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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
Indiana Jones Dials A for Adventure but Is the Call Answered?
I'm a lifelong Indiana Jones fanguy who has seen every movie in the series during their original theatrical runs. Seeing each of the original three movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom and Last Crusade changed my life in some way. The original gave me a basic template at a young age that helped me understand what a movie was supposed to be. The second set a new standard for how much action and excitement one movie could have. And the third showed me just how satisfying a movie could be when you've spent years anticipating it and it successfully delivers on all of your expectations. I even found a lot to enjoy in Crystal Skull, even though it was not as magical as the originals. Like all the Indy movies, it was still aiming higher than most blockbusters do. Even it missed the mark in many ways, I still admired its attempt.
Every previous Indiana Jones movie was masterminded by the legendary filmmakers and friends, writer/producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg. My big concern going into this new episode, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, was that for the first time, a new writer/director, James Mangold, was taking over the series. Would he try to reimagine and reinvent the franchise, or would he try, and perhaps fail, to recreate the spirit of the originals? As it turns out, Mangold tried very hard to recreate the spirit of the originals. Too hard, in fact. Dial of Destiny is one of those movies best described as an "entertaining mess." This film tries to throw in everything that it thinks an Indiana Jones fan would want to see. This includes treasure hunts in dark caves, extended chase scenes on land, sea and air, ancient riddles, mysterious puzzles, magic artifacts, international travel, dastardly villains, femme fatales, creepy creatures, gruesome deaths, witty banter, heartfelt character moments, hats, guns and whips. In that sense, Mangold delivers everything an Indiana Jones fan could ever want to see. But there's weakness in the connective tissue that tries to stitch all of these money moments together. It feels like all of these compulsory elements were written out randomly on notecards first, after which the writers tried to come up with a plot, any plot, to string them all together.
That may have been an impossible task. Dial of Destiny is both literally and figuratively all over the place. Too much happens in this movie too fast. The pacing is frequently frantic. The logic teeters on the threadbare. We're not always sure how and why we went from point A to point B, or what the shifting motivations of the various characters are. The movie lacks the same level of comic relief that helped the rest of the Indiana Jones series smooth away some of its rougher, harder edges. It takes everything rather seriously, despite the events here being some of the more absurd and ridiculous in the series.
On a more fundamental level, I can't figure out what this movie is ABOUT, aside from the aforementioned giving Indiana Jones fans all the things they want to see, and keeping the franchise going as a commercial enterprise. This is a movie about the other Indiana Jones movies, not about any intrinsic meaning or purpose of its own. Spielberg said in an interview that it's a really good "Indiana Jones" movie...but is it a really good film, that stands on its own, outside the context of the Indy series? Not really. It would be a stretch to call the other Indiana Jones movies "message" movies, but they paid enough attention to essential story values that we felt uplifted by the emotional progress Indiana Jones made throughout the course of his adventures. I can't figure out what Dial of Destiny is trying to say about the Indiana Jones character, if anything.
Given that the story is little more than a framework on which to showcase the action and adventure, this movie must be judged on the quality of its individual scenes and set pieces. This is not a boring movie. It feels like it has more non-stop action than any of the previous Indiana Jones movies. The excitement level of all of this is relatively high, but the scenes never really feel assembled out of the tight clockwork structure that Spielberg built the action with in the previous Indy movies. A lot of people are running, riding, driving, flying, crashing, jumping, punching and shooting, but all of this feels a little more random than is typical for the series. The chases and fights don't always build up anticipation and suspense regarding what's going to happen next, and they don't necessarily lead to a satisfying conclusion. They just flood the screen with activity, and end when enough people have died or gotten away.
At a certain point, I decided that the movie was uneven enough that it was going to need to have an exceptional finale to justify its existence. And the good news is, it achieves that. The denouement of Dial of Destiny is creative, intriguing and wondrous in a way that the rest of the movie isn't. I wish we had seen a lot more of that originality and imagination throughout the film. The screenplay should have been scrapped and rewritten as a full-length expansion on what happens in the climax.
Out of all the actors, there is one who emerges completely unscathed in reputation amidst all of the chaos, and that is Mads Mikkelsen. He is the archetypal Nazi from central casting that the Indiana Jones series has been looking for since day one, and the best villain the series has ever had. His cruel, ominous epithets are delivered with an understated intensity through a crooked smile and a piercing glower that owns the screen every second he's on it. He correctly never makes evil seductive, but he certainly makes it compelling. If you've seen Mads before in other movies but never quite found him memorable enough to recognize later, this is the movie that will make you remember him.
The movie's other most important new character, Helena Shaw, struggles to rise above the obvious ambitions the franchise has for her. She's very clearly been given all of the characteristics that she needs in order to potentially inherit the series from Harrison Ford as its new lead, including having a sidekick of her own. (The awkward, overstuffed nature of Dial of Destiny is perhaps never more evident than when the story layers on multiple sidekicks like Russian nesting dolls.) The only real cringe-inducing writing in the movie comes when Helena outwits Indiana Jones on various matters, and he misses clues that he never would've overlooked in the previous movies, just so we can be shown how brilliant this new Helena character is supposed to be. This is the same energy we got from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, when the young woman Rey teaches the veteran Han Solo how his own ship the Millennium Falcon works. Helena is a diverse collection of off-the-shelf character traits, but I'm not sure if she ever feels like a real character. It doesn't help that her motivations seem to constantly be shifting in order to service the wild plot turns of the movie. Is she a femme fatale, a plucky heroine or a hard-boiled cynic? I didn't walk away with a sense of how she truly feels about anything, and definitely not WHY she feels that way. I wouldn't know how to write The Further Adventures of Helena Shaw, because I don't understand what Helena really wants or values in life. Phoebe Waller-Bridge's acting doesn't help. She's unable to bring any clarity to this conflicted character. Like the rest of the movie, her performance is all over the map.
Finally, we come to series star Harrison Ford, who is promoting this movie as Indy's final adventure. Harrison has made a late-stage career resurgence out of reviving his classic franchises, including Star Wars, Blade Runner and Indiana Jones, twice. Whatever the reception has been to these movies, he's never been considered anything but an asset to them. That tradition continues here. With Ford now at age 80, Dial of Destiny abandons any pretense of hiding how much Indy has aged, which is probably for the best. Ford's face has never looked craggier, but his screen presence is no less commanding than it was in his younger days. He's aged into a new phase of movie stardom as effortlessly as Clint Eastwood did. The movie's opening sequence uses digital de-aging to try and recreate the Raiders-era Indiana Jones. While that's an intriguing idea, the technology hasn't been perfected yet, and this scene goes on a lot longer than my suspension of disbelief was able to. I enjoyed watching Indy at his current age more. There's balance in Ford's performance, not just grumpiness and weariness, but vulnerability and curiosity too. One casualty of Ford's age is that we don't get a real two-fisted brawl with a big bruiser of a villain like we did in all the other Indy movies. He spends a lot more time driving vehicles in chase scenes than he does engaging in fisticuffs. But everything Ford does in this movie is done well, and this feels like the genuine Indiana Jones in every scene.
