the official magazine for Scientific Malaysian
In “X-Men: First Class” film, the general premise has been sufficiently adapted from its comic book series. X-Men film series have been created based on a team of “genetically-enhanced” humans, who carry mutations that confer them with special abilities. Particularly, this movie focuses on the relationship between Charles Xavier, Erik Lensherr and the origin of the “X-Men”.
It might not be wise to compress a three-hour epic into a mere two-page review when the film consists of six distinct yet interwoven stories spanning across different centuries (from 1849 to 2321), with diverse elements comprising of sci-fi, comedy, romance, action, thriller, and ultimately philosophy. Despite its vast ambitions, Cloud Atlas could be, ironically, one of the most overlooked films of 2012.
Dr Wong Kah Keng reviews a movie which puts the audience straight into the shoes of the protagonist suffering from short-term memory loss (a disorder known as ‘anterograde amnesia’).
The Sun is dying in 2057. A group of professionals consisting of astronaut, physicist, biologist, medics and engineer from diverse backgrounds are onboard of a spaceship (deliciously-named as Icarus II) in a mission to re-ignite the Sun with a nuclear bomb constructed from all of Earth’s fissile materials. On their journey to the Sun, they receive a distress signal from an external source in the outer space. This forces them to make a coin-flip decision whether to make a detour heading to the distress signal or to continue with their journey whose success of re-igniting the Sun is entirely theoretical. A series of pulsating and nail-biting events follow with a rising crescendo of death-defying situations brought into the finale.