Tubi Tuesday: Three Films Worth Your Time This Week
Tubi is still the best deal in streaming and it isn’t close. While Netflix and the rest keep raising prices and thinning out their catalogs to fund whatever prestige project is on the docket this month, Tubi stays free and keeps its shelves stocked with the kind of films that made going to the video store worth the trip. Classics, cult favorites, cheesy genre pictures, hidden gems, and everything in between. Every week I pull three worth your Tuesday night from the catalog.
This week we’ve got a Will Smith sci-fi movie that has somehow become more interesting with age, one of the most controversial romance films of the 1980s, and Tim Burton unleashing an army of big-brained Martians on one of the most ridiculous casts ever assembled.
I, Robot (2004)
Action/Sci-Fi • 1h 54m
There was a stretch where Will Smith could seemingly walk onto a movie set, make something entertaining for two hours, and Hollywood would collect a few hundred million dollars. I, Robot landed right in the middle of that run, and more than twenty years later it holds up considerably better than a lot of the CGI-heavy blockbusters that came out around it.
Smith plays Del Spooner, a Chicago detective living in 2035, where humanoid robots have become an ordinary part of everyday life. They cook, deliver packages, handle public services, and generally do whatever humans don’t feel like doing anymore. Everyone trusts them because they’re governed by the Three Laws of Robotics, which are supposed to make it impossible for a robot to harm a human being. Spooner doesn’t buy any of it.
When robotics pioneer Dr. Alfred Lanning, played by James Cromwell, apparently commits suicide, Spooner becomes convinced that a robot named Sonny may have killed him. That’s supposed to be impossible, which naturally means nobody believes Spooner and he spends most of the movie looking like the crazy guy yelling about robots while the robots continue multiplying around him.
The murder mystery is enough to carry the first half, but I, Robot eventually opens up into a much bigger science-fiction action movie about artificial intelligence, free will, and what happens when a machine follows human instructions to their logical conclusion instead of the conclusion humans actually intended. Alan Tudyk’s performance as Sonny gives the movie far more heart than you’d expect from a CGI robot, and Bridget Moynahan works well opposite Smith as Dr. Susan Calvin, a robotics expert who initially trusts the machines considerably more than she trusts Spooner.
Watching this thing in 2026 is also a little different than watching it in 2004. Back then, the idea of people willingly handing enormous parts of their lives over to artificial intelligence still felt like distant science fiction. Now we’ve got AI writing emails, generating images, answering questions, driving cars, and creeping into practically every piece of technology we own. We’re not at NS-5 robots walking around the house yet, but suddenly Spooner’s distrust doesn’t seem quite as ridiculous as it did twenty-two years ago.
Alex Proyas keeps the movie moving, Smith is still operating in peak movie-star mode, and the action is big without completely overwhelming the story underneath it. It isn’t a perfect science-fiction film, but it’s a damn entertaining one, and it has aged into something a little more interesting than the summer blockbuster it was originally sold as.
The Blue Lagoon (1980)
Adventure/Drama/Romance • 1h 44m
Well, this one is complicated.
Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins star as Emmeline and Richard, two children who survive a shipwreck and end up stranded on a tropical island. An older sailor named Paddy survives with them and teaches them how to live off the land, but after his death, the two children are left entirely on their own. Years pass, they grow into teenagers, puberty arrives without an instruction manual, and the movie becomes a coming-of-age romance about two young people trying to figure out adulthood, attraction, sex, pregnancy, and parenthood without having any society around them to explain any of it.
And yes, they’re cousins. Told you it was complicated.
The Blue Lagoon was a huge commercial success despite critics absolutely hammering it, and it’s easy to understand why audiences showed up. This is one of the most gorgeous movies of its era. Director Randal Kleiser and cinematographer Néstor Almendros make the island look like an actual paradise, with blue water, untouched beaches, tropical forests, and the kind of natural scenery that makes you understand why this movie stayed in people’s memories even when they couldn’t remember much about the plot.
The part that has aged considerably less gracefully is everything surrounding Brooke Shields. She was only fourteen during production, and the film’s fixation on the sexual awakening of its teenage characters makes the entire thing much more uncomfortable to watch now than Hollywood apparently thought it would be in 1980. You can understand what the story is trying to explore while also wondering how in the hell some of it got made the way it did.
Strip away that controversy, though, and there’s an interesting survival story underneath it. Emmeline and Richard essentially have to invent their own little civilization from scratch. They don’t understand illness, reproduction, social customs, or most of the things adults normally explain to children. Nature is their entire world, and the film is at its best when it simply lets them exist inside that world and figure things out.
I wouldn’t call The Blue Lagoon a great movie, and parts of it are going to make a modern audience squirm for reasons the filmmakers probably didn’t intend. But it is absolutely a fascinating artifact of its time; it’s visually beautiful, and it’s one of those movies everybody has heard of even if they’ve never actually sat down and watched it. Tubi gives you the chance to finally see what all the fuss was about without paying anything for the privilege.
Mars Attacks! (1996)
Comedy/Sci-Fi • 1h 46m
If you gave Tim Burton a gigantic Hollywood budget, a stack of old science-fiction trading cards, one of the most absurd ensemble casts ever assembled, and absolutely nobody standing behind him saying “maybe don’t do that,” you would get Mars Attacks!
Which is exactly what happened.
Martians arrive on Earth in flying saucers, and the United States government initially assumes peaceful contact is possible. President James Dale, played by Jack Nicholson, wants diplomacy. Professor Donald Kessler, played by Pierce Brosnan, is convinced the aliens are an advanced civilization that surely wouldn’t travel across the universe just to murder everybody.
Then the Martians come down, say “Ack! Ack! Ack!” and start vaporizing people.
From there, Mars Attacks! basically becomes Tim Burton destroying the world for his own amusement. Jack Nicholson plays two completely different characters because apparently one Jack Nicholson wasn’t enough. Glenn Close is the First Lady. Annette Bening plays a New Age believer who thinks the Martians are spiritually enlightened. You’ve got Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Rod Steiger, Natalie Portman, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Jack Black, Lukas Haas, and Tom Jones playing himself because, at that point, why the hell not.
The Martians are the real stars. They’re horrible little bastards who pretend to come in peace, incinerate crowds of people, conduct ridiculous experiments, pose for photographs while murdering humans, and spend most of the movie laughing hysterically at the destruction they’re causing. The whole thing plays like a 1950s alien invasion movie made by someone who thinks humanity probably deserves whatever happens to it.
It bombed with a lot of audiences in 1996 because people weren’t entirely sure what they were supposed to make of it. It wasn’t Independence Day, even though both movies arrived the same year and involved aliens attacking Earth. Independence Day played the invasion completely straight and turned humanity fighting back into a giant crowd-pleasing spectacle. Mars Attacks! looked at basically the same setup and decided it would be much funnier if the aliens vaporized Congress.
Thirty years later, that’s exactly why it works.
The effects are intentionally cartoonish, Danny Elfman’s score is fantastic, the production design is pure Burton, and the movie never takes itself seriously for more than about thirty seconds at a time. It’s weird, stupid, violent, colorful, occasionally brilliant, and completely committed to the bit.
Sometimes that’s all you need on a Tuesday night.
That’s your Tubi Tuesday for this week. Three films, no subscription required, and none of them are going to waste your time with a lecture.
Tubi Tuesday runs every week here at Titanquisitor, so check back next Tuesday for three more. And if you’ve got a Tubi hidden gem that deserves a spotlight, drop it in the comments below.
