Ghost (1990)
After being killed during a botched mugging, a man's love for his partner enables him to remain on earth as a ghost.
Fire in the Sky
This film recreates the strange events which happened November 5, 1975 in the town Snowflake, Arizona. Travis Walton works as a logger in the woods. When he and his colleagues drive home after work, they encounter an UFO. For the next five days Travis disappears and his colleagues are accused of murder. When he reappears, first he didn't remember that he was gone, but in time the terrible memories come back.
District 9
District 9 is a 2009 science fiction thriller film directed by Neill Blomkamp. It was written by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, and produced by Peter Jackson and Carolynne Cunningham. The film stars Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, and David James. The film won the 2010 Saturn Award for Best International Film presented by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films,[3] and was nominated for four Academy Awards in 2010, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Visual Effects, and Best Editing.[4]
The story, adapted from Alive in Joburg, a 2005 short film directed by Blomkamp and produced by Sharlto Copley and Simon Hansen, pivots on the themes of xenophobia and social segregation. The title and premise of District 9 were inspired by events that took place in District Six, Cape Town during the apartheid era. The film was produced for $30 million and shot on location in Chiawelo, Soweto, presenting fictional interviews, news footage, and video from surveillance cameras in a part-mock documentary style format. A viral marketing campaign began in 2008, at the San Diego Comic-Con, while the theatrical trailer appeared in July 2009. Released by TriStar Pictures, the film opened to critical acclaim on August 14, 2009, in North America and earned $37 million in its opening weekend. Many saw the film as a sleeper hit for its relatively unknown cast and modest-budget production, while achieving success and popularity during its theatrical run.
Star Trek 2009)
In the year 2387 (9 years after the events of Nemesis), a supernova located near the Romulan homeworld threatens to destroy the “galaxy”. The Vulcans, led by Ambassador Spock, build a ship to carry a supply of “red matter”, which, once ignited, can create a singularity, drawing the supernova into a black hole. However, they are too late to save Romulus, and the supernova nearly wipes out the entire species. Captain Nero of the Romulan mining ship Narada, having watched his family and homeworld die, attempts to exact revenge on Spock, but both ships are caught in the event horizon of the black hole, traveling to the past and, through their actions, creating an “alternate, parallel” timeline from The Original Series. The Narada arrives about 150 years before the incident, and lays siege to a nearby Federation starship, the USS Kelvin. Nero demands that her captain, Richard Robau, surrender, and learns that Spock has not yet arrived. Nero kills Robau and orders the destruction of the ship. As the Kelvin is evacuated, acting Captain George Kirk is forced to stay behind to provide cover for the fleeing shuttlecraft, and dies shortly after his son, James Tiberius Kirk, is born. The Narada crew calculate that due to the event horizon, Spock will appear in about 20 years, and silently wait for him. When Ambassador Spock arrives, Nero captures his ship and the remaining supply of red matter, and banishes Spock to the planet Delta Vega near Vulcan, telling him to prepare to watch his home world die.
Without his father, Kirk becomes an intelligent but reckless and cynical young man. After getting into a bar fight with Starfleet cadets, he is approached by Captain Christopher Pike. Pike sees a lot of potential in Kirk, and is dismayed that he is wasting it on self-destructive behavior. He then challenges Kirk to outdo his father, who was captain for only 12 minutes but saved 800 lives. Kirk takes Pike up on the challenge, enlists in Starfleet and befriends Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy and Uhura. However, when Kirk alters the Kobayashi Maru test, he angers Commander Spock, who is still struggling with his human side’s emotions. During the official hearing, after which Kirk is suspended, Starfleet receives a distress signal from Vulcan, and the fleet is prepared to launch with the cadets helping to man the ships. Acting as his attending physician, Dr. McCoy manages to bring Kirk on board the USS Enterprise, while Uhura convinces Spock to transfer her assignment to the Enterprise as well.
