…I’ll give you counterintuitive. I list AND rank the 50 Greatest Summer Blockbusters of All Time, or whatever you call them, over at MSN Movies. And yes, The Omega Man is one of them; I deem it a summer blockbuster avant le lettre, and grant the same privilege to…yeah, Psycho. It may interest you. It was certainly interesting to dream up.
You want counterintuitive?...
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So MIDNIGHT RUN and A FISH CALLED WANDA weren’t blockbustery enough to make the list?
I hate MSN so much.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m always grateful I get to read whatever you’re writing, and even more when you’re paid to do so.
But how can a company whose primary business is the internet itself design so godawful, anti-intuitive, hard to navigate webpages? The fact that it asks of each reader to click a hundred times to read the whole list just baffles me.
Anywhoo. Fun list, great read as always.
“A lot of laughs, true, but the thrilling climax, particularly in IMAX 3D, had at least two adults of our acquaintance in gibbering, tearful near-hysteria by its end.”
I can only assume you’re not including me in that, but still: me, too. Although it wasn’t during the thrilling part, but rather what followed. I was on the exercise bike during the last half hour or so, and I suddenly felt a rush of emotion that not only brought on the tears, but made it hard for me to breathe. It was sudden and alarming and hard to hide from my wife.
Also – I never thought about NORTH BY NORTHWEST and PSYCHO being back-to-back Hitchcock films. Kind of crazy, when you think about it.
The last time I tried to watch CONAN THE BARBARIAN, I was surprised at how kinda logey it is. Through no fault of the great Basil Poledouris, of course. RIP.
Spielberg’s WAR OF THE WORLDS is near-perfect, in my opinion. I have no beef whatsoever with Cruise, either, and I’m tempted to call this his best performance. Yes, it goes soft, but I can barely bring myself to complain by that point.
RETURN OF THE JEDI has some of the worst moments from the original trilogy, but also some of the best. The operatic showdown between Luke, Vader and the Emporer is fantastic, and Vader’s turn towards good had the opening day audience I saw it with as a wee lad standing and cheering. It was an amazing theatrical experience which no doubt colors my perception of the film now, but oh well.
TOTAL RECALL is a fun movie. But if Verhoeven intended the vast majority of the plot to be an false memory implant, he failed to plot it out that way. In this sense, it nicely mirrors the badly failed satire of STARSHIP TROOPERS. And since I hate the kind of shit Verhoeven was trying in TOTAL RECALL, I’m happy it didn’t come off, because I like it much better the way it plays.
Ah, I can’t go on any longer now. I know! Too bad, right!? More later, maybe…
Okay, what else…
The interesting thing about FRIDAY THE 13TH – the *only* thing interesting about FRIDAY THE 13TH – is the mercenary way in which it was made. The DVD commentary track is really fascinating, particularly the bits with Victor Miller, the screenwriter. He wasn’t a fan of horror, and knew nothing about it. He was primarily a soap opera writer. But he knew Sean Cunningham and had worked with him before, so he took the job, went and saw a bunch of popular horror movies, picked out the stuff that seemed the most workably formulaic, and Bob’s your uncle – nearly irreperable damage has been done to the genre! But really, it’s interesting, and Miller comes off rather charming. He had a job to do and he did it.
ROAD WARRIOR is a masterpiece.
I don’t think any of the quieter humor of BLUES BROTHERS is lost at all. That’s what’s so great about it. I can make a pretty good guess at why Landis seems to have lost it so completely, but he had whatever it is that makes a good summer movie at one point.
The thing about ANIMAL HOUSE that makes it so unappealing to me is that by and large the jokes come from wiseass jokesters who think what they’re saying is funny, and who invite us to laugh AT other people. Self aware funny people in comedies really plays badly for me, at least in relatively modern films. Bill Murray is one of the very few guys who can pull this off, and he doesn’t even do it as often, or as shallowly anyway, as people often think. GROUNDHOG DAY, for instance, somehow manages to have it several different ways at once, with Phil Connor managing to be the mocker and mockee within the same line of mocking dialogue. In ANIMAL HOUSE, all the heroes are cool and funny, or rather, “cool” and “funny”, and I’ve never liked that angle for comedy. What was I saying before about Landis again…?
