By Robert Scucci
| Published 22 seconds ago

Sometimes you want to watch sci-fi anthology series like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, or Black Mirror for their existential subject matter without fully diving off a dread-induced deep end. That’s where 2017’s Dimension 404 comes in handy. It tackles the same kind of metaphysical topics while functioning as a straight-up comedy series. Narrated by Mark Hamill and featuring talent like Joel McHale and Patton Oswalt, Dimension 404 plays out like The Twilight Zone for the digital age.

Clocking in at only six episodes across a single season, Dimension 404 is a breezy weekend binge if I’ve ever seen one. It’s a satisfying watch if you’re into the above series but want to lean more toward levity. It’s still cynical and brushes up against the same moral and philosophical conundrums you’d expect from a forward-thinking sci-fi anthology, but it carries significantly less existential baggage.

We’ve Seen These All Before, But Not The Funny Versions

While I fully understand that shows like Black Mirror aren’t all doom and gloom and can be quite funny at times, they tend to occupy that lane more often than not. Dimension 404 leans into camp, comedy, and parody as its baseline approach to storytelling. 

The first episode, “Matchmaker,” which premiered just months before Black Mirror’s Season 4 episode “Hang the DJ,” treads similar territory with its absurdist take on dating apps.

Where the Black Mirror episode hinges on the futility of modern dating, “Matchmaker” goes full absurdist, involving cloning, dating do-overs, and a campus full of men named Adam (Robert Buckley), all of whom chow down on pink slop while watching each successive version of themselves try to win the dating game. It’s the same subject matter but has a better sense of humor about everything.

The rest of Dimension 404 follows a similar pattern, with each episode feeling vaguely familiar but twisted toward comedy instead of dread.

Patton Oswalt portrays a movie snob who brings his own 3D glasses to a high-tech theater in “Cinethrax,” only to discover that a Lovecraftian monster is crawling out of the screen and face-sucking every patron wearing the glasses the theater provided. In “Chronos,” a young woman named Susan (Ashley Rickards) finds herself stuck in a time loop centered on her favorite 90s cartoon that nobody else remembers, and she has to break the cycle in time to submit her physics final.

“Polybius” centers on an arcade game that pulls its players into its realm, complete with ancient, biblical implications. “Bob” gives us the classic “what if AI has feelings” routine, except the titular machine is made entirely out of genetically modified human meat and is as disgusting to look at as you’d expect. And finally, “Impulse” follows an aspiring professional FPS gamer who learns the dark side of fame after slugging down one too many energy drinks.

Doesn’t Reinvent The Wheel, But Still A Fun Vehicle 

Dimension 404 doesn’t reinvent the thought-provoking sci-fi anthology wheel, but it doesn’t really need to. There are plenty of genuinely laugh-out-loud moments, and everybody involved is clearly having fun with whatever ridiculous scenario they’re trapped in. It’s the diet Black Mirror, or the version of The Twilight Zone that mom says we have at home. I don’t mean that as a knock, but the series clearly wears its influences on its sleeve, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

If you’re a sci-fi fan who’s seen it all before, you know exactly what you’re getting into when firing up Dimension 404, which is currently streaming for free on Tubi. That familiarity doesn’t make it any less entertaining, though. For everything it may lack in originality, it’s still an engaging watch from start to finish thanks to the talent involved, and it swerves away from baseline expectations just enough to earn your attention.

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 39 seconds ago

If we’re being honest, there have been plenty of problems with NuTrek since it premiered in 2017, but one of the more persistent problems has been figuring out what stakes a story should have. Discovery and Picard exhausted fans by having huge stakes, whereas early episodes of Starfleet Academy annoyed the fandom with hilariously low stakes. In the latest SFA episode “Come, Let’s Away,” however, NuTrek has finally found a storytelling sweet spot, delivering the kind of medium stakes that typified the Golden Age of Star Trek.

For better or for worse, Star Trek: Discovery was always a show swinging for the fences with high-stakes storytelling. Season 1 involved saving the Federation from Klingons who were intent on destroying the Earth, and Season 2 involved saving the entire galaxy from evil AI. Season 3 involved saving the Federation yet again (this time, in the far future), while Season 4 was all about stopping a threat that destroyed entire planets. The final season wrapped things up with a plot about keeping reality-rewriting technology from ending up in the hands of the scariest aliens the galaxy has ever known.

Star Trek Fans Experience Disaster Fatigue

Star Trek: Picard continued this tradition: Season 1 turned Picard’s quest to help Data’s daughter into an adventure involving an ancient Romulan conspiracy, android rebellion, and all-powerful machine gods from outside the galaxy. Season 2 had Picard and his buddies fighting to keep their entire future from becoming a freaky fascist dystopia. Oh, and Season 3 wrapped things up by having our heroes prevent the Borg from taking over and rewriting the entire galaxy into their cybernetic image.

Understandably, audiences grew tired of what amounted to disaster fatigue; as with superhero movies, the simple truth is that it’s just exhausting when the stakes are always impossibly high. It’s hard to care that the entire galaxy is in danger when this is happening in literally every season. Strange New Worlds tried to fix this problem with simpler, episodic adventures, but some fans thought the adventures were too low-stakes, and it was hard to care about stories with plots like “will everyone stop singing?” and “will Spock fulfill his naughty nurse fantasy?”

