If you’re looking for the most ridiculous movie of the year you’d be hard pressed to find something more bizarre than Cowboys and Aliens starring Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford.
Set sometime in the old West the movie centres around a cowboy called Jake (Daniel Craig) who gets abducted by aliens, as was quite common in them there days, and finds himself mysteriously back on the cold sandy planet we call Earth with an alien weapon attached to his wrist.
Harrison Ford plays baddie come goodie, Woodrow, who owns much of the land in the town and becomes distressed by the mysterious disappearance of his cattle and therefore money. He gets no such alien weapon, plenty of normal guns though.
As the Summer blockbuster season drew to a close it dawned on my that it had been largely underwhelming. It all kicked off with Pirates of the Caribbean 4 which was average, had sprinkles of mediocre with Cars 2 and The Green Lantern, and a large dollop of boredom with Transformers 3.
It’s no surprise then that I didn’t walk into Rise of the Planet of the Apes with high hopes, and yet I walked out pleasantly surprised by it.
The movie is obviously a prequel to the movie: Planet of the Apes, I don’t think it matters if it’s Burton’s version or Schaffner’s. It starts off with a scientist called Will Rodman, played by James Franco, who is working on medication that will treat, and possibly cure Alzheimer’s. His father has the illness and so this motivates him to carry on his work.
It hasn’t exactly been the greatest Summer of all time for movies, but nonetheless it has provided some good ones. And one of the best has to be J.J. Abrams’ science fiction thriller Super 8.Set in the 1980s (well, 1979 actually), Super 8 focuses on a young boy who, with his friends, comes across an alien who is trying to get back to his homeworld. Yeah, it isn’t difficult to see where the comparisons to ET came from is it? It’s even produced by Steven Spielberg himself. Of course being likened to one of the best science fiction movies of all time is hardly a bad thing, and in fairness it is different enough to stand on its own two feet.
I recently went to watch a weird new video game that didn’t allow the player to actually play. No controllers, no headset, just a screen. It was called Battle: Los Angeles.
Of course I jest, it isn’t really a video game, though the action found in it is more like a video game than Call of Duty is. Instead it is the latest alien invasion movie to hit the big screen. I went into this movie pretty pumped, I thought it looked action packed and I was looking forward to seeing what they were going to do that other movies sharing their tent hadn’t already done.
That’s pretty much been the tagline The Adjustment Bureau has based the entire premise of it marketing campaign on. TotalFilm really has a lot to answer for. So is it Bourne meets Inception? Well not really. It’s Matt Damon in a film that appears to have some sort of alternative reality, I think that‘s the link with Inception.
It has the science fiction vibes that Inception sort of has too. Well maybe not sci-fi but perhaps something a little more towards the supernatural. The film focuses on the idea of free will, whether we have it or not.
We’re a few months into the year now and we’ve been dealt our first superhero movie: I Am Number Four. Well it’s sort of a superhero movie but in truth I don’t really know what genre to put this movie in. It could be a whole range of things.
Upon going to watch this I had no idea about it whatsoever. It’s based on a book that I’ve never heard of let alone read, so really I could have been walking into anything. I hadn’t even seen a trailer for it. I just knew it was about some guy who has superpowers of some sort.
Comedy duo, Nick Frost and Simon Pegg returned to the big screen once again in February with their new movie Paul. Although they’ve both been involved in plenty since, this is largely seen as the follow-up to Hot Fuzz which is now an astonishing four years old now. My, how time flies.
I loved Hot Fuzz, it’s one of my favourite comedies out there, so Paul was always going to have very large shoes to fill. I wasn’t a huge fan of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz was a huge improvement so I was interested to see what direction they were going to take with this new one.
