Tom Salinsky

I remember thinking “uh oh, this COVID thing is really serious” when they didn’t release the James Bond movie as scheduled. Since then, the world of cinema has been in turmoil, and now this feels like the first real summer of movies we’ve had, the first year that the top ten films at the global box office will all be ones I’ve actually heard of, the first time that the logjam was finally cleared, even though at least one of the films on this list was shooting during global lockdowns. I hadn’t necessarily planned to write a summer blockbusters movie round up blog post, but I’ve been going to the cinema a fair bit and I’ve been having a good time, so – for what it’s worth – here’s what I’ve seen and what I thought, and yes, we will be ending with Barbenheimer. These are presented roughly in release order. There may be spoilers, you have been warned.

John Wick Chapter 4

My introduction to the Wickiverse was watching all three movies back-to-back during a “snow day” and I had the best time. The series becomes more and more absurd as it goes on, and while by the end of the third instalment I found myself missing the lean, taut ferocity of the first film, the action sets pieces are still a thing to behold and the wider universe that the series creates is absolutely fascinating, as soon as one makes peace with the fact that while the world of these films bears a superficial resemblance to our own, it definitely has different rates of employment for professional assassins and different laws of physics (wait till we get to Fast X). What’s remarkable is how much variety they are able to conjure up without really changing the formula overmuch. The best set-pieces here (the early hotel fight, the long overhead shot, the Arc de Triomphe) are some of the most exciting I’ve ever seen (wait till we get to Mission Impossible) and if it isn’t really about anything… well, was that ever the point? MVP: Rina Sawayama who makes an astonishing debut in her first movie.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3

I don’t care about Marvel the way I care about some other properties, like Doctor Who or James Bond. A bad James Bond film is a particular tragedy as there tends to be only about one every three years. But if this Marvel movie / TV series / holiday special doesn’t work, well there’ll be another six later this year. Antman and the Wasp: Quantumania I thought had some bright spots and some fun cameos, but managed to squander the promise that Jonathan Majors showed in Loki (and how Kevin Feige must be ruing building all of Phase Five around that particular actor) and eventually collapsed under the weight of its own silliness. This tries to combine some of that same goofy good-time feel, with the same cartoony anything-is-possible vibe and still try and deliver a backstory with real weight and depth of character and theme. It’s an odd mix, and the elements fight with each other as often as they mesh, but it’s still a pleasure to see this team together again. MVP: Will Poulter, who clearly isn’t needed for the plot to work, but is determined to make his every second on screen count.

Shazam: Fury of the Gods

If Marvel is slipping into irrelevance generated at least in part by overabundance of content, DC is suffering from releasing movies which set up stuff we know is never going to be paid off because the James Gunn reset is bearing down on us. Like a lot of part twos, this benefits from not having to walk us through the standard beats of the superhero origin story, allowing us to get straight on with the adventure, but then is weakened because the whole point of this particular character is the gulf between the two personas, which are brought far too close together now that Billy Batson is used to being Shazam. Dijmon Honsou, Helen Mirren, Lucy Lui and Rachel Zegler are fine additions to the cast, but there are too many members of the super team for me to keep them all straight, especially when they’re all played by two actors, so it was hard for me to stay invested. An uncredited Gal Gadot shows up at the end as Wonder Woman. MVP: Skittles.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

The first Spider-Verse film was such an astonishing achievement that any attempted to create a follow up looked doomed to failure. And yet what’s fascinating about this film is that it takes the weakness which doomed Fury of the Gods and turns it into a strength. By emphasising the importance of the superhero origin story and making the repetition of that the whole point of the narrative, it manages to say something about mythic storytelling, while being visually eyepopping, terribly funny, tightly plotted and tugging the heartstrings. Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Brian Tyree Henry and Luna Lauren Vélez all return and do excellent work as everyone’s favourite local neighbourhood spider-family and new recruits Jason Schwartzman, Oscar Isaac and Issa Rae all find moments to shine. But nobody told me that this was designed as part two of what is now a trilogy so I found the unresolved ending bewildering. MVP: Daniel Kaluuya whose Spider-Punk should be in every movie from now on. Not every Spider-Man movie. Every movie.

