Hollywood has processed airborne paranoia into some fairly odd forms over the past few years, but none more closely resembles a fever dream than Snakes On A Plane. How to describe it?

A $33m viral clip with an A-list leading man? Had the blogosphere not gonenuts for this movie, it might well have shed its astonishingly literal title, lost a chunk of its funding, been fronted by a has-been or a nobody and gone straight to video. Instead, well, it became what Wiredreferred to as “the best worst movie of the year” months before it was even released.

A throwback to the Seventies heyday of ludicrous aviation-disaster flicks? The insanely implausible threat, the cast of neurotics, stoics and unfortunates, the histrionics and heroics – all hearken to the kind of film that Airplane was supposed to have finished off for good. Even the interior of South Pacific Airlines 121 looks like it was last refurbished in 1974.

A particularly eccentric take on the “postmodern slasher” subgenre pioneered by Scream? The unpleasantly sadistic nature of the deaths in this film speak more to murderous gross-out than tongue-in-cheek disaster, and it obeys the rules: the first to die are a young couple busy toking and joining the Mile High Club … drug use and casual sex is apparently still punishable by death in the movies.

An instant camp classic in the vein of Showgirls, complete with rubber snakes, shout-along quotes, call-and-response and the rest? (In this respect, going to see it weeks after release in a virtually empty hall might not have been the smartest idea.) A movie whose makers know that you know that they know that nobody is taking this remotely seriously – except the unfortunate critics, who have no choice but to offer up their utterly redundant verdicts.

Or all of the above, plus a few other tropes and tricks borrowed from randomly from all over the place? There’s an air stewardess who has “just one flight left” before she graduates (does this imply that “flight attendant” is now as risky an occupation as “cop”?). There’s a (probably unintentional) Cronenberg-lite moment when two characters become aroused by an impromptu medical procedure. There’s state-of-the-art herpetological special effects, culminating in a chihuahua-eating anaconda, for pete’s sake.

I don’t know what the hell Snakes On A Plane is. The secret of its unlikely success may be that it doesn’t either.

Much too, you will think, reader, to engender jealousy: if a woman, in my position, could presume to be jealous of a woman in Miss Ingram’s. But I was not jealous: or very rarely; — the nature of the pain I suffered could not be explained by that word. Miss Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy: she was too inferior to excite the feeling. Pardon the seeming paradox; I mean what I say. She was very showy, but she was not genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not good; she was not original: she used to repeat sounding phrases from books: she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment; but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were not in her.

You go, girl.

Contains spoilers, but definitely not explanations. Also: The reviewer once wrote a term paper on time travel under general relativity. This means he cares a lot about it but not that he knows what he’s talking about.

I’ve been boring my friends for a long time now with my contention that there hasn’t been a really good science fiction movie made about the experience of time travel – something that suggests how it might feel to be a time traveller in the same way that 2001: A Space Odyssey suggested how it might feel to journey through space. Might Primer be that film?

It seems to me that time travel would be an extraordinarily disorienting experience, something that’s largely been ignored in most pop-cultural treatments of the subject. These tend overwhelmingly either to use time travel as a way to add novelty to a caper (Back to the Future), quest (The Terminator) or farce (Groundhog Day). Sometimes it’s a handy “reset button” (see Quantum Leap) and occasionally a way of adding a particularly bittersweet twist to an otherwise linear story – the modern equivalent of a soothsayers’ prophecy fulfilled (Twelve Monkeys).

But what they generally don’t do is address the problems of trying to negotiate an eerily familiar environment using only unreliable memories – in fact, you could argue (and I have) that the best treatments of that subject so far are actually to be found in Memento, or perhaps Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – both of which actually use amnesia as their central plot device. I haven’t seen a movie which uses time travel to create the same effect – Donnie Darko comes close, but its “time travel” is virtually indistinguishable from magic. So: no good time travel movies.

Until Primer, that is. Shane Carruth’s microbudget ($7,000!) debut feature hits the ground running. It scores points immediately by dumping us into the garage workshop of a bunch of fast-talking, evidently brilliant boffins whose patter is almost entirely convincing; there’s plenty of technobabble here, but it’s plausible technobabble. (Primer’s style has been described as “analog egghead”, which I would dearly love to see become sci-fi’s next wave.) They could be building anything from Google to a cold-fusion plant, but in fact they’re developing a superconducting rig that can partially levitate objects – which turns out, unexpectedly, to also be a time machine.

It’s a plausible time machine, too: it seems to generate closed timelike curves and its physics are reasonable, if necessarily speculative. There’s none of that “meet yourself and you’ll explode!” bollocks here: mass-energy is conserved, time changes direction but not speed; and there’s even a nod to entropy with the notion that repeated or interrupted travel is harmful (leading to lousy handwriting, spontaneous bleeding and worse). Okay, you need to suspend your disbelief when it comes to the machine’s economy and portability, but that’s not too difficult. It’s certainly no harder than it is to believe in a fusion-powered DeLorean …

Of course, this versimilitude would count for little if all Carruth did with it was to show us Eloi and Morlocks, but that’s not the case. During the film’s brief running time, the central characters – the elementally-named Abe and Aaron – take an unspecified number of trips through the box, creating at least nine time-lines along the way. The first few trips are confusing enough – and made slyly more so by the rapid-fire dialogue, anonymous locales and use of flashbacks – but the story rapidly grows much more tangled when it transpires that there are additional boxes and that Aaron, a control freak if ever there was one, has been making covert solo trips to arrange various matters to his liking and impersonating himself at critical junctures.

