Man Rehearses Machine: GRAN TURISMO

We’re so used to stories of man versus machine that there’s something peculiar about landing in a story that’s man merging with machine. That’s the uncanny element that made Neill Blomkamp’s sci-fi debut District 9 such a sensation, and his followups Elysium and Chappie so divisive and confounding. To see a human swallowed up by something alien or robotic, and to emerge the other side something altogether transformed, treated as ambivalent, and maybe even net positive, is a head-scratcher. Thus I find Blomkamp’s filmmaking alternately compelling and off-putting, especially as he takes such potentially cold ideas—all the more so when they’re juiced with viscera-splattering action sequences—and slathers on sentiment and quasi-pointed uplift within their mechanical hearts. There’s really nothing else quite like it, for better or worse.

Somehow, though, in stepping away from sci-fi, one can find his personality still fits in a based-on-a-true-sports-story like Gran Turismo. Car racing is already a story of man melding with machine to do something greater than either could alone. This one adds the wrinkle of the eponymous video game. The narrative is loosely formed around real events in which the makers of the game convince Nissan and Playstation to bankroll an experiment by which the world’s best Gran Turismo players would get the chance to compete as real race car drivers. The movie casts its lead as a cute fresh-faced gamer and aspiring racer (Archie Madekwe) with a blue-collar dad (Oscar Nominee Djimon Hounsou) and mom (Spice Girl Geri Halliwell) who have their doubts as he leaps at this chance to live his dream. As we follow a pretty standard rise-fall-rise underdog story—would you believe the rich career drivers aren’t keen to share the track with an untested joystick jockey?—the young man is trained by an expert (David Harbour), boosted by a corporate climber (Orlando Bloom), and dogged by self-doubt.

The racing scenes are well-shaped and photographed for quick-paced car stunts. But the real charge in its heart comes from the way it allows the lead’s video game knowledge of tracks and tires to come in handy in real life. That’s the Blomkamp touch, letting the simulated dynamics of the game—down to the digital flourishes that visualize his memory of routes and alerts—turn into a thrill and an asset, as a real winner emerges from a melding with the machines. Even the real doubts, typified by a moving scene in which Hounsou and Halliwell watch a wreck on live TV and register the shock and uncertainty with only their eyes, fade in the midst of the momentum of the formulaically effective plotting. It’s selling a fantasy of man melding with machine that any number of gamers will find flattering, and makes for a sturdy car picture, a la such diverse pictures as Grand Prix and Ford v Ferrari and Talladega Nights, redone in a fresh coat of paint.

Hero Go Again: SHAZAM! FURY OF THE GODS

There’s something charmingly small about Shazam! Fury of the Gods. It’s not a mindlessly bombastic superhero picture taking place entirely in a multiverse or among incomprehensible sliding scales of cosmic cause and effect in which entire galaxies hang in the balance and there’s nary a normie around. Instead it is about a few teenagers and the fate of…Philadelphia. There’s even a scene where the heroes save innocent bystanders from a collapsing bridge and, later, chase monsters away from fearful crowds of fleeing onlookers. When’s the last time you saw that? Small wonders. The movie itself has the kind of dopey adolescent charm you’d expect from a superhero movie, and its makers load it up with the generic moves and slippery genre play—monsters and Gods and heroes, with mild horror and teen comedy elements jostling around, too—that pass the time for its target audience of 12-year-olds. Director David F. Sandberg knows how to frame a sequence and linger on some earnest character moments, juggling a bright kid-friendly tone with harsher fantasy violence. And when the movie’s somehow both sometimes-convoluted and cut-to-the-bone plot bumbles smoothly along, there’s passable entertainment here.