Ultimately, I was glad to see Harrison Ford back in the saddle as Indy for his advertised one last ride. Dial of Destiny is not an embarrassment to the series, and doesn't tarnish what came before (unless you're a fan of Mutt Williams, who is written out of the series pretty decisively here). The movie provides entertainment that will hit the spot for most Indiana Jones fans, even though they will be precisely the people that can recognize what the movie is missing, and why it's one of the lesser entries in the franchise. I enjoyed it enough that I wish the curtain wasn't closing on Indiana Jones just yet. I'd like to see him again, but with less noise and distraction getting in the way of Indy's natural charm, likability and humanity.
Black Adam (2022)
The Adam Bomb Takes Superhero Movies to an Eve of Destruction
Black Adam is one of the sloppiest, clumsiest, most incompetent superhero films ever made. It's fitting that the man who produced it, Walter Hamada, left the studio and his position as head of DC Films the week it was released. Rarely do we get justice in Hollywood for the many creative disasters they put out, but justice was served here. This is the worst film to come out under the DC Comics banner in the last ten years.
This movie thinks that superheroes are about costumes, powers, action and special effects, not about plot, character, dialogue, relationships or meaningful themes. Black Adam lays the visual spectacle on so thick that, after a while, the viewer becomes numb to it and the screen looks like so much gobbledygook. The movie, already way over-budgeted at $195 million for such an obscure comic book character, seems to have caked on so much CGI that they ran out of money before the end. The film concludes with an embarrassing, clunky action climax that looks like a stiff, poorly programmed video game scene.
Black Adam becomes a lost cause much sooner than that though. The film gets off on the wrong foot and never regains its footing. To explain who the Black Adam character is, the movie gives us yet another one of those long-winded introduction scenes where a narrator tells us "the story so far." This isn't what cinema is designed to do. We're supposed to be able to observe a story through scenes acted out by characters, not by an invisible narrator giving us an historical lecture. There is nothing in this introduction that couldn't have been explained by actual characters actually talking in the movie.
The introduction doesn't play fair with the audience either. Near the end of the movie, we get yet another cheap storytelling gimmick, the "everything you thought you knew was wrong" scene. We are told that what the narrator told us in the beginning was all a lie, or something. The gimmick is executed in such a hamfisted way that I have no real idea what they were trying to say, other than that they seem to have faked us out on some minor details in the introduction. This is a cheap screenplay trick that is way past its sell-by date. There is no reason to bamboozle the audience by purposely telling a story in an obtuse fashion. A filmmaker's job is to explain things efficiently and with clarity, not to put up artificial roadblocks to us simply understanding what's going on. A fantasy movie is complex enough as it is. They should not make it any more complicated for us.
At least they try to give Black Adam some kind of origin story. That's more than they do for the four other superheroes fighting each other for screen time in this movie. Superhero origin movies exist for a reason, and that is so we don't have to learn everything about where these people come from and why they do what they do via one awkward dialogue exchange. Most of the audience has never heard of Hawkman, Dr. Fate, Cyclone or Atom Smasher, and almost none of the audience has any idea what their origins are. I was almost sure Hawkman came from another planet before this movie, but here he simply seems to have borrowed Falcon's mechanical wings from over in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Atom Smasher also seems to have taken his origin story and powers on loan from Marvel's Ant-Man. Cyclone supposedly harnesses the power of the wind, like X-Men's Storm, but all she seems to do here is momentarily turn into a blurry special effect. The performances of these three actors do absolutely nothing to flesh out the depth that the screenplay fails to provide. They are one-note, with no emotional range whatsoever. Pierce Brosnan brings a bit more texture to Dr. Fate, who we learn has a helmet of alien origin that lets him do a bunch of random, unexplained things. Brosnan gives us one of cinema's rare gray-haired superheroes, and brings a wistful weariness to the character that is endearing. But there are too many characters in this movie. Cyclone and Atom Smasher in particular serve no purpose and could've easily been written out.
Black Adam himself, played by Dwayne Johnson, shows some signs of star power peeking through the impenetrable morass of CGI carnage on display here. He underplays his delivery, which is the right choice for a character who is already overwhelming the senses with repetitive, mind-numbing violence. He gets some chuckles with the old "stranger in a strange land" routine, as a character who is brought into an unfamiliar world. The most effective relationship in the movie is between Black Adam and a child, the son of a freedom fighter who is trying to sway Black Adam to join her revolution. The child has studied superhero comic books, which in the DC film universe appear to be non-fiction, and tries to train Black Adam on how to be a superhero. These scenes give us one sign of recognizable human behavior in the film, but they are scarce.
The rest of the movie is filled with plot points that are undeveloped and just don't work. Hawkman and Dr. Fate talk about having a long history of working together, but that doesn't do us any good when we've never been given the chance to see how their relationship developed before the events of this movie. Their words have no weight behind them. Hawkman preaches a message of anti-violence in between brutally beating other characters and knocking down buildings. This begs a question I saw someone pose recently, how noble is a no-killing policy if it doesn't preclude you from maiming, crippling and giving people traumatic brain injuries? The freedom-fighting woman is so singularly focused on launching her revolution that her crusade becomes exhausting and irritating to watch. Doesn't she have any other interests or hobbies? As if the movie doesn't have enough going on, we get the old Braveheart scene where the townspeople are inspired to take their freedom back. This only adds more confusion as to what the movie is actually trying to be about. The villain is astonishingly underwritten. Again the movie thinks that a few lines of expository dialogue are a substitute for actually fleshing out a character through genuine dramatic scenes. The leader of the Suicide Squad makes an appearance, but now she seems to be controlling Hawkman, who isn't a criminal at all. How? The movie doesn't explain. Hawkman is opposed to killing, but seems to become more open to it in the end. It's hard to tell if that's the lesson the movie wishes to impart or not. The attitude of the other characters to Black Adam seems to change by the end, but it's not clear why.
Black Adam represents an extreme low point in the canon of DC films. This is a movie that has no respect for its genre or for its audience. It has no sense of the basic storytelling structure that goes into making an engaging, involving, memorable film. The superhero genre has no future if this is the kind of empty, mindless, meaningless slugfest that becomes its standard bearer. Black Adam ends with a brief epilogue that reminds us of earlier, much better films in the genre that still had heart and meaning. The glimmer of hope this memory provides feels hollow, though, after suffering through two hours of a hopeless, artless, mindless gesture.
