This thinning out of comic book movies has paved the way for a good deal of original sci-fi and fantasy properties to fill up the coveted summer blockbuster slots. Just as M. Night Shyamalan dares show his face in Hollywood again with Will and Jaden Smith vehicle After Earth, Tom Cruise will be promoting his strangely similar Oblivion, from Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski. Even though these will most likely fail to deliver, it's good to see that we're starting to get to a place where original properties are getting prime summer release dates. It's the effort that counts, anyway. Right?
Upstream Color, April 5
Shane Carruth has finally come out of hiding with his follow-up to 2004's bemusing low-budget cult phenomenon Primer with something that appears to be just as dense and mysterious. The plot (as I understand it) follows a woman who, after being subject to some sort of brainwashing, meets and falls in love with a man who may or may not have been subjected to a similar process. As of right now, Upstream Color has already premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah and has been met by divided opinions. As with Primer, the one thing most people agree on is that the majority of the film's entertainment will be derived from the discussion and theory-crafting that will follow viewing.
This is the first (and certainly not the last) somewhat controversial pick on my most anticipated list for this year. Many horror fans hold the Sam Raimi original to the highest degree of respect and were enraged to hear that there were plans to remake it. I certainly have enjoyed the original film series but have no objections to seeing it remade for a modern audience, especially if it's half as good as the trailer lets on. Sure, there's no Ash this time, but trying to shoehorn someone into Bruce Campbell's iconic role would've done more harm than good. Hopefully this will be this year's The Cabin in the Woods for me.
J.J. Abrams has been confirmed to be the first director to tackle the new Star Wars trilogy, an even more scrutinizing eye will be directed at his follow up to his 2009 reboot of the other "Star" franchise. Much like most of the projects Abrams has his hands in, Into Darkness has been shrouded in a bit of mystery, mostly concerning the identity of Benedict Cumberbatch's character and role in the film. I've admittedly never been a huge fan of the original 1960's series, but I really enjoyed Abram's attempt at rekindling the franchise for modern times. My only requirement for this installation is more Simon Pegg.
Now that he has finally made some reasonable success in the states with Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn is about to show people what he is really made of. His next collaboration with Ryan Gosling is due to premier this year, tentatively scheduled for a late-May release. Only God Forgives is set in Thailand and deals with a boxing trainer ex-cop in exile that gets wrapped up in mob dealings when his brother is murdered. Early previews confirm my suspicions that this will be more like his earlier work and therefore probably not as easily approachable as Drive but more akin to his Danish crime thriller Pusher. No matter how it turns out, I'm sure it will be gloriously violent. I can't wait to see Ryan Gosling get his pretty face beat in.
In the hands of any other director, I would probably shrug off Pacific Rim as another soulless Transformers wannabe. With word that Guillermo del Toro is directing, my ears instantly pricked up. Knowing that GdT is a huge nerd for classic monster movies like the Japanese kaiju films (see Godzilla) gives me maximum faith that this giant-robot-versus-space-monster will be nothing short of an absolute blast of pure entertainment and fun. I couldn't be more excited to see del Toro succeed at creating a gigantic blockbuster, mostly so that he gets funding to get his adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" off the ground.
It's about time we finally get the stand-alone Wolverine movie we deserve. As far as I'm concerned, this is the first attempt at doing so. The Wolverine is set to take place after the events of The Last Stand (X-Men, not Schwarzenegger) and revolve around Logan's time spent in Japan. I'm not expert in the field of comics--I can probably count every one I've read on both hands--but I recognize iconic X-Men imagery when I see it. Wolverine's silhouette against the Rising Sun instills a sense of unfounded optimism and faith in James Mangold at finally getting the character right.
It's hard to believe that it has already been 4 years since Peter Jackson released his South African protege Neill Blomkamp into the wild with his debut sci-fi actioner District 9. Although we still have not yet witnessed the return of Christopher the prawn, Blomkamp is back with another original sci-fi creation that appears to be drenched in similar themes. In Elysium, the upper class lives on the titular space station in orbit above Earth while the poor and downtrodden live on ruined planet below. It's up to Matt Damon to use crazy future weapons to turn people into blood mist and do something to bridge the physical gap between heaven and Earth as well as the metaphorical one between social classes. Whatever, as long as I see some more exploding people.
OldBoy, October 11
Probably the most controversial pick on this list is Spike Lee's upcoming remake of Chan-wook Park's Korean cult classic thriller Oldboy. The original is the centerpiece of Park's Vengeance Trilogy and follows a man, kidnapped and imprisoned for fifteen years, who is one day released with five days to find his captor. Of all of the films I am looking forward to this year, this is the one that could go either way. With a cast including Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Olsen, Sharlto Copley, and Samuel L. Jackson, I can't help but assume this will be completely insane. Whether it turns out to be a serviceable remake or complete train-wreck, I'm sure it will not fail to entertain.
Gravity, October 18
Alfonso Cuarón hasn't made a single feature-length film since he released the single best science fiction drama of the decade Children of Men in 2006, dropped the metaphorical microphone, and walked quietly off stage right. Now 7 years later he's back with Gravity, a film that was originally scheduled to come out in 2012 but later pushed back almost an entire year to be released in 3D. The film, as far as anyone can tell at this point, will mostly consist of Sandra Bullock and George Clooney floating infinitely into open space after a space station catastrophe. In my eyes, this could potentially be the most interesting concept for a film I have ever heard of.
Last, but as far from least as you can get, is the bookend to Edgar Wright's "Blood and Ice Cream" trilogy 9 years in the making. Seeing as it's still most of the year away, not much is known about the plot of The World's End. What we do know is that it centers around a group of friends who reunite after several years to complete an epic pub crawl. While that might sound like a strange fit to close out a trilogy of genre send-ups, it is also said that it will do for social science fiction films what Hot Fuzz did for buddy cop movies and Shaun did for zombie flicks. There's not much that could happen that would kill my excitement this October.
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