This belated sequel to a 2019 DC comics adaptation continues the story of a teenage boy who is gifted with superpowers. The scrawny foster kid (Asher Angel) just has to shout “Shazam!” to be instantly transformed into a broad caricature of a Superman (Zachary Levi). All these years later, though, and there’s some fun to be had in watching the disjunction between these two performances, especially as Angel is basically an adult now and a subplot concerns his anxieties about aging out of the foster system. You see, he’s found a nice, welcoming family full of foster siblings who, if you recall the previous film, have also been Shazamed and can zap into muscular superpowered hotties at will. That gives the movie a nice backdrop of family togetherness. (I wish there was even more for the kids to do, but the family’s incorporation into the finale is once again a funny, and heartwarming, touch.) It has stock villains—angry Ancient Greek goddesses (Lucy Liu and Helen Mirren)—swanning in looking to reclaim the Shazam powers. Turns out the kindly wizard (Djimon Hounsou, here doing ace comic relief, a fine respite from his usual villainous typecasting of late) stole their father’s powers to give to these kids. Oops. So it’s a super-powered fight for the right to fly faster than a speeding bullet and leap tall buildings in a single bound. It feels cut tightly and constrained by its smallness at times, but that very smallness makes the aw-shucks charms of its teen-centric story play all the more shaggily appealing. It feels exactly like the sort of amiable matinee effort that I would’ve loved as a kid, back when these sort of movies weren’t out every month.

Anti-Hero: BLACK ADAM

Here we are again. Black Adam is another walloping might-makes-right superhero power fantasy. It mistakes noise and movement and non-stop violence for excitement, and assumes loud frantic explanations can pass for story. It has some good visual designs and an atypical setting that engages some novel ideas, but it’s also cloaked in a dour, murderous tone and a pace that’s so quickly cut there’s no room to catch a breath. Yet I’ve also come to appreciate the DC movies for their willingness to go overboard, for their sense of careening out of control with more characters and world-shaking developments than one cluttered feature film could contain. That seems to suit the mythological dimensions of even the lesser efforts in this particular cinematic universe. Unlike Marvel’s tidy decades-long planning and homogenous style, DC has been more often than not a chaos of outsized comic book visuals and nonsense plotting that’s concurrently too thin and overstuffed. This one locates a potentially provocative story of exploitation and imperialism—and the need for the enslaved to rise up and take over their own destinies—and buries it in a hurry-scurry plot that gets nowhere fast amidst breathless exposition and cheesecloth characterizations. It’s unsatisfying in its miss, but not in its swing.

After an endless prologue, it introduces a Justice Society (not to be confused with the Justice League) that apparently works with the Suicide Squad’s leader (Viola Davis) to tackle superpowered problems. In this case: Black Adam. He’s an ancient protector of the fictional Middle Eastern kingdom Kahndaq. He was a slave granted god-like powers by the same wizard (Djimon Hounsou) who gave the kid in Shazam his boost. Adam was asleep for thousands of years. Now awoken in modern day by a freedom-fighting professor (Sarah Shahi), he mostly just wants to bring death and destruction to the imperialist gang that rules what was once his city. They fly around on their sci-fi jet bikes and amass an entirely undifferentiated and vaguely defined army. Adam, played by Dwayne Johnson with a stony edifice and rumbling monosyllabic pomposity, floats like an indestructible block through these armies of Bad Guys, exploding them in surprisingly intense ways given the ostensible bounds of the PG-13. He loves killing those who get in his way. But instead of a simple fight for his country’s freedom, the conflict for most of the movie is that the team of shiny heroes sent in to get him under control would rather he not indiscriminately murder people with his lightning hands and speed and strength and flight. Sure, the enemies are bad, the likes of Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) and Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan) tell him. But that doesn’t mean you can just blow them apart.

So Black Adam fights these and other heroes—invincible action figures who slam power into power over and over beyond all reason—until they agree that they instead need to agree to disagree and stop the real bad guys together. The villain who basically sits out the first chunk of the movie suddenly, and literally, turns into a demon from hell, complete with devil horns and a pentagram on his puffed-up CG chest, inaugurating a whole new round of super-punching. It’s all a deadening too-muchness of a repetitive spectacle. The performers are game, and director Jaume Collet-Serra (the B-movie expert in his recent, less effective, A-budget phase) manages to whip up some appealing bombast here and there amidst the otherwise fuzzy, muddy visuals. (I especially liked the fractal planes through which Brosnan travels.) But the swirling frenzy deadens and dominates more than it entertains. I could imagine a version of the movie where it had a slightly sharper take on its politics. Coding the Justice Society as clueless American interventionists is already a step in a clever direction. Explaining their existence even a little bit might’ve been nice. The movie would still need a better shape to its story, though. There’s so much repetition of plot and action beats that one wonder why they wasted their time doing it all so quickly the first time. It may have suitably outsized potential—and a huge, booming orchestral main theme that promises a grander adventure than we get—but it’s just a bludgeoning experience to which you either begrudgingly surrender or give up on entirely.

