Summer Blockbuster Wrap-up

So another summer blockbuster season is over for me. I'm not going to consider Simpsons and Bourne Ultimatum to be blockbuster caliber, though both will hopefully be good.

My blockbusters were Spiderman 3, POTC3, Harry Potter 5, Transformers, and Die Hard 4. I've already done reviews for Spiderman 3 and POTC3. To summarize, Spider-Man I didn't find to be awful. I enjoyed it mildly... very mildly. Pirates I found to be very bad, about as bad as 2.

So what happened with the remaining three?

Well the next that I saw was Transformers. After seeing it, I thought, ok it was better than Spiderman, but just barely. Since, I've thought about it, and it's fallen from grace. I really can't stand it. People are saying "oh come on, it was fun, it was about big robots fighting each other, what did you expect?" Well for one, I expected Michael Bay to become a good director since The Island. I don't know why, I did, that's my fault. Really, it was Michael Bay that killed this movie for me. He's terrible. He doesn't get a free pass because every single one of his other movies was a mindless action film. I just thought Transformers was bad.

Harry Potter on the other hand improved greatly from the fourth installment, which I didn't like. OOTP could have suffered from the same things Goblet suffered from. That is, I thought Goblet was emotionless and vapid. I felt that they were just going over the major events in the book, and that was it. Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson were awful to watch "act".

In Order of the Phoenix, which was even longer, I felt that it was much sleeker, and a better job was done injecting feeling into the movie. It wasn's great, but it was based off of a 900 page book or something like that. Things were left out I thought might not have been. But for a shallower movie version of an already shallow book series, it wasn't as terrible as I might have feared.

Finally, Die Hard 4. While it wasn't really a Die Hard per se, it was still a well done action film, that could have done without the terrible John McClane standing on a flying F35 fighter jet scene. Unlike Transformers, which had awful out of place humor at all the wrong moments, the humor in this movie is wellplaced and actually funny. The action scenes were scattershot, some good, some ridiculous, but worked for the most part pretty well. Again, not great, but worthwhile.

So as the summer ends, at least for tentpole films, how did this summer do? Better than last year, thank heavens. Last year was disgusting. This year was alright. Nothing brilliant, and while Pirates really stunk it up, Die Hard and Harry Potter made up for it.

What else have I seen?

Well nothing really amazing, some good stuff though. Still a weak year for movies that I hope improves. I'll be back as soon as something blows me away, good or bad.