Anyone bored by my ramblings yet? I sure am.
The presence of BLADE RUNNER on the list is kind of anamalous. Yes, it was designed to be a collosal summer block-blockbuster in the way that FANNY AND ALEXANDER or FULL METAL JACKET. And it currently holds an interesting position on the great movies list. If you look at theyshootpictures.com top 1000 movies, you will find, not surprisingly, CITIZEN KANE at the top. The greatest movie made after 1941 is VERTIGO, and the greatest movie made after that is 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and so forth with THE GODFATHER, THE GODFATHER PART II, RAGING BULL, BLADE RUNNER, FANNY AND ALEXANDER, GOODFELLAS, PULP FICTION, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, MULHOLLAND DRIVE, SPIRITED AWAY, THE ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, THERE WILL BE BLOOD, and THE DARK NIGHT.
But BLADE RUNNER wasn’t very successful either commercially and critically when it came out. No one was upset when it wasn’t nominated for any major awards, in a year, as it turns out, that the best pictures nominees were more defensible than usual. Unlike say VERTIGO, or 2001, or NEW YORK, NEW YORK, it’s not as if Scott’s past or future body of work would on the face of it encourage a reevaluation. And it wasn’t until 1991 that the first of Scott’s alternative (and better) versions became available. Yet already by that time BLADE RUNNER had already struck a chord. I wonder how exactly that happened.
Great feature, I really enjoyed it (aside from having to click “more” on every page, as already noted above). I’m sure I’ll think of an objection at some point – maybe the inclusion of _Ghostbusters II – but this was fun stuff.
partisan: “Yet already by that time BLADE RUNNER had already struck a chord. I wonder how exactly that happened.”
I think a big part of it was ’80s pay cable. I can clearly recall one of those services using APOCALYPSE NOW as bait in commercials and another using BLADE RUNNER. These ads played for a couple of years, or at least seemed to. I’m wondering how laser disc fits into the equation.
I saw BLADE RUNNER at a preview screening, and I seem to remember that it “struck a chord” almost the minute it appeared. It may not have done well or been received all that rapturously, but it seemed to achieve immediate cult status, which is exactly why the other versions were created.
“So MIDNIGHT RUN and A FISH CALLED WANDA weren’t blockbustery enough to make the list?”
I’d add NO WAY OUT to that list (aka the other movie Kevin Costner released in the summer of 1987 besides THE UNTOUCHABLES). Along with E.T., BACK TO THE FUTURE, and A FISH CALLED WANDA, it’s my favorite summer blockbuster, and still one of my all-time faves.
Bill, I agree they could have done more to play up ambiguity in TOTAL RECALL about whether or not it really was a false memory, but I still enjoyed it (for that matter, I completely disagree with you about STARSHIP TROOPERS being “lame satire” – I think it’s brilliant satire, though we probably also disagree about the source material). I do agree with you about WAR OF THE WORLDS, though; I’ve never understood why that film got such a beating in the press, as I found it very entertaining until the ending. I especially appreciate how Spielberg creates tension from the start not by hitting us over the head with special effects, but with the menace of everyday things, like he did with CLOSE ENCOUNTERS.
Blade Runner’s look is very distinctive, whatever its dramatic and commercial shortcomings – it’s one of the great design/FX visions, along with Melies’s shorts, Metropolis, 2001, yada yada… I imagine it made an impression on a fair number of folks even the first time around. For my part, I was vaguely aware of it as a child in ’82 because I was a Star Wars fan and liked Harrison Ford, but I was secluded from R‑rated movies and didn’t see it until years later. Suddenly, freshman year at film school in ’92 (around the time of the first Director’s Cut), it was The Hottest Movie and everyone was talking like they’d always loved it. I don’t even remember when I first watched it. Caught it on VHS, probably, sometime in the late ’80s.