The fleet warps to Vulcan, with the Enterprise trailing the other ships. Kirk connects information about the distress call from Vulcan with a Klingon signal Uhura had translated the day before regarding an attack on several Birds of Prey, and quickly warns Captain Pike that they are heading into a trap and will encounter the same ship that destroyed the Kelvin. Pike follows Kirk’s advice in time, as the rest of the fleet has already been wiped out by the Narada. The Narada is also drilling into the core of Vulcan, and the drilling machine is blocking all external communications or transports. Captain Pike agrees to surrender himself to Nero, leaving Spock in command and Kirk as first officer. However, Pike uses the maneuver to arrange for Kirk, Hikaru Sulu, and Chief Engineer Olsen to perform an orbital skydive onto the drilling platform and destroy it. Though Olsen, carrying the explosive charges, dies in the attempt, Kirk and Sulu are able to stop the drill, but not before it drills to the planets core. Nero launches a sample of the red matter into the core of Vulcan, causing the planet to start imploding into the black hole. Spock is able to rescue most of the Elders, including his father Sarek, but his mother Amanda Grayson is lost in the beam out as billions of other Vulcans perish on the surface. After Vulcan’s destruction, Spock estimates only ten thousand Vulcans are left and that they are now an “endangered species.” Uhura, who is involved in a romantic relationship with Spock, attempts to help him cope with the loss. The Narada leaves on a course set for Earth, using Pike’s Starfleet command codes, which he was forced to divulge through infection with a mind-controlling parasite, to bypass Earth’s security forces.
Kirk attempts to convince Spock to travel to Earth to stop Nero from doing the same he did to Vulcan, but Spock instead banishes him to the frozen planet Delta Vega and orders the ship to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet. On Delta Vega, Kirk encounters the elderly Ambassador Spock from 2387, who relays the future events through a mind meld and insists that Kirk must become captain of the Enterprise. The two travel to a nearby Starfleet outpost where they meet the talented Montgomery Scott. Spock helps Scott refine his equations for “transwarp transportation” to allow Kirk and Scott to beam aboard the Enterprise while she is still at warp. Aboard the Enterprise, Kirk manages to anger Commander Spock, forcing him to give up command due to being emotionally compromised, and Kirk takes the Captain’s chair. Spock, Scott, and math-whiz Pavel Chekov devise a plan to bring the Enterprise to Titan and take advantage of Saturn’s magnetosphere to disguise their presence from the Narada, allowing them to beam Kirk and Spock aboard unnoticed. While Kirk comes face to face with Nero, Spock retakes the future Ambassador Spock’s ship, and uses it to destroy the drill and lure the Narada away from Earth. With the Narada safely far from Earth, Spock pilots the ship on a collision course with the Narada. Kirk, Pike, and Spock are beamed safely away before the ships collide, creating a black hole which the Narada is caught in. Kirk offers to help rescue Nero, but the Romulan refuses. As the Enterprise finishes off the Narada, she is able to free herself from the black hole’s gravity well due to Scott’s plan to ignite the ship’s warp drive reactor cores in the black hole both to seal it off and to gain speed from the resulting explosion.
Kirk is promoted to captain and relieves Pike, who is in a wheelchair and promoted to admiral. He is assigned with his crew to the Enterprise. Spock, preparing to leave Starfleet, encounters his older self, who is departing to a new colony for the remaining Vulcans. Ambassador Spock tells his younger self that he and Kirk need each other, and that he should remain in Starfleet. Spock does so, becoming first officer under Kirk’s command. As the Enterprise warps away, Ambassador Spock recites the modified tagline used in Star Trek: The Next Generation: “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life-forms and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before.”
Starring – Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Eric Bana, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Simon Pegg, Bruce Greenwood, Leonard Nimoy.
Director – J. J. Abrams.
Screenplay – Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.
The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)
In 1928, a mountaineer (Keanu Reeves) encounters a glowing sphere while on an expedition in the snowy mountains of India. He then finds himself awakening after a sudden loss of consciousness, with the sphere now gone and a scar on his hand. In the present day, Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly), a Princeton professor, and other scientists are hastily assembled by the government in order to formulate a survival plan when it is feared that a large unknown object with a speed of 3x107m/s is due to impact Manhattan in approximately 78 minutes.
