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The 1982 John Carpenter’s version of The Thing has gone down in movie history as the very definition of an Antarctic alien horror movie. This new prequel documents what happens at the Norwegian station immediately preceding the events of Carpenter’s opus.

It actually more follows the storyline of the 1951 The Thing from Another World version that inspired the 1982 classic. I re-watched this original recently and I must say, I was impressed by its structure, dialogue, and plotting. Sure, many old B&W movies compare unfavorably to modern fare, seeming trite and unsophisticated, but this was really quite entertaining, keeping me involved from the opening credits to the end.

Apparently I’m not alone in this opinion, either. In 2001, the Library of Congress cited the movie as “culturally significant” and a copy was placed in the National Film Registry.

So that’s an intimidating pedigree to live up too. Unfortunately, The Thing 2011 doesn’t quite hit the high mark its lineage set.

Obviously, the structure of the movie is bound by the terminal bookend that opened its predecessor, and director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. valiantly attempts to get us there, but nothing original really occurs. There are a couple of little twists here and there, but it does seem more like a remake than a prequel.

A Norwegian Antarctic base discovers an alien spacecraft buried in the ice, with the body of an extraterrestrial similarly encased nearby. Obviously, foreigners can’t be trusted to dig stuff up with anything approaching aplomb, so they call in a couple of American digging experts to appropriate the lead in the movie and guarantee a higher domestic box office return.

The monster invariably defrosts and begins tearing the crew a new one. It achieves this goal by absorbing its victims’ cells, thereby replicating their appearance. This doppleganging creates all kinds of distrust, ramping up the tension, but no real scares: the lacking character development creates little empathy. In movies, indeed as in any other narrative format, until you give the audience a reason to care about a character, they’re not going to.

The plot progresses much the same as the ’82 version, with much evisceration, dancing tentacles and insectoid legs growing out of things they really shouldn’t. The special effects are impressive, but nowhere near as groundbreaking as those seen in its predecessor.

One of the Americans, Kate Lloyd (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead) evokes notes of Alien‘s Ripley as a woman working in a man’s world, but doesn’t quite pull the protagonist role off with the same authority. I felt some angst for her character in particular, as opposed to when the other anonymously bearded members of the crew began dropping like ninepins; it felt more like the filmmakers were checking off a list.

A credible attempt at a prequel from a first time director, but I can’t help feeling it could’ve been done so much better.

Rating: R. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Opened on October 14th.

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by Stefan Abrutat

It’s rare a decent movie gets by me; I pay too much attention to the movie press and sites like Ain’t it Cool News and Rotten Tomatoes. My obsessive need to entertain myself (or rather, insist other people do) thus becomes your celluloid revelation.

These three movies combined made less than US$100 million domestically, which is a shocking reflection on how good they are. All three are available for rent right now.

Source Code

I can see the pitch to the studio now: “Combine Quantum Leap and Groundhog Day. Liberally season with Inception. Bung it on a train about to explode from a terrorist bomb. Rinse and repeat.”

Such a plot would have most studio execs reaching for the aspirin or whiskey bottle, but somehow, this wonderfully complicated cloud of ideas won through to the silver screen. I love movies that make me sit forward in my seat and think. It doesn’t happen often, because studio scrota tend to dumb down anything intriguing given half a chance.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Cpt. Calter Stevens, a dying soldier commissioned for one last task, (via some stretching gobbledygooky science, I must confess) to enter the mind of one particular commuter on a doomed train bound for downtown Chicago. Stevens mission is to find the bomber so clues can be garnered for an even bigger promised dirty bomb attack on the city’s downtown. Repeat ad infinitum. To tell you more would risk spoiling the plot.

Rating: PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. Box Office: $54.7 million. Released on DVD: July 26, 2011.