Fast X

Listen, I’m a huge Fast fan and this was a big leap up from the doldrums of F9 and even if there’s a slight sense of fatigue setting in as far too many characters circle the plot hopefully looking for a role in it, and even as far too many of them started off as implacable villains needing only one encounter with the Fasticles to turn them into self-sacrificing goodguys, and even if there seems to be an awful lot of standing around and talking for the first hour – when the action does kick in, it’s pretty impressive, with Hulk director Louis Letterier never giving away that he was essentially brought in to steer the ship after it had set sail. Retrofitting a new villain into the plot of Fast Five (still the high watermark of the franchise, although Seven is pretty banging too) is exactly the kind of dementedly convoluted continuity I’ve come to expect from these films and – what a villain! Jason Momoa is funny, scary, hulking, camp, prissy, absurd and clearly having the absolute time of his life and he’s obviously the MVP. But nobody told me that this was designed as part one of what is now a two-part finale, so I found the unresolved ending bewildering. An uncredited Gal Gadot shows up at the end as Gisele.

The Flash

Tired? Try being the Flash. Seeing the shadow of the James Gunn reset looming over you? Try being the Flash. Even by the standards of modern superhero blockbusters this is a very busy, noisy film. Faced with a leading actor who is pretty annoying on-screen and pretty reprehensible off it, Warners has opted make a film with an even more annoying version of the character and I have to say, scenes of the older and younger Barry Allens interacting are pulled off with a degree of aplomb from both a performance and a technical standpoint. But the plot doesn’t make a lick of sense, generally relies upon everyone involved being as dumb as possible and the few good ideas that are present never cohere into anything meaningful or even all that interesting. Yes, sure, it’s fun to see Michael Keaton back and saying his famous catchphrase “Why don’t we be crazy?” but it all feels re-heated, pointless and dull. Possibly this would all have had more impact if we hadn’t already seen multiverse excursions in Everything Everywhere All At Once, recastings of iconic characters in Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and return appearances by veteran actors in Spider-Man: The Third One with Home in the Title. An uncredited Gal Gadot shows up at the beginning as Wonder Woman. Guys. The trick is keeping her to the end. MVP: Sasha Calle as Kara Zor-El. I would have watched a whole movie about Superman’s cousin landing in the Soviet Union instead of America.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Tired? Try being an action movie star in your ninth decade, as Harrison Ford is here. The most successful section of the film is the opening, when largely convincing computer graphics return the 80-year-old actor to something like his prime (and when Toby Jones makes a wonderful addition to the supporting cast). But there’s a depressing lack of either innovation or specificity here, and while James Mangold mounts some impressive sequences (one of the best being the very tense sub-aqua scenes, where the primitive 1960s technology really ramps up the anxiety levels) this fails to recapture any of the old magic, and very few of the rest of the supporting cast really register. Shaunette Renée Wilson is a luminous presence who looks as if she’s going to be a key player in the narrative, until she’s suddenly shot dead and never referred to again. Ethann Isidore as Teddy is more often annoying than adorable, and Mads Mikkelson looks like he’s going through the motions. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is given more to do than anyone else – she’s really the only one with anything like a satisfactory arc – and she gives the film everything she’s got, but even she can’t stop the final act from feeling anything other than completely absurd. MVP is Phoebe obviously, but I also want to mention Antonio Banderas who does much with very little screentime.

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One

Having enjoyed past Missions Impossible, especially the third and fourth instalments, nothing could have prepared me for quite how good the sixth film was – it absolutely blew me away. It might be the perfect action film for the twenty-first century. Everything about it just works. So, the pressure was on for this one to succeed. And early on, it seems to have just a little trouble getting the sparks to ignite. A lot seems to be happening around the characters we care about, but not to them or by them. Luckily, this doesn’t last for very long and once the chessboard is set up, and the pieces start merrily colliding with each other, the fun really begins. The now familiar team of Ethan, Benjy and Luther is augmented by the winning unpredictability of the frankly incredible Hayley Atwell, who manages to simultaneously embody complete disbelief at the ridiculous things that the IMF is involving her in, with her own sense of self-possession, self-interest and mischief. It’s a star-making turn for a phenomenal performer and it’s a fantastic new ingredient which freshens up the formula without fighting with it. Like Indiana Jones, the McGuffin here is a little outré but Christopher McQuarrie treats it lightly, and keeps the emphasis on what matters most. This time, I did know that this was part one of two (it very helpfully says “part one” right up there on the screen) but by the time that extraordinary final stunt sequence had concluded I was wrung out, and not the least bit bothered by the presence of a few dangling plot threads. A far cry from the other movies which played the same trick which just stopped in the middle. My only other complaint is that the villain was a bit underpowered, but then this series has only ever had one really top-notch villain (Philip Seymour Hoffman). MVP: Hayley.