Nothing can be done about it because a vital military satellite has been disabled. The object is a large spherical biological spaceship, which slows down and lands gently in Central Park. A being (taking on the appearance of the man from the opening scene of the film) named Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) emerges from the sphere while accompanied by a large robot. Klaatu, a representative of a group of alien races, has come to assess whether humanity can reverse the environmental damage it has inflicted on planet Earth.
In the ensuing confusion, Klaatu is shot, but survives. The large robot activates and proceeds to disrupt all electrical systems in the city of New York, including many of the defense systems that the military has mustered in a perimeter around the spaceship. Before it can do any further damage, Klaatu orders it to shut down. While recovering from his injuries, Klaatu is detained by Regina Jackson (Kathy Bates), the United States Secretary of Defense, and is barred from speaking to the United Nations. Klaatu manages to escape with the help of Helen, and he soon finds himself eluding the authorities throughout Newark, New Jersey, and the forested Highlands, with Helen and her stepson Jacob (Jaden Smith).
Meanwhile, the presence of the sphere has caused a worldwide panic and the military manages to capture the robot after it thwarts their attempts to destroy the sphere using unmanned aerial vehicles and sidewinder missiles. Klaatu meets with Mr. Wu, another alien who had been assigned to live with the humans for years, and upon learning of humanity’s destructive tendencies, he decides that humans shall be exterminated to ensure that the planet-with its rare ability to sustain complex life-can survive. Mr. Wu, however, decides to stay on Earth having seen another side to humanity that he is unable to put into words to explain to Klaatu. Klaatu orders smaller spheres previously hidden on Earth to begin taking animal species off the planet, and Jackson, reminded of Noah’s Ark, fears that a cataclysm is imminent.
The robot, named “GORT” (Genetically Organized Robotic Technology) by the government, is the subject of experiments within an underground facility in Virginia when it transforms into a swarm of self-replicating insect-like nanites that begin destroying everything in their path back to Manhattan, including an armored battalion of the U.S. Army.
After speaking with Nobel Prize-winning Professor Barnhardt (John Cleese) about how his own species went through drastic evolution to survive its sun’s demise, Klaatu is convinced by Helen and Jacob that humans can change their ways and are worth saving. The three go toward the sphere in Central Park, where Klaatu warns that even if he manages to stop GORT, there will be a price to the human way of life. The nanobot cloud arrives before they can reach the sphere and they have to hide under a footbridge.
There, it is revealed that Jacob and Helen have been infected by the nanites. She pleads with Klaatu to save Jacob. Klaatu saves both of them by transferring the infection to his own body, then sacrifices himself to stop GORT by walking through the nanites to the sphere and touching it. His actions cause the sphere to emit a massive EMP blast which destroys GORT, saving humanity, but at the price of all of Earth’s technology shutting down for 30 minutes Klaatu disappears, and the giant sphere leaves Earth.
They Live
They Live is a 1988 science fiction/horror film directed by John Carpenter, who also wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym Frank Armitage. The film is based on Ray Nelson's 1963 short story Eight O’Clock in the Morning.
Part science fiction horror and part dark comedy, the film echoed contemporary fears of a declining economy, within a culture of greed and conspicuous consumption common among Americans in the 1980s. In They Live, the ruling class within the moneyed elite are in fact aliens managing human social affairs through the use of a signal on top of the TV broadcast that is concealing their appearance and subliminal messages in mass media.
Bugsy Malone
Bugsy Malone is a 1976 musical film, very loosely based on events in New York City in the Prohibition era, specifically the exploits of gangsters like Al Capone and Bugs Moran, as dramatized in cinema. Featuring only children, director Alan Parker lightened the subject matter considerably for the children's market; the film received a G rating.
This film was Parker's feature-length directorial debut and introduced actor Scott Baio as well (it is Baio's first listed credit at the IMDb). It also featured Jodie Foster (already a veteran actress at the time) near the beginning of her transition from television child star to award-winning film actress. Foster was awarded two BAFTAs