West Side Story (2021)
Masterful Filmmaking Technique Makes an Old Tale Feel New Again
I feel like an even bigger Steven Spielberg fan today than I ever was before. West Side Story, along with Spielberg's previous film Ready Player One, are some of the only movies I've seen in recent years that made me want to go and see them again the very next day. The genre and the story aren't the point so much as the pure, raw filmmaking style. The framing of the shots, the motion of the camera and the timing of the editing just make these movies an incredible joy to watch. The actors hit the right notes, the stories are well-constructed and, in West Side Story, the songs sound as good as ever, but as examples of the cinematic artform, these movies feel vibrant and alive in ways that few other movies do.
I saw the original 1961 West Side Story one time before, in high school in the 1990s. I think it was in Spanish class. I also saw My Fair Lady in English class, so maybe our faculty was just big musical fans. Lots of things stayed with me about West Side Story, but especially the song "Tonight." I thought that was pure magic, one of the best love songs ever done. There were certainly elements that felt dated about the movie even back then. No one could mistake it for a 1980s movie, like some of us might have thought Willy Wonka was (yet another musical I first saw in school!). So when I heard Spielberg was remaking West Side Story, I was very excited to see it. A story filled with drama, romance, violence, comedy and great music, updated to modern film sensibilities by one of my favorite directors sounded like a slam dunk.
Seeing it in Dolby Cinema, my high expectations were met. The movie is a visual feast, one of the rare ones that isn't obviously dependent on CGI. The leads, Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler, bring just the right sense of optimism and naivete to their doomed romance. They also deliver the best singing in the movie, that truly surpasses what's in the original film. Mike Faist is a surprising standout as Riff, a character I can't even remember from the 1961 version. Physically, he couldn't look more right for the part. He also brings depth and subtlety to the role that gives a sense of the tortured soul underneath his aggressive exterior. He deserves a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination (he's earned 4 with 1 win from critics groups so far).
I think the new Anita and Bernardo are just on par for their roles. Neither seem to have the same electricity firing them up that the 1961 actors did. Hence, the "America" number feels like one of the few that doesn't measure up to the 1961 movie. The actors don't seem to bring the same bite to all those cutting back-and-forth remarks. The "Anybodys" character seems to be one of the most noteworthy modernizations in the movie, as she now represents a very modern idea of a gender-neutral character, rather than the old tomboy stereotype of the original. But the problem with this character is that the actor is one of the oldest in the main cast. It made more sense to have a young teenager tagging along and trying to join a street gang than a near 30-year-old. This version of the character loses some of that cute comic charm.
Almost all of the songs in the movie are so revitalized that I felt like I was hearing them for the first time. Most of the movie feels like the new, definitive film adaptation of the play. "Tonight," and its reprise in a later medley, are magnificent and powerful. The way the characters are shot through the fire escape grates during the duet adds a level of visual poetry that's absent from the 1961 film. The new choreography for "Officer Krupke" makes that song even more hilarious. I'm more impressed seeing the filmmakers make visual magic happen on a small set like that than out on the city streets. It takes more creativity to make things look interesting on camera under those tighter limitations. Zegler gets the innocence of her character just right for "I Feel Pretty." Elgort completely holds command of the screen for his solos "Something's Coming" and "Maria." I think the dancing is wisely deemphasized throughout the movie in favor of what might be better termed "stylized movement." That makes it feel more relatable and modern, as opposed to an old time Busby Berkeley affair. There is dancing in the scene set at an actual dance, of course, and that looks terrific.
The dark themes in the story didn't stop me from leaving the theater feeling satisfied, full of emotion and humming the songs. When I listened to the songs online later, though, I was struck with a serious craving to see the visuals again. The visual imagination put into the film is what makes the 1961 version completely pale in comparison. This is one of the best-looking films that Spielberg has ever made. The theatricality of the material has freed Spielberg up to create grand, stylized imagery, in a way that wouldn't be possible in a traditional narrative film. Meanwhile, his natural inclination for authenticity has compelled him to work with a certain level of restraint. This makes for the best possible motivation, to use every cinematic technique possible to make a realistic city appear more stunning and breathtaking than it ever could to someone just walking through it in real life. I don't know who asked for this movie, or if it made sense to make, but we should all be grateful that it did get made. Spielberg has taken something old and dated and made it feel newer and fresher than most of the formula franchise films that are filling multiplexes today.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)
Simple, Human Charms Elevate Supernatural Sequel
I'm a Ghostbusters fan going back to seeing the original movie in the theater at age 7. That movie became an obsession for me, and I watched it on VHS enough times to be able to recite most of the dialogue from memory. Five years later, I was disappointed with Ghostbusters 2, feeling it was too much of a copy of the original with a misplaced sentimentality added in. I never saw the 2016 movie because, to me, Ghostbusters isn't just a brand name you can slap on anything, it's about a specific universe populated by specific characters.
I saw Afterlife last night and enjoyed it a lot. This is a Jason Reitman movie, not an Ivan Reitman movie. For much of the running time, it feels like a low-budget, indie, light comedy about a family with lots of personal problems. That seems like a good choice. This isn't a soulless, corporate-driven blockbuster that sets out only to copy someone else's movie, like The Force Awakens. This is a story told from the heart that deals with subject matter that means something to the director. In this case, that means it's not a movie populated by stand-up comedians who know how to craft a perfect punchline like the original. It's the kind of low-key human comedy where you smile all the way through at the characters' charm and sweetness.
Of course, these characters are quickly placed into a supernatural, sci-fi world. This reset focusing on a new, young cast allows the fourth movie in the franchise to reintroduce a pleasant sense of discovery and mystery. The search for answers eventually leads to one of the most exciting ghostbusting set pieces in any of the movies, the Ecto-1 ghost chase seen in the trailers. If there's a weakness in the film, it's with the special effects and action in the third act. These aren't quite as well-constructed as what we saw earlier in the film and threaten to overwhelm the movie's generally simpler sensibility.
Even though this film has new characters as its stars, the specter of Egon Spengler hangs heavy over the entire story. In that sense, it has deep ties to the original film that make it feel like a strongly integrated part of the same universe. The original surviving Ghostbusters of course make an appearance, but there's a reason the trailers don't feature them prominently. No one should go in expecting them to have a big part. The good news is that the new cast is so lovable and has such distinctive personalities, that you don't miss seeing the old guys. Mckenna Grace is a real discovery here. Her performance is subtle, sweet, sensitive and offbeat. I left the theater just as excited at the prospect of going on more adventures with the new cast as I was about potentially seeing the original busters again.