Paul

Another uproarious comedy from the British Pegg & Frost stable, previously responsible for such movies as Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

Two British fantasy/sci-fi geeks attend the huge Comic-Con in San Diego, then rent an RV to tour the famous alien-landing sites of America. On the way they pick up a bona fide, wonderfully-CGIed alien called “Paul”, beautifully underplayed by Seth Rogen, as he escapes the authorities and needs help to rendezvous with a ride home.

There’s a cascade of subtext inhabiting this story, both of the pleasant Brit abroad (dashing stereotypes therewith), arrogant big US government ineptitudes, and some fairly blatant science vs. America conversations.

Of course, we know our plucky-but-unassuming heroes are going to win out, but the journey is where the comedic gold lies.

Rating: R. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Box Office: $37.4 million. Released on DVD: August 9, 2011.

TrollHunter

The title tells you what it is, and it doesn’t disappoint.

A miserable $300,000 totaled this movie’s US domestic box office, which I attribute to scandalous lack of transatlantic marketing. This Norwegian vérité-style movie has English subtitles, which I’m sure put a lot of people off, but the movie itself rocks as a much as a troll exposed to sunlight.

We’re not talking about the knee-high trolls that permeate the American movie mythos, folks, we’re talking the trolls of Tolkien’s borrowed lore; tall as a tree, dumb as a stump, and ready to rain down destruction like an honest-to-goodness monster should.

A trio of film students hook up with the eponymous secretive Norwegian government Troll hunter, who roams the Scandinavian forests like a wildlife ranger, managing populations and studying their habits. The effects couldn’t be better and the atmosphere is palpable.

It’s a helluva concept, and pulled off with great panache. At times both scary and hilarious, it’s one of the greatest unknown treasures of the movie world over the past couple of years.

Rating: PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Box Office: $0.3 million. Released on DVD: August 23, 2011.

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by Stefan Abrutat

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Star Wars fan, just not a frothing, gibbering, Lucas-is-a-Genius type of fan. I don’t go to conventions or dress up as Darth Maul (although I have been known to make the occasional swipe at a passing friend with my motion-sensing iPhone lightsaber audio app, but let’s be honest, who hasn’t?). I’d rather have a root canal than engage in pointless, circuitous, endless debates about how, in later versions, Lucas screwed this bit up or should have left that bit unmolested.

I think George Lucas is a visionary, but not a skilled storyteller. If you look at the cringing narrative faux pas he’s been guilty of over this series of movies, the use of the word “canon” in relation to Star Wars material makes me want to grip the feckless offender’s homemade Jedi bathrobe, pull him in nice and close, and interrogate the skittish adolescent about his lifestyle and language choices.

I can tell you this abiding memory, though: I was eight years old in 1977 when Star Wars came out. My brother and I left the theater with eyes shining, chattering excitedly about the experience. We’d never seen anything like it. Neither had my accompanying mother, who commented, “What a load of rubbish.”

There was an initial dip of disappointment when I considered I had thoroughly enjoyed something my parent dismissed as piffle, but this was rapidly replaced by a surge of rebellion. She didn’t like it, because she didn’t get it. It was the first time I felt the thrill of independence, and considered an adult to be fallible. Star Wars gave me that, and I’ll be forever grateful. However, I somehow doubt driving wedges between parents and their offspring was ever Lucas’ intent…

The Content

Anyway, to the Blu-ray pack. Nine discs, one for each of the six movies plus three with additional documentaries, interviews, deleted/extended scenes, etc; all the usual bells and whistles. Two commentary tracks for each movie. No original trilogy theatrical versions and (thank all that is holy) no 1978 Holiday Special.

The Infamous Changes

Most of the controversial changes are inconsequential to the casual fan. The most abhorred change made in the 2004 re-release is retained, where Han Solo shoots the bounty hunter in the Cantina self-defensively instead of pre-emptively. Many purists were up in arms about the shallowing damage done to his arc throughout the trilogy. I tend to agree, though I steadfastly refuse to froth.

Puppet Yoda from The Phantom Menace has been wisely replaced by the CGI version from the following prequels.