Barbie

This is a very silly film. It’s disorganised, unruly, and often makes very little sense. It sets up rules and then ignores them. It places great emphasis on where certain characters are and when, and then forgets they ever existed. It seeks to contrast the unreality of Barbieland with the grounded reality of the real world, and then makes some elements of the real world just as loopy as Barbieland. Very few characters have anything like an inner life, or an arc, and you don’t have to wonder what the point is, because it gets spelled out to you with relentless in-your-face clarity. I loved it, and it might be a work of genius.

It’s vital to understand that all the foregoing is perfectly deliberate, just as Gerwig’s decision to split Little Women into two timeframes was, and for all the apparent shenanigans going on here, I believe there’s just as much careful directorial rigour here as there was there. The casting is also perfect, with Margot Robbie sensational as Barbie, Ryan Gosling hilarious as Ken and able support from Helen Mirren, Kate McKinnon, Simu Liu, Will Ferrel, Rhea Pearlman and countless others. Only Kingsley Ben-Adir seemed to be struggling to find the tone – pulling faces when others were just being. I desperately wanted the final credits to include the joke of simply crediting all the Barbies as “Barbie” and all the Kens as “Ken” as was delighted when they did. The “anything goes” approach of this film means that it’s unlikely to resonate deeply inside my soul, but I was thoroughly entertained, I’m thrilled that it exists, and even more thrilled that it looks like it’s going to go on to make a billion dollars at the box office. MVP: a photo-finish between America Ferrera, who maybe has the hardest job of anyone and makes it look easy, and Michael Cera as Allan, whose complete irrelevance eventually comes quite close to being the entire point of the movie.

Oppenheimer

And this is the big one. Big as in 70mm IMAX, 11 miles of film big. Big as in atomic bomb big. Nolan’s films thus far have usually avoided confronting what goes on inside the heads of his central characters: Batman is the costume, Leonard Shelby is defined by his condition, The Prestige is about the tricks, Inception is about the dreamscapes, Dunkirk is about the acts of heroism, rather than who did them and why. The one which tries to deal with who a person is, is one of my least favourites. Who watches 2001: A Space Odyssey and says “You know what would make this better? A daddy-daughter love story.”? No. No, it would make it a hundred times worse. But this film doesn’t present the building of the first atomic bomb as a race against time, or a scientific or engineering problem to be solved, or a political conundrum, although all those things are aspects of the story. It wants to know: who would build such a thing? And what effect would that have on the rest of his life? In a way, it’s new ground for Nolan, who takes sole writing and directing credit for this one.

He couldn’t have asked for a better collaborator than Cillian Murphy, who manages to dig under the surface of the text and unearth a man who goes from nervy student to strident professor to guilt-wracked public figure to quietly malicious political operative. But the film has a lot of ground to cover and in the first third, this felt like the frantic bang-bang-bang pace, which killed Tenet for me, was back, as people marched in and out of rooms, announcing exposition at each other, to the relentless strains of Ludwig Göransson’s ever-present score. Thankfully, after a while, the editing slows down and the feeling of “Last time on Oppenheimer” recedes, and scenes are allowed to breath a little. And there are some remarkable performances here, including a very solid Matt Damon, Emily Blunt bringing much to an underwritten part, Gary Oldman doing his Gary Oldman thing as Harry Truman, and Tom Conti as a cuddly and thoughtful Albert Einstein.

But while the race to build the bomb, leading up to the first test, is absolutely incredible (and it’s great to see this presented as a true team effort, unlike say the absurd The Imitation Game which gave Alan Turing credit for everything that happened at Bletchley Park) and the cut-aways to the senate confirmation and security clearance hearings help fill in other aspects of his character, I do feel that it fundamentally did not work to escalate from the detonation of the world’s first nuclear device to a petty act of political revenge from one embittered man to another. That said, MVP here is clearly Robert Downey Jr whose performance as Lewis Strauss might be the best of his career. I also thought that having Oppenheimer recite his “I am become death” catchphrase during a tits-out sex scene was completely ridiculous, and the kind of thing I’d expect to see in a film like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

Right, now I think I need to watch a movie in black-and-white with subtitles about someone who goes for a quiet walk and sees a caterpillar or something.