Once and Future KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD

Guy Ritchie takes a mythic English figure and turns his story into a scrappy ye olde Guy Ritchie-style story in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. With good gusto, he makes Arthur the nexus of a scampering rebellion, a gang who will become the knights of the round table plotting to take down an evil king and crown the rightful heir by heisting supplies, staging ambushes, beating back black-helmeted ne’re-do-wells, and sinking ships. They’re like the distant ancestors of the grubby, low-level criminals who populated Ritchie’s early works – Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, RocknRolla. This is fun at times, watching bantering, quick witted oafs and bruisers scheme their way into the highest positions in the land, and all for a noble reason. It’s especially charming because such a light touch and unassuming mode sits right next to the lugubrious solemnity of High Fantasy, dark magic swirling up stone walls, slithering snake women promising good luck in return for blood sacrifice, giant bats, enormous serpents, war elephants, magic rocks, and a sword in a stone. (That that last one is guarded by David Beckham cameoing as one of the villain’s henchman tells you something about the contrast set up here.) This isn’t nearly as fun a finished product as Ritchie’s spry, visually playful, charmingly plotted reimaginings – two red-blooded Sherlock Holmes adventures and a super cool Man from U.N.C.L.E. – but it has its charms.

The film errs on the side of gloopy CG confrontations and thin characterization, especially in its drearily predictable grand finale, but is otherwise fantasy filmmaking done up with pleasurable genre resonances. Its murky opening, quietly drifting across foggy green hills while mysterious magic erupts in the distance reminds me of nothing less than John Boorman’s brilliantly bonkers sci-fi Zardoz crossed with his Arthurian take, Excalibur. Fire blasts forth and a ginormous battle involves a king jumping his horse from a parapet onto an elephantine platform. This noble hero king (Eric Bana) is victorious, but abruptly betrayed by a nefarious usurper (Jude Law) who covets the crown (and works on self-taught Dark Arts, hoping to one day graduate to master Firestarter). A tiny orphaned prince is floated down the river – Moses style, in this never-ending parade of legendary allusions – and raised in a blisteringly rapid-fire montage that takes him from naïve boy taken in by kind criminals to a tough, streetwise brawler. Grown (into Charlie Hunnam), he’s as quick with his quips as he is with his fists, all swaggering confidence even when he’s doubting himself, like when that sword comes out of the stone and the kingdom’s revolutionaries (led by Djimon Hounsou, Aidan Gillen, and Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) scoop him up into their plots against the evil reigning o’er the land.

Generally easy going and light on its feet, despite plodding inevitably to a dull, clangorous climactic confrontation, Ritchie goes all in on his stylish energy. His films, good, bad, and in between (like this one), manage to be at once rough-and-tumble and smooth operators. He fills this telling with snap zooms, propulsive smash cuts, speed ramping, and zippy, fluid, computer-assisted dipping, spinning, and flying establishing shots. He also draws on his Rubik’s-cube-jumbled approach to what in other hands would be conventional setups and payoffs. Instead of long sequences of exposition leading up to bursts of action, he will often intercut the two, cross-cutting speeches and arguments and planning with execution. We see Arthur and his band of would-be heroes devise a trip into a monster-filled wasteland where he must learn to control his magic sword by placing it on a magic rock, their words carrying over as the soundtrack to a lightning fast montage of creature feature derring-do. This gives the picture a jumpy jangle, at once ponderously mythic and casually loping. No one has time to catch their breath between spasms of style, but the movie somehow accrues a sense of heavy sag.