In fact, the use of the word “tangled” is misleading here: it suggests solving the puzzle is just a matter of patiently following the threads to their ends, whereas that approach would actually only end up with a handful of loose ends. Carruth’s boldest move is to revisit his time travelers’ bewilderment on Primer’s viewers – even when that means abandoning linearity and narrative resolution. Just as those caught up in a temporal paradox may never be able to gather the information needed to make sense of their experiences, so Primer’s viewers aren’t given enough information to fully decipher the movie’s narrative.

The best example is that of Granger, a potential investor who disrupts Abe and Aaron’s plans after discovering one of their boxes and taking an ill-advised trip – or rather, that’s what they (and we) assume, since we never see the chain of events that lead him there. And just as they struggle to deal with his sudden manifestation, so do we. As Carruth says in an interview: “The universe is not going to explode or break down if you create a paradox. Whatever’s going to break is probably going to be you.” The film isn’t going to explode or break down if you introduce an unexplained narrative element …

So Primer is playing an intertextual game with the viewer that reminds me a bit of Blade Runner, with its multiple edits and corresponding interpretations. There’s another layer, too, in the characters of Abe and Aaron: almost instinguishable at the outset, their divergent paths also suggest bifurcating timelines, in this case splitting as a function of free will, rather than causality. But Primer is no Blade Runner: it has only a feeble emotional core. It seems rather begrudging to complain that a film (and director) which gets so much right, working with so little, fails to deliver in the acting department: but there it is.

Whereas Blade Runner’s replicants make us question what it is to be human, Primer’s humans never seem like much more than automatons. Of course, science fiction frequently skimps on character development, but in Primer’s case the problem’s not so much that characterisation is absent as underdone. Aaron’s actions are perplexing because they’re clumsily introduced, not because they fit into Primer’s puzzle-box, and that undermines the force of the consequent developments. So while Primer is a great time-travel movie, it’s not quite a great movie overall. But that’s good enough for me.

I had high hopes for Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, talked up as the most (first?) faithful adaption of a Philip Dick novel to date and promisingly cast with Reeves, Ryder, Downey Jr, et al – not to mention the now celebrated rotoscoping effect used to give the picture an other-worldly edge.

In the event, most of those expectations were satisfied. Scanner certainly is the most faithful Dick adaptation so far – adhering fairly closely to the plot as well as the themes of the original novel – and the effects and acting were both impressive in a low-key way. In fact, there was a gratifying solidity in the movie’s juxtaposition of 70s-fried dope shenanigans and 21st-century surveillance state – a combination I’d found it a little hard to visualize when reading the novel.

That said, I was mildly disappointed that Linklater didn’t quite go the distance – although perhaps that really would have been too alienating for viewers who hadn’t read the book. The comedy was played a little too broadly, foregoing its potential to unsettle the viewer; Arctor’s mental disintegration was a bit abrupt and a bit too clinical; and the ending was so thoroughly foreshadowed as to have lost much of its power.

Still, it’s the best Dick adaptation we’re likely to see for a while …

Picked this up in Calcutta because I was curious as to what homegrown Indian science fiction might be like – particularly as written by film maestro Satyajit Ray. The answer, alas, was pretty disappointing.

Ray’s many talents apparently don’t extend to science fiction: this is derivative, thin stuff. Shonku is clearly modelled after earlier scientist-heroes like Professor Challenger, but lacks their charm, while his adventures are a bit on the dull and linear side.

Granted, it is a children’s book, but the stories in this volume would have seemed creakily old-fashioned even when they were first published in the 1960s or so.

Wanted to re-read this before seeing the film; was amazed how much better it was than I had remembered. Astonishing book.

Makota Shinkai is apparently poster boy for a new generation of anime film-makers, having produced his debut, Voices Of A Distant Star, almost single-handedly in his home studio. (A bit like Kerry Conran). So I lucked out when I randomly bought a ticket for The Place Promised In Our Early Days, his debut feature at the National Film Theatre.

The Place Promised In Our Early Days doesn’t conform to any of the lazy stereotypes of anime: it’s anything but knockabout and there’s very little action of either the sexual or violent kinds. Rather, it’s an elegiac character study: the tale of three friends’ struggle to make good on a childhood pact to fly a home-made ornithopter to a mysterious tower in enemy territory.

There’s not much more to the plot than that, really: this movie’s much more about mood than anything else. It’s drenched in nostalgia; many scenes are saturated with sepia tones and the editing does a good job of conjuring up a sense of half-forgotten memories. The film’s McGuffin – the mysterious Tower – also toys with might-have-beens and should-have-beens.

Ultimately, The Place Promised In Our Early Days is fairly slight – its pace relaxed despite its relatively brief running time. But Shinkai’s control of character and tone is impressive. Be interesting to see what he does next.

Let’s face it, the only reason to watch this is the fight sequences, which are okay. Although the sequence in which Statham loses his shirt, rolls around in some oil and then snogs a bloke^{1^ underwater might cater to those with, uh, specific interests.}

1^ _{Okay, so the bloke’s dead. Still and all …}

Apparently CSI: Miami is the world’s most popular TV show. Moral: detectives in Miami = laughing all the way to the bank.

Very clean-tasting schnapps that you can combine to make up any number of cocktails. I had an apple pie (apple and vanilla), black forest gateau (blackcurrant, chocolate and um, something else) and a peaches-and-cream (peach, duh, and vanilla). Um, and a pint of bitter. And two shots of tequila, sambucca and tabasco. And yet today my head is clear as a bell (and not ringing like one). I must do this more often.