Will Smith's back!

Men in Black is a strange movie franchise. It’s not the biggest science fiction movie series ever devised and yet it seems to have an almost cult following these days. Before this year there had been two movies, the second came out five years after the first and it appeared to be the last.

Hollywood had other ideas though, and this summer, ten years after the release of Men in Black 2, Men in Black 3 was released into the universe.

Boom.

Thankfully this year there will be no helping of Transformers movies, this is something we all should cherish. However when one door closes another opens; this year’s explosion extraordinaire also comes from Hasbro: Battleship.

I know, it sounds ridiculous but there is a movie based on the game Battleship. You know B2: Miss D7: Hit. That sort of thing. It’s hardly the kind of thing you’d expect to see getting a movie made about it, but here we are.

Battleship is all about, well battleships. There isn’t much else to it really apart from the fact this isn’t blue battleships vs red battleships, this is battleships vs ALIENS! Because as we all know adding Aliens makes your movie a whole lot better! Case in point Indiana Jones 4.

Originality will get you nowhere.

Disney released its big money blockbuster John Carter this year and it bombed so badly it has been declared the biggest flop in cinema history with losses of over $200 million.

But was it really that bad? Well, no actually it wasn’t. In fact I thought it was pretty good which is quite sad considering nobody saw it because they figured it must be bad because of the unfortunate box office figures.

The movie is about a man, surprisingly called John Carter, who is a bit of a loner living in the old West. While in an unwanted skirmish between cowboys and Indians Carter ends up in a strange cave with stranger spiderlike markings on the floor and walls. Whilst in the cave he’s attacked by a random cloaked man from a divine cult, but he manages to kill him and ends up warping to the planet Barsoom (Mars) thanks to an old artefact the cloaked man had.

Rootin' Tootin' Cowboys (and Aliens).

If you’re looking for the most ridiculous movie of the year you’d be hard pressed to find something more bizarre than Cowboys and Aliens starring Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford.

Set sometime in the old West the movie centres around a cowboy called Jake (Daniel Craig) who gets abducted by aliens, as was quite common in them there days, and finds himself mysteriously back on the cold sandy planet we call Earth with an alien weapon attached to his wrist.

Harrison Ford plays baddie come goodie, Woodrow, who owns much of the land in the town and becomes distressed by the mysterious disappearance of his cattle and therefore money. He gets no such alien weapon, plenty of normal guns though.

Hail Caesar.

As the Summer blockbuster season drew to a close it dawned on my that it had been largely underwhelming. It all kicked off with Pirates of the Caribbean 4 which was average, had sprinkles of mediocre with Cars 2 and The Green Lantern, and a large dollop of boredom with Transformers 3.

It’s no surprise then that I didn’t walk into Rise of the Planet of the Apes with high hopes, and yet I walked out pleasantly surprised by it.

The movie is obviously a prequel to the movie: Planet of the Apes, I don’t think it matters if it’s Burton’s version or Schaffner’s. It starts off with a scientist called Will Rodman, played by James Franco, who is working on medication that will treat, and possibly cure Alzheimer’s. His father has the illness and so this motivates him to carry on his work.

Like ET, only slightly bigger.

It hasn’t exactly been the greatest Summer of all time for movies, but nonetheless it has provided some good ones. And one of the best has to be J.J. Abrams’ science fiction thriller Super 8.

Set in the 1980s (well, 1979 actually), Super 8 focuses on a young boy who, with his friends, comes across an alien who is trying to get back to his homeworld. Yeah, it isn’t difficult to see where the comparisons to ET came from is it? It’s even produced by Steven Spielberg himself. Of course being likened to one of the best science fiction movies of all time is hardly a bad thing, and in fairness it is different enough to stand on its own two feet.

USMC - Be the best (All of you not just Eckhart)

I recently went to watch a weird new video game that didn’t allow the player to actually play. No controllers, no headset, just a screen. It was called Battle: Los Angeles.

Of course I jest, it isn’t really a video game, though the action found in it is more like a video game than Call of Duty is. Instead it is the latest alien invasion movie to hit the big screen. I went into this movie pretty pumped, I thought it looked action packed and I was looking forward to seeing what they were going to do that other movies sharing their tent hadn’t already done.

Unfortunately the answer to this question is this: very little.

Bourne meets Inception.

That’s pretty much been the tagline The Adjustment Bureau has based the entire premise of it marketing campaign on. TotalFilm really has a lot to answer for. So is it Bourne meets Inception? Well not really. It’s Matt Damon in a film that appears to have some sort of alternative reality, I think that‘s the link with Inception.

It has the science fiction vibes that Inception sort of has too. Well maybe not sci-fi but perhaps something a little more towards the supernatural. The film focuses on the idea of free will, whether we have it or not.

I am Bernie the Beagle's owner, and don't you forget it.

We’re a few months into the year now and we’ve been dealt our first superhero movie: I Am Number Four. Well it’s sort of a superhero movie but in truth I don’t really know what genre to put this movie in. It could be a whole range of things.


Upon going to watch this I had no idea about it whatsoever. It’s based on a book that I’ve never heard of let alone read, so really I could have been walking into anything. I hadn’t even seen a trailer for it. I just knew it was about some guy who has superpowers of some sort.

Pegg + Frost - Wright + America + Brahbrah = Paul

Comedy duo, Nick Frost and Simon Pegg returned to the big screen once again in February with their new movie Paul. Although they’ve both been involved in plenty since, this is largely seen as the follow-up to Hot Fuzz which is now an astonishing four years old now. My, how time flies.

I loved Hot Fuzz, it’s one of my favourite comedies out there, so Paul was always going to have very large shoes to fill. I wasn’t a huge fan of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz was a huge improvement so I was interested to see what direction they were going to take with this new one.