Recently, I mentioned that I was looking forward to the new Star Trek movie because the trailers looked pretty good. I was accused of having cloudy judgement—I wanted the movie to be good, and so of course the trailers looked good. Which is fair enough—plenty of movies haven't been as good as their trailers. But what's wrong with rooting for a movie? I want Star Trek to be awesome again, to be all about adventure and a future where people get do interesting things other than hide from radioactive mutants left over from the apocalypse. Sure, rooting for a movie from the get-go has led to some pretty harsh disillusionment (The Phantom Menace, the second and third Matrix movies), but on the other hand The Empire Strikes Back, Terminator 2, and Lord of The Rings all turned out pretty well. So, in order of their release dates, here are the five movies I'm rooting for this summer:
Star Trek (May 8th) I've already said my piece above on this one, leaving only one question: when is Star Wars going to get a reboot?
Terminator: Salvation (May 15th) I think Christian Bale has the chops to pull off the adult John Connor, and I'm really looking forward to seeing the future war laid out on a big canvas after the glimpses we've gotten from the previous movies and the TV series.
Moon (June 12th) I'm totally cheating here, since I already got to see a preview of this movie, and therefore know it's good, but I included it because I want everyone to go see it—a thoughtful, wry movie in the style of Silent Running or the later scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
They Came From Upstairs (July 31st) Sooner or later you're going to get dragged to a kid's movie; hopefully you'll enjoy it too—I started rooting for this tale of teens fighting off alien invaders the moment I saw Doris Roberts laying down the ninja moves in the trailer...
District 9 (August 14th) Although I'm tired of the sort of alternative reality marketing campaigns being used by the movie's promoters, and District 9's "alien ghetto" premise looks to be borrowing heavily from Alien Nation, I'm rooting for this one because if it does well, The Powers That Be may finally cough up enough cash to let director Neill Blomkamp go ahead and make that Halo movie with Peter Jackson...
So what are you looking forward to this summer?