NGM03 Insurrection (). Michael Piller had saved Star Trek once. Could he save it again?

The “Creative Consultant” on DS9 and Voyager, who had turned the ship around back in 1989, was asked to write the screenplay for the third Next Generation film and nobody knew the show and the characters better than he did. His original pitch was a riff on Heart of Darkness and The Magnificent Seven with Picard as a lone figure, desperately defending a benighted group of settlers from a seemingly-invincible foe. As loving retold in his amazing (but unpublished) book on the subject, following endless fretting about what the studio wanted, what the studio thought fans wanted, what Patrick Stewart wanted, what Rick Berman thought Patrick Stewart wanted, what Brent Spiner wanted, what director Jonathan Frakes wanted, and finally what the studio wanted, again, we got… this.

It’s a curious film and one which keeps sliding off my brain. I watched it first on a plane – hardly ideal – and I kept falling asleep half way through and having to go back and find what I missed. When I finally had it on DVD and watched it all the way through, it still struck me as piecemeal and inconsistent. Not maddeningly sloppy the way that Generations is, but light years away from the focused thrill ride of First Contact. The usual criticism of Insurrection is that it feels like an overlong episode of the TV show, and reading Piller’s book, you can see how that happened. His huge movie-sized idea of a story was drawn back into the gravity well of the TV series. But most TNG two-parters have been hugely entertaining, so if Insurrection is just a 100 minute episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, well I can think of a lot worse things to watch on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Let’s give it a spin.

The opening is very unusual for a Star Trek film – all bucolic calm and cheerful domesticity. Star Trek films tend to open with death and destruction (Motion Picture, Wrath of Khan) or catching up with the gang (Search for Spock, Voyage Home, Generations). The calm-before-the-storm is a perfectly fine way to start a story, but not a particularly interesting one. Nor is the revelation that this community is being covertly studied all that shocking or surprising, being familiar from TV episodes like Who Watches the Watchers, while Data-goes-rogue-in-a-pre-Warp-society is a re-run of Thine Own Self. Even the “Briar Patch” is just the nebula from Wrath of Khan with a new name. Part of the problem is that the B’aku society is so blandly generic. TNG figured out what a pre-Warp civilisation in the 24th century would look and feel like and has stuck to it, even though this is going to the backdrop for this whole movie. Even Michael Westmore hasn’t been inspired to give them three noses or six ears or whatever.

Another problem with this opening is that it’s all played from the point of view of people we haven’t met, don’t know and don’t care about. So this feels simultaneously low-stakes and confusing. But, anyway – Data blows the gaff on whatever this is, for as-yet unknown reasons, and reveals himself while beating up and revealing his comrades. Darn it, if only the Federation had some kind of magical technology that could “lock on” to him and instantly “transport” him out of there. Oh well. One for the boffins to keep working on, I expect.

Now we catch up with the gang, but the supposedly amusing hijinks of Picard’s diplomatic quickstepping feel like the plot is losing momentum, not gaining it, for all the script’s hurried enthusiasm to make this veteran crew feel like first-year cadets who are complete beginners at this kind of ambassadorial function. And now it turns out that the Enterprise is two days away from the plot (and the flagship of the fleet is not equipped to enter the region in any case, although the unspecified properties of the “Briar Patch” are never particularly relevant as it turns out).

Adding a bit of class is F Murray Abraham as Ru’afo, who also gets some nifty makeup effects, but who is bossing Admiral Dougherty around (Anthony Zerbe, familiar from the James Bond film Licence to Kill, and he weirdly gets the same death scene there as here) like he’s the Federation and Starfleet are his soldiers. Adding-the-backstory-on-the-hoof can make for propulsive storytelling, but it can also lead to bewilderment, as here. Who are these people? What are they doing? And why – other than the still-inexplicable involvement of Data – should I care?

Inside and out, the Enterprise has never looked better, with the bridge striking a nice balance between the beige comfort of the TV version and the shadowy gloom of Generations. But the whole set up is unnecessarily confusing, laboriously moving our people into place instead of having them there from the beginning, telling the story from odd viewpoints, rarely getting me terribly invested in what is happening, and Patrick Stewart hamming out HMS Pinafore doesn’t help matters much.

