Father and Son

Very quick update, three more things before Christmas!

 

My 2017 Doctor Who novel Plague City has just been re-published in paperback. Its subject matter is even more topical than it was back in 2017. Edinburgh in lockdown, 1645. Plague doctors and ghosts in Mary King’s Close. You can order it from Waterstones here.

 

I also had the opportunity to write the ‘Afterword’ for the Doctor Who Magazine 2020 Yearbook. With all the episodes covered within, I decided the only thing to do would be to write something personal about what Doctor Who meant to me in 2020. Because the personal is often universal. The article is called You Are The Timeless Child and I’ve had a few kind words back, which is lovely. The Yearbook is available in all good newsagents, if they are open in your area. If not, you can also order the yearbook here.

And finally, I've contributed a short story to a charity e-book collection in aid of Scope called Once Upon A Time Scope. A worthy cause very close to my heart so please check it out here.

Unbelievable

Latest news, in brief.

 

Look at this – a trailer for my just-released Doctor Who story, Genetics of the Daleks. I’ve listened to the first half of it so far, and even though I say it myself, it’s turned out rather good. It appears to be going down very well, some people have even been kind enough to say it’s their favourite Big Finish story of the year, so that’s a relief. You can order it here.

Here's a photo of Tom Baker recording the story at home:

Tom Baker as Doctor Who in a story I have written! It still doesn't seem real. It's like entering a competition as an adult where the prize is getting to be eight years old again. It is very, very difficult to come to terms with the fact that me watching Tom Baker in Doctor Who as a child and me writing for him forty years later are two events in the same reality. It is a very unrealistic thing to have happened! (My son, on the other hand, thinks it is perfectly normal that daddies write Doctor Who stories). 

Listen to this – a trailer or the forthcoming River Song box set which includes my story Queen of the Mechonoids. The last quarter or so of the trailer are clips from my story. The box set can be pre-ordered here.

Listen to this – another trailer, this time for my forthcoming Doctor Who story The Day of the Comet, which can be pre-ordered here.

 

 

And finally, don’t forget to pick up the latest issue of DWM. My contribution is the annual Christmas quiz, which is always fun to do, if very hard work because you have to try to come up with questions that can’t be solved using google and the TARDIS wiki. The magazine also contains reviews and previews of some of my things, along with some excellent articles about The Feast of Steven and I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With A Dalek. A real Christmas bonzana.

 

 

And that’s it for now. Whenever I write one of these blogs I have the sense that there’s something I’ve forgotten because I have so many things working their way along various pipelines, as well as all the confusion, excitement and despair of real life. But if I don’t blog before the big day, a very Merry Christmas to anybody who is still reading this.

Pulling Rabbits Out Of A Hat

Hope you're well. I've a few things going on.

 

 

Yesterday saw the release of my latest Doctor Who for Big Finish, a story with the tenth Doctor and River Song called Ghosts. David Tennant speaking words I’ve written, how incredibly exciting. It seems to be going down okay so I’ve got away with it again. I’m waiting for the CD, so haven’t heard it myself, so if you fancy hearing it before me, get yourself over to the website and order the download.

There’s also an exciting trailer for Doctor Who: Genetics of the Daleks, which is coming out in December, which you can see here.

And in January I have Doctor Who: The Day of the Comet coming out, here’s the cover for the box set which also includes a story called The World Traders. You can pre-order my story here. 

And finally – out now, I think – I have a short story in an anthology called Judge Fear’s Big Day Out And Other Stories. My story is Bernard, which I wrote for the Judge Dredd Megazine back in 2003. It’s a sort of tribute to the old Jimmy Stewart film Harvey. Anyway, it was lovely to receive some copies of this book through the post as I had completely forgotten about writing this story (and agreeing for it to be re-published in a collection). The collection has other, almost certainly even better, stories in it by various literary luminaries, and would be the ideal Christmas gift for the Judge Dredd fan in your life (if you have one). 

Monster Love

It’s all go! I have three things out this week.

