Giant Freakin Robot

The Wachowskis’ latest, Jupiter Ascending opened this past weekend, and the results were not good. Coming in third in the weekly box office race, it only earned $19 million (with a cost of $175 million plus), and a critical lashing following a premiere at Sundance didn’t help matters. While this doesn’t seem to be dampening their enthusiasm one bit, the filmmaking siblings think their days of $100 million plus budgets are over. But that doesn’t mean they’re imagination is getting any smaller.

Talking to the Wall Street Journal, Lana Wachowski addressed their ambition, saying, “Everyone says, ‘Why can’t you be simpler?’ We’re drawn toward difficult subjects, like the disparity of rich and poor,” “We’ve been lucky. People at studios have been interested in our crazy, strange brand of complexity. And we’ve been allowed to keep making them. Will that continue? Probably not.”

The Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending finally opens wide this weekend after being pushed back and delayed multiple times. It’s a movie you’re either going to love or hate—it premiered at Sundance recently and was brutalized—but either way, it’s a wingnut spectacle to behold. It’s like a pulpy, B-grade sci-fi flick from a bygone era, only with a huge budget and no restrictions, which is both an asset and a curse.

As filmmakers, the brother/sister duo wear their influences on their sleeves. There are obvious inspirations, like Star Wars, but you might references or nods any number of other, more obscure films. With that in mind, we thought we’d go ahead and make a list of some of the stranger flicks that might make a nice double feature with Jupiter Ascending, for a variety of reasons. For the most part, this is really a list of movies that, as I watched, I exclaimed loudly (at least in my own head, that would be rude to do in a theater), “hey, that’s just like movie X.”

Welcome back to another Cross the Streams, which hadn’t been around for a while due to too much stream crossing, resulting in me having to undergo a special procedure to remove all the junk from my system. But this edition is jam-packed with a plethora of quality goodies that have hit the Internet in recent weeks. The only way you could get bored is if you stopped reading right now.

Enough small talk. Let’s get down to brass sci-fi tacks and take a look at what’s new in streaming science fiction, including Netflix Instant, Amazon Instant Video, and more.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Seasons 1-6 (Netflix Instant)
A lot of tie-in cartoons over the years have been substandard crap, and while The Clone Wars started out as a fairly average take on the Star Wars universe, it became so much more over the course of the next few seasons, expanding the link between the second and third Episodes with excitement, sweet-ass CGI, and more ample storytelling skills than Lucas has shown in many years. Not to mention the host of voice actors that crop up over the course of its run. The major plus here is that Netflix has added the never-before-seen sixth season, which fans thought they might never see after the show was canceled post-Disney buyout. May the Force, and so on.

“Everything is connected.” Remember Cloud Atlas? The latest film from the Wachowskis and German director Tom Tykwer was probably the most ambitious film of 2012. Although the film was a colossal box office disappointment, the genre hybrid film still managed to capture the imagination of many. One of the reasons why the film didn’t perform well in theaters was its three-hour running time and time-jumping narrative structure.

General audiences found Cloud Atlas to be just too weird. Now that it’s out on Blu-ray/DVD, hopefully Cloud Atlas will find a new audience. Warner Bros. has released an infographic with the home entertainment release of Cloud Atlas, which should help people follow along with the film’s complicated narrative structure. Check it out below. (Click the picture for a larger version you can actually read.)

As one of the most polarizing movies of 2012, the Wachowskis and German director Tom Tykwer’s Cloud Atlas is an ambitious film that embraces different genres and forms of storytelling. Upon its theatrical release, general audiences seemed uninterested in a story that spanned over 1,000 years of human history. Hopefully Cloud Atlas will find a bigger audience when it’s released on home video this May.

Did you ever stumble across something on the Internet that proved to you that people have too much free time on their hands? You say that happens every single second that you’re online? That sounds about right. This is one of the good examples, though, where you’d want to pat the guy on the back while only silently judging his use of time and talent.

One of the most universally beloved film franchises, the Back to the Future trilogy, goes head-to-head with one of the most ambitious releases of 2012, Cloud Atlas, which split critics right down the middle. We here at GFR were fond of the Wachowski Starship and Tom Twyker’s multi-layered approach to adapting David Mitchell’s sprawling novel. And we have BTTF stories here on a regular basis, so you know how we feel about that. This mash-up from Justin Fields, which matches the epic six-minute Cloud Atlas trailer mixed in with footage from Field’s favorite trilogy, seemingly couldn’t be better.