Redshirt Cinema Club

Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a podcast about fandom and watching movies with friends. So when you’ve just finished watching a massive series of superhero movies, and it’s nearly Halloween, and one of your three hosts hasn’t seen a particular beloved 80s classic, who you gonna call? The cadence of that was all wrong but, yes, we watched Ghostbusters this week, the 1984 smash hit comed...

We've arrived! But where? At the muster station for wayward Marvel superheroes, also known as (genuinely) the biggest thing to happen to cinema since Star Wars. The Avengers is the culmination of an ever-evolving plan for the comic book publisher to make it's own movies, to control its own stable of characters, to give Stan Lee as many screen credits as possible, and to make gigantic stack...

Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a podcast about fandom and watching movies with friends. Now the film we’re watching this week is called Captain America: The First Avenger, despite the fact he’s actually the last one to be introduced before Marvel’s superhero superteam assemble. Chris Evans stars as the titular Cap, breaking free of his Fantastic Four shackles and establishing himself a...

Film number four in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is Thor, and we've come a long way from Tony Stark's cave in Afghanistan. All the way to Asgard, in fact, as the bounds of the MCU expand even at this early stage to embrace other worlds, mythical beings, and stuff happening somewhere in the gap between endless space and affordable CG. THERE IS A LOT GOING ON. The MCU gets its first supervi...

Three episodes into our MCU series and we’ve already got our first sequel - 2010’s Iron Man 2 - which Marvel couldn’t resist making after the success of the original. Robert Downey Jr returns as Tony Stark, facing off against both Mickey Rourke’s Whiplash and the age-old conundrum of what do you do with a superhero after their origin story? You talk about them on a podcast, that’s what. Let’s go!...

Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a podcast about fandom and watching movies with friends. We’re doing it! We’re getting through Phase One of the MCU, and today that means our opinion lens is focused on 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, a complicated entry in that it came out mere months after Iron Man, features a star in Edward Norton who never returns to the franchise, and is a sort of sequel...

The truth is, we are watching Iron Man... Listeners, it's time for a reboot. For Edward Norton to become Mark Ruffalo. For Andrew Garfield to become Tom Holland. For us to have a vision, a quest for the podcast once again. It's time for Redshirt versus the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In what we're enigmatically calling Phase Three of the podcast, we’ll be rewatching the biggest movie phenomenon of...

Welcome Redshirt team, to the final pre-MCU comic book episode before we dive into the world of The Avengers, singularly and collectively. This week, it's Dave's pick, and he has chosen Constantine - although it proves to be more of a case of Constantin-terruptions as Nath and Rob lead us astray (or should that be ashtray?). Don't hold your breath for this one (though weirdly, we do. Really).&nbsp...

Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a weekly podcast Bat-transmitting from the Batcave. That’s right, a few short episodes after our trip to Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City, we’re back with the Dark Knight thanks to Rob’s choice for pre-MCU superhero viewing. Which is… Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, featuring a rogue’s gallery of Catwoman, The Penguin, and some guy making a reverse power stat...

Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a podcast about fandom and watching movies with friends. We’re about to tackle the big one - the MCU. The biggest movies, the most fervent fandoms, opinions so divisive they could probably splint a continent in half and sink the entire West coast of America. Which, coincidentally, is Lex Luthor’s plan in Superman: The Movie - the film we’re watching today...

Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a podcast about fandom and watching movies with friends. We’ve done it! We’ve watched ALL the Christopher Nolan films apartfromTheFollowing, and now we’re going full white guy podcast by RANKING THEM ALL. Will you agree with us? We don’t even agree with ourselves! Before we get to that however, it’s time to read out YOUR excellent opinions in our end of s...

Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a podcast about fandom and watching movies with friends. Today, it’s Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s multi-award-winning 2023 biopic of the man who made the bomb. Best Picture. Best actor for Cillian Murphy, Best Director for Nolan himself. But can it win the less-prestigious but harder-to-obtain award for entertaining all three of the Redshirt Cinema Cl...

The end of our Nolan series approaches, as you can tell by the fact we've reached a film that doesn't care about beginnings, or endings, or - more than one of us might argue - what happens in the middle, either. This week we're watching/have watched/will have been about to be watching Tenet, which is like a time-based counterpart to the globe-spanning, dream-plumbing action of Inception. Not conte...