Black Widow (2021)
Soaring Spy Adventure is One of MCU's Most Action-Packed
I saw Black Widow in Regal's 4DX format on opening night. It was an incredible showcase for 4DX, with all of its car crashes, hand-to-hand combat and explosions. The chairs almost throw you out onto the floor at some points. One particular segment ended with an audible "wow" from the audience, and laughs after the violently shaking chairs finally stopped. I saw my first 4DX "snow," thanks to one scene set in a wintery locale. At one point, the 4DX put out a giant plume of smoke that was just too much. It obscured half the screen for a couple of minutes. The smoke's the only part of 4DX I would do away with. The 3D also looked very pleasing to the eye, with a lot of shots with noticeable depth. I think Godzilla: King of the Monsters was the only 4DX I've seen that was more intense than this one.
It looks like Marvel Studios might've spent the year-long delay of this movie polishing up the effects and tightening up the editing, because this is one of the MCU's most technically flawless movies. Kevin Feige clearly has a well-oiled machine in place to produce these films. The movie's credited director has only directed three no-budget films before, so it's inconceivable to me that she could pull off a production this massive with so little experience without a lot of help.
I thought that overall this was one of the strongest MCU movies. It was a welcome change of pace to see a down-to-earth spy thriller after the heavy sci-fi and superhero storyline in Endgame. This, at different times, felt like the 1980s G. I. Joe cartoon, the James Bond franchise and the Mission: Impossible movies. My two favorite MCU movies are Winter Soldier and Endgame. I enjoyed this one just about as much as Winter Soldier. It was definitely much more entertaining than their other recent film Captain Marvel, a dull, dry outing that is one of my least favorite MCU movies.
Black Widow probably has plot holes, but it's so fast-paced and action-packed that you don't have a lot of spare time to think about the plot. This movie functions on the level of pure action, making it almost a pointless exercise to analyze the story. Therefore, I also wasn't too concerned about what any of the "reveals" were going to be. There isn't a lot of time to think during this movie. There's only one three-minute scene in the middle when the momentum grinds to a halt, and half the theater seemed to be checking their phones or muttering to each other. Then things pick right back up. There's a lot of backstory in the film covered in flashbacks and dialogue exchanges. I think I understood MOST of it, which is a laudable achievement for the film considering how incomprehensible a lot of spy thrillers can get.
As it goes on, the movie loses some of its down-to-earth grit and gets more over-the-top and less plausible. By the end, it starts to feel more like a comic book and less like an adult spy thriller, because of the incredible feats of derring-do that the characters are able to pull off. But I can't really complain about that, because I knew going in this is based on a comic book, and not on the grittiest or most hard-boiled source material. Still, maybe there are some difficult situations that the characters get out of just a little too smoothly and easily at times.
Florence Pugh was the most interesting actor to watch in the film. As the "other" Black Widow in the movie, she was the second most important character to pull off, and she achieved that to the maximum extent possible. She's the one character in the movie I would eagerly anticipate seeing more of, if possible. As for ScarJo, this is probably her best performance as Black Widow, but I still feel she was miscast in the role from the beginning. Emily Blunt would've nailed this part in a way ScarJo just isn't capable of. I feel satisfied now that I've seen enough of ScarJo in the MCU, and she can be retired. I didn't recognize Ray Winstone in this film. I'm not that familiar with him, but he sure gave a different, and better, performance here than he did in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The Red Guardian character, as indicated in the trailers, is largely here to provide comic relief. He was something of a caricature and not the best part of the movie by a long shot. I enjoyed him more when he was given some moments of dignity.
I feel like this movie leaves wide open the possibility that we may get a similar Captain America movie, set between Civil War and Infinity War. If I recall, what Steve Rogers was doing during that time was left just as vague as what Natasha was doing. For any new fans to the MCU, I think this movie should be watched in chronological order after Civil War, EXCEPT for the post-credits epilogue. The home video release ought to move that to a bonus feature with spoiler warnings.
On an unrelated note, as a G. I. Joe franchise fan, I'm greatly disappointed that the G. I. Joe movies don't feel a lot more like Winter Soldier and Black Widow. 1980s G. I. Joe was based right off of the Marvel Avengers comics in many ways, but the people making the G. I. Joe movies don't have 1% of the understanding that Marvel Studios does of how these kinds of stylized action-adventure stories are supposed to be done.
The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island (1981)
A Buried Treasure
The final and most obscure of the Gilligan's Island TV movies gets more right than the other two. While the previous two specials incorporated a lot of melodrama based on realistic situations that often made them feel more like the Brady Bunch than Gilligan's Island, this film goes for broad comedy, cartoonish antics, bold characterizations and sight gags that better capture the tone of the original series.
Sci-fi aficionados may notice that this television film curiously foreshadows elements from more prominent sci-fi movies and shows that came out later:
*The rare element supremium sounds a lot like Avatar's unobtanium and both are used as the MacGuffin in the plot.
*A villain's henchman sneaks venomous spiders into the windows of the heroes' huts to attack them while they're sleeping just as a hired bounty hunter sneaks killer bugs into the window of Padme's bedroom in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.
*The villain manipulates Thurston Howell the 4th into doing things he shouldn't do by taunting him that he's chicken. Marty McFly is manipulated the exact same way in the Back to the Future sequels.
*The supremium becomes unstable and destructive over a certain temperature just like the acid does in Superman III.
*George the robot opens the front panel on his torso to retrieve items just like Bender does in Futurama.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)
A Classic of the Superhero Genre
Batman V Superman was made by people who know, love and understand comic book history and superhero mythology to their core. This movie is in the great tradition of mature superhero graphic novels that DC Comics started with The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. It doesn't give us the simplistic, one-dimensional heroes that other film franchises do. It portrays superheroes at their most realistic, complex, conflicted, complicated and fascinating. As they would if they existed in real life, the Batman and Superman of this movie have to face not only the obvious threat of supervillains but also a skeptical, sometimes hostile public and the risk of moral compromise within themselves. Director Zack Snyder understands that the greater the challenges a superhero faces, the more heroic they are when they finally overcome them. This storyline is one of the most relevant, dramatic and fascinating ever seen in a superhero film.