 

Firstly, Doctor Who: The Monster Vault, a guide to (nearly*) all the monsters that have appeared in Doctor Who, from 1963 to 2020. I co-wrote it with Penny CS Andrews, it’s (amazingly) illustrated by Lee Johnson and the whole thing was put together by the (lovely) Paul Lang.

As you might imagine, writing this book was a dream job for me. A labour of love. So, wherever possible, I tried to go the extra mile in finding stuff out. For each and every monster I went back to the story or stories they appeared in, and went through the scripts (as broadcast) to glean every piece of information we are told, or which is implied, about them. And then I went through the rehearsal and camera scripts, looking for any extra details the writer intended which may have been left on the cutting room or rehearsal room floor. (So, for instance, the Pipe People from The Happiness Patrol have a whole backstory which is taken from the rehearsal scripts). Where possible, I tried to include the descriptions of the monsters given in the original scripts; this wasn’t always possible, because either the writer didn’t bother to describe them, or because what they ended up looking like was nothing like how they were described in the script. For the more recent stories, where I don’t have the scripts, I made use of the fact that Andrew Pixley covered every single description and cut line in his articles for DWM and The Complete History.

And then, given all this information and a word-limit of 400 words per monster (except for the ones that Came Back For More) I tried to tie together everything we know and extrapolate logically, trying to work out what each creature’s ecology, its life-cycle, how it might have evolved and so on. (So, for instance, for the first monster I covered, the Mandrels, I thought how they might interact with the Eden moths that have a tranquilising sting; maybe they feed on them and the reason why Mandrels contain so much ‘Vraxoin’ is because they have absorbed it from the moths!). That sort of thing! For over a hundred monsters.

So, essentially, it’s a book based on the monsters in terms of their TV appearances. Now, as we all know, that is the tip of the proverbial iceberg, as nearly every monster has made subsequent appearances in comic strips, novels, and audios as well as having more information included in novelisations, other monster books and online guides. While much of this information is vivid, ingenious and fascinating (such as my own backstory for the origins of the Nucleus of the Swarm), it is also contradictory and researching it would be like trying to mine a bottomless pit. A line had to be drawn somewhere and so, whilst it would have been lovely to have included the Quarks’ ongoing battle against giant space bees, I had to limit myself to stuff that was on the telly. Which was more than enough to be going on with!

I could go on. I could go through every entry I wrote and tell you where I got all the bits from. But I shall spare you that. Suffice it to say, I put in the hours, and hopefully it will delight readers to read how I have, for example, explained about who created the Raston Warrior robots and why. And even if you don’t care one bean about my theories, it’s worth getting just for Lee Johnson’s amazing illustrations.

The book should be available from all good bookshops. If it isn’t, they should be able to order it in. It’s officially out on the 22nd October but apparently it has already started appearing on shelves and copies have started being sent out by online booksellers. So if you order it from amazon it should be with you fairly soon. And if you do enjoy it, please, please, please remember leave a good review, recommend it to your friends and buy it for people for Christmas.

* A few didn’t make the grade because either they couldn’t be illustrated (hello, Visians), because they are basically just wild animals (hello, Taran Wood Beast) or because they are villains and would be better served in a book about villains (hello, Lady Cassandra). Hopefully, if The Monster Vault sells well, we’ll get asked back to do The Villain Vault.

On top of that, earlier this week saw the release of my latest Doctor Who audio adventure, Lightspeed, part of the Shadow of the Daleks epic. I’d thought that The Kamelion Empire would be my last story for the main range so I was delighted to be asked back, with the additional challenge of having a pretty tight deadline. I like rising to challenges! I haven’t heard the finished product yet, but it seems to be going down okay. It can be ordered here.

And finally, I have returned to Doctor Who Magazine after a well-deserved hiatus. The Blogs of Doom is back. And hopefully it will have an even more refined wit than usual as I had to write it twice; for some reason when I was doing my usual thing of checking spelling and taking out double spaces I also deleted half the article and then saved it, thus losing what I had deleted forever. I’m telling you this just to let you know that I’ve suffered for my art so now it’s your turn.

