Heart of the Sea shows the [oil] industry, through the lens of ages past, simply as it is, for good and for ill: the danger, the greed, the politics… and the thrill, the upward mobility, the way to a better life headlong into hard weather and harder work.

That strange juxtaposition of dinosaur subjects and an old west setting is one of several examples of the film mixing motifs without purpose or payoff.

For all the success of The Martian and the hype anticipating The Force Awakens, the annals of popular culture will not remember 2015 as the year of space fiction, grounded or fantastical; no, 2015 is destined for the moniker of “The Year of Espionage.” One of the most critically successful games of the year has…

Spacecraft need to be flawless in their design and execution. The disasters of the Apollo 1, the Challenger, and the Columbia were not brought about by glaring errors of engineering, nor were they haphazardly constructed, nor were they crewed by foolhardy thrillseekers filled with hubris and bravado.  It was infinitesimally fine details, like the maximum…