The Most Anticipated Movies of 2015

Courtesy of StarWars.com

When I first started developing this article I wanted to take the angle that 2015 was one of, if not the most, anticipated movie year ever.  But when I thought about what that meant I realized that…well duh, of course it is – with social media and the 24 hour a day news cycle everything is hyped to the nth degree at a near constant rate.  So, instead I took a look at the list of expected and potential blockbuster movies coming out in 2015 and wanted to A) compare that against a period in history and B) dig into what Hollywood has become.  I’ll start with the latter.

This year should prove to be spectacular with the myriad of comic book, sci-fi, action and adventure movies coming out.  But when you take a step back and look at the laundry list of films on the docket for 2015 you see a very specific trend: retread.  This is most assuredly nothing new for Hollywood – but this year seems particularly pervasive.  For example we have new: Jurassic Park, Friday the 13^th, Mad Max, Terminator, Fantastic Four and Star Wars movies coming out.  Now, don’t immediately mistake my comment of retread as all bad…Star Wars alone makes my slip into a mild excitement induced comma all by itself; but with some of these series (FF & Terminator – as of recent) that were failed attempts the last time(s) out it’s frustrating to see Hollywood fall back on such titles to fill an already jam-packed year with movies that will most likely fail utterly in the face of their competition. 

Looking at Friday the 13^th and Mad Max; the elder-statesmen of the bunch and their respective reboots have the potential to be grand gestures to their genre…but this is unlikely and again – where’s the originality?  I never much cared for the SAW movies, but at least they were trying to be different for their time.  These two films are trying to get tickets sold on name recognition alone and that is a bad formula.

Courtesy of Universal Pictures

Then we have Jurassic World and Star Wars; undoubtedly the best two films of this group and I even hesitated to put them in this category but facts are facts.  Jurassic World will be the 4^th installment of the series and this time the park is FINALLY OPEN!  Clearly with all the kinks worked out (at least enough to get the park up and running this movie will probably be pretty boring, right?  Just two and a half hours of smiling people hanging out with dinosaurs!).  Nope; apparently they went and bread some new super smart dinosaur that can like do calculus and your taxes while you wait…plus eat people.  The cast is outstanding and I wait with bated breath. 

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is pretty much the holy grail of retreads.  People have long anticipated the continuation of this classic saga.  But that anticipation was mostly riddled with fear that George Lucas would once again take a giant shit on our childhoods and we’d be forced to suffer through more trade embargo debates while watching whiny children sob about their intergalactic troubles.  Not much is known about the story of the seventh installment with only most of the cast known and a mere teaser trailer to go off of; and I wouldn’t have it any other way.  This movie SHOULD be shrouded in mystery; it SHOULD be something that when you walk into the theatre your eyes and ears are working at peak efficiency to soak in every morsel of what it’s about to partake of.

As retreads go 2015 has some definite possibilities for quality flicks and I sincerely wish them all the best at the box office.

Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

If you’re wondering why Spectre – the next James Bond movie isn’t in the retreads list it’s because this series (aside from the occasional hiatus for recasting) has been ongoing and would not fall into that category.

The other avenue that is popular in Hollywood these days is: stories that are for kids turned into movies for adults.  The Avengers movie is something that huge swaths of people will see, millions and millions – of which only a fraction will have ever read an Avengers comic.  Years ago this would have angered me intensely; like when Episode 1 of Star Wars came out and people all went to see it, but I was still the geek kid outcast for being a fan and reading the SW EU books…because that makes sense.  But now it’s exciting and I am hopeful that even a small percentage of them will become interested in the comics and keep that industry thriving.  Marvel is also doing another classic “let’s take a not-so-popular/totally unknown character and make a movie” bit with Ant-Man.  I don’t mean to come across annoyed at the direction the company is going, especially considering how much better a job they are doing than DC in that department overall, but they may as well have made a Moon Knight movie.  The only hope for this movie is that they make significant Avengers overtures throughout with the plan to be for him to join that next installment. 