As usual, Doctor Who Magazine is available from all good newsagents and some large supermarkets, but you can also order it and even download it by pointing your megabyte modems in the direction of this site.

Genetic Engineering

The beginning of lockdown was quite busy for me. As well as a book all about Doctor Who monsters – Doctor Who: The Monster Vault, out very soon, you can look at some of the pages on Amazon – in a couple of months I wrote five audio scripts. One of them has, sadly, been shelved (and it was probably the best one, isn’t it always the way?), but I think most people would agree that four adventures by Jonathan Morris is more than enough to be going along with. For now!

 

 

So, after Lightspeed, Ghosts and The Queen of the Mechonoids comes Genetics of the Daleks. It’s just been announced by Big Finish and has even been reported by the Radio Times. Tom Baker joins Time Lord Victorious! So it’s story which, for the fourth Doctor, is a prologue to it all, but for the Dalek he encounters it’s a kind of epilogue. A bookend, if you like. And, in a way (though I didn’t realise it at the time) that’s what it’s about – the Doctor and the Dalek seeing a story from two different ends; for one it’s in the past, for the other it’s all in the future.

I’ve been interviewed about it in various places, so expect me to turn up talk about it in Doctor Who Magazine and Vortex. The main thing you need to know is that if you’ve followed Time Lord Victorious or visited the Escape Room (‘A Dalek Awakens’) this story will serve as a lovely bonus, but if you have done neither, it’s such a clear and complete standalone story you won’t feel you are missing out on anything at all. If you just want an exciting Doctor Who story with the fourth Doctor and the Daleks, you will not be disappointed.

The other exciting thing about it for me was that I got to hear it being recorded. Remotely, over the internet. Normally I have to travel up to London or across to Tunbridge Wells, but this time I could hear my words being acted from the comfort of my own settee (the former property of a Doctor Who companion so it’s kind of my Doctor Who settee). I can see this way of recording being adopted even after the plague has passed; I am sure directors will be happy at the thought of Jonny being far, far away in a different room during the recording.

So, yes, check out the other interviews and previews, and the story can be pre-ordered here.

 

During those hectic days of lockdown I also wrote a couple of articles for a Doctor Who Magazine Special on Production Design. I wrote an overview over how design changed when the series returned in 2004 and a jokey bit at the end pointing out how Doctor Who recycled sets and costumes from other shows and films. But never mind my bits, they are merely the walnuts in the cake, there’s all sorts of amazing other things in there, previously unseen design drawings and fascinating interviews with the previously uninterrogated. Indispensible!

It should be available in WH Smiths and all good newsagents but if that isn’t an option for you then you can simply order it online here.

Miss The Start, Miss The End

SHAKESPEARE’S DELETED SCENES*

Whenever you go to see a Shakespeare play being performed, there is always one question lurking in the back of your mind as the lights dim and the curtains open. Which bits will they cut? Because they usually do. There is usually something missing.

Not that there is anything wrong with cutting Shakespeare, of course. Every director has to decide – or discover, through a process of rehearsal and preview – whether every part of the script justifies its inclusion. And, invariably, not every bit will. The director may cut for numerous reasons; because a scene slows the play down, because it is painfully unfunny, because it gets in the way of the willing suspension of disbelief. For instance, if you go to see Henry VI Part I it might be missing Talbot flirting with the Countess of Auvergne, because it slows things down, or Joan of Arc summoning ‘fiends’ from the underworld, because it’s a bit weird for things to suddenly get supernatural in Act 5 of an otherwise ‘realistic’ history play. Or, if you go to see The Taming of the Shrew, it might be missing the lengthy prologue with Sly because it seems to be setting up a ‘framing device’, setting up the action as a play within a play, that isn’t reprised at the end so seems a bit pointless in retrospect. Or, if you go to see Love’s Labour’s Lost, the director might cut some of the stuff with the academics discussing anagrams, because they are not complete sadists.

