Well, there’s no need for bloated, portentous introductions
here, is there? These are my thoughts, on each of the movies I was able to see
over the summer. I’ll try to keep this brief, as I have 999: 9 Hours, 9
Persons, 9 Doors to get back to as soon as I’m done posting this. ;-)
X-men: Days of Future Past
The X-men movies have never exactly been great, and some of them have been
downright awful, but the consistently good casting (mostly) seems to have kept
the series afloat. That being said, Days of Future Past is one of the better
ones. Of course, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine is prominently featured, and Days of
Future Past also brings back Sirs Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellon as the
elderly Charles Xavier and Magneto. Being a time-travel story, Xavier and
Magneto’s younger selves also get much more significant screentime, and James
McAvoy and Michael Fassbender reprise their roles from First Class as a result.
The actual plot, centered on preventing a mad scientist played by Peter
Dinklage from getting his hands on Mystique’s (Jennifer Lawrence) DNA to
construct his army of mutant killing Sentinels is a little flimsy, but it must
be said that the Sentinels themselves look BADASS (their future incarnations,
that is. The prototypes we see at the end of the film are adorably retro). Superhero
movies have gotten much better since the days of the original X-men, but Days
of Future Past is still a decent action film with some great actors.
Godzilla
Now this is the one we were all worried about. After Pacific
Rim brought a full-scale Kaiju epic to the big screen, my hopes were rather
high for the Gareth Edwards-directed Godzilla film. The stink of the 1999
reboot film still lingers over the concept of an American Godzilla adaptation,
but fortunately the new Godzilla is
much more faithful an incarnation of the classic franchise than we could have
hoped for. Two major problems keep Godzilla from true greatness, however. Like
with Pacific Rim, the human element of the story is the worst aspect of the
film, yet gets a bizarre amount of focus. Brian Cranston and Ken Watanabe do a
decent job with what little the script gives them to do, but the other human
characters are terribly bland. Second, the amount of Godzilla fake-outs in the
movie gets a little absurd. It isn’t until the end that we finally get to see
the monster-on-monster action, and it is excellent, but less so in the wake of
all the times we thought we were
going to see Godzilla duke it out only to have the camera cut away to Bland
Human Protagonist 1234567. Still, if nothing else, it’s worth seeing for the
climactic battle between Godzilla and the Muto.
Million Dollar Arm
…ugh.
Here’s my completely objective analysis of Million Dollar
Arm.
It is a movie, featuring actors, that was recorded with a
camera. It contains baseball.
You have probably seen this movie before, and it was
probably more interesting there.
Chef
Iron Man cast reunion, sponsored by Twitter.
Moving on.
Edge of Tomorrow
Have you ever been surprised to find out that a movie was
good? I was all set to hate Edge of Tomorrow, based on a Japanese novel called
All You Need Is Kill, simply because I was expecting another Tom Cruise ego
trip. Instead, it ended up being a surprisingly smart sci-fi action film that
effectively used its central gimmick- that Tom Cruise is stuck in a Groundhog
Day-esque loop where he restarts the day after dying, which he uses to aid the
war effort against an invading alien force. It’s a lot of fun and highly
recommended.
Transformers: Age of
Extinction
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that Age of Extinction
is a bad film, but what’s especially curious is that it both falls into the
same pitfalls that the pervious Bayformers did, as well as making strides to
avoid them. There’s no Shia, the robots have been redesigned to make them
slightly more distinctive, Linkin Park has been swapped out for Imagine Dragons
(which, actually, isn’t an improvement at all), and the hyped-up Dinobots are
admittedly a lot of fun… but you have to slog through two hours of the same painfully
boring, awkward human character subplots before anything even remotely exciting
actually happens, and by then it’s hard to muster up much enthusiasm.
Snowpiercer
Another movie that caught me completely off guard,
Snowpiercer is actually a Korean film. There was quite a bit of executive drama
surrounding this film, so it only got a limited release, and I feel fortunate
that I got a chance to see it because it’s one of the best films of the year.
Snowpiercer stars Captain America himself, Chris Evans, as a reluctant
revolutionary leader in a post-apocalyptic world where the world has frozen
over and the surviving humans are confined to a high-speed train that never ceases
moving. So, Hunger Games meets Polar Express? I can dig it.
Dawn of the Planet of
the Apes
Rise of the Planet of the Apes turned out to be a lot better
than it had any right to be as far as reboots go, and Dawn is a significantly
improved follow-up. Everything that the first film did well is done better
here. The apes are effectively characterized, allowing the audience to
sympathize with both sides of the inevitable conflict. Motion capture legend
Andy Serkis once again plays the role of Caesar, now the leader of an ape
colony who would, given the choice, avoid war with the humans, but… well, we
all know how well that turns out. At least we got an excellent movie out of the
deal, right?
Guardians of the
Galaxy
I’m just going to say it. Guardians of the Galaxy is the
best Marvel movie.
Or, at the very least, I would place it up there with the
original Avengers in terms of quality, which is not praise I give lightly.
Guardians had the potential to be a disaster- it marks the Marvel Cinematic
Universe’s first attempt to expand its boundaries beyond the well-trod ground
of the earlier Marvel Films. The result is a sprawling epic that is just as
dramatic and humorous, if not more so, than any of the MCU’s prior efforts. It
delivers a Star Wars-esque space opera that functions as a stand-alone movie,
but also provides interesting tidbits of exposition and clarification for those
of us who have been keeping up with Marvel Studio’s prior efforts.
And J.J. Abrams, I
hope you were taking notes during this movie.
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