Then there are the teen novels that are rolling out into theatres: Insurgent, Hunger Games, Paper Towns.  I’m super happy that teens are able to experience the books they enjoy in another medium and in the case of Paper Towns, a book I personally am a fan of, very happy for the author as well.  This explosion of the last few years was no doubt ushered in by the success of Harry Potter and we will have to see what direction this goes in the future.

In the annals of history 2015 may stand alone with so many top-flight movies on the horizon; but let’s take a look and see.  For consistency’s sake I decided to limit my spectrum to ten-year increments starting with 1985.

As years for movies go ’85 was pretty damn good.  It had a solid mixture of teen related films (sound familiar?) with The Breakfast Club, Better off Dead, the Goonies and Mask.  There was a splash of Sci-Fi with Back to the Future and Re-Animator (and to a much lesser extent Cocoon).  1985 also saw the release of the second Mad Max movie as well as The Color Purple.  By far the best comedy movie released was Fletch which helped solidify Chevy Chase in the hearts and minds of America’s youth.  And it saw the second-to-last Akira Kurosawa movie, Ran. 

Skipping ahead to 1995 we start to get into epic territory; here’s a breakdown: The Usual Suspects, Casino, Leaving Las Vegas, Braveheart, Toy Story, Apollo 13, Seven, Heat, 12 Monkeys, Kids, Mallrats, Dead Presidents, Friday, and many others.  Now, it’s easy to look at this list and say: wow, clearly 1995 was the greatest movie year ever!  But you may be looking at this with the eye of hindsight.  For example: the Usual Suspects wasn’t some highly anticipated blockbuster – this is pre-Xmen Singer and 1995 was Kevin Spacey’s leap onto the Hollywood stage – before that he’d done little in the way of big movies.  Leaving Las Vegas was a surprise drama hit and shocking winner of Academy Awards.  Toy Story was one of the first of its kind in the full-length animation stories from not pre-existing characters and no one knew if a non-Disney movie would be received.  Seven, Heat and 12 Monkeys are all kind of out there movies; and though in retrospect their casts look amazing – at the time the main stars (other than Heat) weren’t that well known.  Kids, Mallrats, Dead Presidents are all on the independent, not for everyone side of movies but have become cult classics. 

So that leaves us with Casino, Braveheart and Apollo 13.  These are the blockbusters of the year – these are the movies everyone was waiting for.  Gibson. Spielberg, De Niro.  Hanks.  This is where the real rivalry with 2015 lives.  At this point I’d still take Avengers and Star Wars over these three…but we’ll have to see how it all plays out.

And finally, 2005 where a more artistic turn in moviemaking appears with films such as: Brokeback Mountain, Good Night, and Good Luck, Capote, Munich, Broken Flowers and Thumbsucker.  But there were also blockbuster movies this year: King Kong, Batman Begins, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Sin City, V for Vendetta and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.  Amongst the “blockbuster’s” it was pretty hit or miss.  Batman Begins was a shockingly great movie – I say shockingly because of where the Batman franchise had been left previously would not have led anyone to believe it could be revived so amazingly.  Harry Potter continued that fantastic series and was expectedly very good.  V for Vendetta blasted (pun intended) onto the scene and continued to push Hugo Weaving into stardom.  King Kong, Sin City and Star Wars III were all disappointments; each would have been better off never having been made.

It’s fair to say that each of these periods in history have claims to fame and quality movies that were released.  In the end, though, it boils down to the confluence of quality that 2015 is bringing to the table.  It would be hard to argue that 2015 does not have a healthy lead – at this point – in expected quality movies and whereas 1995 could give it a serious run for its money in total great movies, we will have to wait and see what surprise films come out and make a big splash. 

For now, sit back and enjoy the year ahead.

Movie Review: Interstellar

The world is dying. Humanity, in its splendor and ignorance, has finally driven the planet past the breaking point.