Aside from its powerful thematic material, the movie is absolutely gorgeous to look at. But not in a flashy or obvious way. The cinematography takes some of the grungiest and grimiest environments you can imagine and makes them look incredibly detailed, dramatic and cinematic. The combination of artful camera angles, moody lighting and a hypnotic Hans Zimmer score makes the film a uniquely captivating experience. The movie gives us the greatest-looking Batman costume ever seen on film. The creepy all-black fetish look the character has been cursed with in live-action since Tim Burton's 1989 film is finally, mercifully gone. The movie's Batmobile displays the best combination of style and function seen yet in a Batman film. And the movie's Batman action scenes are hands-down, bar-none, the greatest Batman battles ever put on film.
Ben Affleck overcomes all doubts in this movie to prove that he is as well-suited for the Batman role as anyone ever has been. With his square jaw and thick hair, he resembles the comic book and animated series Bruce Wayne better than anyone ever has. He brings an intensity to the role that is nicely tempered with a sense of sensitive humanity, crucial to keeping the character from going so far over the edge that he can't find his way back.
The other actors make an impact as well. Henry Cavill continues to look like the picture of reserved strength. His quiet intensity makes the movie's most magnificent sequence work, a montage of Superman's feats of power set to a thoughtful narration ruminating on the meaning of superheroes. Amy Adams is a more believable and feminine Lois than she was in Man of Steel. Jesse Eisenberg makes for a young, devilish version of Lex Luthor who dominates his scenes with ingenious dialogue full of the zaniest mix of highbrow historical references and lowbrow pop culture references since Gene Wilder's in Willy Wonka. Holly Hunter, Jeremy Irons and Diane Lane provide absolutely expert, professional support while Gal Gadot makes a smashing debut as Wonder Woman exhibiting all the beauty and power anyone could've hoped for.
Any discussion of the film has to address the mixed reaction it received from critics and audiences. As someone who loves the film, it's almost impossible for me to understand why someone would hate it. Looking back in history on films that were not well-received in their original release but eventually became regarded as classics, there seems to be a common thread. Willy Wonka was considered too scary and disturbing a fantasy for the young children it was aimed at. Blade Runner was considered too dark, violent and intellectual for audiences who were accustomed to seeing Harrison Ford in traditional action-adventures. Look at other films like It's a Wonderful Life, Citizen Kane, Fight Club, Heathers, Brazil, Shawshank Redemption, etc. The films that most often take years to achieve high recognition and cult status are most often films that deal with dark, depressing or dystopian subject matter. Very often these films are more popular overseas at first than they are in the U.S.A. All of these are patterns that seem to be evident with Batman V Superman. I firmly believe that, in time, BVS will be widely regarded as an absolute classic of the superhero genre. It will never be forgotten or lost to history. It will be a film that people who grew up on superhero films look to when they're older for a deeper, more thoughtful, more artistic exploration of the genre.
Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017)
The Last Jedi Finally Brings Balance to Disney's Force
Director Rian Johnson has delivered an intense, eye-popping, stirring and thought-provoking entry in the Star Wars saga, perhaps the best episode we've seen since the original trilogy. Johnson took the "Christopher Nolan" approach to Star Wars with this movie, giving it a darker, more realistic tone and a complex plot filled with reversals and reveals. In doing so, Johnson has created a far more interesting and involving movie than J.J. Abrams' bubblebrained retread The Force Awakens and the sloppy, unfocused Rogue One. While the movie lacks the dazzling visual splendor of George Lucas' prequels, most notably suffering from some uninspired creature designs, it makes up for that with its sheer sense of literacy. For the first time, audiences can have hope in the ongoing quality of Disney's Star Wars movies.
The Last Jedi is darker, grittier and more realistic than anything we've seen before in the Star Wars film series. Its battles are more reminiscent of Dunkirk than of Flash Gordon. This approach takes some of the original trilogy's escapist fun away, in the same way Nolan's Batman films did not provide the same simple entertainment of the previous live-action Batman movies. But in exchange for that, we get a rich and dense experience that gives thinking adults a lot to digest and enjoy.
Johnson makes almost all of the characters introduced in Episode 7 more developed, more believable, less cliched and less simplistic. He also does well fleshing out the new characters he introduces. Most importantly, Johnson succeeds at advancing Luke Skywalker's character into new and intriguing areas. Compare this to The Force Awakens which actually regressed Han Solo's character into a lazy retread of his original smuggler persona, giving us absolutely nothing new to think about.
Johnson wisely understands that for a character to be truly heroic, he has to first be seriously tempted by the dark side. Like Batman V Superman, this movie makes the characters into bigger heroes by forcing them to deal with the temptation of evil. In a movie filled with some of the strongest acting ever seen in the Star Wars movies, Mark Hamill fully embodies all the complexities of this older, grayer Luke in the best performance of his career. Hamill ages perfectly into his role in a way that his original trilogy co-stars did not.
Johnson is handed a lot of mess from The Force Awakens to try and clean up and is mostly successful in doing so. Some plot threads are perhaps still being saved to be resolved in the next and final chapter of the trilogy. Others may have been mercifully forgotten. Johnson had a herculean task on his hands to fashion a proper followup to movies created by two different previous directors and still make a movie that is worth seeing on its own terms. He did an admirable job in light of that challenge. It's no surprise that Disney has promised him his own separate Star Wars trilogy to create from start to finish. One can only imagine how much more solid and satisfying this new trilogy would've been if a real artist like Johnson had helmed it from the beginning instead of the serial plagiarist J.J. Abrams. This movie is the sequel we deserved from the beginning, something that respects what came before but takes everything in a new and different direction.
Everest (2015)
Stronger on atmosphere than character, cold but grimly compelling.
It's not an adventure story. Everest is a harrowing and heartbreaking tale of man vs. nature that reaches great dramatic peaks after suffering through an overly long and slow ascent. The movie starts out on unsure footing with storytelling as uneven as the giant mountain's slopes but by the end it had my eyes frozen on the screen.
The "true story" on which the film is based is filed on Wikipedia under "1996 Mount Everest disaster." It concerns organized bands of hikers attempting to scale Mount Everest with an emphasis on "attempting." The story was chronicled in a 1998 IMAX documentary and has now been resurrected in this $65-million-dollar dramatic film directed by Baltasar Kormákur who was born, appropriately enough, in Iceland. In a month when U.S. President Obama purports to warn the public about the dangers of global warming, this movie comes along to make us stop worrying and learn to love global warming.
In a belabored, tension-free and yawn-inducing first act, we're introduced to the members of the ill-fated climbing expedition, most of whom, judging by their accents, seem to be from New Zealand. We're only nominally introduced to about half of them, or at least I think their names were mentioned once. Little insight is given as to what inspired (possessed?) these people to want to scale Mount Everest. "Because it's there" is one of the few reasons mentioned. Some of them don't seem to know why they're doing it. Judging by their personalities, it appears most of them were just bored.