We’re nearing the end of our Nolan run now, and we’re heading for the stars - or at least a handful of uninhabitable planets and a wormhole or two - with 2014’s Interstellar. A movie less about space and rockets than it is about love, regret, parenthood and just how much of a dick Matt Damon can be if the script is right. Does it get the Redshirt seal of approval? Time to find out! Hosted on Acast...

Check out our Nolan-esque use of non-linear plotting as we interrupt our chronological journey through the films of Christopher N to take in the director's newly released epic, The Odyssey. Praise Zeus, we did it! We got Rob to the cinema, and he stayed there until the film was over. But what did he - and Nath, and Dave - make of this take on Homer's epic tale? Even more crucially, how did Dave -...

Inception is the next film under the Redshirt Cinema Club spotlight, the cerebral 2010 sci-fi action movie Christopher Nolan somehow made in-between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. It’s generated memes and hot takes galore since then, with audiences loving to hate it as much as they love to… love it. On which side of the fence do we fall? It’s time to find out! Hosted on Acast. See acas...

Most people would probably have a break between making two blockbusting superhero movies, especially when they're as brilliant and ambitious as Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). Not Christopher Nolan. Instead he teamed up with Christian Bale and knocked out The Prestige (2006), a cerebral character drama following two feuding magicians and their shared obsession with outdoing the ot...

Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a podcast about - finally - BATMAN movies. Well it is for today anyway, as we tackle Christopher Nolan’s 2005 comic book blockbuster Batman Begins, the film that arguably made both him and lead-actor Christian Bale household names and kickstarted a superhero trilogy still regarded by many as the greatest ever. How does it hold up 21 years later? It’s time...

Today we continue our journey through the movies of Christopher Nolan with 2002's Insomnia, the comparatively little-known film he made between Memento (cult favourite, liking it makes you sound clever) and Batman Begins (the first chapter of everyone's favourite superhero trilogy). The cast is stacked with A-list talent - Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank will get your movie noticed - an...

It's finally happened. We're giving the world not the podcast it deserves but the one it needs right now. And what the world needs is a movie podcast where three early-middle-aged straight, white guys talk about Christopher Nolan films. First up is Memento, Nolan's critically-acclaimed mainstream debut from 2000 that - despite its raw, indie feel - carries itself with the artistic swagger of a sur...

Welcome back to Redshirt Cinema Club! We’re done with videogame adaptations for now, but before we move onto the next big thing it’s time to read your excellent and hilarious emails in an episode we’re calling Super Mailbag Bros. We didn’t come up with that, Shani Fox did on our Patreon chat. Well done, Shani. You’re better than us. Let us know what you think of this episode by emailing us at reds...

This week on Redshirt Cinema Club it’s the turn of 2002’s Resident Evil, an adaptation of the survival horror videogame that spawned a series of actually quite successful films despite never really being that good. Kind of like Fast and the Furious but with zombies instead of cars. Did the first movie convince US, however? Is the Licker scary? And just who is Milla Jovovich supposed to be? We’ll a...

Today we continue our videogame adaptation season by tackling 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, an early-noughties action flick starring megastar Angelina Jolie in the lead role, alongside pre-Bond Daniel Craig, a very young and very handsome Iain Glen and also Chris Barrie from Red Dwarf. Can it be the first videogame movie we’ve watched that isn’t terrible? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy f...

This week it's time for Pokémon: The First Movie. Rob is a lifelong is a lifelong Pokéfan while Nath and Dave are bemused onlookers ready to receive a heartwarming introduction to the world of collecting, training, and trying your best. Which is a shame because what they actually get is an existential nightmare dressed as a children's adventure. What does it mean to be alive? What is the purpose o...

For you, the day our episode on Street Fighter graced your village was the most important day in your life. But for us? It was Monday. Welcome back to our continuing series on video game movies, where this week we have reached the garish, often nonsensical, somehow still wonderfully entertaining Street Fighter from 1994. Several pillars of the game have been turned upside down - Guile is the main...