Darth Vader has an added “NOOOOO!!” when he tosses the Emperor over the balcony, which is just as uncomfortably cringe-inducing as the “NOOOOO!!” squeaked by Hayden Christensen when Anakin Skywalker completes his conversion to a Sith Lord in Revenge of the Sith. Utter, utter Jar Jar Binks-level mistake.

I’m sure there’s many others, but those are the only ones that really stood out for me.

The Sound! Oh, the Sound!

The movies, as one might expect, look magnificent in all their high definition glory, but what really blows me away is the sound. This is DTS-HD Master Audio 6.1 channel surround lossloss (or so I’ve been told). I don’t really know what any of that means but it inspires one word: epic. Watching movies with sound design on this level make you realize just how integral it is in the immersion process.

When that first Star Destroyer passed slowly overhead you can feel it in your marrow. Space battles and fight scenes are a cacophony of ear candy as ships and laser blasts swoosh through the soundscape, rattling fillings and making you jump. Explosions back you up the sofa. If you close your eyes you’re in it.

It’s breathtaking, and honestly whisked me back to that evening when I was eight. Any movie that can stir such emotional childhood memories deserves a coveted place in one’s heart.

$79.99 from most large retailers. Released on September 16th.

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by Stefan Abrutat

If I had suspended my disbelief any further it could’ve become permanently disabled (I’m not sure how this condition of zero disbelief would manifest itself, of course (for some reason Sarah Palin springs to mind)), that’s how hard I tried to like this somewhat compelling premise.

This is a “found footage” movie in the style of Blair Witch or Cloverfield, where a covert Apollo moon mission follows the last overt one, Apollo 17, two years later. The idea is to plant listening devices on the moon to spy on the USSR, hence the secrecy; as secret as a massive rocket blasting off the planet can be, anyway. This is the first of many problems with the story. For example, if we’ve never been back to the moon, how was the footage retrieved?

When the astronauts get to the moon, they find evidence of a previous soviet mission and extra-terrestrial life, which is, of course, aggressively anti-human.

Plot holes gape wider than the dark craters the astronauts counter-intuitively wander into. It’s difficult to muster even the most perfunctory of eye-rolls at such stupidity. Best of the best, huh? You don’t care about them and you don’t care they’re in danger. Even the dislikeable characters in Cloverfield, a movie I could take or leave, inspired more reaction that this trio of ill-conceived cutouts.

I simply don’t understand how filmmakers can drop the ball so heavily on character development in movies like this. Isn’t it surely the most important thing, to build that empathy within the audience so they can more readily feel the dread and fear? Especially when the vast majority of the action is contained in a tiny lunar capsule: we need to know who these people are, where they’re from, their desires and motivations etc. The dialogue, especially, needs some style and verve to keep things interesting. Unfortunately, this is far from the case.

Alas this promising premise has been handled so clumsily I was willing along the painfully slow hands of my watch way before the 86 minutes were up.

Come back Cloverfield, all is forgiven.

Directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego and written by Brian Miller and Cory Goodman, Apollo 18 stars Warren Christie, Lloyd Owen and Ryan Robbins.

PG13. Running time: 1 hr 26 minutes. Opened on September 2nd.

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by Martin L. Shoemaker

Oh.

My.

Word.

Go see this film.

Go see this film.

Go see this film, go see this film, go see this film.

Well, maybe not. There might be reasons why you shouldn’t go see “Apollo 18”.

If you only like science fiction films with an explosion roughly every 2.3 minutes and enough CGI space battles to blow up a star, don’t go see “Apollo 18”.

If you only like horror films with an unkillable, chainsaw-wielding psycho in a hockey mask or a never-ending army of zombies, don’t go see “Apollo 18”.

If you believe “movie” means “move” and you get bored if there’s not a fight or a car chase every other scene, don’t go see “Apollo 18”.

