the same year as the release of Groundhog Day, has almost nothing in common with the original story other than the title and the idea of a time loop. The story was a tragedy and the movie is sf romantic suspense with some comedy elements. It’s not great, and Helen Slater’s character seems poorly written, but it has its moments and reportedly has something of a cult following.

Incidentally, Lupoff ended up writing two sequels, naturally titled “12:02 PM” (F&SF Jan/Feb 2011) and “12:03” (F&SF Sep/Oct 2012), but unfortunately I’ve never read any of the original short stories.

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In the not-too-distant future Earth has been invaded by aliens called “mimics,” which is odd, because they don’t actually seem to mimic anything. In fact, they’re pretty original as aliens go, most of them looking like about a hundred flailing, whip-like tentacles knotted together.

The invaders have taken over pretty much all of Europe, though humans still control the other continents and Great Britain for now and are fighting back.

The protagonist — he’s no hero, at least at the outset — is an American PR officer with no combat training who is suddenly forced to take part in a D-Day-like invasion, during which he gets caught in a time loop, reliving the day over and over again, something we’ve all seen before, but this time with a science fictional explanation of sorts.

I hadn’t read much about the film before seeing it, so I didn’t recognize the lead actor. He looked familiar, and I kept thinking he looked like an aging version of Tom Cruise, but it wasn’t until I saw the end credits that I discovered there’s a reason for that. The heroine is played by always appealing Emily Blunt.

It’s not a great film, and much of it consists of war-movie clichés combined with computer-generated action scenes, but it does have the virtue of being actual sf, like something we might have read in the 1950s or 60s, so it’s a fair amount more interesting than the average special effects shoot-’em-up. And if you can’t stand the star, the film has the added virtue of letting you watch him get killed over and over again in different interesting ways.

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Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine (Logan to his friends) may be the most popular character in the X-Men movies, so it’s not surprising that he would get a couple of solo films.

The first, set mainly in the 1970s I think, tells how he came to acquire his powers from a mixture of mutant abilities and advanced technology and how he came to lose his memory. As a lot of reviewers complained, the film is marred by an overload of clichés, even, no kidding, a shot from overhead as a character looks up and cries “NOOOOO!” in reaction to some tragedy, something so often parodied that at this point it’s hard to imagine anyone trying to get away with it.

On the other hand, for all its flaws it’s not unwatchably awful. In fact, as someone who’s rather short for his weight, I quite liked the scene in which Wolverine gets his skinny ass thoroughly kicked by a fat guy.

The first film reveals that Logan has been around for a while and fought in the Civil War as well as World Wars I and II. In the second, set mostly in the present day, he’s invited to go to Japan to say farewell to a Japanese soldier he’d befriended during WW2. The man had later become a major Japanese industrialist and is now coming to the end of his life.

Strangely enough, Logan seems to remember the guy despite his amnesia. Maybe this is explained and I just missed it. Then again, I didn’t notice the inconsistency until I started writing this. That probably classifies it as what Alfred Hitchcock once called an “icebox scene,” i.e., a plot hole that doesn’t occur to you while watching a movie but only later when you’re back home taking something out of the refrigerator and suddenly think, “Hey, wait a minute.” Hitchcock implied he didn’t worry too much about that sort of thing. (The terms seems to have morphed into “refrigerator logic” in current usage.)

Anyway, in Japan Logan encounters various mysteries and menaces and a couple of very attractive women, one the industrialist’s granddaughter and the other her childhood best friend. The latter is a sort of ninja and a mutant besides. For some reason Logan takes up with the granddaughter despite having more in common with her friend, not to mention the fact that unlike the granddaughter the friend doesn’t have a fiancé. I also found the friend more physically attractive, in an exotic way, but maybe that’s just me. If Logan prefers the more conventional beauty, that just leaves more exotic hot mutant female ninjas for the rest of us.

The second film is definitely better than the first, but I wouldn’t recommend either to anyone not already inclined to see them.

Incidentally, one amusing bit of trivia: It seems Hugh Jackman, an Australian, initially didn’t realize that there is an animal called the wolverine and hence thought the term was an adjective meaning something on the order of “wolf-like.” So when he was originally cast to play Wolverine in the first X-Men movie he reportedly spent a lot of time studying wolves to develop mannerisms for his character.

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