Usually, of course, the more famous a play is, the less inclined directors are to tamper with the text. There are, after all, school parties to consider. So if you go to see Romeo and Juliet it’s likely that most of it will be intact (though they might cut some of Mercutio’s longer speeches) because the audience will be answering questions later. That said, if you go to see Macbeth it’s unlikely to include the bit where the witches break into a showtune and summon Hecate; for years directors have looked for excuses for cutting this silly digression, as it’s hard enough to get the audience to accept a play with witches and ghosts without including a tap-dancing goddess of the underworld as well. Fortunately scholars have now proved that that bit was interposed by someone else, probably Middleton, meaning directors have a cast-iron get-out for not including it.

A director may also cut to change the emphasis of a play – giving less time to supporting characters to emphasize the leads – or for clarity of action or motivation. Any director putting on Hamlet, for example, as to decide at what point Hamlet actually decides to become pro-active and seek revenge on the King (when he decides 'to be' and take arms against his sea of troubles). Because, in the text as written, his motivation is a little muddy, to say the least (indeed, some would say that is the whole point). Is it when he sees the King pray? Is it when he sees the Norwegian army marching over the hill and is strangely put in mind of eggshells? Is it when he ponders mortality with the skull of Yorick? Or a director may – perversely, because directors are often perverse – decide to increase ambiguity by removing speeches where a character explains their motivation. If it’s already clear enough why a character is doing a thing, do we need to hear them explain their reasoning in laborious detail? Back in Shakespeare’s day, people did, but not so much now. Modern Shakespearean actors are highly skilled in getting across the meaning of a line irrespective of what actual words they might be saying!

Hamlet is one of the few, possibly the only – I can’t be bothered to look it up – instances of us being given an insight on how Shakespeare’s plays were cut during his time, as we have the ‘bad folio’ version probably based on prompt sheets, probably those of the actor who played Marcellus. We know his plays were cut because in Romeo and Juliet there’s a line in the opening spiel reassuring the audience that it will all be over in two hours’ time, but there’s no way the full play can be performed in that time. (Maybe they cut the opening spiel?) When it comes to Hamlet, I’d quite like to see a version based on the ‘bad quarto’, as in some areas it makes more sense (it has the ‘to be or not to be’ bit earlier on and Gertrude realizes the King is a bad ‘un).

This is just the beginning of a long, long history of the plays being cut for performance. Nahum Tate did his own version of King Lear with a happy ending. Davenent and Dryden did their best to make a tolerable version of The Tempest, and then Davenent, in his madness, decided that what Macbeth really needed was more showtunes. Henry V had its funny bits excised to make it into a proper tragedy. Charles Johnson did a ‘mash-up’ of the comedies. Garrick cut the bit with the gravediggers from Hamlet and Bowdler famously bowdlerized the plays (but not for performance, for family readers). The idea that the plays should be performed as written – that the text was sacrosanct – only came along in the early 18th century.

Another area where the plays are usually cut is in the cinema. Partly, obviously, because films tend to have shorter running times. They may also have less physically captive audiences. And films are primarily a visual medium – there’s a Hitchcock quote somewhere about, ‘Once you’ve written the script, you add the dialogue’ – and if a play is to work in that medium it needs to be adapted to an extent. Do we need the dialogue establishing that these two characters are standing on a battlement if we can actually see the battlement? That sort of thing.

And so it is very rare for a film to give you the full text. Ken Branagh basically stuck to the script with Henry V, even including the mind-numbing stuff in French, and then perversely – I did warn you about directors – decided to do a version of Hamlet which combined both the good folio and quarto versions in a way which defied both logic and the risk of deep vein thrombosis. I mean, it’s very good, but it’s not the play Shakespeare wrote, it’s like having a version with all the deleted scenes from two different versions reinstated. But by the time he got to Love’s Labour’s Lost he basically came to the very sensible conclusion that the less of the play he used, the better.

