A Summer Movie Review Round-Up, or, What Vampires, Billionaires, Predators, Dragons, Pedro Pascal, Aliens, Race Car Drivers, Dinosaurs, Demons, Metahumans, and Zombies* Taught Me About Being More Human
My youngest brother turned twenty-nine years old the other day, and that means I am very not twenty-nine years old anymore. We texted briefly about his plans for his birthday. He said he and his wife were going to see a movie that night. He didn’t know which one. I said I had seen just about every movie playing in theaters currently, and they were all worth his time. The only one I hadn’t seen I almost saw but I was too tired the night I had planned to go out and see it – refer to my earlier comment about very much not being twenty-nine years old anymore. In any case, as the outdoor temperature continues to rise and air conditioning that comes free with the price of admission starts looking better and better, I thought this might be the perfect time for a review round-up.
Sinners
Sinners is not a summer movie. It was released in April, but I didn’t see it until May and it’s still playing in theaters so I’m counting it here.
What a picture! I’ve been waiting for many years for Ryan Coogler to extricate himself from the IP factories and make an original film again, and he did not disappoint. Has any movie released this year had so many ideas packed into it? Has any movie this year been big enough to contain all those ideas? Has any movie this year been daring enough to pack all those ideas into a sweaty juke joint on a hot summer night and let them grind up against one another for the sheer pleasure of it?
See this movie. Talk about this movie. See this movie again. Talk about this movie some more. And if you need a jumping off point, consider this: Is the truth of the Gospel true even when it’s misused by evil people? God, I hope so.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
I’ve always written about this movie at length, but I’m checking in with again just to say that I have seen it two more times since, and I stand by everything I wrote before.
The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson’s latest movie is like his most recent films in that I think I will appreciate it more as I rewatch it. The Phoenician Scheme isn’t as narratively labyrinthine as his recent films but it is just as challenging. My first thought was, “Is there any point to this beyond the obvious one?” My subsequent thought is that the obvious point is a pretty big one that, in my limited capacity for mercy, I find very difficult to believe. Zsa-Zsa Korda is a miserable human being but something in him, and it might be something very, very small within him, longs for grace. He has gained the whole world, and I think deep down he wants to lose it so that he might find his soul.
Predator: Killer of Killers
Speaking of “what’s the point?”, there is perhaps no franchise in film history more vulnerable to that question than the Predator franchise. It’s a film series which insists that the mightiest fighter will somehow win, and historically it has insisted on little else. Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey had enough to it to make me take notice, and he’s followed that up with a surprise animated feature released straight to Hulu. This sorta anthology film ties together three stories in three time periods about three predators fighting against warriors from different eras in human history. Each segment – Viking, Samurai/Ninja, and WWII Dogfighting – is terrific, and they come together in a fun way. The predators’ weakness is that they fight alone; humanity fights for and with each other. It’s a simple idea but a worthwhile one in a real world where each individual nation and so many leaders seem more and more to want to do what’s best for themselves only. Oh, and the action is spectacular.
How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
I was deeply suspicious of the “live action” remake of Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon. I’ve been burned by many a Disney “live action” remake in recent years, and I feared Dreamworks was likewise just trying to keep their valuable intellectual property in the public’s mind in order to sell tickets to their dragon-inspired theme parks. But I was wrong. The movie works in ways the Disney counterparts do not. I’ve puzzled over this and think it comes down to this:
Disney’s animated masterpieces are highly stylized, often bordering on impressionistic. Recreating them as if they are “real” only serves to flatten out the films. How to Train Your Dragon, on the other hand, was made in a realistic style from the get-go. Along with WALL•E, it was the first CGI-animated film to bring in Roger Deakins to advise on how to use cameras in their virtual environment. It was already “real.” So watching a live-action version of the story feels like you previously watched the animatic and it was always supposed to be live. It’s a step up instead of a step back.
Seeing it “real” also highlights how awful life in Berk is. Hiccup’s decision to break his society’s cycle of violence feels more daring. It feels more like a message we need to hear now, a challenge even for us adult viewers to listen to our young people lest they inherit a world just as broken as the one we have created. How to Train Your Dragon has always been a hopeful story. Now it feels urgent.
Materialists
Materialists is a movie I need to see again. I enjoyed the way it jumps from kind of rom-com to kind of rom-com like a person scrolling through an Instagram feed. It reminded me of a more serious Down With Love. And then it got really serious and I started to think Celine Song had a particular target in mind – the way we’ve commodified dating in these later days. It’s almost a satire. At least it would be if it wasn’t so earnest and so doggedly insistent that romantic love is a real thing worth everything. It’s Challengers written by Nora Ephron.
Elio
Close Encounters of the Cute Kind
Pixar is famous for wildly revising their stories throughout the production process. I don’t know that I’ve ever so felt the impact of those revisions while watching one of their films before. It’s a movie that does all the things it’s supposed to do, but I can’t help but think I’d like it more if it had been made in the 1980s with the involvement of Jim Henson’s creature shop.