Star Trek’s Drama Loses Its Shirt

When Starfleet Academy began, it arguably replicated the problem of Star Trek’s low-stakes stories. It’s a show modeled after Young Adult franchises like Harry Potter, so the episodes mostly revolve around the young cadets discovering the power and value that has been hidden inside of them all along. That makes for some interesting coming-of-age stories, but some fans found story hooks like “will Starfleet Academy win the prank war?” and “will SAM stop arguing with her holographic parents?” so low-stakes that they couldn’t really care about these episodes.

That’s part of why I was so impressed by “Come, Let’s Away:” the most recent Starfleet Academy episode effectively found a narrative sweet spot by giving us an adventure where our cadets were in mortal peril. After a training mission goes sideways, several cadets are kidnapped by killer cannibals, forcing Starfleet to ask space pirate Nus Braka for help. While the cadets are ultimately saved, Braka doublecrosses our heroes, destroying a starship and ransacking a starbase while leaving a trail of bodies in the cold vacuum of space.

How Star Trek Got Its Groove Back

I personally loved this episode for many reasons, including the fact that it ditched the show’s signature bad humor to deliver a tense thriller reminiscent of the Golden Age of Trek. Seeing the characters cut the jokes and pool their different skills to overcome an impossible situation reminded me of why I fell in love with shows like The Next Generation. Eventually, I realized the other big reason this episode reminded me of TNG: it finally found the sweet spot between insanely high stakes and laughably low stakes.

The cadets being in mortal peril is certainly higher-stakes than, say, stories focusing entirely on Caleb’s love life or prank battles with the War College. But it’s not like Discovery or Picard, where the crew regularly had to save the entire galaxy from some insane threat or another. Instead, Starfleet Academy finally found that sweet spot by giving us the ultimate Trek trope of a story: a simple mission goes wrong, and everyone must put their training to the test to overcome impossible odds.

Only time will tell if Starfleet Academy can maintain this sweet spot for future episodes or if we will go back to low-stakes adventures punctuated by cringeworthy potty humor. But as I mentioned in my review of “Come, Let’s Away,” my fingers are crossed that this represents a turning point for this controversial show and that it is becoming the kind of series older franchise fans have been begging for. With any luck, the writers realize they are dealing with their own high-stakes story about whether Star Trek survives another 60 years or gets a Dr. McCoy-like assessment from a bored fandom: “it’s dead, Jim!”

By Jonathan Klotz
| Published 1 hour ago

In the last decade, we went from multiple raunch comedies hitting theaters every year to nearly zero. One of the last of the mainstream raunch comedy releases, 2014’s Sex Tape starring Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel, was a small hit, but its premise could only have supported a film in 2014 when the general public didn’t know what “the cloud” was or how it worked. A few years later, Apple’s iCloud became a common, everyday feature for users, who now understood that the entire plot of the film made no sense. 

Sex Tape Has No Idea How Technology Works

In Sex Tape, Diaz and Segel play a married couple, Anne and Jay Hargrove, trying to rediscover the spark that they once had when the kids are away for a night. With nothing else working, they let their intrusive thoughts win and decide to film a sex tape. The problem is that instead of deleting the next day, Segal’s hapless Jay realizes it’s been uploaded to the cloud and shared with the iPads he gave away for Christmas. And yes, they are not only called iPads, but they are constantly shown on screen in the oddest product placement you can imagine.

Jay and Annie head out to recover all of the iPads and delete the video before anyone can see the sex tape. This involves committing breaking and entering, battling a German shepherd, accidentally doing a rail of cocaine, and getting busted by their best friends, played by Ellie Kemper and Rob Corddry, a pairing that, in a just world, would have headlined their own rom-com by now. The thing is, in reality, videos aren’t sent to iPads through the Cloud unless you specifically set up a shared file, then download them on each and every iPad. The entire plot could be resolved with one five-second act of deleting a file. 

Sex Tape relies entirely on the comedic chemistry of Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel, who reunite after knocking it out of the park with Bad Teacher. The physical comedy and one-liners are so few and far between that it’s one of those movies where you see everything in the trailer. Everyone involved has been in better, funnier films, but in the 12 years since Sex Tape’s release and the complete collapse of the rom-com industrial complex, it now looks like a masterpiece. 

Sex Tape Hastened The End Of Rom-Coms

Bad Teacher set off the last gasp of rom-com relevance thanks to great reviews and a huge box office haul, while Sex Tape approached rock bottom with a 16 percent critical rating and a 33 percent audience rating. At the box office, it made three times its estimated budget with $120 million, but again, that doesn’t take into account the large marketing budget from attempting to turn the two leads into a Julia Roberts and Richard Gere for a new generation. 

This decade, Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell had a little success with a rom-com, Jeniffer Lauirence crashed and burned in her attempt, while the time-loop rom-com Palm Springs, starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti, has been the most creative entry in the genre in decades. By comparison, Sex Tape hinges on a plot that’s both out of date and, given the Cloud’s common knowledge, makes zero sense. You can do better by watching Bad Teacher or Palm Springs again, then spending your time watching Sex Tape.