Television has a better record of doing ‘uncut’ versions of the play, because the audiences are in the comfort of their own homes and, certainly in the early days, television was a fairly theatrical medium – plays being rehearsed and then performed live or ‘as live’ – but with the added bonus that the cameras could get in close so the actors could give smaller, more nuanced, more filmic performances, and the occasional perverse director could decide that a monologue would be better done as a pre-recorded voice-over while the actor mugged away staring into space doing ‘thinking it over’ acting.

So, up until the 1980s at least, television versions of the plays tend to have very few cuts. Indeed, that was one of the raisons d'être of the BBC’s run of not-quite-but-nearly-all the Shakespeares in the late 1970s and nearly 1980s. At last, the plays as they were written, unabridged. Well, nearly... they didn’t include Sly’s prologue for The Taming of the Shrew, they cut Act 3 Scene 10 of Anthony and Cleopatra, and by the time they got to Cymbeline they were basically skipping whole chunks of the script in order to get it over with before the pubs shut. (This is not counting the innumerable cut lines from the Henry VI plays, Richard III and others).

Anyway, this got me thinking – what is the rarest Shakespeare scene? Which scene is most often deleted? Which scene is almost always not included in performances of the plays? I have a vague memory that one of the play texts features a pointless scene about a character buying a goat or a horse but getting tricked, as some sort of obscure topical joke. Maybe that is it, but I’m not sure which play it was - because if I were to look for it, it wouldn't be there...

* This is not an article about stuff deleted by Shakespeare during the writing process, though, of course, we do know a little about that because Love’s Labour’s Lost has a transcription error and accidentally includes two versions of the same scene.

Groovy Movies

 An updated list of every SF classic I have seen. Please let me know if there are any good or essential films I’ve missed.

 

1926

Metropolis

1930

Just Imagine

1933

King Kong

1936

Things to Come

1950

Destination Moon

1951

The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Man in the White Suit, The Thing, When Worlds Collide

1953

Invaders from Mars, It Came from Outer Space, War of the Worlds

1954

20,000 Leagues under the Sea, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Them!

1955

The Day The World Ended, The Quatermass Xperiment, This Island Earth

1956

1984, Earth versus the Flying Saucers, Forbidden Planet, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Plan 9 from Outer Space, X The Unknown

1957

The Abominable Snowman, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Quatermass 2

1958

The Fly

1959

Journey to the Centre of the Earth, On The Beach, Return of the Fly

1960

The Last Woman On Earth, The Little Shop of Horrors, The Time Machine, Village of the Damned

1961

The Day the Earth Caught Fire

1962

Doctor No

1963

The Birds, The Damned, The Day of the Triffids, La Jetee

1964

Children of the Damned, Doctor Strangelove, Fail Safe, The First Men in the Moon, Goldfinger, The Last Man on Earth

1965

Alphaville, Crack in the World, Dr Who and the Daleks, Thunderball, The War Game

1966

Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 AD, Fahrenheit 451, Fantastic Voyage, Seconds

1967

Barbarella, Casino Royale, Privilege, Quatermass and the Pit, The Terrornauts, They Came From Beyond Space, You Only Live Twice

1968

2001-A Space Odyssey, Charly, Planet of the Apes

1969

The Bed Sitting Room, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Doppelgänger, Marooned, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Zeta One

1970

The Andromeda Strain, Colossus: The Forbin Project, No Blade of Grass

1971

A Clockwork Orange, Diamonds are Forever, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, Percy, Silent Running, Solaris, THX 1138

1972

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Doomwatch, Slaughterhouse Five

1973

Battle for the Planet of the Apes, The Final Programme, Phase IV, Sleeper, Soylent Green, Westworld, World on a Wire, Zardoz

1974

The Cars That Ate Paris, Dark Star, The Land That Time Forgot, The Little Prince, The Man with the Golden Gun, The Stepford Wives, The Terminal Man, Young Frankenstein

1975

A Boy and His Dog, Death Race 2000, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Rollerball