It never quite finds a way to reconcile these competing tendencies, but as a Ritchie romp – co-written, photographed, scored, and edited by some of his familiar collaborators – it never quite loses its loose-limbed charms either. They’re there jolting and jumping underneath even the stateliest fantasy tropes, production design from Game of Thrones vets turned slightly askew, like when the Lady in the Lake appears to pull Arthur through an impossibly deep mud puddle in a dime-store adventure version of a memorably gross Trainspotting swim. So, it’s not totally satisfying. But it’s also not every day you see a movie that straight-faced sends its hero into battle against Rodents of Unusual Size, or includes a moment when a growling Jude Law cuts off a man’s ear and whispers one last threat into it. Those are the sorts of charming eccentricities of which these dusty big-budget boondoggles could use more.

Wild Things: THE LEGEND OF TARZAN

How do you make a Tarzan movie in 2016? Over the character’s century of existence he’s been in everything from the original Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp novels, to classic studio programmers, cheap boy’s adventures, stately period piece epics, gauzy romances, and even an animated Disney musical with songs by Phil Collins. (The last one might be my personal favorite.) The story of a 19th century child, born in the jungles of Africa to shipwrecked British blue bloods, tragically orphaned, raised by apes, and who grew into a muscular wild man swinging from vines, is an old-fashioned and familiar one. What can possibly be done to make this a story worth retelling? Director David Yates’ solution is to play it straight and take it seriously, tapping into the feelings of displacement Tarzan has while torn between two worlds. The Legend of Tarzan is therefore a rip-snorting jungle adventure, a mournful story of loss, and a sober-minded reflection on the evils of colonialism. The film doesn’t always get the combination of these elements exactly right, but its heart is in the right place, and it’s an often-enjoyable entertainment.

This is a movie that begins with Tarzan (Alexander Skarsagård) already a legend, having met and married Jane (Margot Robbie) and moved to England years before the story begins. Invited back to Africa by a Belgian mercenary with ulterior motives (Christoph Waltz) and persuaded by an American adventurer who needs help proving the colonists are up to no good (Samuel L. Jackson, as a character loosely based on a real man), Tarzan decides to return to his childhood home, reuniting with the apes who raised him and the natives who taught him to become a human. He finds it’s nice to be back, but soon the bad guys attack, and the adventure through the jungle starts. The film began in the thick of colonial African politics, with the scheming Belgian cutting a deal with a vengeful chief (Djimon Hounsou) to trade Tarzan for diamonds. The reasons why are simple. The European needs money to help a bankrupt king pay for his army’s impending takeover of the Congo; the chief wants revenge for some previous scrape. The setup is clear and the villains obvious. Tarzan is in danger, and his return has endangered his loved ones.

Screenwriters Adam Cozad (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) and Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow) supply an interesting narrative structure, a flashback origin story nestled inside a tale of domesticated Lord Greystoke feeling the pull of the wild. This is as much The Legend as it is Tarzan, his famous exploits the source of internal and external conflict, his present as much about how he’ll reconcile his past and his present as it is the action it inspires. Potential nostalgia for the old story is cut with the horror of its peril and the sadness of what’s become of this place as colonial powers encroach. This isn’t a light adventure about a boy scampering with animals. There are hints of a more traditional Tarzan in his upsetting and romantic past, while the present is a rescue mission to stop the looting invaders from enslaving the population and strip-mining the country’s resources. It’s a high-flying, vine-swinging matinee cliffhanger – with some corny lines and broad performances – in a heavier approach. The violence carries menace and weight, and the danger in stock B-movie scenarios is played for real impact.

