Summer Movie Roundup 2: The Sequel!
The trees in my yard are already losing their leaves, which means that summer is almost done, alas.
That means it’s time to do the second half of my Summer Movie Roundup!
SECRET WARS (2023)
Dour, plodding, and very confusing. Marvel’s attempt to do a John le Carré spy novel but with space aliens, and it didn’t really work.
All the actors gave good performances, especially Ben Mendelsohn, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Olivia Coleman, and Emilia Clarke (and Don Cheadle is really good as a villain, as you know if you’ve seen his hilarious CAPTAIN PLANET parody), but again, they seemed like characters in a John le Carré novel, not characters in a Marvel show about shapeshifting space aliens.
It was annoying that Nick Fury got the LAST JEDI treatment in this – he went from mastermind superspy to a bumbling old man who single-handedly causes all the problems in the series with his incompetence and is replaced by an effortlessly competent younger woman. Honestly, if his exasperated Skrull allies decided to eliminate Fury and replace him with one of their own, you really couldn’t blame them. Disney seems to really love this “legacy character is now a loser” storyline – if Disney had made TOP GUN: MAVERICK, Maverick would have been a bitter old man unwillingly dragged out of retirement by resentful recruits, and the movie would have lost $100 million instead of making $1.4 billion.
Honestly, it feels like the Marvel Cinematic Universe had a satisfying ending with AVENGERS: ENDGAME and an excellent epilogue with the Tom Holland SPIDER-MAN movies (especially NO WAY HOME) and GUARDIANS 3 (more on that below), but most of the TV shows feel like DLC cranked out to squeeze a few more bucks out of a good game fading from the public consciousness.
Overall grade: D-
BATTLESHIP (2012)
I saw this for a very idiosyncratic reason – I listen to the HALO soundtrack a lot on Spotify, and Spotify decided to recommend the BATTLESHIP soundtrack to me. Then I saw that the BATTLESHIP movie was on Prime, so I thought “what the heck, let’s try it.”
You could tell this movie had been in production hell for a while. It’s ostensibly based on the board game Battleship, and while the connection is there, you kind of have to squint and have a few drinks first to notice it.
It was as dumb as SECRET INVASION, but much more entertaining. The first third of the movie plays like some sort of wacky comedy – aimless loser steals a chicken burrito to impress a girl at the bar, but it turns out the girl is the admiral’s daughter, so he joins the US Navy to impress her. This apparently works, because after the time jump he’s a lieutenant and they want to get married to the admiral’s daughter (who is in fact a physical therapist at the naval hospital in Hawaii), except Lieutenant Loser keeps screwing up and threatening his naval career.
Then space aliens invade. For some reason, aliens who have mastered interstellar flight and impenetrable forcefields land their ships in the ocean and engage in naval combat. All the other senior officers get wiped out, so Lieutenant Loser suddenly finds himself in command. Since the aliens’ ships are impervious to radar and sonar, the US Navy has to track them using water displacement on a grid. Just like the game of Battleship!
Meanwhile, the Admiral’s Daughter is helping a double amputee acclimate to his artificial legs when they discover that the aliens are preparing to phone home from Hawaii and they need to stop it.
That would have been a much more interesting movie – wounded war veteran is recuperating at a hospital, only aliens invade. Since he’s the only one with leadership skills, it’s up to him to save the day. It was also interesting when a group of retirees take a museum ship to fight the aliens, since that’s the only ship they have left. That also would have been a better movie than this one.
Overall grade: D-, but C+ for the bits with the wounded veteran and the retirees.
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 (2014)
Honestly, I think this movie got a bum deal. It’s actually pretty good.
I saw the first AMAZING SPIDER-MAN movie last year, and thought it was so-so. Sort of a gritty reboot for Spider-Man. I expected AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 to be worse, but instead I really liked it. It had an entirely self-contained arc, and had good character growth for both the villains and the protagonists. This was the first version of Harry Osborn who seemed kind of scary and not just a loser punching-bag for his evil dad.
It was nice that the Andrew Garfield version of Spider-Man got a proper send-off in SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME.
Overall grade: A-
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY: VOLUME 3 (2023)
It’s a rule of thumb in writing and screenwriting in particular that if you want the audience to hate a character, show the character being mean to an animal.
Boy, does GUARDIANS 3 lean hard into this.
