Summer's gone, so we take this time to look at some of the genre movies that debuted this year, before this column started. (Well, I thought it was clever...)
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian: The CGI was in spectacular; you watched thinking how real it looked rather than watching, say, one of the Spider-Man movies and merely thinking how cool the CGI looked. Narnia seems to be a more diversified imaginary world than Middle Earth and the war against the non-humans has echoes of the "ethnic cleansings" all too common in this world. Aside from a few pacing problems, my major complaint with this movie is the rather casual attitude the Pevensie children have toward killing. True, the people they dispatched deserved it but they showed no more remorse than their grandchildren will display playing a video game.
10,000 BC: Or as I think of it, 10,000 BS. In les arts fantastique (I just made that up, sounds cool, doesn't it?) suspension of disbelief is sine qua non (okay, that's the last foreign phrase for today)—but don't abuse the privilege. I gave them a pass on the geography (walking from Europe to Africa in a few days—maybe the continents hadn't separated yet), the killer ostriches, the ridiculous encounter with the saber-tooth-whatever-that-was... twice, using mammoths as pack animals, the meaningless mega construction project... But I had a problem the notion that, prophesy notwithstanding, fifty thousandty-leven armed black people couldn't come up with an action plan until this one white guy comes along.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army: The first Hellboy had some genuinely scary Lovecraftian moments. The filmmakers decided to go for a lighter tone this time, the action-adventure-horror-thriller as screwball comedy. Enjoyable, but mainly a set-up for the next installment.
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