No love for J.J. Abrams? I think MI:3 and STAR TREK are pretty excellent as summer blockbusters go…
@edo: MI:3 and Star Trek are positively dire as summer blockbusters go, as are Ghostbusters 2, Pirates of the Caribbean, Mission Impossible II (ahead of True Lies? Shame on you Mr Kenny!)and Independence Day. Apart from that it’s a solid list, though we’ll ignore The Dark Knight being placed ahead of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Nice to see Temple of Doom rightly being placed above the Raiders rehash that is Last Crusade. And seeing that pic of Ford, Hamill and Fisher takes me right back to the late 70s/early 80s when my world and that of all my friends was completely dominated by Star Wars. Lucas can take hits from overweight geeks forever but at the end of the day the guy made Star Wars. Ah, bliss was it to be alive in that dawn.
And The Abyss should be in there.
Edo, I guess you’re wrong. You forgot that J.J. Abrams’ movies are dire. Oh well…
See you at the SUPER 8 première.
@Kent: I’ve yet to hear a well-constructed argument as to why JJ’s movies are good. He has no discernible style, the screenplays he uses are appalling. He’s a TV director doing exactly the same thing on the big screen, his films are completely lacking on a cinematic level, little to no use of staging or inventive cinematography. More importantly his films are lacking ideas, or as someone I was talking to yesterday said there is no sense that JJ is standing on the shoulders of anyone culturally or artistically meaningful, Spielberg was into Lean, with Lucas it was Brakhage, Belson and the underground movement. There’s also something deeply cynical about JJ’s work, something that the sci-fi author China Miéville nicely summed up: “I disliked Star Trek intensely. I thought it was terrible. And I think part of my problem is that I feel like the relationship between JJ Abrams’ projects and geek culture is one of relatively unloving repackaging – sort of cynical. I taste contempt in the air. Now I’m not a child – I know that all big scifi projects are suffused with the contempt of big money for its own target audience. But there’s something about [JJ’s projects] that makes me particularly uncomfortable. As compared to somebody like Joss Whedon, who – even when there are misfires – I feel likes me and loves me and is on some cultural level my brother and comrade. And I don’t feel that way about JJ Abrams.”
If you can point out to me something i’ve missed in Mission Impossible 3 (a second-grade mash-up of True Lies) and the revamped Star Trek (another appalling screenplay by Kurtzman and Orci) i’ll happily rethink my position. Until then i’ll be giving Super 8 a wide berth.
To address the larger issue, hmm, “Midnight Run.” Guess that counts as a miss. Don’t know about “Wanda.” “The Abyss” is an interesting kettle of fish.
These lists are fun, but they’re not put together according to ANYTHING like a scientific method. A few of my MSN colleagues look over potential lists, pitch in, etcetera. For the most part I DO get to keep my own head, and I thought it would be fun to think outside the ostensible box and throw in stuff like “Psycho.” Up until a very late point I had FORGOTTEN that “Blade Runner” was initially a summer release, and I put it in at almost the last minute even though as great as it is there’s something about it, and something about my recollections of first experiencing it, that make it not FEEL like a summer movie. But the thing about doing these lists is, as soon as they go up, you’re gonna get somebody pointing out omissions, some of them really kind of careless (yeah, “Midnight Run”) and others arguable. It’s part of the fun, or “fun.”
As for J.J. Abrams, I’m neither particularly big no him, nor do I think he’s the devil. I did get a good snicker at his anointment last week as The Blockbuster Filmmaker It’s Better Than Permissible For The New York TImes’ Magazine-Reading-Middlebrow To Like. Wonder if The Dan Kois Official Seal Of Not Being A Cultural Vegetable will follow. Abrams’ being the creator of “Felicity,” which featured an episode in which Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” was a major source of anxiety, brings the whole thing full circle. No, it isn’t noisy in my head at all, why do you ask?
Especially nice to see all those John Landis movies on the list.