Against this sturdy backdrop there’s an investment in the feelings of its leads. Skarsgård carries himself with strength and confidence in his physical abilities, and a hesitance in his interactions with other Europeans. Early scenes have him stiff in suits, coming to life when showing off his unusually strong hands, or when nimbly climbing a tree in his yard. It’s with the African people and places where he stretches out, more himself even when forced into an action plot. Then a key delight is watching the burgeoning buddy relationship with Jackson’s quipping, gun-slinging American (so fun and fully formed I wished he could ride into his own exciting adventure series), which brings some of the movie’s lightest capering moments while rarely taking away from the more contemplative tone. Elsewhere the filmmakers have tried to minimize potential elements of sexism and racism from the old setup, allowing Jane (Robbie is fine, even if the character isn’t quite as fully defined as her mate’s) some agency despite quickly becoming a damsel in distress, and giving the tribesmen some portion of personality and meaningful backstory before letting them slip into the background to let Tarzan save the day.

For a long stretch of its runtime this is a more thoughtful approach to Tarzan than we usually see, the action beats landing with visceral thuds in the subwoofer while built on a convincing life-and-death sensation growing naturally out of the emotional underpinnings, which makes concessions to overfamiliar spectacle in its back half disappointing. It culminates in a big stampeding climax that’s more routine than the fascinating early going. But the way there is an effective marriage of adventure with somber impulses, a chase through the jungle with shootouts, fistfights, vine swings, and encounters with wild animals, and an earnest engagement in the reality it creates for itself. Even though this is a movie that plays into tropes – convenient animal assistance; scowling one-note villains; emotional shorthand; flat exposition – there’s a commitment to treating Tarzan’s story with a degree of seriousness, wondering what it would be like to struggle with his place in the world. It doesn’t make this a fresh story, but it makes it a solidly engaging one.

It works because Yates is a real filmmaker with a steady hand. Years helming BBC political dramas and half of the Harry Potter movies have given him the confidence to treat this material seriously without feeling the need to apologize for the potentially sillier moments. He can stage a man fighting a gorilla or a lion nuzzling an old human friend and actually make it resonate with feeling, a fearful intensity in the former and a hushed tenderness in the latter. And then he can turn around and have sincere historical understanding of Belgian slavers in the Congo without feeling exploitative or cheapened. Yates grounds the proceedings in specificity, the handsomely mounted production designed by Stuart Craig (another Potter vet) and photographed by Henry Braham gleaming in cobblestone London, palatial manors, and lovely natural vistas of savanna, river, and jungle. As the movie is interested in examining its wilderness locations from the eyes of a man who was raised there, then left, and is now back again – and through its bifurcated structure that makes it an introduction and its own sequel – there’s an interesting tension powering the action.

Vroom Vroom Kaboom: FURIOUS SEVEN

The Fast & Furious series continues to drift into hyperbole, finding in Furious Seven its most ridiculous entry yet. It is 137 minutes of improbable vehicular chaos, pausing only to reiterate its core cast’s affection for one another. The series began as modest, loosely connected heist/street-racing pictures before arriving in its fifth and sixth installments at a perfect blend of heightened automotive action – dragging a two-ton safe through Rio; racing a tank down an elevated highway – and sincere lunkhead melodrama playing off the reassembled ensemble’s family dynamic. Sure, cars went flying and the plots became tangled webs of backstory. But the brotherly bond that built up between Paul Walker and Vin Diesel, and the chummy affection amongst the whole diverse gang (Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Jordana Brewster) anchored the fast, often clever, action in good feelings.

Now here we are, seven films deep, and the series’ usual screenwriter Chris Morgan continues the typical pattern of sequel escalation, adding new characters and heightening the stakes. This time, a resourceful evil British assassin (Jason Statham) is hunting our team of drivers. See, they burned his villainous brother (Luke Evans) in Furious 6, so he wants to make sure they blow up real good. It’s a revenge plot, and the blood runs quickly. One teammate is killed, as teased in the previous installment’s credits. Their best frenemy (Dwayne Johnson) is hospitalized. And then Dom (Diesel) barely escapes with his life when his house is bombed. This means war, and a different kind of action movie than this series has been.

