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 DVDs War of the WorldsFebruary 2006
Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) is expecting no more than a weekend with his children when a freak and violent storm strikes his city. As Ray and his neighbours go to investigate, they discover a hole in their street, from which climbs a three-legged alien machine. As the startled crowd reacts, runs or just stands and looks in awe, the machine's death ray begins firing, and all hell breaks loose. The Martians are here (and have been for quite some time, we discover), and they want us dead.  Space Odyssey: Voyage to the PlanetsFebruary 2006
For anyone who missed the BBC's dramatised three-hour tour of our solar system when it was screened by the ABC earlier this year, the price of this DVD is a modest levy indeed for a small slice of television history. The two-part presentation travels with the crew of the Pegasus to Venus and Mars, through the Sun's outer atmosphere and the asteroid belt to the gas giants and beyond.  Blake's 7, Series 3November 2005
Blake's 7 was being made as Ridley Scott was frightening the pants off filmgoers with Alien. Scott's Nostromo, flown with weary disregard by Dallas, Ripley and the others, looked plausibly futuristic, battered but solid - as you'd expect an interstellar ore-refining vessel to look. Blake's Liberator, flown by Avon, Cally, Tarrant, Dayna and Vila is bright, clean and loaded with high-tech widgets you'd expect from a ship that's the envy of the cosmos. It's also an early '80s example of BBC set construction and isn't at all convincing.  PaycheckNovember 2005
Based on a short story written by Dick in 1953, Paycheck addresses the author's abiding fascination with groundbreaking technology and the problems such advances pose for humanity when things go awry. As a writer, Dick was quite philosophical about our reliance on machines and this film explores that idea, which is helped along by a few action sequences from director John Woo.  The Day of the TriffidsSeptember 2005
Humanity has faced destruction in a thousand increasingly horrible ways in print and on screen since John Wyndham's fine novel, The Day of the Triffids, was published in 1951. Most recently and cataclysmically, the world (with the inestimable help of Tom Cruise) fights an apparently impossible battle against the tripods in Steven Spielberg's film, War of the Worlds.  The Final CutAugust 2005
What if, before you were born, you were implanted with a device that recorded every act of your life - as seen through your eyes? What if this record only became available after you died - to be edited by a 'cutter' and presented to grieving family at your funeral? In The Final Cut, Robin Williams is Alan Hakman, a cutter. He is the best of the best. No matter how awful a person's life, he views it all, then deletes the bad bits and presents the family with the sanitised version. And then his own life starts to unravel.  SolarisJuly 2005
The Polish novel Solaris (1961) was announced as a classic from the day it was first published in English. Its author, Stanislaw Lem, was Eastern Europe's most successful science fiction writer, and intent on showing the whole English-language world just how the genre should be written! Lem's fictional planet, Solaris, behaves as a giant alien mind, one essentially unknowable to human intellect. 
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