@lipranzer – To focus on the film that’s actually on Glenn’s list (and besides it’s been a while since I last watched STARSHIP TROOPERS and would rather not go by memory when debating it), it’s not so much that Verhoeven doesn’t play up the ambiguity enough – it’s that he THINKS the movie all takes place in the hero’s head, but right around the scene where Sharon Stone’s character gets killed, the possibility that it’s in his head is completely blown away. That no longer makes any sense, yet Verhoeven, and many of the film’s fans, persist in thinking that’s what happens in the movie. Not only that, but it’s part of this popular idea now that if a movie takes place almost entirely within a character’s head then it’s somehow better and smarter than if it didn’t. Witness the movement that would have us believe that the second half of MINORITY REPORT never happened, and that this is a good thing.
@markj – You haven’t exactly provided a solid argument for why Abrams is bad, you know. You say his movies are dire and the scripts are terrible and that China Mieville agrees with you because he tastes contempt in the air, but that’s not really a argument. I don’t put much stock in what anybody tastes in the air.
How many ways can you say “J.J Abrams SUCKS?” I think we’re about to find out.
Am I supposed to like George Lucas’ movies because he likes Brakhage and Belson? And Bruce Baillie? Does that mean I have to sit through STAR WARS again?
I was never close to being a “Trek” fan and don’t know much of Abrams’ work, so I was surprised by how much I liked the reboot. When Kirk took the captain’s chair at the end, it felt earned, and actually made the idea of TV prequels seem not so terrible after all.
Also, maybe I missed the definition somewhere, but how in the world does “Midnight Run” rate as a “blockbuster”? It sure *seemed* to come and go quickly, it didn’t put up any colossal numbers, and over the years *at least* as many people I’ve asked have told me they haven’t seen it as have. (Also, a huge number of the no-sees are just adamant that a De Niro buddy-movie about bounty-hunters couldn’t be very good, but that’s just a bur under my personal blanket.)
“The War of the Worlds” lost me at the Tim Robbins scene. Wow, was that not good.
We saw STAR TREK twice at the dollar show. The second time, they projected it in the wrong aspect ratio, and so the title of the film became TAR TRE, Spock hailed from the planet lcan, etc.
It actually changed the film considerably; a lot of the shots have Kirk on one side of the frame and Spock on the other. Projected 1.85, though, you get Spock and half-or-none of Kirk, which really made it more Spock’s film.
@Kent: Fair enough. I guess calling MI:3 and Star Trek ‘dire’ as I did was a surrender to my “hang on honey, somebody on the internet is wrong” mode that I have the bad habit of slipping into, ‘average’ would have been a better word (though I stand by my comment that Kurtzman and Orci’s screenplays are terrible). It would be good if you could mount a defence of Abrams’ work though, instead of pithy one-liners. I wasn’t saying you have to like Lucas and Spielberg’s movies, just that at least they have some things going on in their movies beyond the surface level of action, whereas JJ’s films (to me) operate only on that bland surface level (and even then not very well). I know i’m in the minority here, just saying that nobody has really said why his films get elevated to being the work of the natural heir to the blockbuster thrones of Spielberg and Cameron. When anybody says anything against Abrams on a talkback there is a rush to mock the opposing view without ever explaining what it is about his work that is liked. I am actually genuinely confused as to why his films are so admired, not just trolling! (And despite my bluster I admit I probably will end up seeing Super 8, Spielberg himself said it was JJ’s “first true film”, so you never know).
Anyway, don’t want to derail the talkback, carry on gentlemen.
I hadn’t realized that Tom Cruise was in every summer blockbuster ever. Though he’s never been a favorite actor of mine, I agree with Bill that he’s quite effective in WAR OF THE WORLDS (except perhaps when singing “Little Deuce Coupe” as a lullaby). Also dig MINORITY REPORT, RISKY BUSINESS, the first M:I…
Glenn, Ah-nuld is Austrian, not German, though his dad was in the German Army during WWII.
Anyway, fun article, despite all the clicking.
@markj – But you haven’t mounted anything to argue against. Why is the burden automatically on the people who casually mention an appreciation of Abrams’ films when somebody comes in to tear the guy down? You’re the one tearing him down, so make your case.