Jason Clarke (John Connor in Terminator: Genisys) as the expedition leader serves as a calm and steady center in the ensemble. The undemonstrative nature of his performance does nothing to enhance the low energy of the tepid early dialogue scenes, but it does add to the sense of eerie, fatalistic hopelessness that the characters face after the "perfect snowstorm" arrives. When the most skilled character in the story quickly and calmly seems to embrace his dark destiny, it's a clear sign that there isn't much hope. If only the characters had been more energized in the beginning, it would have been easier to notice later that they were slowing down on account of being half-frozen.
Josh Brolin plays the only character that approaches having a dynamic personality. At first he seems to have just a minor part, but it eventually becomes clear why his character was played by the biggest name actor in the cast. Brolin has the closest thing to an actual character arc, but it's based more on basic life and death than on any lessons learned. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a character who is of so little consequence that I think he could've been cut out of the movie without anyone noticing a difference.
Where Everest succeeds beyond compare, no doubt enhanced by the premium IMAX 3D format, is in vividly capturing the characters' descent from the top of Mount Everest into multiple levels of wintry hell. This is not a disaster film in the conventional, mainstream sense, like the melodramatic and unconvincing San Andreas. This is a dark, stark, dramatic and intensely realistic portrayal of human beings swallowed up by a grim force of nature who are unable to do much except hope that they'll be spit back out again with most of their pieces still intact. The script does a good job of explaining in advance some of the specific things that can go wrong on this journey, even though the discerning viewer should expect that whenever a movie like this tells you what can go wrong, it will go wrong.
The technical prowess of the filmmaking in the back half of the film is unparalleled. Whatever combination there might have been of location shooting and digital work, the final effect looks seamless. The howling winds, blowing snow, gleaming skyscapes and cavernous crevasses, supported by a quality 3D conversion, all create a completely believable and harshly beautiful environment that is fully engrossing. Even a brief sequence involving a helicopter is more realistic and exciting than the phony, staged helicopter action scenes in lesser titles like the aforementioned San Andreas.
Everest is not a cliffhanger despite all the cliffs and hanging you may have seen in the trailers. This is the tragic tale that the mountain-climbing industry does not want you to see. It starts out making the pastime of mountain-climbing look like an unpleasant compulsion and ends up making it look like outright suicide. After seeing Everest, you might find that the best reason not to climb the mountain is because it's there.
*I viewed the movie in an IMAX 3D preview screening shown in the U.S. on September 2nd, 2015.
X: First Class (2011)
One Quick Rewrite and This Could Be an X-Spoof
You know there's a problem when you start making up MST3K-style gags in the middle of a movie. X5 has a good opening sequence and goes steadily downhill from there. There is some solid acting and a couple of exciting scenes, but the plot gets more implausible and the characters more laughable with each passing moment. Eventually you realize you're not going to see anything new, that this is as predictable as the typical prequel, and that your time is best spent making up jokes.
It's not good when the most memorable image from the movie is Kevin Bacon wearing Magneto's helmet. This is not something that longtime X-Fans have been dying to see on the big screen as far as I know. Aside from the decidedly unthreatening helmet, Bacon would have been a better villain if he spoke with a German accent the whole time as he did in the introduction. The filmmakers forgot a basic rule of pulp films which is that foreign accents equal villainy.
They also forgot another rule of comic book movies, which is that "comic panel"-style scenes are stupid, as Ang Lee's Hulk demonstrated. Yeah, we get it, this is based on a comic book. We don't need to be hit over the head with it. They also spent too much time focusing on how the characters' names get made up, a now tiresome comic book movie cliché.
Other than Xavier, Magneto and Mystique's story lines, which are largely rehashed from the previous films, there's almost nothing that works as drama here. The march to Nuclear War was as contrived as I've ever seen that done. I honestly think Superman IV did a better job by just having Lex sneak up and push the launch button himself. X5 asks us to believe that all you have to do to start nuclear war is threaten/buy off/seduce two generals (or whoever). As if neither countries' presidents nor other officials have any say in the matter, but are just puppets of these two guys. The powers-that-be then do stuff that's so despicable, Professor X looks like a dolt for continuing to have faith in humanity. It brings to mind Dark Helmet's point about evil always triumphing because good is dumb.
More rehashing comes when this movie sloppily shoehorns in a redo of the "cure" subplot from X3. Beast claims he can normalize his appearance yet retain his powers. But since his powers are a physical ability caused by his body being in the mutated shape that it is, what he says makes absolutely no sense.
First Class also suffers from the old "Submarine Crew" problem of having a bunch of characters that are necessary to perform functions in the story, but are woefully underdeveloped. Half the characters here serve no purpose other than to be special effects. I think even Professor X realizes his new recruits are disposable, since he almost kills one of them in some reckless training exercises without giving it a second thought. The movie signals that it doesn't consider the new characters important by putting together an extremely slapdash special effects sequence to introduce them.
Then there's the "Batman Begins" problem of running out of decent new characters to introduce since they're up to the 5th movie already. Hence we end up with a "G.I. Joe: The Movie (1987)" Big Lob-esque mutant who has the strangest, most inexplicable and illogical power since Spider-Man's spider sense...at least the version that was so sensitive it could warn Spidey if he wrote a bad check. His power to basically "do anything he needs to do when he needs to do it" strains credibility as much as it induces humor. There's usually something off about new characters written into an adaptation that weren't vetted through the normal channels the pre-existing characters were. If you recall, Big Lob's great military specialty in G.I. Joe was that he could dribble grenades like a basketball, or something.
Worse yet, every somewhat interesting new character is dispensed with perfunctorily. Instead of having a big psychic face-off between White Queen and Xavier as a change of pace from shooting, kicking and punching, she's all but forgotten about. Much more could have been made of the human allies of the mutants, but the Bill Richardson-esque CIA agent and Moira basically vanish after they perform their duty in the plot, one of them in the most anticlimactic way since what happened to Xavier in X3.
Let's also consider X-Stripper, whose power is that she can give you one hell of a "buzz" in the champagne room. She makes me question the strategy of rounding up every single mutant to create this elite task force. Let's say there was a mutant who had the power to pass enough gas to stink up an entire aircraft carrier. Would they want him on the team too?
There remain lingering questions. How do the X-Men operate their jet without being shot down? How does Beast single-handedly build the thing in the first place? Exactly what happens to all the energy that one character absorbs at one point? I feel like I was cheated out of a big explosion here. How exactly would Xavier pull off eluding the CIA? Shouldn't he set up shop outside a Pakistani military base to be more inconspicuous?