The villain, the High Evolutionary, regular experimented on animals and raised them to sentience, and then killed them if they failed to meet his increasingly insane expectations to perfection. Of course, the High Evolutionary also committed genocide fairly regularly for thousands of years, but that mostly happens off-screen. There was a minor Internet controversy about animal cruelty in film when this movie came out, but I think it was overblown because 1.) all the animal cruelty is the work of the villain, 2.) this is shown to be unambiguously morally bankrupt, and 3.) it’s mostly shown off screen through montages of whirring surgical instruments, and the results of the High Evolutionary’s experiments – a rabbit with cybernetic spider legs and so forth.
Anyway, the plot of the movie is that Rocket Raccoon was the High Evolutionary’s most brilliant creation, a technical genius without equal, and the High Evolutionary wants him back so he can dissect Rocket’s brain and use that genius to chase his elusive perfect society. The Guardians team up to rescue Rocket.
It’s a very dark movie for all the reasons mentioned above, but it has numerous moments of genuine humor, and it achieves an increasingly rare feat – a satisfying ending in a superhero saga. All the characters experience growth in their arcs and achieve resolution, even if it is somewhat bittersweet.
Overall grade: A-
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE DEAD RECKONING PART ONE (2023)
An excellent example of a high-quality action movie.
I think we can all agree that Tom Cruise is a strange dude, but his devotion to his craft is both inspiring and very unsettling. However, in the early 2010s, he seems to have embraced the role of Action Star, and he’s been running with it (often literally) ever since.
The MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movies are implausible as the FAST & FURIOUS movies, but somehow they maintain a greater air of verisimilitude. Perhaps Mr. Cruise’s insistence on doing as many of his own stunts as possible really does help with that. In this movie, Ethan Hunt’s up against an evil artificial intelligence called The Entity, and it’s up to him to find the two halves of the key that can control the artificial intelligence. Many action sequences follow.
Overall grade: A
And now for the best movie I saw in the second half of the summer:
OPPENHEIMER (2023)
A biopic about J Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, done in Christopher Nolan’s non-linear style.
In my opinion, I think this is tied with THE DARK KNIGHT and INCEPTION with Nolan’s best movie. All the cast give stellar performances, and for a movie that is about historical events (meaning the ending has already been spoiled by default), it has a remarkable degree of tension.
It’s a great portrait of Oppenheimer – a man who helped build the atomic bomb so the Nazis wouldn’t get it first, is later horrified by the consequences of what he has done, and yet still loves his work and probably would have done it all over again if given the chance. Oppenheimer’s nemesis Lewis Strauss is usually portrayed as a villain in popular American history (in Real Life he did numerous admirable things that his rivalry with Oppenheimer overshadowed in the public consciousness), but the movie is also an excellent character portrait of him, an egotistical man who is underhanded and a very petty, but absolutely convinced that he is doing the right thing to serve his country, and finds Oppenheimer both personally and morally offensive.
“Moral ambiguity” is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, but OPPENHEIMER actually does manage to do moral ambiguity quite well. All the characters have no good choices, only an array of bad ones and the resultant consequences.
I would give it an A+, but I think the nude scene was pointless and I don’t approve of nudity in film in general.
Overall grade: A, almost an A+
FINAL THOUGHTS:
I didn’t get around to seeing BARBIE, though I don’t disapprove of the idea of a Barbie movie, and I thought the whole “Barbenheimer” thing was hilarious. But I don’t go to the actual movies all that often – I took a half day off to celebrate publishing DRAGONSKULL: CROWN OF THE GODS – so I went to see OPPENHEIMER. I expect I’ll see BARBIE on streaming at some point, but let’s be honest – I’m definitely in the “Christopher Nolan” target demographic and not the “Greta Gerwig” one. Though Gerwig’s adaptation of LITTLE WOMEN was excellent.
What’s amusing is that Warner Discovery released BARBIE on the same day as OPPENHEIMER to screw with Nolan, since he fell out with Warner during the pandemic and went to Universal instead. The goal, obviously, was to try and bury OPPENHEIMER. What actually happened was the “Barbenheimer” meme and BARBIE made a billion dollars and OPPENHEIMER did seven hundred million. Some executive at Warner was probably like “we wanted revenge and all we got was a lousy billion dollars!” 🙂
-JM