Lower Decks

Okay, so let’s get past the obvious things everyone else seems to be saying in their reviews: this is James Cameron’s first movie since ‘Titanic,’ once again he spent a lot of money, and all of it went to creating revolutionary new special effects. Despite all that, you could see ‘Avatar’ for complete different reasons. I’ve read a review that compares it negatively to this summer’s ‘District 9,’ but however wrong that is, it’s a good place to start with a more accurate reaction and characterization of the experience you can expect to get.

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Another movie that wasn’t all that heralded but hits with the impact of a blockbuster upon viewing, ‘Surrogates’ could be summed up as the adaptation of a graphic novel and a Bruce Willis film at worst, or as a sort-of culmination of a long line of movies exploring the human-machine relationship. The latter, to me, certainly sounds more flattering.

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Imagine a world where you have no fear of getting hurt or sick, while still being able to fully participate in your daily life?  Where a machine, called a surrogate, can do all of the heavy lifting while you command it from the safety of your home?  This is the world of Surrogates, the new genre film based on a graphic novel by Robert Venditti.  And while I’ll freely admit that the idea is fascinating, does the film itself work?

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This is one of those things where you’d have to be living under a rock to not have heard of. But, seeing that Lower Decks has not yet made official mention of it, I’m here to tell you that you’ve got to visit ‘District 9.’

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While strong cases could be made for Spider-Man and Robin, Green Lantern has got to be considered my first real favorite superhero. It started, obtusely enough, with an action figure, from the Super Powers line some twenty years ago. Those were some of the toys that came with tiny little promo comics (the original He-Man releases did as well), but I don’t remember the one that came with Hal Jordan, just Green Lantern himself. Some years later, I was trying desperately to represent an entire comic book collection with only barely a handful of Green Lantern comics, including one old back issue and two reprint editions, one of which was ‘Showcase #22,’ Jordan’s debut, during a special activities class in middle school while every other classmate had boxes full of ‘Punisher’ and other favored, violent comics of the day. Green Lantern wasn’t cool back then. Well, the joke’s finally in my favor. Marc Guggenheim and Ryan Reynolds are working on a live action film, which has long been a dream of mine, ‘Blackest Night’ is DC’s big summer event of 2009, and hey, there’s this animated film, too, just to make sure the stragglers are aware that all the cool kids are wearing emerald (or, the color of their preferred corps, right?) these days. I haven’t the faintest clue how Guggenheim and Reynolds are going to represent Hal on the big screen (hopefully really faithfully and really fantastically), but in moving 2D, he looks quite good.

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In 2007 the final book in J.K. Rowling’s famous book series was released, the same year Hollywood got around to ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,’ the fifth book. That film concluded with an epic wizarding clash in the halls of the Ministry of Magic, where it was finally confirmed for all that Voldemort had returned, after ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ had resolved the entire affair. All the secrets were out, and yet the fans were still enthralled to see it play out on the big screen. With the release of ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,’ a different kind of culmination comes to pass, the sixth and final film before audiences, in 2010 and 2011, have a chance to experience the conclusion all over again. Far from a slowing momentum, the odd way in which the books and films have complemented each other only further lends the symbiotic relationship along the path, to the point where the films become bigger all the time because they are and they aren’t, exactly, what came before them. They become an expression, more and more, of what makes the story of Harry Potter so great, so timeless, even as they so immediately make an extended moment of it in our own time, at the start of its impact on the culture.

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I’d read a few reviews of ‘Moon’ before I finally got a chance to see it, and none of them were written specifically for the genre audience. I’ve never seen ‘2001,’ so of course when it was inevitably referenced, all I had were the sequence of books to draw from, and not the famous film itself, so that won’t be my focus in this review, and you’re going to get a different perspective on what it means when you hear that for most of the movie, Sam Rockwell talks to himself, because that will be my focus, specifically what the means of that dialogue means for the genre audience.

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Okay, so I’m not exactly a Marvel sort of guy. As with comics, so too with the films, I end up with more enthusiasm for DC projects. Last year was an easy pick for me when others found it difficult to choose between ‘Iron Man’ and ‘The Dark Knight’ as the best superhero flick of 2008. While I enjoyed the X-Men series, I was never quite as swept up in the Spider-Mans. I still consider ‘Daredevil’ (the original or director’s cut) to be the epitome of that clan. It’s not that Marvel screws up quite so badly on the screen as it seems to on the page (hey, my opinions, okay). Casting is usually an undeniable highlight. It’s the stories that invariably let these movies down. ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ is really no different.

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