The other thing is, where did this idea that Abrams is being exalted as some great filmmaker come from? I like his movies, and I’m very much looking forward to SUPER 8, but SUPER 8 will be his third film. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III was pretty well liked, but nobody went crazy over it. So on the basis of one movie, suddenly he’s being treated as the second coming? I’m not seeing that reaction anywhere, at all. I’ll grant you that the SUPER 8 commercials have been pretty over the top in terms of breathless anticipation, but that’s marketing. From actual filmgoers, Abrams is, at best, regarded as a good filmmaker who has potential to get better, but nobody knows yet.
STAR TREK was dire (but had its moments) because of the need to appeal to every dumb TV desire (Beastie Boys song; that awful Kirk hiding in Uhura’s room scene out of THREE’S COMPANY IN SPACE; the stupid McCoy repeatedly injecting Kirk gag (JACKASS, kids!); the ridiculous intro of Scotty and Spock on the same planet; etc. etc.) I did like some of the actors and with a twist it could have worked for me. It just seemed so pandering.
Probably nothing to do with JJ Abrams, but I found the STAR TREK movie depressing because it seemed like the folks that made it were just generically “badassifying” it by making its characters more like Jack Bauer (à la the Battlestar Galactica remake, the new Dr. Who series, the new Sherlock Holmes movie, etc.) rather than to really engage with and rethink Gene Roddenberry’s original vision. Specifically: depressing that this is just about the only Star Trek story I can think of where we’re meant to cheer someone getting killed at the end.
I’d mount an attack on Abram’s M:I3, or a defense of his Trek, if only my eyes weren’t still suffering from acute mydriasis due to the constant and overbearing lens flares that they were forced to endure throughout both pics.
Jon – Just from the films alone, there’s STAR TREK II (the death of Khan), STAR TREK III (the death of Christopher Lloyd), STAR TREK VI (the death of Christopher Plummer)…
bill – I don’t think we’re supposed to cheer any of those deaths, really. I mean, in the new movie, there’s that moment where the bad guy has a chance to save himself: he doesn’t, and Kirk and Spock are both really psyched that he doesn’t. The earlier movies aren’t like that though: there, violence always seems more like a last resort. With Khan, in particular, a couple things make it impossible to cheer: (1) we’re always aware that the whole thing stems from Kirk’s arrogance and (2) the movie ends on a somber note with Spock’s sacrifice. The endings of those other movies don’t work quite as well, but they’re aiming for that kind of mixed tone, I think. The new STAR TREK movie, though, has been Jack Bauer-ized and neo(ret)conned.
I remember a pretty big “yeah!” beat when Sulu orders his ship to fire on Christopher Plummer in VI – I think that was quite cheerleadery. Khan’s death is more tonally ambiguous, and Reverend Jim’s is colored by the much bigger emotion around the Enterprise exploding.
Now I have to go watch some football or something, in order to balance out the universe.… ummm, go team!
So now you have to be a neocon in order to enjoy the deaths of fictional alien genocidal maniacs? Man, you guys don’t have ANY fun at movies, do you?
Not to mention, why do the mitigating factors of Spock’s death and the Enterprise’s destruction take away from the happiness the audience is meant to feel at the villain’s death? Christopher Lloyd’s death is constructed and written to elicite cheers. “I…have HAD…enough of YOU!” Kick, fall, lava, dead. It’s so blatant as to be stupid.
And not only that, if mitigating factors count, why don’t the death of Spock’s mom and, you know, the destruction of his planet and most of his race count? More, even, than a ship blowing up.
I’m pretty sure STAR WARS is dire. And Dave Kehr agrees with me, which trumps the Abrams-basher’s cite to some French sci-fi writer.
I don’t really think either the new BATTLESTAR GALACTICA or the revived DOCTOR WHO are really trying to be badass or neocon in any real sense. By any standard the second BATTLESTAR was much more thoughtful and intelligent than the original, not the least by replacing the original clumsy robots with enemies were practically human themselves. If the ninth, tenth and eleventh doctors are occasionally ambiguous, so were the original seven. It would be hard to be find a more pacifist hero than the Doctor.
Also, GREMLINS 2 is actually one of the best summer blockbuster sequels, admittedly a not terribly distinguished genre. If not as good as THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK or ALIENS, it is much better than INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM or indeed the original ALIEN.