F1
This is The Shootist but with race cars. More, it’s the second half of Beowulf; at the end Brad Pitt even says he’s “off to fight more dragons.” Joseph Kosinski is the most kinetic filmmaker working today. The racing scenes in this movie are spectacular. F1’s combination of technology and ambition EXPENSIFY is always fascinating to me. This won’t be as much fun on your television, so see it in a theater while you can. The film is also guilty of the most egregious acts of product placement I’ve ever seen.
Jurassic World Rebirth
One day I’m going to get to the bottom of why Gareth Edwards is so good at staging action and so not good at establishing and developing characters. I would say he should sit down and watch some Spielberg movies but it’s clear he’s done that. Maybe he should watch Michael Mann’s filmography. It’s packed with men and women of action who also have rich inner lives.
Anyway, Jurassic World Rebirth is the best Jurassic Park/World movie not directed by Spielberg. It didn’t make me feel like the filmmakers think I’m stupid, and that’s a big step up from the recent entries in the franchise. I think this is the movie Spielberg thought he’d make when he agreed to do the first Jurassic Park movie.
K-Pop Demon Hunter
This is on Netflix. It’s from Sony Animation Studios. It’s a beautiful film and everyone in my house thinks the songs are crazy catchy. This movie makes me feel old but I don’t mind. As a film lover, I like seeing things that are not made for me. It makes me think there is a future to this art form. If this is for the kids, the kids are alright.
Superman
Before we’re even half-way through Superman we’ve seen what would have been the third act climax of three other Superman movies. One of them is even used as a multicolored backdrop for an important conversation between two people. Writer/director James Gunn seems to think we all know who this guy is and what he’s about. There’s an aire of in media res to this film that I found off-putting at first, and then I just decided to go with it.
If you don’t want any kind of SPOILER for this movie, skip the rest of this brief review.
Superman experiences something that I haven’t experienced but which many of my friends have – he discovers his parents desire terrible things for the world, that their values aren’t what he thought they were. They aren’t hypocrites, exactly. He just never saw them clearly, and once he does, he faces the terrible choice of having to turn his back on his parents in order to be the kind of person he thought they wanted him to be. I’m sorry, Superman. I know, from discussions with many of my friends, how painful that is.
The world is really messed up in this movie. It’s bright and shiny and colorful, like James Gunn movies always are, but it’s a dark place. It’s ruled by despots and billionaires who barely even try to conceal their hatred for humanity. The masses are blown every which way by every rumor they hear. Even the supposed heroes are uncaring, brutish, and selfish. True to Gunn’s style, the humor is in the absurdity of it all.
Through this bleak world, Superman flies, trying against all evidence to believe in goodness and beauty and love. He calls it “the most punk rock thing of all,” and I think I understood Gunn, as a filmmaker, for the first time. Everything is awful, absolutely, so the only real superpower is believing in something good.
28 Years Later
Never would I have believed that the film of the year (so far) for me would be a Danny Boyle movie. I have a long, difficult history with him. I admire his filmmaking greatly, and I chafe against what his films say. He is so skilled at being gleefully ugly. He is also so earnestly sentimental. I have a hard time believing either side of his work. Combine him with Alex Garland, a real punk of a writer, who plays with themes and narratives like a cat toying with its prey, and you have the potential for a movie I hate.
But I don’t hate 28 Years Later. I think I love it actually. It’s an extremely British film. There are things going on here dealing with Brexit and British pop-culture that go right over my head, but in the weeks since I saw this film, I have come to treasure the way this movie deals with the COVID pandemic and ways of being masculine in the world.
I am angry that the Western world has avoided dealing with the fact of the pandemic and the losses we suffer still because of it. The pandemic wasn’t a thing that began and ended and then things went back to the way they were before. Things are not the way they would have been. We have not mourned those losses. Where is the memorial? When is the day of remembrance? Why do I know that some people who read this will roll their eyes or unsubscribe from my newsletter because they don’t think it really that big a deal?
I mentioned in a previous letter that I saw a therapist earlier this year to help me learn to deal with depression as a father. The biggest insight I had during therapy was that my family life began in a state of emergency, and even though the societal emergency ended, many facets of my life continue as they were arranged during that time. The emergency ended but there was no ritual to mark it. Nothing ever acknowledged that something died, so nothing can rise. This is the state of things during which I have had to learn to be a father. It is not the world I grew up in. I don’t have exemplars. The kind of masculinity I see depicted in popular culture and in the world seems to be a form of extreme aggression masking repressed anxiety. It’s bullshit, and whatever else the pandemic taught me, it taught me to have zero patience with bullshit.
28 Years Later is the first film I’ve seen that contains all those messy feelings. Our hero, a boy explicitly on the cusp of manhood, sees his society for what it is, rejects it, and seeks out something better. He finds a healer/priest/artist soaked in iodine who shows him a more honest and hopeful way to handle the death that surrounds him. God, it’s beautiful. There is so much beauty in 28 Years Later, and it’s all the more lovely for the devastation that surrounds it and threatens to snuff it out. Punkishly, the movie refuses to solve all these issues. A true Boyle/Garland outing, it’s annoyingly messy – I shook my head as the film ended – but it gets at a question I have and a truth I want to believe better than any other film I’ve seen in the past few years.
* The Infected in the 28 … Later franchise are not zombies.