Instead of spending their time drag racing or heisting, though they do each for a scene, the gang decides to work with a mysterious military man (Kurt Russell). He offers them help defeating their new enemy in exchange for finding a MacGuffin held by a hacker (Nathalie Emmanuel) who has been kidnapped by a terrorist (Djimon Hounsou) and his henchman (Tony Jaa). What follows is a blitz of violence and movement, in sequences that feature such sights as: cars parachuting out of a plane, two people surviving a rollover accident down a mountain, a sports car careening safely between skyscrapers, and a climax involving a helicopter, a drone, a supercomputer, crumbling buildings, and a bajillion bullets that wouldn’t look out of place in the third act of any superhero movie.

Fast & Furious movies are no stranger to the absurd, the dubious, the gleefully stupid, and the charmingly outsized. But Furious Seven is the most mostness of all of them. It’s chockablock with exotic locales, roaring engines, bruising hand-to-hand combat, convenient technological assists, last-second escapes, huge explosions, and lasciviously objectified women in bikinis. It’s amped up, and trying hard to be. Perhaps it’s the influence of the director, James Wan, taking over from Justin Lin, who had directed the last four entries. Wan, he of Saw and The Conjuring in his first non-horror effort, seems extra sure to hit the required elements of a F&F film hard, leaving the audience happy to have received not just what they’d hoped to see, but so much of it at once.

Instead of building with each scene, Seven is all exhausting crescendo. A few times, the movie tipped over into exasperated monotony, often leaving me worn out, eyes rolling. The action sequences aren’t as infectiously exciting. The movie basically admits it, with the “don’t try this at home” disclaimer buried deep in the credits instead of prominently displayed. (At least the characters are at one point worried about a concussion.) The loud, silly action is the series’ biggest and craziest, sometimes entertaining, but hardly the most satisfying. I idly wondered if the filmmakers hoped to stun an audience with an overdose of exaggerated mayhem into forgetting the action’s just not as clever or memorably staged this time. In fact, the fistfights are better than the car chases. And who goes to one of these excited to see the punching?

Yet, when I managed to shake off my doubts, I found myself enjoying the ride more than not. This is a perpetual motion machine manipulating the audience with jolts of adrenaline and sensation. It’s scattered, characters appearing and disappearing when required for an action beat (Brewster gets less screen time than the product placement for Corona and Abu Dhabi), and emotional threads loosely strung (flashbacks flashing by to get teary-eyed about the past). But all this overstuffed muchness is in service of a thunderous series finale feeling rolling over the film. This finality is partially due to star Paul Walker’s untimely death mid-shoot, his unfilmed scenes finished with effects, doubles, and old footage, the ending doubling as a sweetly mawkish tribute. But it is also partially for the way the film gathers up familiar faces, events, and vehicles from throughout the franchise for what these characters (and Universal’s marketing) call “one last ride.” I doubt it will be, but I don’t know how much further over the top they can go.

Galaxy Quest: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

Though hardly finished with earthbound heroes like Captain America and Iron Man (and Thor, whose realm is Earth-adjacent), Marvel has opened up a new wing of worldbuilding far removed, in distance anyway, from the cinematic Avengers space we’ve come to know. Trading in superhero tropes for standard space opera stuff (you’ve seen bits and pieces in Star Trek, Star Wars, Farscape), Guardians of the Galaxy finds a ragtag group of intergalactic misfits who spend the runtime gradually learning to work together and earn the moniker of the title. It’s often fun, but it also proves Marvel Studios is happy making good movies, but has little interest in making great ones. They’re too homogenous for that. This one goes to the other end of the universe and finds on its variety of alien worlds a plot that moves and sounds much like any other movie in their roster. It has brightly proficient images, appealing goofiness, and personality that disappears once the obligatory CGI chaos takes over.

In typical Marvel Studios fashion, the characters are intriguing and well cast, then swallowed up once routine effects explode and collide around them for far too long. Before then, though, it’s charming to meet a dopey space pirate (Chris Pratt), a likable underdog as the rare human in these distant parts, having been abducted by aliens as a child. He’s after an orb that’ll get him big bucks. Too bad that a rogue green warrior princess (Zoe Saldana) wants the orb as well, and a pair of bounty hunters – a talking raccoon (Bradley Cooper) with anger issues and a sentient tree (Vin Diesel) with only three words to his vocabulary – are after him. They all get thrown in a maximum-security space jail where they meet a hilariously literal red-and-grey brute (Dave Bautista) who joins them when they soon escape in order to keep the movie moving.