1976

At the Earth’s Core, The Big Bus, Futureworld, The Killer Bees, Logan’s Run, The Man Who Fell to Earth

1977

Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Demon Seed, Empire of the Ants, The Island of Dr Moreau, The Glitterball, The People That Time Forgot, The Spy Who Loved Me, Star Wars

1978

The Boys from Brazil, Coma, A Hitch in Time, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Pirahna, Superman, The Swarm, Warlords of Atlantis

1979

Alien, The Black Hole, The China Syndrome, Mad Max, Meteor, Moonraker, Star Trek, Starcrash, Time After Time

1980

Altered States, The Apple, Battle Beyond the stars, The Empire Strikes Back, The Final Countdown, Flash Gordon, Monster,  Saturn 3, Scanners, Superman II

1981

Escape from New York, Galaxy of Terror, Mad Max 2, Outland, Piranha II, Time Bandits

1982

Airplane II, Blade Runner, ET, Forbidden World, The Thing, Tron, Videodrome, The Wrath of Khan

1983

Krull, The Man With Two Brains, Never Say Never Again, Return of the Jedi, Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Superman III, Testament, Wargames

1984

1984, 2010, The Brother from Another Planet, Dreamscape, Dune, Electric Dreams, Ghostbusters, Gremlins, The Last Starfighter, Night of the Comet, The Philadelphia Experiment, Repo Man, Search for Spock, Starman, Terminator

1985

Back to the Future, Brazil, Cocoon, Creature, Enemy Mine, Lifeforce, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Morons from Outer Space, The Quiet Earth, Weird Science

1986

Aliens, Biggles: Adventures in Time, Critters, The Fly, Howard the Duck, Invaders from Mars, Peggy Sue Got Married, Short Circuit, Star Trek IV

1987

Batteries Not Included, Innerspace, Predator, RoboCop, The Running Man, Spaceballs, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace

1988

Akira, Alien Nation, Earth Girls Are Easy, Moonwalker, They Live

1989

The Abyss, Back to the Future II, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Ghostbusters II, Slipstream, Star Trek V

1990

Back to the Future III, Gremlins 2, The Handmaid’s Tale, Hardware, Moon 44, Total Recall

1991

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, The Rocketeer, Star Trek 6, Terminator 2, Wedlock

1992

Alien 3, The Lawnmower Man

1993

Coneheads, Demolition Man, Les Visiteurs, Jurassic Park

1994

Stargate, Star Trek Generations, Timecop

1995

12 Monkeys, The City of Lost Children, Congo, GoldenEye, Judge Dredd, Screamers, Tank Girl, Waterworld

1996

Barb Wire, Crash, Independence Day, Mars Attacks!, Star Trek: First Contact

1997

Contact, Cube, Event Horizon, The Fifth Element, Gattaca, The Lost World, Men in Black, Starship Troopers

1998

Dark City, Deep Impact, Pi, Sphere, Star Trek: Insurrection

1999

eXistenZ, Galaxy Quest, The Matrix, Muppets from Space, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

2000

Mission to Mars, Pitch Black, Unbreakable

2001

AI, Donnie Darko, Jurassic Park III, Planet of the Apes

2002

28 Days Later, Equilibrium, Impostor, Minority Report, Solaris, Spider-Man, Star Trek: Nemesis, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, Signs, The Time Machine

2003

The Core, Paycheck, Terminator 3, Timeline

2004

The Butterfly Effect, The Day After Tomorrow, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I, Robot, Primer

2005

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Robots, Serenity, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, War of the Worlds, Zarutha

2006

A Scanner Darkly, Children of Men, The Fountain, The Host, Southland Tales, Superman Returns, V for Vendetta

2007

28 Weeks Later, I Am Legend, The Mist, Next, Sunshine, Timecrimes

2008

Cloverfield, Iron Man, Outlander, WALL-E

2009

2012, Avatar, District 9, Frequently Asked Question About Time Travel, Land of the Lost, Lockout, Moon, Mr Nobody, The Road, Star Trek, The Time Traveler’s Wife