GREMLINS 2 is better than ALIEN?
FTR, MI‑3 is a two-part episode of Alias. Abrams is a TV director through and through, for better or worse (some might say the former).
“Lucas it was Brakhage, Belson and the underground movement.”
Well, okay, so Lucas attended some of Baillie’s first Canyon screenings and shot some stuff for Al Maysles and liked Brakhage… and then… he made STAR WARS…
And I sort of fail to see how Abrams’s movies’ screenplays are any worse than those for the STAR WARS franchise. I think they’re quite superior in fact. In STAR TREK, the introduction of each new character through action – a demonstration of their talents, rather than a lot exposition or the kind of crude psychological shading we get in a film like, oh, THE DARK KNIGHT – is breathtakingly orchestrated.
GREMLINS 2 is *definitely* better than ALIENS. GREMLINS 2 is better than most things on this planet.
Comparing GREMLINS 2 to ALIENS is like comparing SHAUN OF THE DEAD to ZOMBIE. I love G22 but it exists in a another film/genre universe. Oh, and it’s a comedy.
As a childhood fan of the Star Trek shows and films, I have to say I’ve never agreed with the idea that each new addition to the franchise should have to be faithful to, or, as expressed here, deeply engage with “Roddenberry’s original vision”. In fact, to my mind, the best Star Trek films – Nicholas Meyer’s two entries, FIRST CONTACT, and the reboot – have been the ones that actively ignored it! I mean, Roddenberry wasn’t God. Star Trek has grown beyond him, and that’s perfectly okay.
> “I…have HAD…enough of YOU!” Kick, fall, lava, dead. It’s so blatant as to be stupid.
Hmm, forgot all about that beat. So yeah, rah rah Reverend Jim’s death – that’s the tone they’re going for.
Khan’s death is weird though – he’s alone in his ruined ship quoting Melville, and he blows it up, and then it’s all about the danger to the Enterprise. I mean, sure, he’s the villain and you can be happy he dies, but anyway there’s no specific beat where there’s a rah-rah moment around it.
I guess the general idea here is that the Abrams movie undercuts the can’t-we-all-just-get-along ethos of the original series and much of Next Gen, in which seeming villains often turned out to be just trying to defend their homeland etc. (Classic moment: Spock mind-melds with a murderous hunk of living concrete and learns it’s a mother protecting its eggs! Seriously, I’m not being ironic. It’s a classic moment! And Nimoy gives a masterclass in acting commitment.)
Abrams definitely pitched the thing more in rollicking-adventure mode, but I enjoyed it as far as it went. At least it felt like a movie more than like an extended episode, and Zach Quinto did a fine job of riffing on Nimoy. No question the screenplay creaked like hell in places, and Eric Bana’s villain was a sort of vaguely angry nonentity.
Gremlins 2 better than Aliens? Well, that’s an awfully apples-to-oranges comparison. G2 is one of those movies that wants to be smarter than itself, is too cool for school, etc., whereas Aliens just goes in whole hog. In my opinion, Aliens is a far better movie, though G2 has its moments. It’s probably deconstructing lots of stuff and more fun to write about, but then, Aliens constitutes a wonderfully operatic take on motherhood, if you want to get all theme‑y with it.
But were we referring to Alien or Aliens?
Edo, at the Bruce Baillie/Apichatpong event, Baillie went into quite a bit of detail about Lucas financing alot of the restoration of QUICK BILLY, until he threw up his hands or something – it was unclear what happened, but the funding dried up. Also unclear is why the “master” was a Digibeta.
STAR TREK is “dire,” “pandering,” “depressing,” “badassified,” “Bauer-ized,” and, my favorite, “neo(ret)conned” – whatever THAT means.
That’s a lot of adjectives.
I thought Bana was wonderfully entertaining in STAR TREK myself. A non-entity perhaps in the sense that there isn’t much depth to his character’s motivations. But STAR TREK is not meant to be that kind of film. Frankly, I’m tired of blockbusters that feel they have to be ‘important’ or ‘deep’ like Nolan’s films…
“Frankly, I’m tired of blockbusters that feel they have to be ‘important’ or ‘deep’ like Nolan’s films…”
You should be thrilled then. Which ones are those besides Nolan?
