Giant Freakin Robot

The apocalypse is a big trend in movies this year. Whether it’s the zombie apocalypse in World War Z, an alien invasion in The Host and The World’s End, or just the aftermath of the apocalypse in Oblivion and After Earth, the end of the world is big business in today’s science fiction landscape. Seth Rogen’s This Is The End is no different, but we’ll see what the apocalypse will be like from a celebrity’s point of view in the new action-comedy.

This Is the End looks hilarious and the cast is top notch, but you have to wonder if the gag will sustain a full-length feature film. The film’s premise is based on a short film titled Jay and Seth vs. the Apocalypse, featuring Jay Baruchel and Seth Rogen, and then later expanded into This Is the End. We’ll find out this June when the film is released.

With today’s early IMAX release of Star Trek Into Darkness, the sequel from J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot Productions will surely be a box office hit. The film has already opened overseas, and many early reviews make it sound more like a standalone film than a sequel. According to the film’s producer Bryan Burk, that was the idea.

In an interview with Collider, Burk speaks candidly about the structure of Star Trek Into Darkness. J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot crew wanted to make the Star Trek film accessible for a wide general audience, regardless of their abundance of lack of Star Trek knowledge. You don’t have to know anything about Star Trek, or even have watched the first reboot film, to fully enjoy Star Trek Into Darkness. Burk explains:

Well consciously what we were doing when making the film was, we really wanted to make sure it was a film about – in our mind it was never really a sequel, it was its own movie going forward and it’s why the movie doesn’t have a number by it. It was a film that you should be able to jump in, if you’ve never seen it before you’d be able to jump right in, and obviously if you have seen it then you’ll be bringing your own emotion to it. We wanted to appeal to both. It was really important to try to reach a whole new audience so we had a lot of people in who not only had not seen the last film but were not Star Trek fans, or thought of themselves as not being Star Trek fans, or they had seen bits and pieces of Star Trek in the past and it was just not for them.”

The Search for Spock was the movie that first suggested the whole “even movies good, odd movies not so much” pattern, but give the poor sequel some credit. It was following on the heels of The Wrath of Khan, arguably the best of the Trek films, and one of the best science fiction movies of all times. That’s a lot to live up to, so I can’t hate on it too much for not rising to the occasion. But while it’s not nearly as bad as, say, Star Trek V, it is pretty forgettable.

Picking up hot on the heels of Star Trek II, The Search for Spock finds the Enterprise returning to Earth so they can hammer out all the dents Khan put in the ship. They can forget about enjoying a little shoreleave, however, because they soon discover Bones is walking around with a bit of Spock crammed in his noggin. Kirk realizes they must recover Spock’s corpse and take it to Vulcan, where they might be able to reverse that pointy-eared bastard’s noble death. Unfortunately, the Genesis planet is now a hot-button political issue and has been quarantined except for approved scientific researchers. So Kirk does what any self-respecting maverick starship captain would do: he steals the friggin’ Enterprise.

This whole sequence is fun, but it feels like it could have been “bigger.” That’s not saying I need a Michael Bay setpiece or anything, but the whole scam just seems a little too easy. If nothing else it suggests that Starfleet security may be trained by the same people who instruct Stormtroopers. I’m pretty sure Starfleet security would have got their asses kicked by ewoks too. There’s also a scene where a Spock-possessed Bones tries to hire a ship to take him back to Genesis, which involves him negotiating with an annoying alien who talks in Yoda cadence. It’s like somebody decided to drop McCoy briefly into the Star Wars universe, but it’s not nearly as funny as it thinks it is. The bit where Scotty sabotages the snazzy new ship Starfleet sends to pursue them, however, is worth a laugh.

“The Sun Persists In Rising, So I Make Myself Stand.” Although the film doesn’t come out in theaters until November, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is one of the most anticipated movies of the year. Lionsgate doesn’t want audiences to forget about Catching Fire during the summer movie-going season, so the studio is busy working various social media channels.

Yesterday, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire started an Instagram account (@TheHungerGames) and will be sharing new images, like the epic poster above, to all of its followers. The new Hunger Games: Catching Fire poster features Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) on a mountain peak as the new victor of the 74th Hunger Games. The new poster almost looks like a painting rather than a photo-real or photo-shopped movie poster, which is quite refreshing.