But if you enjoy science fiction with subdued but detailed special effects with the verisimilitude of “2001” or Duncan Jones’s “Moon”… If you enjoy suspenseful horror classics like “The Birds” or the original versions of “The Haunting” or “The Legend of Hell House”, where what you don’t see is even scarier than what you do… If you enjoy a film with pacing, where slow scenes develop tension until a sudden menace jolts you out of your seat…

The previews for this film had me torn. On the one hand, advance news told me it was a “found footage” movie, pretending that this was real NASA footage. I expected that to disappoint me, big time. I told friends flatly that I expected “The Blair Witch Project” meets “Aliens” on the Moon. The fact that the release was delayed until effectively the end of summer worried me further. That’s usually an indicator that the studio lacks confidence in the film.

On the other hand, that fake NASA footage in the trailers was PERFECT. I’m a huge fan of the Apollo program (as you might guess from my story, “The Night We Flushed the Old Town”, in Therefore I Am). I’ve pored over NASA footage and photos. And those trailers looked perfect for early 1970s NASA film and video. And I’m such an Apollo fan, I had no choice: fully expecting to be horribly disappointed, I still had to go see this film.

And I spent the first third of the film in awe. Director Gonzalo López-Gallego crafted a “documentary” that perfectly captured an Apollo Moon launch. If there were technical gaffes, I couldn’t catch them (except for one discussed below). In fact, there WERE technical glitches in the advertising: the ads spoke of the astronauts going to “the dark side of the Moon”, and there ain’t no such thing. (Sorry, Pink Floyd fans!) There’s a near side, and a far side; and both sides get half a month of light, and half a month of darkness. But the idea that one side of the Moon is always dark is absolutely wrong. It’s a mistake no one at NASA would make; and when I saw it in the ads, it made me nervous about the film. But writer Cory Goodman and screenwriter Brian Miller never made that mistake. Some ad writer did, and should henceforth be restricted to writing ads for Adam Sandler films. This film is too far above his head (pun unintentional).

I spent the second third of the film with a growing sense of dread. Something was wrong on the Moon, but it wasn’t clear what. Often we would see glimpses of things the astronauts missed, and I wanted to scream at them to look around!

And I spent the final third of the film literally on the edge of my seat – when I wasn’t jumping out of it. More than once I felt the whole row of theater seats shake as someone jumped.

The plot is fairly predictable, especially if you’ve seen the trailers or read reviews. In a way, that in itself speaks to how good this film is, because the one thing I normally hate in a film is predictability; but even though I could tell well in advance how “Apollo 18” would end, I was engrossed in seeing how it got to that ending.

Except for one thing: I DIDN’T predict the ending. I predicted most of it, as could almost anyone who has seen a good horror film; but the last three minutes or so… Wow! I never saw that coming, even though it was clearly foreshadowed almost from the start of the film.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the plot. After NASA canceled Apollo missions 18-20, the Department of Defense secretly reactivated Apollo 18 as a classified mission to deploy missile warning radar units on the Lunar south pole. (Here is the one technical glitch, and you have to be a real rocket geek to notice it: it would take a LOT of energy for an Apollo mission to land on the Lunar south pole, probably more energy than a Lunar Module could muster. For reasons of orbital mechanics, it’s easier to take off and land near the equator; and the farther you get from the equator, the harder it gets. But in Hollywood, it’s a minor miracle if they produce a movie without whooshing sounds as the ships pass through space, so I think they can be forgiven a small matter of orbital mechanics.) Commander Nate Walker (Lloyd Owen) and Lunar Module Pilot Ben Anderson (Warren Christie) descend to the Moon in the Lunar Module, while Command Module Pilot John Grey (Ryan Robbins) waits for them in the Command Module (which many clueless reviewers called a “shuttle” – I’ll bet they thought it was an actual space shuttle!).  Once the astronauts land, they start experiencing minor but annoying glitches in the cameras and their radios. Unexplained things start happening. Slowly they begin to learn that they’re not alone; and so they investigate the mystery. And slowly they come to suspect that the Department of Defense is lying to them, and they’re being used. As they get closer and closer to the secret, the danger mounts higher and higher. There’s a threat out there, hiding in darkness, especially in the permanent darkness found in some craters at the south pole. Can they solve the mystery? Can they survive? You can probably guess the answers, but I’m not going to spoil them here.