Let’s see here, besides Nolan’s Batman films and INCEPTION, there are:
THE HULK, V FOR VENDETTA, WATCHMEN, X‑MEN: THE LAST STAND (Ugh, Brett Ratner is the bane of my existence), X‑MEN, X2, SUPERMAN RETURNS (though I think Singer’s films are actually pretty okay at what they do), DAREDEVIL, QUANTUM OF SOLACE…
Shall I continue? Or is that enough for you?
Oh, then there’s also Paul Greengrass’s entries in the Bourne trilogy.
10 films over the course of ten years to represent the tidal wave of “smart” blockbusters, okay.
Uh, that’s more than ten films, Christian… I count 14 precisely. And why don’t you add to that TERMINATOR SALVATION, THE INCREDIBLE HULK (the Norton one), THOR, X‑MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE, X‑MEN: FIRST CLASS, the currently-in-production Wolverine film, headed by Darren Aronofsky, which practically guarantees it will take itself way way too seriously, and the currently-in-pre-production MAN OF STEEL, being shepherded into existence by none other than Chris Nolan…
But I also didn’t say it was a tidal wave, nor did I use the adjective “smart”. I don’t think they’re smart. The operative word is really “serious”. These are films that load themselves down with all sorts of melodramatic weight and dreary portent…
Yes, and then there’s THE MATRIX trilogy, which practically gave pretentious a whole new meaning…
Edo, man, I am with you there. Even the damn Transformers movies are overloaded with the hero’s journey. Which is incidentally why I adore Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III – it’s breezy, simply-shot (by which I mean the cinematography is clean and effective; he presents the action compellingly without embellishing it), inventive-but-familiar spy stuff. And it takes some great shots at its own genre while it’s at it, by not giving us the scene in which Tom Cruise breaks into some well-guarded lair to recover the Rabbit’s Foot, only to have him reemerge and totally interrupt two characters are doing that fake-action-movie-bonding thing where the writers realize they haven’t dedicated any time to them so one tells another a story from their childhood. All that AND they never tell us what the Rabbit’s Foot is, which may come across as lazy writing, but to me read as the definitive example of the MacGuffin.
Abrams’ Star Trek, by comparison, tries to have it both ways. When it’s breezy and rolling, it’s great, but Abrams lacks the capacity to take anything seriously when he should. When Spock’s planet blows up, he (Abrams) pauses for a moment, then shoves it aside and continues. By the end, I was so totally disconnected from the final battle because Abrams effectively communicated that it didn’t matter. I agree partially with the sentiment that reboots tend to be a little too gung-ho for their own good, and I don’t even know Star Trek well enough to say he took it too far as an adaptation, but for a film whose bad guy is mostly just pissed that Spock ran over his wife with a black hole, it is pretty certain of who’s allowed to push who off of a ledge.
I also really, really hate his use of lens flares. I know that’s partially just a gut-level thing, and I get the motivation, but that doesn’t mean they need to be in every damn shot.
And cultural influences aren’t everything, until they show up in your work – the classics palpably affected Spielberg, particularly his period in the late 70s and early 80s, while Abrams seems very content just recycling the superficial elements of what his target audience is already familiar with. Spielberg’s debt to Lean or Capra or Wilder or even Hitchcock wasn’t just in that warm feeling in our tummy or the airtight suspense, it was in how to effectively tell a story with images or convey endless emotion with a single shot. Abrams just has not done that yet. And for something like Mission: Impossible III or even Star Trek if you’re into that sort of thing, it’s fine to be big and poppy and superficial, but I’m more than a little skeptical about this Super 8 business, which is supposed to be his big personal film.
Great list, by the way, Glenn. Interesting to trace Spielberg’s development across it, too.