During the 1930s in America the people of the southwest experienced a Dust Bowl; a multi-year drought which created massive dust storms that killed the agricultural abilities of that region. 

When we meet the main characters of Interstellar: Cooper, Murph, Tom & Donald, it is a dark time for crop production.  Virtually all cash crops have been made extinct by the blight and now all that humanity has left is corn.  Cooper (Mathew McConaughey) is an engineer/pilot/genius turned farmer and he and his family have made the tough decision to stick it out and keep producing corn in an attempt to continue feeding the world.

The first part of the movie sets the tone for why humanity needs to act as desperately as they appear to do later in the film.  The director, Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Inception) does an excellent job of maintaining the human element throughout the movie.  Far too often the audience has the need for an emotional connection to the characters thrust at us at some point in the film and then the idea is abandoned and it is simply expected that it will continue to exist.  Like a sapling dropped in the ground, loosely covered in soil and given no water or nourishment; it will not grow.

Courtesy of Warner Bros.

Let’s talk about the story.  NASA has detected a wormhole in the space around Saturn.  Prior to this story’s beginning they sent twelve individual manned missions through the portal to land on and explore the planets that had been discovered.  If the world was found to be habitable and of good quality the explorers were to report back and NASA would begin the process of sending the rest of our race to follow after them.  Cooper and his daughter Murph come upon the installation NASA is running this operation from in secret. 

Despite the long runtime, 169 minutes, there is not much dilly-dallying.  From the point where Cooper finds NASA to when he is on a spaceship heading into the unknown is roughly eight minutes of screen time.  It was as if Nolan was saying to the director of Armageddon, “I could have done your movie…better…an in about a quarter of the time”.

Let’s talk physics.  Christopher and his brother Jonathan Nolan, whom have partnered on several script writing undertakings in the past: The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Memento, and it is clear that these brothers know their physics.  Far too often in science fiction films that are supposed to be based in reality the impossible is set as merely a tiny hurdle to be jumped (I’m looking at you Gravity!).  But Interstellar uses actual science to discuss potential risks and dangers involved in the mission.  For example: when visiting the first planet after coming through the wormhole the team must decide how to approach the planet, which is incredibly close to a black hole, because the closer they pass by the anomaly the more slowly time will move for them.  Because the planet is so close to a black hole time operates differently; an hour on the planet is seven years of real time.  This is both totally fucked up and cool at the same time. 

Courtesy of Warner Bros.

Often times with science fiction movies that involve present day humans there is a tendency to use the “everything that could possibly go wrong will go wrong” mentality; a good example of this would be Mission to Mars.  Interstellar doesn’t do this.  Sure things go wrong and sure there are problems to add drama to the film but they are more believable because they are not so damned predictable. 

There are portions of the movie that you just have to take on faith.  Faith that Nolan will explain himself and his vision at some point.  Like how when a dust storm kicks up and Murph forgets to close her window so her room is covered with dust.  The dust coalesces into lines which spell out coordinates in binary…which Cooper realizes and identifies.  This isn’t TOTALLY insane since Cooper has already been portrayed to be exceedingly smart and inquisitive, but it’s a bit of a stretch for the audience.

At times movies can be either ruined or significantly enhanced by their score; movies like Gladiator and Star Wars are examples of the latter.   Interstellar has a score that completely draws you into the story.  The moments of tenderness are soft and inviting and the moments of pure adrenaline driving intensity are represented by roaring crescendos that will drop your jaw without you even realizing it.

Nolan has proven himself to be an outstanding creator and he did not let us down with Interstellar.  You don’t have to be a fan of sci-fi to enjoy this movie; because in truth it’s not a science fiction movie.  What occurs is rooted in fact or theory…with a little bit of imagination added to it. 

If you missed this in the theater I feel for you, but make sure you catch this as soon as possible!

As always, thanks for reading!