Director López-Gallego, cinematographer José David Montero, and film editor Patrick Lussier have done a masterful job of filming. I’ve already commented how well they captured the look of NASA archival footage; but they also did a great job with lighting and angle to build suspense. That’s an even more impressive accomplishment when you consider that most of the cameras for this “found footage” were in fixed locations and angles, so they had to arrange the ominous events and the sudden shocks so that they occurred where the cameras could capture them. A classic horror film trope is unreliable lighting: every time you almost see something, the light fades or changes, and you lose sight of the threat. They use that trope to great effect in this film, including one of those seat-shaking scenes where I actually heard people scream in the theater. Good, suspenseful horror films are moody, they have atmosphere. And sure enough, this film has plenty of atmosphere (even if the Moon doesn’t!).

For López-Gallego and Montero, this is their first English-language production (though the actors have long lists of American TV and film credits). I hope they do more. I’ll be watching for their names as avidly as I watch for Duncan Jones.

The film does have one HUGE gaping logic hole; but I can’t explain it without spoiling the ending of the film. I enjoyed the film sooooooo much, I’ll forgive them that logic hole. (But if they ever make a sequel, they’d darn well better fill in that hole!)

Go see this film, go see this film, go see this film.

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by Stefan Abrutat

I couldn’t help but feel, after walking out of the movie theater post-Captain America: The First Avenger, that I’d just been exposed to a self-profiting marketing campaign for the upcoming Avengers movie. The story, though set in 1942, opens and closes in the present day, which broadly hints at where a healthy percentage of these recent superhero movies are going to end up.

The Avengers (currently set for release on 5/4/2012) proposes to tie together this movie, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, and Thor into one giant megabuster movie event that, I think, is going to have a very difficult time fulfilling the preemptive hype, even under the skillful storytelling guidance of that flick’s director, Joss Whedon.

The problem with Captain America: The First Avenger is that it seems just too familiar. We’ve all seen this stuff before. Sure, it’s nicely shot and framed, but with a mediocre, cookie-cutter story it’s difficult to build one’s anticipation and thereby excitement for the set pieces. A wholesome and lantern-jawed Chris Evans plays Steve Rogers competently enough, with his muscular torso replacing the scrawny 90 lb one his head is CGIed onto for the pre-powers part of the movie (shades of Benjamin Button immediately sprang to mind).

Chief antagonist The Red Skull is played with Hugo Weaving’s usual scenery-chewing enthusiasm, and romantic interest is supplied by a fairly innocuous Hayley Atwell.

I think the only reason this movie got made is because they needed at least some story behind Captain America for Avengers. I was reasonably entertained throughout, though I did find the ending a trifle disappointing. Solid, but not spectacular.

Rating: PG-13. Running Time: 2 hours 1 minute. Released 22 July 2011.

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by Stefan Abrutat

We seem to be in the grip of a spate of alien invasion movies. With last week’s release of Cowboys and Aliens, and the recent Super 8, Battle: Los Angeles, Monsters, District 9, Skyline, Paul and Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon, this subgenre of science fiction is exploding. Every few months a new breed of aggressive multi-mandibled beasties plunge through our stratosphere to begin kidnapping, or eating, or breeding with, or experimenting on (or all four) any earthlings in their path.

Attack the Block is made by the same people that gave us Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, which means I expected a good ride and some hearty laughs, and I wasn’t disappointed. The plot involves a gang of teenage muggers who take up arms to defend their rundown London housing project during an alien invasion. The aliens, in this case, are black splotches of fur with double rows of giant, luminous teeth, that arrive individually in personal meteors. It’s Guy Fawkes’ Night in Britain, when the country explodes in firework displays to celebrate the foiling of a 17th century plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. It’s these displays that camouflage the arrival of the aliens and the leftover fireworks supply our protagonists with some convenient firepower.