Hi Kent -
On “neo(ret)conned” – just a little joke on my part. There’s been a trend over the last fifteen years or so in pop sci-fi and fantasy where characters and stories have been revised to make them more like Tom Clancy novels. I’ve seen it in Brian Michael Bendis’ AVENGERS comics and Mark Millar’s ULTIMATES comics, where the super-hero team is reimagined as a paramilitary strike force. It’s at the heart of the reboots of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (which does go on to complicate matters quite a bit) and DR. WHO (which even features a monologue where the Doctor tells us, yes – he IS the most badass person in the universe). So, yeah – it depressed me that the guys who wrote the STAR TREK movie decided to follow along with this trend rather than buck it in a way that would have felt a bit more like Roddenberry’s STAR TREK and less like a Mark Millar comic.
Glenn, I have no problem with you stretching the release date for THE ROAD WARRIOR; I must’ve seen it five times that summer. bill is right – it’s an action masterpiece.
But no Romero DAWN OF THE DEAD? Seems like that one played almost all summer back in 1979. Audience reactions alone made it worth repeated viewings.
Other than that, great list!
Last night, I found myself projecting MEN IN BLACK for a crowd of drunk college students. It holds up pretty well. Smith and Jones play off each other beautifully, and the supporting cast is just amazing: Rip Torn, Tony Shaloub, Siobhan Fallon, Linda Fiorentino, and especially Vincent D’Onofrio. Talk about a Marvel production that just has some fun with its premise!
“N‑Y-P‑D. Means I will KNOCK. YO. PUNK-ASS. DOWN!”
edo: I thought Aronofsky opted out of the next Wolverine. Did he opt back in?
As for pretentious blockbusters, I think that a certain earnest “importance” comes with the territory, at least with comic book adaptations. Perhaps that’s understandable when the stakes often include the potential end of the world and such. It may also be over-compensation for the unabashed silliness of people in tights flying around shooting death rays at each other.
I just double-checked this, and you are correct, sir. I hadn’t heard about it, but sounds like he left the project nearly three months ago.
Yeah, I don’t know about earnest importance necessarily accompanying the material. It’s clear that the folks who made MEN IN BLACK didn’t feel that way. Nor did Favreau’s IRON MAN team. And I think Del Toro walked the tight rope between silly and serious quite well with the HELLBOY films, and even then his films are less self-important, and more just grotesque and disturbing.
All that said, the nicest thing about Singer’s two X‑Men films was that they tried fairly earnestly to imagine what the reality of being a mutant outcast in contemporary American society might be like. In the first film, those scenes between Hugh Jackman and Anna Paquin are very sensitively performed. I think it helps that Singer brought some of his own experiences as a gay man to bear on the films. That said, he also had a sense of humor about it. The ‘coming out’ scene in X2 is pretty hilarious.
Yeah, the reason Singer’s earnestness succeeds while so many others fail is that he actually draws on real-world emotions and events without confusing them with comic-book events, the way Nolan does. That’s the difference between a pop artist and a special pleader.
I don’t mean to suggest that all superhero blockbusters are full of pseudo-significance, nor that they should be – just that they do often reflect the material from which they’re adapted, which, if anything, can be even MORE puffed up with “significance” (granted, I haven’t followed comics for decades – maybe they’re all much snarkier and larky now). But the majority of comics I grew up with used humor mostly as witty quips the heroes delivered while battling villains, a nice respite from the overriding sturm und drang of their personal lives (especially in Marvel comics) or the prevailing evil threat of the moment. So it doesn’t surprise me that MEN IN BLACK and IRON MAN feel more like exceptions to the rule. Can’t wait to see what Whedon brings to THE AVENGERS; if anyone can find a balance on this issue, it’s him.
Must strenuously object to the exclusion of the ‘original’ BATMAN ( particularly when another ’89 entry, GHOSTBUSTERS II, made the list. And even the ‘argument’ for it is almost entirely apologetic). BATMAN was a huge phenomenon- Burton’s assignment heralded the ‘egdy’ property, Nicholson’s perf set the bar for star-turns in blockbusters, Keaton’s casting riled the geeks months before release- in pre-internet days, and WB’s decision to shrink the video window heralded sell-through as a integral the film business.