They are a likable ensemble working sarcastic asides and zippy punchlines for all they are worth. The group gets drawn into the cosmic MacGuffin chase for the orb, a haphazardly formed team of mercenaries caught between the galactic government and blue-skinned baddies bent on smashing solar systems or something. I don’t know what the villains are up to, other than growling at each other and trying to blow up anyone who gets near them. Good thing the heroes set about making things right through the usual clamor. If you think the strife and conflict won’t make reluctant allies fast friends, you’ve never seen a Marvel movie. At least director and co-writer James Gunn and screenwriter Nicole Perlman seem aware of the best aspects of these things: the odd asides and strange half-campiness in the margins. For a while, Guardians is built almost entirely out of them.

This is a movie that contains humanlike aliens in every primary color, robot prison guards, a deadly glowing purple stone, a whistle-powered arrow, and a deep space mining colony built in the enormous skull of a long-dead cosmic being. It also has a collection of character actors (from Benicio Del Toro to Michael Rooker, Glenn Close to John C. Reilly, Djimon Hounsou to Lee Pace) putting on funny wigs and funnier accents. Aliens tend to speak in British accents – years of genre fare taught us that – but this movie adds backwoods roughneck drawls, airy Euro lilts, and one that sounds exactly like a pleasant, amiable John C. Reilly. Wigs, on the other hand, come in pompadours, elaborate braids, and beautiful baldness. It’s a treat for fans of scenes dense with sci-fi bric-a-brac and actors swanning around having a fun time being there.

And so, with a solid cast and decent goofy sci-fi appeal, the movie gets by on charm and mood, with a relaxed approach to escalating tension by contrasting it with the ensemble’s prickly group dynamics, snappy banter, and appealing personalities. Smart aleck dorkiness sits next to obliviousness of an alien kind. It’s cute. The raccoon gets a little annoying – mostly for the pinched voice Cooper’s attempting – but the Guardians of the Galaxy are charmers. If all the film is intended to do is put out good vibes – an oldies soundtrack played off a literal mixtape doesn’t hurt – and introduce characters for a new franchise, it gets the job done in the standard slick, bland Marvel house style. It’s new sights and fresh faces shot, edited, and mixed like what we’ve seen before. Gunn brings to it his typical queasy mix of tone as displayed in his horror movie Slither and awful dark vigilante comedy Super. He wants us to think Guardians is both serious and silly, with chaste plotting dusted with out-of-place vulgarity, with bloodless bloodshed both joke and hurt. A rough fit, but it’s got a good beat, a bright look, and is still of a tonal piece with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The brain trust couldn’t cook up a fresh storytelling approach to go with its new locales, feeling the need to hit the standard plot beats. It’s a weird concept told in a totally conventional way. You could set your watch by the time the false climaxes, periods of doubt, determined scheming, and tearful emotional conclusions will appear. Then it all culminates in the same old endless rounds of weightless carnage and staggering body count that’s sadly expected and hard to take. The charm and knowingly goofy demeanor disappears as the movie glazes over and goes through the motions with a sense of “this is how we end these” instead of “here’s a natural conclusion to this story.” So here are hordes of anonymous figures slaughtered. Here's a one-on-one fight with the villain that goes on and on and on. Now here’s a ginormous spaceship leveling a metropolitan area. Again. Like last summer. And the summer before that. Marvel is consistent, churning out product with fun diverting detail that disappears once the fireworks start firing. It gets the job done, and I liked it more than not, but it wore me out.

