This week, I went to a theater to watch a showing of the black-and-white version of Johnny Mnemonic, starring Keanu Reeves. Old-heads like me may recall it as a bad mid-90s cyberpunk film (written by William Gibson!) about a data courier whose brain is the storage medium, but who had to have his childhood memories erased to make space for the work.
I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid, and you know what? It’s still not a good movie. But if you ignore the plot holes, mostly awful acting, and terrible pacing, it’s at least very cool to look at. Also, I had totally forgotten about Ice T’s turn as J-Bone, leader of the Lo-Tek underground. It was fun enough, but it was weird to hear the theater audience erupt with applause at the end, though, knowing how it was received almost three decades ago.
At least some of the movies below, from the last week’s worth of trailers, are bound to be better.
A Minecraft Movie
Jack Black’s Steve gets a backstory in the latest Minecraft trailer. The trailer shows young Steve (you can tell he’s young because his beard is brown at first) mining his way into the blocky game world, where he discovers he can build anything he imagines, as long as it’s made with blocks. Plus we get a look at Jason Momoa, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers, and Sebastian Eugene Hansen, who all find themselves dropped into this world with a now-much-older Steve (who now has a gray beard to show the passage of time).
You can catch A Minecraft Movie in theaters on April 4th. Then you can follow it up with a Minecraft theme park in 2026 or so.
Elio
The new teaser trailer from Pixar’s Elio lets us know the film is still alive and well. The movie comes from Coco screenwriter Adrian Molina, who co-directs alongside Domee Shi and Madeline Sharafian. It features the voice of Yonas Kibreab as Elio, a child who gets abducted by aliens and pretends to be Earth’s leader. If Coco is any indication, I expect I’ll be openly sobbing at the end. It’s out on June 13th.
Alien: Earth
The FX spinoff Alien: Earth is on its way in summer 2025, when it promises to finally* show us what it might be like to see xenomorphs on our planet. There’s little revealed here apart from the release timeframe and that, as The Verge’s Andrew Webster remarks, the aliens are “still very shiny.”
*Unless you count the Aliens vs. Predator films.
Star Wars Outlaws: Wild Card
Star Wars Outlaws is getting its first DLC in the form of Wild Card, a storyline that brings Lando Calrissian into the game. If you haven’t been playing the game lately, maybe hopping into a space battle with Han’s old buddy will draw you back in. Wild Card is available now for $14.99.
How to Train Your Dragon
Oh hey, look, a live-action version of an animated movie. How to Train Your Dragon will go head-to-head with Elio when it’s released on June 13th.