A Look Back: Summer 2016

The biggest season for movie is usually summer when the kids are out of school, or in December during Christmas time, when kids are also out of school for the holiday.  The summer usually brings in the biggest draws of the year and has the biggest releases of the year.  The summer movies were usually big-budget blockbuster films like The Avengers, Aliens, and Batman.  The one thing that these movies generally have in common is their enormous budget, usually on the plus side of 100 million bucks.  While every summer since the dawn of film making has seen its successes and failures, I don’t think I’ve seen so many high-profile failures that the summer of 2016 brought.  Of the number of movies that were released this summer, only one has managed to truly impress me in a good way.  This year is really strange, because despite the fact that the summer brought in 4.4 billion dollars to the industry, people really didn’t react very well to the movies that came out.  There are a number of reasons for this.  For one, a lot of these movies were well over 100 million dollars in terms of budget, so they were massive movies.  Putting that much money behind a movie isn’t always a good thing.  Another is that many of these were released within two to three weeks of each other.  When you have such an influx of giant movies, people are going to have a hard time choosing which one to go to.  It gets to the point where people just don’t even bother anymore.  The market this summer was so over-saturated with movies that there was absolutely no way that anybody was going to be able to see them all.  What I’m going to do for this post is go over some of the movies that I’VE seen this summer.  Some of them I have reviewed, so you may find them by hitting the Reviews tab at the top of the page.

X-Men: Apocalypse

When X-Men: First Class was released back in 2011, it was a real breath of fresh air, with a new cast taking over.  James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender would play Xavier and Magneto respectively, and the film would focus on them.  It was surprisingly awesome, especially since they set the film during the 60’s.  It was cool.  In 2014, we got the first sequel in the new trilogy of films called Days of Future Past.  Drawing on the comic story of the same name, Days of Future Past combined the new and the old cast members in a brilliantly epic entry into the X-Men universe.  So, when a third film was announced with Apocalypse being announced as the main villain, I was excited.  The pictures that showed up prior to the film’s release were…odd to say the least, but they managed to get the right guy to play the character.  Here’s the problem:  The movie tried to go bigger than Days of Future Past and as a result the film suffered in a number of areas.  One: Apocalypse was not a particularly compelling villain as he should be.  He only grows giant one time, and that’s inside somebody’s head.  That was one of Apocalypse’s defining powers:  He was  able to manipulate his own molecules as well as transfer his spirit to another body.  Jennifer Lawrence didn’t spend as much time in the character’s actual form of Mystique, and it looked like she didn’t want to be there.  Bryan Singer tried to put too many characters into the movie and the focus was all over the place, as a result.  I didn’t hate the movie, it was just underwhelming, and a movie of this scope should NEVER be underwhelming.

Independence Day: Resurgence

This was an unfortunate victim of bad timing and not having Will Smith in the cast.  A sequel to the 1996 box-office juggernaut, Independence Day: Resurgence was intended to be an epic follow-up, but ended up being very generic and mediocre.  The real saving grace of the film is Jeff Goldblum as David Levinson.  He and Brent Spiner basically help keep the film from being just another run-of-the-mill alien invasion flick.  When you consider it’s almost the same movie as the 1996 film, it’s even more disappointing that the film wasn’t as good as it could have been.  It took itself far too seriously and it relied way too much on CGI, whereas the original film was a perfect combination of practical, CG and miniature effects.  The original Independence Day was one of the last movies to do that.  Had Resurgence come out about a decade ago, it might have done better.  It’s one of those unnecessary sequels that unfortunately had the gall to set up for a third film, which it might not get.  I was unpleasantly disappointed with this one.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows

I honestly didn’t have a whole lot of expectations for this one.  Yeah, it had Rocksteady and BeBop, but it also had Krang in it, so when I saw the trailer, I was actually curious.  When I first saw it in theaters, I wasn’t overly impressed, but I was fairly entertained.  They actually managed to make it a genuine Ninja Turtles movie.  The film actually gets better when you watch it a second time.  Believe it or not, I really like the design of the turtles in these new movies.  However, when they decided to make Krang the main villain instead of the Shredder, it was mind-boggling.  Krang was always the master behind the scenes manipulating everything.  We don’t actually get to see Shredder being Shredder here.  Yeah, he gets his helmet towards the end of the movie and looks positively bad-ass, but he’s immediately sidelined for a battle with Krang instead.  LAME.

Captain America: Civil War

This was the defining summer blockbuster as far as I’m concerned.  This was the movie that impressed me the most.  After Captain America: The Winter Soldier, I didn’t think they’d be able to top that movie.  I was right, but they came really, really close with this one.  I like this one because it takes the Avengers and focuses on the consequences of the battles they had fought for the past 4 years.  Faced with a decision to either sign an agreement limiting their power to the oversight of a UN committee, or forced retirement, Captain America decides to go off the reservation because he believes that the team should go where they are needed without permission.  This tears the entire team apart and the ramifications of what’s happening is very emotional and action-packed.  You see both sides of the argument, but it’s very hard to side with one over the other.  Civil War did such a great job with its characters and story, that I can’t wait for what happens next in the MCU.  This was definitely the movie to see in the summer.

Ghostbusters(2016)

…And this is the one that took the wind out of my sails for the summer season.  This was the last movie that I saw in theaters, and after I saw it, I became depressed, because I was kind of hoping that there would be more than ONE movie to really shine during the summer.  Ghostbusters wasn’t it.  Aside from being plagued with really piss-poor marketing and shit PR, the film felt like it was trying to say, “Hey, look at me, I’m a Ghostbusters movie!”  It really didn’t work.  The main cast was fine, in fact, I really loved Kate McKinnon’s character.  Chris Hemsworth was a hoot as the idiotic receptionist.  The problem is that the villain was extremely lame, the constant references to the previous films were not particularly good, and the cameos from the original cast grinded the film to a halt.  Bill Murray’s cameo was the most egregious.  He clearly didn’t want to be there.  Don’t get me started on the new theme song from Fallout Boy and Missy Elliott.

Those were the films that I caught in theaters this summer, and I was not overly impressed.  You had all these huge movies that were being promoted and with the exception of one, didn’t live up to the hype.  This was NOT the best summer for movies, I can tell you that.  Next year’s summer movies look fairly promising, but so did this year’s.  Take that for what you will.  The year isn’t over yet, and there are still more movies to see including Rogue One: A Star Wars Story which looks amazing.  I’m still working on that Best Marvel list, so you’ll probably see that hopefully by Friday at the latest.

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