2009 Summer Blockbusters!

So this summer, I plan on seeing all the big blockbuster films and judging them accordingly. And by judging accordingly, I don't mean I'll be reviewing them like a real film, I mean I'll be assigning them a rating based on the following criteria: 1) Is there a scene where two people face against each other in dead earnest, scowling and glaring at each other so close, they can smell each other's bad breath? 2) Will there be big explosions that either vehicles or people walk nonchalantly away from to emphasize their bad-assedness? 3) Will there be little ethnic children in the movie to emphasize the fundamental humanity of the protagonists? 4) Is there lots o' lens flare in the cinematography? 5) Is there innovative camera work that really adds nothing to the story, but it looks cool? 6) Is the cast populated with robots or humourless robot-like automatons? 7) Is time travel a plot point? 8) Is the film part of a 'franchise', that is, is it banking on the audience's goodwill towards earlier versions of the characters and settings to pull in the dosh? 9) Does the story fall to pieces if you spend more than five minutes thinking about it? (See: point #7) 10) Is the soundtrack so loud and bombastic that it kills your sperm cells?




Star Trek (B-) It is in fact, SULU, who fires the torpedoes. That comes from a bit from comedian Patton Oswalt, who tells us of his time in a liberal arts college when he had to take an elementary physics class, taught by the head of the physics department. At the semester's end, the professor, in a probably misguided attempt to reach out to the little art-fag wood nymphs, drizzled some pop culture dust atop the questions in the finals test. One of the questions was phrased as such: The U.S.S. Enterprise, moving at a specific speed, fires its torpedoes at a Klingon warbird at a certain speed. The Klingon ship is moving at another defined speed. The student is then, given the variables, asked at what time Chekov's torpedoes hit the cruiser. It's a speed vs. velocity question dressed up to appeal to the students. Upon reading the question, Oswalt gets up from his desk, and according to a friend in the class, says something 'VERY specific and VERY angrily to the professor, then storms out of the class in a huff.' The professor hangs his head, then addresses the class:

"I have just been informed, that it is Sulu, and not Chekov who fires the weapons in Star Trek. If this makes the question impossible to solve for you, please turn the test book into my T.A. , and I will head home to drink a full bottle of gin, then slip into a hot bath and open my veins. Fuck all of you, I do not want to live on this planet with you anymore..."

This addresses the inherent problem in adapting a much-loved franchise like the Star Trek one for an audience. Because there's been, what, almost forty years of back-story and continuity to the Star Trek saga, any new stories are inevitably going to antagonize any Trekkie-nit picker. (I, for one, was chuffed that Finnigan did not make an appearance during Kirk's time in Star Fleet...) So J.J Abrams and the writers did the only thing they could. That is, reboot the series.

When doing this type of movie, the rule is thus: Give the audience what they need, not what they want. (If you give an audience what they want, you get the last three movies of the Star Wars series. Serves you right, Star Wars nerds.) While a hardcore audience would like to see every shout-out and in-joke from the last forty years crammed into their movie, it would make for a tedious, five-hour yawn fest, and Paramount would go broke. So they go with a reboot, where Kirk and Spock's destiny is changed thanks to some pissed off Romulan miners travelling back through time. This results in Old Spock and New Spock living in the same timeline, as well as changing the dynamics between the main characters. It winds up being a pulp sci-fi adventure straight out of Doc Smith.

And that's okay. While I think time-travel plots in sci-fi movies tend to be really fucking stupid, (Even the Back to the Future franchise took a good idea and beat it into the ground to the point where they basically wanted to do a western-oh, sorry...) and Star Trek is no better in that regard... In this case, I'm gonna go with it because otherwise the lack of continuity and my dwelling on all of it will lead me to kill myself in shame...

2009 Summer Blockbuster checklist: Lens Flare? Lots and lots. Characters scowling and facing off? Check! Nonchalant retreats from an explosion? Yup. Cute little ethnics? Well, Scotty gets an Ewok covered in snot as a sidekick, so close enough! Cool camera work? Um, in this case, the camera work actually has a sense of proportion, except for the lens flare, so...No. Humorless automatons? You'd think Spock would do the job, but he actually shows some emotion in this, so no on that count, also. Time travel? Check. Franchise? It's 'Star Trek', doye. Flimsy script? Eeyeah, but they couldn't not write themselves into a corner, put it that way... Loud soundtrack? Oh, my, yes. Final tally: 8/10





Terminator: Salvation: The End of the Franchise: (C-)

If you gave Skynet a hundred million dollars to make a Terminator movie, this is what it would come up with. There is no indication that human beings worked on the script at all. So what you get is boring slog from action sequence to action sequence until the end credits. If it were a demo reel for a special effects company, I'd give it a 'A', for what that's worth. And let's face it, the plot of the first movie was, 'Run from a robot.' The second movie's plot was 'Run from a different robot.' The third movie's plot was... well, you see what I mean, right. And they screwed it up?

Instead of hashing over the movie, I'd like to explain why the movie stunk on ice, and there's two main reasons: Spinelessness on the director's part, and studio politics. Taking the last point first, it's a case of Christian Bale demanding (and getting) a bigger part as John Connor, thus forcing the writers- the guys who wrote 'Catwoman', 'The Net', and 'The last Terminator movie starring the current governor of the fifth largest economy in the world and that chick who wound up in a couple of Uwe Boll flicks, so she should be on an infomercial hawking shoddy weight-loss crap pretty soon.' - to write him a bigger part. And the movie suffers. Suffers more, I should say. On the plus side, it looks like Bale won't be in any position to make any more creative demands on that magnitude.

Then there's 'McG'. Oh, Mcg! He makes Michael Bay look like Robert Bresson! Well, he can put an action sequence together okay. But you can tell that's all he's interested in. You can see him twiddle his thumbs and yawn whenever there's story exposition or character development on screen. Also, I get the impression he's just too nice to direct actors over a long shoot. Case for the prosecution? Bale's infamous tirade to the schmucky lighting director who 'blew his concentration.' Bale goes on a near-psychotic four and a half minute rant to the guy, in front of a conspicuously silent McG. McG should've just shut Bale down after half a minute, sent the lighting guy away, and taken the extra time to cool things down on the set. That's part of his fucking job, after all.

2009 SBC: Face-off? It's practically the center piece of the movie! Lens flare? Nope. Looks like they filmed it through a cheesecloth, actually. Nonchalant bad-assery walking away from booms? Can't really remember, but there must've been. Remember, it's Terminator! Innovative camera work? It's McG! Robots? Terminator! Cute little kids? One! (Well, two if you count the teenager playing Kyle Reese.) She even squeezes the 'good' robot's hand near the end to emphasize humanity's connection! Aww! Time Travel? Terminator! Flimsy script? Like it was written on a spider's web! Franchise? Terminator! Loud-ass soundtrack? Terminator! Final tally: 10/10. Terminator! Terminator? FUCKING TERMINATOR!!