Tag Archives: sequels

“Avatar: Fire and Ash”: Spider! He Is Our Hero!

December 28, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Avatar 3 IMAX poster with Oona Chaplin's evil fire-motif warrior astride her pet alien dragon.

Beware the Dragonriders of BURN!

Previously on Avatar: three years ago James Cameron did his part to help save beleaguered theaters worldwide after the pandemic with the billion-dollar spectacle Avatar: The Way of Water, the long-awaited sequel to the 2009 blockbuster. At the time I boiled down my impressions:

The predictably huge box-office smash is the visually stunning James Cameron comeback we expected, an underwater world of wonder that left our IMAX 3-D audience stunned all throughout its three-hour runtime. The beautifully panoramic Pandora ocean-tribe expansion pack and the extended no-holds-barred final-battle extravaganza exceed the baselines even by Cameron standards in all their gloriously maximized CGI razzle-dazzle nonpareil…[but] after exiting the theater and regaining your senses it’s much easier to think again, and disappointing to realize you’ve just watched the most expensive witness-protection story in world history, one in which Our Hero sought to stop endangering his community by moving his family to a strange new neighborhood and endangering them instead. And much of the family’s stresses feel like Cameron reusing salvaged parts from his previous films and from any number of fish-out-of-water family dramas. The technological bells-‘n’-whistles have been upgraded in accelerated leaps and bounds, but the chassis could use some new solder and an oil can.

But oil and water don’t mix, and some guys love laying amazing paint jobs over refurbished parts, so here we go again. Cameron and the same four co-writers continue the saga with Avatar: Fire and Ash, which is here to re-rescue the box office through the healing power of space magic and environmentally friendly EXPLOSIONS!

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“Predator: Badlands”: Yautja, Yutani! Yutani, Yautja!

November 16, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Elle Fanning and guy in Predator costume standing back to back, sternly.

She’s a happy-go-lucky corporate android! He’s a space hunter with a grudge! THEY FIGHT CRIME!

The Predalienator Cinematic Universe is in full effect, or whatever we’re calling it! Fans of the formerly standalone IPs never expected 20th Century Studios would use the two Alien vs. Predator crossover films — one a mediocre slog with a decent Final Boss Battle; the other, amateurish drek — as the foundation of a unified transmedia empire a la Marvel and DC. After both lay fallow for years except in licensed comics, they’ve been called back to active duty and merged into a single science fiction canon through the magical power of Easter eggs.

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Yes, There’s a Scene During the “Tron: Ares” End Credits

October 15, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Jared Leto in black and red CGI armor. The glass faceplate retracted partially to reveal his face. Everything around him is red lines.

In a better film we’d see Morbius evolve into Morpheus and leave the Grid for the Matrix.

When I was 10, the original Tron was one of the last films I saw at the Westlake Drive-In before it closed a month later. I remember being bored, my typical response to a lot of Disney live-action, and got more fun out of the 4-in-1 arcade game even though some malls charged double to play it (i.e., fifty whole cents, a ripoff at the time). My son was a teenager when we saw Tron: Legacy and quickly forgot most of it, though the action sequences were impressive enough that I noted fledgling director Joseph Kosinski’s name before he went on to bigger, better works. In between those wobbly goalposts, Nine Inch Nails’ 1989 debut Pretty Hate Machine was in heavy rotation in my various high school cassette players, so a young Trent Reznor’s industrial synth-metal assaults hold a certain place in my pop-culture heart even though I haven’t kept up with his later, lesser albums. (Fun trivia: Reznor and I share a birthday!)

Nostalgia isn’t an automatic drug of choice for me, but sometimes I’ll play along with its corporate pushers just to see what they think might get me high by injecting my own liquefied childhood into my eyeballs. Fifteen years later Disney has turned Tron‘s CPU off and back on again to install its latest IP expansion pack Tron: Ares, whose marketing tries awfully hard to target Gen-X as if anyone my age yearned for this to be a trilogy to save on our DVD shelves until we die and our beneficiaries give all our boxed sets to Goodwill. The thin dimensional boundaries between video games and the real world have been breached quite a bit since 1982 (Wreck-It Ralph! Pixels! Ready Player One!), to say nothing of invasions from their kid cousin Virtual Reality (from The Lawnmower Man on up), so really, what’s Tron have to offer besides grasping for an extended warranty on its own obsolescence?

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“Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale”: And They All Lived Even MORE Happily Ever After

September 25, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
The "upstairs" cast of "Downton Abbey" at a racetrack watching horses run offscnree, or perhaps something more interesting.

