It's a story that's been told countless times throughout cinematic history but Robert Zemeckis puts his own spin it and delivers a technological marvel that bored the hell out of my family. The story can easily be told in under an hour but the 95 minutes felt like nine hours, especially when Scrooge is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. I'm surprised the film received a PG rating due to some scary images of the ghost's visits. Regardless, the beautiful animation couldn't make up for the shortcomings of the screenplay.

In the early 1980s, an alien spaceship hovers over the city of Johannesburg, South Africa, and shows no signs of life. After waiting six months for contact, the government decides to cut into the vessel to see what's inside, and it finds the alien crew starving and malnourished. The local authorities set up a refugee camp for the aliens, and over the span of nearly 30 years, their numbers grow to over 1.8 million. Now what?

It's the hottest day of the year in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. As the thermometer rises, so do tempers in the racially charged atmosphere. Local Italian pizza man Sal (Danny Aiello), proprietor of Sal's Famous, runs the restaurant with his two sons and employs Mookie (Spike Lee) as their delivery boy. When local radical Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito) takes umbrage with the restaurant's lack of "brothers" on its "wall of fame," all hell breaks loose when the businessmen are pushed too far and the police must intercede.

A deadly plague known as the Reaper Virus attacks Scotland, killing thousands and infecting millions more. To contain the disease, England constructs a wall along the border to keep out infected citizens from the north. Twenty-five years later, the virus reappears, forcing the government to dispatch a military team to search out a Scottish researcher (Malcolm McDowell) who was close to finding a cure during the first outbreak.