2010

Despicable Me, Hot Tub Time Machine, Monsters, Never Let Me Go, Tron Legacy

2011

The Adjustment Bureau, Attack the Block, Cowboys vs Aliens, In Time, Limitless, Midnight in Paris, Paul, Perfect Sense, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Source Code, Super 8, Thor

2012

Cloud Atlas, Dredd, The Hunger Games, John Carter, Looper, Prometheus, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Total Recall, Upside Down

2013

About Time, Continuum, Elysium, Ender’s Game Gravity, Her, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Oblivion, Pacific Rim, Snowpiercer, Star Trek Into Darkness, The World’s End, Under the Skin, The Zero Theorem

2014

The Anomaly, Coherence, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Divergent, Edge of Tomorrow, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Giver, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay 1, Interstellar, Left Behind, Lucy, The Maze Runner, Noah, Mr Peabody & Sherman, Predestination, Space Station 76, Time Lapse, Transcendence

2015

Advantageous, Insurgent, EX Machina, High Rise, Hot Tub Time Machine 2, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay 2, Jupiter Ascending, Jurassic World, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, The Signal, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Tomorrowland

2016

10 Cloverfield Lane, Allegiant, ARQ, Arrival, Ghostbusters, Independence Day: Resurgence, Passengers, Star Wars: Rogue One, Star Trek Beyond

2017

Blade Runner 2049, War for the Planet of the Apes, Geostorm, The Humanity Bureau, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Time Trap

2018

Annihilation, The Cloverfield Paradox, Mortal Engines, Mute, Ready Player One, Star Wars: Solo, The Titan

2019

Ad Astra, Farmageddon, Io, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, The Wandering Earth

2020

The Midnight Sky , Sputnik

 

Still left to see:

 

1955

The Conquest of Space

1957

The Invisible Boy

1958

Teenage Caveman, Terror in the Midnight Sun

1959

Teenagers from Outer Space

1961

The Phantom Planet 

1964

Dogora, Robinson Crusoe on Mars

1965

The Tenth Victim

1968

Je T’aime Je T’aime

1969

The Gladiators, Moon Zero Two

1970

Gas-s-s-s

1971

Punishment Park, Quest for Love

1973

Fantastic Planet

1974

It’s Alive, Where Have All The People Gone?

1977

Capricorn One

1979

Stalker

1981

Looker

1982

Halloween III

1984

Caravan of Courage, Runaway, Supergirl

1985

DARYL

1989

Millennium

1990

Meet the Applegates

1991

Naked Lunch

1996

The Arrival

1998

Armageddon 

2000

Frequency, Red Planet

2001

Ghosts of Mars, Vanilla Sky

2002

The Adventures of Pluto Nash

2003

Riverworld

2005

A Sound of Thunder, Sky High

2006

Deja Vu

2008

Death Race, Doomsday

2009

9, Splice

2011

Cold Fusion, The Collapsed

2012

Mine Games, Robert & Frank, Safety Not Guaranteed

2013

Colony, The Congress, Europa Report, The Last Days on Mars, Love

2014 

Debug, The History of Time Travel, The Last Invasion, Survivor

2015

Chappie, Dark Planet, Infini, Rotor DR1

2016

Capsule, The Darkest Dawn, Midnight Special, Paradox, Spectral

2017

Anti-Matter, Beyond Skyline, The Endless, iBoy, Revolt, Stasis, War of the Planet of the Apes

2018

2036 Origin Unknown, Abduction, Anon, Attraction, The Beyond, Bumblebee, Curvature, Extinction, High Life, Kin, Level 16, Maze Runner: The Death Cure, Occupation, Replicas, Solis, The Shape of Water, Tau, White Chamber, Zoe

2019

I Am Mother, Jurassic Galaxy, White Space

2020

3022, Archive, Bill & Ted Face the Music, G-Loc, Tenet

2021

Dune