The next phase of the story kind of undoes a lot of what was set-up over the previous half-hour. The society which must not know of the existence of the Federation turns out to be post-Warp not pre-Warp after all. Data is put back in his box. The fact that it took the Enterprise two days to arrive was never relevant – it could have been an hour and things would have turned out just the same. And once the decoy village was built, there seems little purpose in continuing to wander around in secret, calling into question the continuing need for the “duck blind” at all. Rather than be present and see what happened to cause Data’s malfunction, we have to learn about it after the fact, when we already know the outcome. And what we discover is yet another lift from a TV episode, this time Homeward with its Holodeck simulation of familiar surroundings. (And it’s surprising to say the least to discover that the computer on this super-secret installation will obey voice commands from literally anyone. Still, I’d find Patrick Stewart’s commands hard to ignore too.)

When it finally comes to light, the MacGuffin turns out to be that the planet is an orbiting fountain of youth, thanks to some exotic “metaphasic radiation” – which like most radiation affects the cells in the bodies of adults differently than it affects the cells in the bodies of children (“Don’t ask me to explain it,” growls Admiral Badguy). Given that this is a series which gave us a 137-year-old McCoy in its pilot episode, it’s an odd thing to choose as the fulcrum of the rest of the plot. Anyway, rather than work with the inhabitants, and send scientists to study the radiation, the Federation in its wisdom has decided to partner with Galactic “thugs” the So’na and take control of the planet in total secrecy. This undermines Star Trek’s traditional sunny optimism for no very good reason, but now at least – nearly half-way through the film – we understand who the badguys are, what they’re trying to do, and what we need to do to stop them. This is all that remains of Michael Piller’s original pitch: Picard standing against the Federation to protect the 600 inhabitants of the village.

It all comes down to Picard’s captain’s yacht vs Salieri and the rest of his flat-faced gang. I’m just not sure I want the Federation to be the badguys in my Star Trek film – and if that is what I’m going to get, I’d like the stakes to be a bit higher than the fate of one small collection of twee adobe huts. The revelation that the So’na and the Ba’ku are the same species likewise is only of conceptual interest – it never hits with any emotional resonance, because we don’t know these people. They can tell us that they recognise each other, but I don’t feel anything. Similarly, a small collection of subplots listlessly orbit the main story without feeding into it in any meaningful way (Data and the moppet, Picard’s banal love story, Troi and Riker getting it on), and then they are all unceremoniously discarded for that whizz-bang ending. Only LeVar Burton’s little speech about sunsets has any real power.

Everything looks great, with very decent computer effects, dramatic camerawork and lighting from Frakes and cinematographer Matthew F Leonetti. Patrick Stewart and especially Brent Spiner are excellent (with the rest getting a little more screen time than is typical, but still no real input into the plot – unless Riker getting a shave counts as character development), but after the great success of First Contact, this is a major disappointment, and the silly jokes which plague the script don’t help, from Data’s assessment of Riker’s smooth jaw, to his use as a flotation device, to Worf’s irrelevant puberty, to the “toning” experienced by Crusher and Troi. Three stars reflects both the fact that this is a slick, well-produced product with strong performances and also how much I enjoy seeing the rest of the crew rally around the Captain, even if the justification is both weak and slightly sour. The most effective material in the whole film is probably the space battle in the Briar Patch. It’s in no way new, goodness knows we’ve seen space battles before, but it has an energy and a desperation which the rest of the film sorely lacks – especially, the ersatz Death Star ending with its laborious countdown and endless flitting between ships (and where the bright blue windows make it look as if the effects team forget to put the stars in). Using the Holoship trick against Ru’afo is cute too.

There are a handful of brief mentions of the Dominion, but this doesn’t feel at all as if the Federation is at war. Once again Worf is onboard the Enterprise for no adequately explained reason. He reports late to the bridge (presumably because he was never formally transferred to this ship and so was never rostered). The title was one of about a dozen which were considered. Why “Insurrection” was chosen is something of a mystery, as no insurrection (violent uprising against a ruling power) is ever depicted.

How long will it take the Enterprise to get everyone home without their warp core, bearing in mind it took them two days to get there at presumably maximum warp?