Rating: R. Running Time: 1 hr 27 minutes.

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by Stefan Abrutat

Cowboys and Aliens promises big, but doesn’t quite deliver on the premise. It’s like two standard movies have been zipped together, as if the producers were expecting the combination to be greater than the sum of the parts. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Cliché after cliché click past at an alarming rate, from both genres, and certainly create the feeling (which is what I suspected going in) that this movie is overwritten and overproduced. With sixteen producers (including Steven Spielberg, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and producer/director Jon Favreau) and five total writers, it’s often an easy slide into mediocrity. Typically so many perceptions and opinions diffuse any potential innovation, despite the luminary qualities of many of the filmmakers involved. I can’t help but think if just ONE of the famous names had more solitary control, there’d have been a little more depth and a lot more spectacle.

The movie starts as a fairly bog-standard western, albeit with a wounded Daniel Craig (no one plays beaten up or injured quite like Craig) waking up alone in the desert, with no memory of who he is or why he’s there, and a weird metallic device attached to his wrist. He wanders into the nearby mining town of Absolution, Arizona, to meet and establish the characters of town boss and son Woodrow Dolarhyde and Percy Dolarhyde (respectively Harrison Ford and Paul Dano), and aesthetic onlooker Ella Swenson (Olivia Wilde), along with the basic tenets of plot. Recognized as a known ne’er-do-well by Sherriff John Taggart (Keith Carradine), he’s arrested and thrown in jail. Shortly thereafter, the aliens (here described as “demons”) arrive in spectacular fashion, but they seem a little CGI generic compared to recent sci-fi offerings. The invasion sparks cooperation between the various Old West factions of good guys, bad guys and Native Americans, and battle commences.

Overall, it’s an okay movie, with performances from a cast that saves it from completely sinking, buoyed by one-liners delivered with the panache one might expect from inestimable James Bond and Indiana Jones.

Rating: PG-13. Running Time: 1 hr 58 min.

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by Stefan Abrutat

There’s not much going on this week in science fiction cinema, so I’m going to have a look at a new DVD release instead.

The first impression I got from The Adjustment Bureau is the movie itself is trying to appeal to the same demographic as last year’s Inception: a high-concept sci-fi tale in a contemporary setting. Not an unachievable goal, when you consider the story is based on a tale by Philip K. Dick, the Hugo Award-winning mastermind behind such other sagas such as Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report.

Unfortunately he died before he achieved any personal success with his stories, but when you consider his legacy, that just plain sucks. He wrote in squalor, marrying four times and raising three kids. Despite cult success in science fiction magazines and with his 44 novels, his work was never accepted by the mainstream. When you consider he died at the age of 53 in 1982, the same year Ridley Scott’s take on his Blade Runner story came out, you can’t help but cringe at the pathos.

It’s difficult to imagine modern movie science fiction without Dick’s influence, which can be seen in just about every science fiction movie made today. The Matrix movies are a prime example, where the universe as we know it is a virtual reality simulation projected by real world self-aware machines and computers into our brains to provide a distraction while our inert bodies are harvested for the energy they need. This kind of woven duality is common in Dick’s work, and his influence is quite blatantly felt here and elsewhere.

Ben Affleck, who played Michael Jennings in John Woo’s 2003 movie Paycheck, based on the 1953 Dick short story, had this to say about the man:

“This is a part I went after really aggressively. I’ve always been a fan of Philip K. Dick, both his writings and the movie adaptations. They’re big-budget movies for smart people. There’s a tendency to dumb these movies down – they’re spending so much money on them, and conventional wisdom dictates that you have to go for the lowest common denominator. But his ideas prevent that. To anybody who’s ever thought, Did that happen or did I dream it? – you’d have to have a PhD in philosophy to get too deep into this, but it has to do with wanting to validate our own first-person experience.”