High-Flying Adventure: HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2

Like all good fantasy sequels, Dreamworks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon 2 takes the world its predecessor built and expands upon it. The first film introduced us to the tiny island of Berk where a village of Vikings lived to fight off dragons preying on their flocks of sheep. It followed Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), the shrimpy son of the leader (Gerard Butler), as he learned dragons aren’t so bad once you get to know them. By the end, he’d trained a fierce and adorable one he named Toothless as a pet and saved his village from destruction in the process. Now, as the sequel starts, the village lives in peace with the dragons, having realized they’re lovable, loyal, useful animals. There’s no conflict there, so the movie pushes forward, opening five years later on Hiccup and Toothless flying out over the ocean exploring new islands and finding new species. When they land on what is to them uncharted territory, he takes out his hand-drawn map and adds a new page, as fitting a symbol for the start of a new chapter as any.

Writer and director Dean DeBlois, who served as co-writer and co-director with Chris Sanders on the first film, takes the light boy’s adventure and enriches it by foregrounding the boy’s evolution into a man and bringing the cast of background characters more clearly into focus. While struggling with his status as heir, Hiccup, now taller, more toned, and with a touch of stubble on his chin, is drawn into conflict. First, he runs into dragon trappers, led by a hunky, ambiguously bad guy voiced by Game of Throne’s Kit Harington. They’re mercilessly poaching the majestic beasts. But that’s merely prelude to bigger trouble care of a distant warlord (a growling Djimon Hounsou) who threatens hostilities with his army of captive dragons. With a name like Drago Bludvist, pronounced “blood-fist,” he’s born to be bad. Riding out to help quell this new conflict are Hiccup’s father, as well as a likable ragtag band of villagers (America Ferrera, Craig Ferguson, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, T.J. Miller, and Kristen Wiig) who last time were background color, but this time come into focus as their own distinct characters with subplots and emotional throughlines. 

The first time around, the dragon training was a highlight, a boy-and-his-dog dynamic between a scrawny teen and a jet black, bat-winged, puppy-dog-eyed salamander. Never better than when in flight, the 3D animation dipped and spun with immediacy and vertiginous beauty. It was a thrill. This time, the thrill comes not just from that relationship and the dragon flying, which is as nicely and excitingly rendered as before, but also in the conflicts complicating this fantasy world. The threatened destruction is at a higher magnitude, the characters have more at stake, and the scale towers over them with subwoofer-rattling rumblings. New dragons include a skyscraper-sized alpha beastie that breathes icy breath leaving jagged icicles in its wake. The damage to dragons is also more personal. The introduction of a mysterious figure in the wild, a protector of dragons (Cate Blanchett) who unlocks further secrets of the species, finds time to highlight sliced wings and missing limbs, the result of near-misses with hunters. There’s an ecological weight to this film, a sorrow and responsibility.

The dragon protector has an important connection to Hiccup and much to teach him. The way the plot unfolds finds surprisingly rich emotions to tap into as their relationship is fully explained. The scene where this woman meets Hiccup’s father is astonishing in its tenderness and maturity. It could’ve gone in many big ways – tearful, scary, or regretful – but instead goes for a hushed whisper and a sweet folk song. The film is all about surprising with those kinds of scenes. An early moment between Hiccup and his love interest has a loose conversational quality as they flirtatiously tease each other. A late turn that deepens and darkens the relationship between boy and dragon is unsettling and a real shock, making the resolution all the more stirring. There’s seriousness to the storytelling here that respects both the fun of its colorful fantasy and the emotional lives of its characters.

It’s a movie about responsibility, aging, death, abandonment, and environmental destruction. You know, for kids! It’s bright, vibrant, has a soaring score and rousing action. But there’s a melancholy beneath that’s unexpected in its gravity. I appreciated how respectful of its audience the film is, unwilling to talk down to children and not feeling the need to stretch for adult attention. It’s simply a good story told well. And that’s more than enough to captivate. The animation is gorgeous, digital-painterly tableaus of fantasy landscapes and fluid character movement. The images within stir the imagination. A swarm of dragons flutters about like a flock of birds. Rising slowly and silently out of the clouds, a lone rider wearing a horned mask and carrying a rattling staff, sits atop a massive creature. A boy flies his dragon into the wild, and returns something closer to a man. It’s a terrific, exciting, involving adventure told with great feeling and a good eye.