This movie is ridiculous enough that with one slight nudge it could become a raucous comedy. One mistake was not deflating some of the hot air by putting more humor in the movie. There's only one funny line and few attempts to create any kind of comic relief. This series needs to lighten up. Or at least do something different. That didn't happen here. People are going to get sick of comic book movies if they keep showing us the same movie they've already shown us twenty times before (no thanks to you, Harry Potter, for popularizing this idea). It also helps when these movies make sense.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)
Exceptional action, special effects and humor!
I loved this movie! It's the best action-adventure I've seen this year, more entertaining and satisfying than Indiana Jones 4, Iron Man, Hulk 2 or Speed Racer. I'm not a Hellboy fan of any kind. I don't remember much about the first movie, except that I thought it was passable entertainment. It looked great but the story seemed a bit clunky and the action scenes weren't as structured and well-paced as I like. I had no desire to watch it again any time soon. Hellboy 2 is on another level entirely. This one I can't wait to get on DVD and watch again.
The best thing about Hellboy 2 is that it captured some of the rare magic of those great genre mashups, Ghostbusters and Men in Black. It follows much more in the tradition of those films than anything from the superhero genre. It had the clever mix of science fiction, fantasy, horror, action and comedy that made those movies such entertaining blends. These movies are very hard to pull off, as the terrible sequels to MIB and GB demonstrated, even though they were made by virtually the exact same people. There was a point in Hellboy 2 when I realized you could have easily substituted the Ghostbusters in for the "paranormal investigators" in this film (you have the cynical one, the intellectual one, the emotional one and the common sense one), and not had to change much else about the film to make the story work. In this case the comparison is a well-deserved one. Although comedy is not the focus of Hellboy 2, the contrasting characters were clearly designed to work as a comedic team. There are many good laughs intermingled with the action of this film, often provided by Hellboy's deadpan reactions to the insane events happening around him.
The action scenes of Hellboy 2 are exceptional, perfectly paced and masterfully staged, blowing away anything we saw from Hulk and especially Iron Man. They're as good as the best Indy 4 action scenes but here you get a whole movie full of them (an early scene involving little man-eating creatures is coincidentally similar to Indy 4's most exciting scene). There are no over-stylized sequences where you feel like a director is trying to pump up a standard fight scene with meaningless camera action. Del Toro only uses camera and editing flourishes to smartly enhance and emphasize key dramatic moments in his scenes. The villains of Hellboy 2 make for particularly effective threats. There are times, reminiscent of past great action epics like Terminator 2, where you simply can't figure out how the heroes could possibly defeat them. That's a terrific way to make you identify with the heroes, adding an important psychological element to the battles. You are not just watching a spectacle but you feel like you're inside the action. You're not just emotionally concerned for the characters but also intellectually trying to figure out what they're going to do next.
Del Toro shows similar deftness in his handling of the movie's special effects. There isn't any gratuitous or overdone CGI, like the entire Mummy 3 trailer seems to consist of. It seems like Del Toro tries to use practical effects as often as feasible, only using CGI where necessary. The uses of different effects techniques seem to blend seamlessly here. Audiences actually seem to be having trouble distinguishing where the physical effects end and the CGI begins. I'm not a knee-jerk CGI basher, but I do dislike bad CGI just like I do any bad special effects. Speaking of which, both Hulk movies would have been better if they had the kind of special effects quality control on the Hulk that Del Toro demonstrates on every single one of his numerous creatures in this movie.
The cast of characters in Hellboy 2 is a wonder to behold. Based on this movie, Del Toro ought to be drafted to direct the new Masters of the Universe film. Here you have a similar blending of characters seemingly inspired by every pre-existing work of science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, classic creature features, pro-wrestling, you name it. There are elves, fairies, trolls, robots, ghosts, tiny critters, giant monsters, shape-shifters and creatures made of rock, plant, air and wood. You even have a guy with a zany rocket-launching metal fist that looks like something straight off of a He-Man action figure. Yet none of this ever becomes overwhelming, confusing or over-the-top. There is an efficiency to how Del Toro shows you what you need to understand about his universe without wasting time on unnecessary exposition. He respects your intelligence and has faith in your imagination.
Hellboy 2 is ultimately an action and special-effects extravaganza. You shouldn't go in expecting great character development or subtle messages about the problems in today's world. There is a solid central plot that drives the movie from beginning to end, stemming from the villains and their dastardly, imaginative scheme to take over the world, just when you thought there weren't any more original ones to be thought of. All the main characters have clearly defined physical and personality traits that add color to the movie. But as far as the personal lives of the characters go, they are dealt with in a handful of smaller, mostly perfunctory subplots (that interconnect with the main plot at key moments). This movie isn't on the level of, say, Spider-Man 2 or Batman Begins where you could remove all the action scenes and still have a great character story. The main purpose the quieter, dialogue-driven scenes serve in this movie seems to be to give you a breather between the many big action scenes. But those scenes are so spectacular that it's unlikely you'll find yourself wishing the movie was any different. This is an excellent entertainment in a year that so far has mostly provided only so-so ones. Hellboy 2 is the science-fiction-fantasy-horror-action-comedy that you may not have known you were waiting for.
WALL·E (2008)
An A+ for Wall-E! One of the best movies this century!
Wall-E is the movie experience I've been looking for. I haven't seen a new film this richly entertaining, thrilling, touching and satisfying since Spider-Man 2. It is truly the finest Pixar or animated CGI film to date. I can discuss it without spoilers easily because it's one of those films, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, that exists more as a pure experience of the heart and the senses than as a collection of events that we're supposed to keep track of intellectually. Wall-E rises above that kind of unnecessary complication into the same kind of space occupied by dreams and the imagination.
This film is beautifully animated, of course, to that magical Pixar point where even piles of what should be disgusting trash somehow look breathtakingly gorgeous and even fairly realistic-looking roaches look cute. But much more importantly, the heart, the emotion in this movie is unlike anything I've experienced at the cinema since Forrest Gump. Certainly my tear ducts have not welled up while watching a movie this much since then. I fell in like with the character of Wall-E when I saw the trailer. Watching the movie, I fell in love with him within about 2 minutes. Shortly after that, I fell in love with the idea of Wall-E falling in love.
My previous favorite movie romance is Superman and Lois Lane in the original Superman films. The love story, or the love experience of Wall-E and Eve is perhaps the first I've seen since then that operates at and succeeds on that same level. These couples create an uncomplicated, innocent, simple, yet deep and powerful bond. They capture the experience of love at first sight, writ large. They possess an instant chemistry that tells you they belong together from the first time they see one another and makes you root for their relationship throughout the film. Wall-E and Eve share moments together of real cinematic beauty, true hilarity, frightening sadness, frustrating difficulty and delightful satisfaction. It's a testament to the level of genius at which the Pixar storytellers are operating that we feel every beat of this relationship resonate every step of the way despite the fact that the characters are robots that are not modeled off of humans and speak no more than a handful of words throughout the movie (this animated movie is refreshingly free of obvious "guest star" voices or any over-the-top stand-up comedians trying to upstage the movie).
