Magellans at the Movies: the Blog

  RoboCop Genre: Science Fiction/Action/Dystopia Director: Paul Verhoeven Released: 1987      RoboCop follows the journey of police officer Alex Murphey in a dystopic version of future Detroit where a tidal wave of crime has drowned the struggling police department and led to their being privatized under the corporate stewardship of shady company Omni Consumer Products. Murphey is brutally murdered at the hands of one of the city's most notorious gangsters, but thanks to OCP's technical wizardry (and desire to make the police department as profitable as possible), his body is quietly confiscated and resurrected as the indefatigable, borderline indestructible Robocop.      RoboCop's first night on patrol is framed like the debut of a freshly minted superhero. He wanders the city in his car, pulling over to administer brutal justice to thugs perpetrating a variety of crimes. RoboCop's steel carapace makes him invulnerable to firearms, and his own burst f...

  Moby Dick Genre: Adventure/Epic Director: John Huston Released: 1956      The first thing I did once I realized that I was loving reading Moby Dick -or- The Whale was research whether or not it had any worthwhile movie adaptations. A straightforward answer proved surprisingly elusive, as this American classic has been adapted and reimagined dozens of times in mini-series, movies, and comic books to varying degrees of success. Eventually I came to a generally liked 1956 adaptation directed by John Huston and starring Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. Not an hour after clearing the final page of Melville's doorstop novel I fired up Amazon Prime and gave it a watch and was treated to a serviceable, if superficial, cinematic interpretation of some very challenging source material.      In case you missed it in high school, Moby Dick is the story of a whaling ship called the Pequod , captained by Ahab, whose leg was torn off by the titular Moby Dick: a legend...