Everyone's a superhero, everyone's a Captain Kirk...

          This summer the movie theaters will be bombarded with geek-fare filled films, from space-trekking stories, to superhero cape-flapping stories to giant robots fighting giant monsters (thank you in advance Guillermo del Toro).  There will be films based on popular novels like World War Z, and The Great Gatsby and over a dozen sequels including Kick Ass 2, Red 2, The Hangover Part III, and Iron Man 3.

There have been articles written and blogs that claim that the ‘geeks have inherited the earth’, or at least in the realm of Hollywood.  This is true to a certain extent, mostly it’s just people who grew up in the eighties and have a sense of nostalgia for what blew their hair back like Saturday morning cartoons and the epic blockbusters of that decade.  We had Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, Darth Vader, Muppet Babies, and classic game-changing comic books like “The Dark Knight Returns”, “Watchmen”, “The X-Men” and “G.I. Joe” and “Transformers”.  Trying to re-create anything close to those kinds of big characters and big stories is what it’s all about.  Now that Blockbusters are no longer a video store, it’s what we should get every summer.

 

What I’m looking forward to most is the big superhero movies, Superman the Man of Steel and Tony Stark the man of iron.  Both show a darker more serious tone, which I hope equals success as it did for the Dark Knight.  The same goes for the latest incarnation of everyone’s favorite X-Man “The Wolverive”.  The trailer shows us a film that is nothing like the abomination that was “Origins”.  This looks like a tough hard-hitting story with enough “snikt” to keep us entertained.

 

And like everyone in America, I’m looking forward to “Star Trek Into Darkness” I got to see the first 9 minutes before last years “The Hobbit” and it was amazing.  It was like a mini-episode of the Original Series with that J.J. Abrams touch with the beginning introducing the villain of the piece with a mystery and leading to a fun and funny adventure with the crew from the ’09 “Star Trek” that leaves you with a cliffhanger ending.  That’s how you sell a movie to a geek six months in advance.

 

The other films that look great on paper and in trailer format are “Before Midnight” Richard Liklater’s trilogy where all three film may be classics.  “Fast & Furious 6” didn’t you see the last one?  Amazing.  “Much Ado About Nothing” a Joss Whedon version of Shakespeare?  Absolutely.  “This is the End” all those funny guys, and Hermione with an axe?  It’s gotta be a little funny.  “Pacific Rim”  I said it already, “Giant Robots!!!”  “2 Guns” the buddy comedy rises.  “Elysium”  Neill Blomkamp’s follow up to “District 9”.  And lastly (appropriately enough) “The World’s End” the reuniting of Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright.  They ‘killed’ in their zombie movie, were ‘arresting’ in the cop movie, now they are going sci-fi?  “Reach for the stars boys!”

So come back and check out reviews of these and other films this summer.  We will be here.

 

--Robert L. Castillo