The Adjustment Bureau doesn’t quite capture the same vibrancy as Inception (another movie though not written by Dick, certainly has his legacy stamped all over it) The Matrix, or the recent Source Code. This is primarily because, I feel, it strips away a lot of Dick’s darker themes to focus on the bare bones of the story, which concerns the juxtapositions of free will, chance, and destiny.

The concept behind The Adjustment Bureau story is there’s a clandestine agency deployed to safeguard a divine plan by secretly and subtly manipulating the population of the planet with a nudge here and a trip there. Relationships are delicately encouraged or, in the case of US senate hopeful David Norris (Matt Damon) and ballet dancer Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), energetically hindered. This isn’t explained, only that it’s not supposed to be. However, chance intervenes and they do end up falling for each other as Norris becomes aware of the bureau’s existence, which ramps their operations into overdrive as they realize they’re letting things get away from them.

The DVD extras include a commentary track from screenwriter/director Geoff Nolfi as well as the usual deleted and extended scenes. Three featurettes, Becoming Elise, Leaping Through New York and Destined To Be describe the making of the film. Of particular interest is Becoming Elise, which tracks Emily Blunt’s pursuing of the role and her exhaustive training of the dance elements.

Pretty standard fare by today’s DVD standards, nothing particularly special, but well-polished and interesting nonetheless. Which is indicative, pretty much, of the movie itself.

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by Stefan Abrutat

Maybe it’s because I’m getting old.

Pointless, content-less explosionfests of the sort director Michael Bay seems to specialize are becoming less and less attractive to me. Of course, I don’t really think it’s because I’m getting old, I think it’s because formulaic action movies with all the charm of a bat to the codgers are becoming the norm rather than the exception.

As I sat back in my 3D goggles and took in the splendor of cleverly (and, it must be said, repetitively) refolding machinery, I couldn’t help but think of the technical wizardry and sheer time it must have taken to create the images violently flitting through my visual cortex. Such complexities involve hundreds of thousands of man-hours to deliver, yet I had a hard time staying awake for the movie’s 154 minute entirety.

Part of the difficulty was trying to keep up with the differences between Autobots and Decepticons (I understand one group are the good guys and one the bad, but how do you tell by looking?). Particularly which robot was aligned with which group. I felt I almost had a handle on the divisions and the various robots therein when one unhelpfully turned traitor, sending me spiraling back into ultimately blissful ignorance.

There’s something fundamentally wrong, here. The amount of effort that went into making this flick should at least elicit an appreciative nod from me. After all, I like explosions, car chases and the thunder and screech of massively destructive events filling the screen. But the only nods I experienced during Transformers 3 were from trying to avoid collapsing into a snoring, drooling heap.

It took an obscene $200 million budget to fund this crap, while thought-provoking, really entertaining movies have a hard time getting made. This dichotomy is reprehensible: these are showcases for effects guys, not filmmakers attempting to amuse or interest you.

Normally, critics tend to blame the studios for producing unimaginative films, but the real fault lies squarely at the feet of the audience. Studios want to make money, which they do by giving the audiences what they want. If the audiences want to watch movies like Transformers 3, well, I’m suddenly seriously disappointed in the average intelligence of my fellow humans.

The audience rating on Rottentomatoes.com is a hefty 90% versus the critics’ 37%. This is a rating of the movie by, at the time of writing, over 60,000 moviegoers. Ye gods. This means we’re probably heading inexorably towards Transformers 4: How Shit can the Script Get?

I understand the irony of me saying this after having just returned from a showing. I tend not to believe most critics either, as the majority seem to be pompous snobs more keen to demonstrate a capacity for elegant wordplay than review the actual movie. Unfortunately, in the case of Transformers 3, the critics seem to be spot on.

PG13. Running time: 2 hrs 34 minutes. Opened on June 29th.