Our Heroes stunned by an unladylike voice in the next section screaming, “COME ON, DOVER! MOVE YER BLOOMIN’ ARSE!”

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife Anne and I are Downton Abbey fans! We’ve seen all six seasons and three movies, most of which she had to annotate for me at length because, as longtime MCC readers know, she’s a history aficionado who can speak on such matters for hours uninterrupted, while I’m a chronic history-deficiency sufferer who needs to be fed very large Vitamin H supplements during and after every period-piece viewing. In exchange, she doesn’t yawn in my face whenever I natter on after every Marvel or DC production about what they changed from the comics.

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“Jurassic World Rebirth” on the Island of Misfit Dino-Toys

July 6, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Scarlett Johansson as a merc in a tall tropical field wielding a rifle with a big needle on the end of the barrel.

Next time your doctor asks for a blood draw, try not to think about this needle.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: for us the Jurassic Park/World film series is a Family Tradition Franchise, by which I mean — like the Marvel, DC, or Star Wars universes — ever since my son was small we’ve seen see every installment in theaters because we’ve always gone to see them every time, no matter how unenthusiastic we are about the diminishing returns. The resistible drag of IP inertia is among our strongest bonds, exactly as studio execs count on to prop up these dilapidated blockbuster assembly lines.

The last trilogy came nowhere near touching the Steven Spielberg/Michael Crichton classic, its first sequel whose flaws get funnier every time I catch a basic-cable rerun, or even Joe Johnston’s underrated yet perfectly fun JPIII. Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World was a roadshow revival presenting a handful of entertaining scenes, numerous derivative ideas in the form of “callbacks”, the first of Chris Pratt’s many generic action heroes to come, the callous murder of poor innocent Lena Luthor, and a T-Rex/raptor team-up that was probably the first line of the pitch. With Fallen Kingdom J.A. Bayona arguably crafted the least worst of the three, with a wild Dinosaur Island cataclysm that segues to the bizarre high-concept “dinosaurs in a haunted house”, only to fumble in the final ten minutes with one of the stupidest movie endings so far this millennium. Trevorrow returned one last time for Dominion, a Jurassic All-Stars cash-grab reunion tour in which our beloved dinosaurs played second-fiddle to the threat of giant locusts, to the delight of that microscopic Venn-diagram subset, Jurassic Fans Who Hate Dinosaurs.

Three years later, here we go again! Those hungry, hungry dinos are back in their seventh chapter, Jurassic World Rebirth — courtesy of sci-fi director Gareth Edwards (The Creator, most of Rogue One), who learned a few things from directing an actual Godzilla film such as “perhaps a giant-lizard movie should have more than five minutes of giant lizard in it” and “always cast a Marvel actor”. Joining him is David Koepp, primary screenwriter of the first Jurassic trilogy, which movie-news sites took as a good sign even though his last blockbuster credit was among the Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny brain trust. The results manage to hurdle the low bar set by Trevorrow’s two company-man products, but once again Edwards and Koepp aspire to a cover-band quality level, which doesn’t have to be an entirely bad thing.

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“28 Years Later”: Undead Will Find a Way

July 3, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Aaron Taylor-Johnson and a kid actor each dressed like Robin Hood with no hoods, looking incredulously at something offscreen.

A father/son coming-of-age zombie hunt? What’s the worst that could happen?

Once upon a time in 2002, 28 Days Later led a post-Romero zombie revival that’s technically never ended if you’re still following at least one Walking Dead spinoff. (No, thank you.) Its depiction of a paler-than-usual 21st-century England overrun by frantic super-speed vomiting jitterbuggers was an electrifying revelation up until it turned into a military action flick and we all learned Humanity Is The Real Monster. But within the span of that terrifying first half, no one could deny the harmonic convergence of Trainspotting director Danny Boyle, The Beach‘s novelist-turned-first-time-screenwriter Alex Garland, and young unknown Cillian Murphy. The audience’s scars from that first half never fully healed.

Boyle and Garland hopped from horror to sci-fi with the riveting apocalypse of Sunshine, leaving their zombie apocalypse in other hands. I never bothered with the sequel 28 Weeks Later unless you count Screen Junkies’ recent Honest Trailer, which seemed like all the recap I needed. Generations later Boyle and Garland reunite for 28 Years Later along with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, whose early pioneering in digital video worked wonders with Days‘ haunting imagery and jump-scare nerve-shredding before jump-scares were played out. The old team ignores Weeks and once again cranks up the visual voltage for half a film, only to diverge yet again from the undead stampede for someplace else. This time the topical shift resonates more bittersweetly. