Some names when involved with a potentially interesting film, lead one's heart to sink... so, naturally any expectations for Pandorum should evaporate when one sees that Paul W.S. Anderson is producing. In fact, it may be worth remarking upon the fact that some time ago Anderson directed the somewhat obscure sci-fi horror Event Horizon. Despite the time which has passed - that film remains superior.

The premise of the film is like some manner of composite of tropes and cliches. The monsters are the offspring of those creepy beasties from The Descent and Ghosts Of Mars, most of the film involves the ever popular running around dark tunnels and everyone's favourite AMNESIA! Really, the amnesia is just there to justify the exposition and there's so little plot here, it's really not needed. Oh, wait! Flashbacks! We get a few of those too! Even though they serve no real purpose beyond padding.

So, Earth gets massively overpopulated - and the Elysium is built to go and find a conveniently discovered Earth-like planet that could sustain a human colony. What isn't revealed immediately is that the purpose of this giant ship full of people is to colonise the planet. One area where the film should gain some kudos - the ship is actually flying at sub-light speeds but don't worry plenty of time to make up for that lapse! Which really isn't too long - apparently the monsters are actually the colonists which made them EVOLVE! Or something. It's not really explained but then, it's not the kind of film that should ever try and have a clever story.

The protagonists wake up with aforementioned amnesia and find everything is broken and realise that they're in the "generic something went terribly wrong and we're fucked" scenario. The sci-fi horror clichés pile up and what little plot is given by snatches of exposition. We get a mandatory ticking clock and a twist and then it plods its way dutifully to the end.

It's hard to say anything about the film - it's just so very unremarkable. It's not bad... it's just a waste of time but hard to hold any strong feelings about it.

Regardless of how much contempt, loathing and hatred is showered upon Twilight - no one can deny that while it has been roundly critically bent over a table that it made money. And so, it came to be - vampires were the new fad!

So - someone thought it was a good idea to make a Twilight imitation with the original title, Vampire Diaries - so you know it has vampires in it! This shows première is mind crushingly banal, it makes the last season of Smallville seem like Shakespeare by comparison. For no reason, we have our main vampire character enrol in high school. He establishes he's over 100 years old! Oh, there's something about one the girls being something important or something stupid like that and while vampires here don't sparkle... they're entirely immune to sunlight, apparently. Hence their ability to stalk girls at high school.

The female protagonist is some vanilla blandness that had her parents die - presumably of boredom. What is there to say of her? Oh, she has a brother who is apparently doing the drugs - coz he's sad. It's just so hard to care about this, it's generic good looking high school drama WITH VAMPIRES. Honestly, regardless of what you had to say about Buffy - at least it had characters that weren't such cardboard cut outs. It's ironic that one of that the brother is on the drugs because the acting in this show isn't bad - it simply isn't there.

If there wasn't much to say about Defying Gravity - there's nothing to say about this. It's just so insipid and derivative. Sure, Defying Gravity stole a pre-existing concept down to the ship design but at least they tossed in mystery. This is just Twilight: The Series.

Bottom line: Try and forget that shows like this even exist - they will only diminish your will to live and increase your hatred of humanity.

Sci-fi is never easy as a genre on TV, you're instantly just by having that word in your description making a big demographic have their hand drift toward the remote control. So, in recent years shows have tried to move away from the archetypal aliens of the week and have tried to be rather more involved in terms of drama and characterisation. The most obvious and successful example being Battlestar Galactica, which was very much about the characters and their interactions.

So, it seems like Lost and BSG got drunk, fumbled around and had Defying Gravity, the newest shade of sci-fi bland. We've got a not too distant future situation and we're following the trials and tribulations of some astronauts on a trip around the solar system for MYSTERIOUS REASONS!

The first thing to notice is the irritating narration. This will come in pretty regularly - maybe they got the idea from Heroes! - and just try and make some obvious point about what has just happened. Also, it's incredibly opaque as regards the fact it's a voyage in space. Static caravans seem to be more in motion than this space vessel. Granted, in the solar system it's probably somewhat hard to convey a sense of motion as it's really only planets that you can see getting larger or smaller but that's what exterior shots are for.

Another thing to mention is - this is basically a long, drawn out BLATANT thieving of the concept behind the quite enjoyable BBC production "Voyage To The Planets" which is a two part docudrama about - you guessed it - a journey around the solar system with people landing on planets! Admittedly, it's a more pointless trip than in Defying Gravity but then Defying Gravity shamelessly stole the ship design.

There's really not a lot to say about this show - it has bland, generic flashbacks which were old news by the end of season one of Lost and the big reveal was just so lacklustre and not even a big reveal, so there is inevitably to be more magical mystery - if the show makes it that far, which seems far from certain. So - a dull, lacklustre show with forgettable characters with a premise clearly lifted from elsewhere and with populist elements dolloped on.

Bottom line: Don't bother - dull, bland and derivative. The televisual equivalent of beige.

So, again it's time to comment on how DC has a whopping one live action film franchise (albeit one that is probably the best critically received) while Marvel has a half-dozen projects in the works... but of course, DC is producing animated features and the latest is Green Lantern: First Flight.

So, Hal Jordan is just in a flight simulator when a Green Lantern ring takes him to a dying Green Lantern and before you know it, he's all Green Lantern'd up and... well, y'know... and this is in the first five minutes. No need to take the origin story slow, eh? Of course, it's somewhat difficult to give a great deal of depth to a Green Lantern origin - it's pretty much "here's your ring, good luck with that."

And we get him head off to Oa and all of a sudden, Hal is doing the Green Lantern thing with Sinestro. For those that are unaware of Sinestro's backstory - it's fair to say that his role as bad guy is telegraphed and that it's all but impossible to miss the fact he's cast as the traitor type character for whom the phrase "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!" was surely coined. He's openly contemptuous of the Masters and shows very little in the way of restraint. He and Hal are running a very literal good cop/bad cop routine.

We pretty much bounce from this scene to another - bigger action scene... and then, it's just exposition about Sinestro's end game, framing up Hal and then setting up the big fight at the end... As usual, we're in a very short turn around. About seventy minutes... so, really - there's very little time between events for anything approaching character development or serious plot, which seems silly as we got a decent amount of that in Wonder Woman but here, it feels a lot more flat. In fact, Sinestro is the only character that really feels fleshed out.

There are - of course - plenty of the Green Lantern roster for those that know their stuff from the comic or cartoons but hardly any of them really get any time. To the point Killawog is probably the only one that anyone will remember. Even Hal feels a little flat. Oh, yes - he's the square jawed good guy who pretty much walks in and kicks ass with his power ring (despite a total lack of training) but Sinestro just feels like he has more depth but that's possibly a function of the fact he gets a comparable amount of screen time to Hal and he has motives and so on, Hal is kind of just along for the ride.

All in all, it's ok. It's fun... there's some pretty cool action in there but it's just not Wonder Woman but not amazing or anything. Too shallow and the action really doesn't compare to Wonder Woman... or the plot... or the characters.

District 9 has been one of the most highly anticipated films of 2009 - and that can be said without adding the qualifier of sci-fi. The basic premise being aliens pull up over Johannesburg but... due to the nature of their society, they don't really have any leadership. So they sit around on their ship for three months before people cut it open.

We then jump forward a couple of decades and the ship is still sitting there and District 9 is a big shanty town for the million or so "prawns" that were inside the ship. People seem pretty blasé about the aliens, in fact - even actively hostile, with resentment and a demand for segregation. Needless to say, while none of the characters in the film ever MENTION Apartheid - the parallels are blatant and utterly undisguised.

If you can live with that, then this is an interesting film. Enjoyable, action packed and certainly one of the smartest films of the year thus far. There are a few plot holes and the change in the style (the film starts in a documentary style and then for reasons that are fairly obvious, it becomes more conventional) can be a little jarring... but certainly an all around entertaining film that looks AMAZING for the comparatively modest budget of $30m. Honestly, the fact that the aliens in this film are almost entirely CGI is easy to forget and films with bigger budgets have done far less convincing work, with far more money.