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Set in 2025, when white men are still called "honkeys" and people still ask if you can "dig it," this story follows Ben Richards, an out of work revolutionary whose wife is a prostitute and whose 18-month-old baby is dying from pneumonia. Desperately needing money to buy medicine for the little tyke, Richards applies as a contestant for a popular game show called "The Running Man." The show is a way of ridding society of some of its more undesirable elements. Contestants are given a 12-hour head start, then pursued by merciless Hunters. Every hour they stay alive nets them a hundred bucks, which in this society is a lot of dough. It's unclear how or why "The Running Man" is a popular show. Though frowned upon, it isn't against the rules for the runner to take out innocent bystanders. Killing a cop is worth another hundred bucks. King, mired in the late sixties/early seventies, takes the hippie hatred of cops to a new level: everyone hates them, deriving entertainment from their deaths. Why anyone would want to be a cop in this society is another matter. The whole milieu is contradictory and self-serving. This is a race for Ben's life (and the life of his daughter); it should be exciting. However, like Rage, his first Bachman book, King substitutes an amorphous anger for anything truly stirring. That might work for teenagers, but adults can see through it all too easily. It all leads to a comic book ending, with lots of blood and wet, hanging entrails. If that's your thing, you may get a kick out of it. Made into a much more entertaining movie in 1987, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Richard Dawson.

++

Selfish dad (Tom Cruise) gets weekend custody of his rebellious teenage son (Justin Chatwin) and precocious ten-year-old daughter (Dakota Fanning), then gets a crash course in fatherly responsibility after Martians invade the Earth, killing or consuming everyone in sight. "Based on" -- which is to say suggested or inspired by -- H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds. This time, the Martians have hidden their gigantic tripedal fighting machines underground for thousands of years, evidently in patient expectation of the day when their preferred food -- mankind -- will have topped 6.5 billion units. (Had 6 billion been enough, they would have invaded in 1999.) The special effects are state-of-the-art, and the film has its moments, but any story that requires worldwide Armageddon to teach one dad the value of raising kids is not a strong one. And Spielberg, forgetting the lesson he should have learned from Jaws, infallibly substitutes action when dialogue would have served him better. With an even more pronounced sense of anticlimax at the end than the Byron Haskin version from 1953, and that because the screenwriters failed to give Wells the credit he deserved as a writer: while Wells wrote a realistic science-based ending to match his semi-historical novel, Josh Friedman and David Koepp simply tack the same ending on to their much narrower tale of personal redemption.

++++

Martians invade Earth one ship at a time for ten straight nights, build titanic tripedal fighting machines armed with heat-rays and chemical weapons, and set out to kill or consume mankind, beginning with the English. While it is interesting to note that had these Martians invaded only a few decades later, their technological superiority would have been eliminated and men would have made short work of them, this remains a compelling novel of survival in a world turned upside down almost overnight. Realistic and believable, thanks in no small part to Wells' choice of narrator, a hearty philosopher whose interest in his own harrowing story is augmented by a wider historical viewpoint, and whose moral sense (thankfully) rejects any notion of the innate preeminence of humankind. A thoughtful story, but also an exciting one, with enough apocalyptic destruction to satisfy all but the most jaded readers. Adapted twice to film, once in 1953, then again in 2005. Also famous for inspiring Orson Welles' "realistic" radio broadcast in 1938, which fooled a few people into believing Martians had indeed invaded.

++

Lifeless, cliche-riddled sequel to Independence Day that, without Will Smith, is both uncharismatic and uncentered. Takes place 20 years after the original story, by which time Earth has been transformed into a science fiction wonderland of world peace, spaceships, and fancy new weapons that only work on misidentified aliens, not the real threats to its continued existence. Like the new mothership hovering over the Atlantic (which part of the Atlantic? a character asks; all of it, she is told) that, in its mission to drill down to and suck out the core of the planet, provides the authorities with a handy, helpful countdown clock to the end of the world. Young fighter pilots Liam Hemsworth and Jessie Usher (playing Smith's step-son from the original film) are supposed to make us care about the future of Earth, but that's hard to do when the future represented by these feuding hotshots, one of whom (Hemsworth) is just another follows-orders-only-when-he-wants-to military man, is so colorless and hackneyed. The oldsters, including familiar faces such as Jeff Goldblum, Judd Hirsch, Bill Pullman, and Brent Spiner, frankly don't make us any more optimistic. Good special effects, though.

