Highs and Lows In 2015 Nerd Movies

Like my past two 2015 roundups (nerd TV and anime shows) for this roundup I am not going to call out the best or worst movies I’ve seen this year, but the biggest surprises and biggest disappointments. And I will start with a Special Judge’s Award for Star Wars: The Force Awakens for being both.

We have had a pair of excellent reviews of the movie already, so I won’t go into detail (also, I still don’t want to be that spoiler guy, even if the movie has been out for two weeks). So I will simply say that the reason Episode VII is one of the biggest surprises is that it captured the sense of excitement and wild space adventure of the original Star Wars like no prequel or any of the TV shows did (although Star Wars Rebels is close).

That is what J.J. Abrams is good at and what he did with his Star Trek reboot — and since wild adventure isn’t what the Trek series were about, that annoyed many die-hard Trekkers.

But it is a big disappointment as well for being basically a retelling of Episode IV, and for leaving gaping plot and logic holes that so far can only be explained by some hoped-for reveal in the upcoming two movies in this trilogy. That is just bad movie making, and even George Lucas understood that individual movies in a series need to stand completely on their own (cliffhangers like Han Solo in carbonite are OK).

So, with a nod to both the excellence and excreta that make up Episode VII, let’s start with the biggest surprises.

Surprisingly Good
I had very little in the way of high hopes for Mad Max: Fury Road. Sure, I loved the originals, but mainly for the amazing vehicle chase and combat scenes — as acting and directing efforts they all were mostly laughable. And in the 30 years since the last in the series, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, writer and director George Miller has made a total of five films, the highlights being Babe: Pig in the City and the two Happy Feet animated films.

Imagine my surprise then upon seeing not only good but absolutely glowing reviews for Fury Road on my social media feeds. I planned to see it anyway for nostalgia’s sake, but now I had some higher expectations. It exceeded them, and hugely. Miller no longer thought drama needed to be created by bulging eyeballs and raging screams. In fact, when characters do scream, as in the Warboys and their cries “Witness me!” or “I am awaited!” it is clear Miller designed an entire backstory that made those shouts have meaning, and not the mindless “Yay for violence!” type shouts the super-punk biker bad guys shouted in the previous movies.

And the cinematography — my God, the cameras caressed the desert landscape like most pornographers wish their cameras did for their starlets. Add to all of that solid performances by Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron and a truly uncommon feminist overarching theme, and you have one of the most surprisingly excellent movies of the year.

From the great spectacle of Fury Road, let’s bring it down to an amazingly intimate look at personal identity and artificial intelligence, Ex Machina. For me, this movie was very much this year’s Moon. Like that previous film, it has a small cast, is very much hard science fiction but also a very personal story about identity and self-discovery. Both are mysteries and watching Ex Machina I got the same sense I did watching Moon — I was watching the start of an amazing career. For Moon it was filmmaker Duncan Jones who was about to burst on the scene. For Ex Machina it is both filmmaker Alex Garland and co-star Alicia Vikander. Garland is a surprisingly good director, but he has movie chops since he wrote three of the best nerd films of the past decade-plus: 28 Days Later…, Sunshine, and Dredd. Vikander, though, is a revelation, at least to us in the United States. She brought a mature level of acting to the character Ava that one would expect from a veteran of TV and film — just not here in the US, but her native Sweden. Sadly, that experience didn’t help her rescue one of this year’s Dishonorable Mentions, Seventh Son (shudder).

Add into that mix a fantastic and creepy performance by Poe Dameron … err, Oscar Isaac, and a setting that will be the envy of everybody who watches HGTV for the houses of the wealthy, and you have a true surprising gem of a film.

Honorable Mentions: Ant-Man; The Martian; Inside Out.

Shockingly Not Good
First, let me say Avengers: Age of Ultron isn’t a bad movie. But as compared to the quality of the first Avengers film, or the outstanding Captain America: Winter Soldier, or even its 2015 little cousin Ant-Man, Age of Ultron was a surprisingly “meh” film. The bulk of the blame for that goes to the decision to make Ultron the Rupert Pupkin of the comic movie world — a bad man who mistakenly thinks he is funny. I don’t fault James Spader, who voiced Ultron with a great deal of menace given the lines he had to deliver. But Ultron shouldn’t be “kind of” menacing, he should be truly world-ending-potential menacing.

Also, the studio’s decision to force-feed in a scene with Thor disappearing for an important chunk of the movie to bring us the unnecessary exposition that sets up the Infinity Gems and therefore the next Avengers movies was remarkably ham-handed.

But the ham-handed studio interference award goes to the second choice, the hugely disappointing Fantastic 4.

Unlike most people I know, I was not one predetermined to hate this movie. In fact, with Josh Trank at the helm, following up on his excellent found-footage superpowers debut Chronicle, I had initial high hopes. And I have never been one to dismiss a writer/director’s vision when that brings changes to some (or many) fundamental aspects of the source material, as it became clear Trank was going to do with F4. So I think I would have liked Trank’s take on Marvel’s one-time core super team. Alas, I don’t think any of us ever got to see that, based on his own comments about studio interference. The evidence to support his claim is right on the screen, with reshoots in which they couldn’t even get the main characters’ hair color or suit design to be consistent with footage shot earlier.

That said, it isn’t as horrible a movie as most people have made it out to be. Yes, it pays very short shrift to Victor von Doom and that makes the third act of the movie a pretty stupid action slugfest with the villain having the thinnest of evil motivation imaginable. And yes, at times the CGI looks like the team behind Sharknado (not even Sharknado 3) did it. But the cast mostly did a good job with their roles and the first third was pretty good “Let’s make some super science!” science fiction. Sadly, it went downhill very fast from there.

Dishonorable Mentions:  Seventh Son; Terminator Genisys; Jupiter Ascending.