Just like in the first Superman films, once you care about the characters as individuals and care about their relationship, it's almost impossible for the rest of the movie not to work. You're hooked at hello. Wall-E adds all the expected complications to keep the would-be lovers from getting together most of the time. There is a truly great "McGuffin" that keeps the heroes and villains busy for quite a while (the item in question is something outwardly simple that ends up holding the key to something more important than anything in the world). The pacing during most of these adventures is as breakneck as anything out of the Star Wars films and the action is always staged with crystal clarity. There are several scenes of peril for Wall-E that are reminiscent of that oddly powerful sequence in Short Circuit 2 when Johnny 5 is almost killed. The filmmakers pull absolutely no punches when it comes to running your heart through the ringer over characters you care about. It probably helps that you can do a lot more physical damage to a robot character than you can to a human character while keeping a G rating and still getting the audience dramatically worried about their survival.
Even on top of the action, the emotion, the visuals and the humor, Wall-E goes the extra mile into thought-provoking thematic territory. The film never hits you over the head with anything preachy and doesn't really even outright tell you what its opinions on the subjects it raises are. It also doesn't explicitly lay out explanations for everything that exists in Wall-E's world (there are no "talking killer" scenes and very little verbal exposition). I think the bits of ambiguity work here because they add to the sense of mystery, helplessness and alienation that most of the characters in the movie feel to some degree.
There are human characters in this movie too, quite a few. I think that's necessary because if humans aren't shown in a robot world, you have to wonder what purpose were the robots designed to serve? That was a curiosity of the earlier CGI movie, Robots. Most of the humans in Wall-E aren't as developed as the robots, but I think that's because they exist more to represent the whole of humanity rather than particular individuals. We're asked to ponder the consequences of the choices they make as though the whole society was moving in that direction, not just one person. Wall-E and Eve are the heart of this movie but the humans are used to add some intellectual gravity for the audience to chew on.
Other choices made in the movie might also leave room for debate, such as the integration of some live-action footage into the film. But because the movie as a whole is so audaciously stimulating and brilliantly satisfying, it's a plus that they left us with a few unresolved or unusual things to think about and question after getting off of the great emotional and visual roller-coaster experience. Wall-E truly serves up everything that I think an audience could want in a movie experience. It will be very easy for me to watch this one over and over again. It is a modern-day classic that I believe should earn a place in cinema history as the "2001" of CGI animated films, both of them movies of indisputable brilliance, unyielding imagination and unending entertainment.
Footnote: The pre-movie short is an awesome, violent Looney Tunes/Roger Rabbit-esquire toon. It wants only to entertain and does.
Transformers (2007)
Humanity not Lost in Transformers
As a non-Transformer fan...a non-viewer of the cartoons, a non-reader of the comics, and a non-collector of the toys...I wasn't planning to see the movie until recently. The stylish trailer shots of giant robots in battle got me interested. I also had an inkling that Michael Bay would give this one his all, because after The Island he would know his career couldn't afford another flop. And after seeing Pirates 3 and Spidey 3 not live up to expectations, I figured the law of averages was in favor of Transformers being the best sci-fi action epic of the year.
I was not disappointed. In fact I was pleasantly surprised at how successful the movie was with its human characters and how much humor it found at all levels of its story. It is so, so difficult for a sci-fi film like this to pull off real genuine, gut-busting humor without descending into camp or disrespect. Part of that is because the filmmakers have to be really brave to try for laughs when they're already afraid the audience will laugh at unconvincing effects or unbelievable story lines. This movie goes on a short list with Superman, Ghostbusters, and Men in Black as one of the funniest sci-fi action films ever made. Shia LaBeouf in both comedic and dramatic scenes was a wonderful asset here. My faith in Spielberg having made the right choice casting him in Indy 4 was given real credence here.
If the movie had one major weakness it was that the villains don't get the development the humans and heroes do. Aside from Scorponok's awesome desert battle and perhaps a bit too much of the little Gremlin-bot's antics we don't get to see the villains display much personality. I think Megatron had less screen time than the Gremlin-bot. That weakens the drama of the final battle because it seems like the Autobots are just fighting mindless machines, ones that we don't quite understand the full capabilities and motivations of. I think we needed more scenes of the Decepticons planning and plotting together to parallel the scenes of the Autobots meeting and introducing each other. And we needed at least one scene where Megatron demonstrates a seriously bad-ass show of force BEFORE he starts fighting the good guys, a la Magneto's bridge attack in X3 or just about everything General Zod does in Superman 2 before the Metropolis battle. Speaking of missed opportunities, I'm not sure why you take us to a major national landmark in a movie like this unless you intend to blow it up.
Other than the whole enterprise sort of unraveling in a final battle that is more dramatically and visually choppy than anything that came before it, this movie was full of pure entertainment. I loved the Herbie-esquire chemistry between Bumblebee and the kids. I had fun with the Christine-esquire suspense when the cars began showing their threatening side and all of the zippy car chases that followed. I enjoyed Optimus Prime's heroic Jor-el-esquire speeches about the good in humanity. I thought Voight as the Rumsfeld character and Turturro as the shadow government guy added solid acting presence and weight to the movie. I liked the human comedy of Shia's romantic and family problems, the geeky in-joke computer references, and the giant robot-slapstick comedy, which I still think was perhaps the movie's most impressive and unlikely achievement. And I thought the transformation effects had all the necessary cool factor. One bad moment, I didn't like the explanation for the origin of earth's technology. That was unnecessary plot overkill and too Terminator-esquire. And Bernie Mac's cameo only served to illustrate how much better the movie's subtler and more unexpected attempts at comedy were.
I think this movie will deservedly earn its place as the #1 box-office smash of the year, besting Spider-Man 3's $335 million gross. It may also have earned a special place in cinema history for crediting both a "Product Placement Coordinator" and a "Military Adviser," in that order. Now I look forward to a sequel where I hope the robots, especially the villains, earn more screen time, dialogue, and character development. I think we're ready for that now that we humans have made a successful transition into the robot world by virtue of this introductory movie. For now, I'll be eyeing up those Transformers movie toys a lot closer while contemplating the potential of a post-Christmas clearance sale...and I'll keep watching the skis, uh, skies, uh, highways....