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Novelization of the original film, credited to Lucas but actually ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster. Foster adds nothing of significance to the film, but doesn’t tinker with the story, characters, or dialogue either, making this an enjoyable, if clearly inferior, alternative. In a far-off galaxy, farmboy Luke Skywalker is swept up in a rebellion against an evil empire led by the fearsome Darth Vader. His allies — mystical Obi Wan Kenobi, tough Princess Leia, cynical Han Solo and Chewbacca, and the robots See Threepio and Artoo Detoo — provide variety and humor in a clockwork plot that delivers lots of action and excitement. A good book in the dicey category of novelizations.

++1/2

Science fiction classic, loosely based on the H. G. Wells novel, about an invasion of Earth from Mars plays better in the memory than on the screen, where we can hack it down to the select few scenes that are its bread and butter. Most of these scenes occur during the first third, when the action is localized to a small California town and the characters still seem to matter. Haskin, however, taking the title too literally, wants to tell a much broader story, evidently believing that mankind's peril will be ours. Of course, it doesn't really work that way, and as the images dance between Washington, D.C., and stock footage of calamity around the world, our titular heroes are reduced to searching for each other in churches throughout Los Angeles. But those early scenes, menacing and mysterious, are indeed good, and the Martian ships never lose their appeal: it’s fun watching them blast humanity to smithereens. With Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, and Lewis Martin as a pastor who doesn't quite make it through the valley of death. Wells' book was also adapted by Steven Spielberg in 2005.

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Sally Fields’ mom (Margaret Field) sees an alien on the Scottish moors and is told by her astronomer father to have a hot drink and go to bed. The pasty-faced alien — yes, dad, there really is an alien and I really did see it — turns out to be a spotter for a race of beings whose world, swiftly approaching Earth, is dying. The nearby townspeople scurry off to lock their doors and the Constable admits that even if the men wanted to help defeat the alien, their “lasses wouldn’t let them.” So it’s up to an intrepid American reporter to win the day for humanity. With lots of fog and absolutely no atmosphere. Bland.

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Alternate history (and I Ching symposium) about several people whose lives intersect in a post-World War II world dominated by the Germans and the Japanese. Sweeping the globe, however, even though banned by the Nazis, is a novel (written by the mostly unseen titular character) that posits a different ending to the war, one in which the United States and her allies won. In spite of the inclusion of action elements like spies, political intrigue, and mortal threats to civilians, Dick's book isn't really about any of that: it's an examination of culture and ethnicity -- Japanese, German, and American, roughly in that order -- each with its own strengths and weaknesses, and all of them subject to the forces of fate and chance, represented by the I Ching (which, being Chinese, stands apart). On that level, this is a fascinating book with a fully-realized setting and interesting and introspective characters. The plot, on the other hand...well, you may find yourself halfway through the book and still wondering where, exactly, it is all heading -- even if, by then, you will have gained some insight into why it has never been turned into a movie. (A TV series began last year, in 2015.) Winner of the Hugo award for Best Novel for 1963.

***

Starts out rather like a British version of The Thing (From Another World) -- mysterious alien ship discovered buried not in ice, but deep in the earth causes friction between military and scientific investigators, while a living remnant of its crew wreaks havoc -- but unlike Hawks' film, the threat here is never very clearly defined and its haziness and inconsistency saps the suspense. Nice-try special effects don't greatly harm the movie, but don't help a lot, either. Still, a film with ideas (many psi-related) and a few nice scenes and touches, as, for instance, when a scholar, translating Latin on the fly, has to turn the page to find his verb. The third and last in Hammer's Quatermass films, preceded by The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass 2. This standalone feature was titled Five Million Years to Earth for U.S. release in 1968. Starring Andrew Keir, Barbara Shelley, James Donald, and Julian Glover.

***

Slick, cowardly Public Relations officer Major William Cage (Tom Cruise) is sent to the front lines in a war with alien invaders; when he kills a rare species, its blood initiates a temporal loop that causes Cage to repeat the day endlessly, each time he is killed. He learns more with each repetition, soon meeting a woman (Emily Blunt) who once had the same ability, and who helps guide and train him to use it as a means of combating the enemy. Ridiculous premise, but well-executed and exciting, leavened frequently with genuine humor. Excellent teaming of an irreverent Cruise with a hard-nosed Blunt. Looking rather like spinning mechanical octopi, the aliens aren’t really a highlight, but then the story isn’t about them anyway. Based on the novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka.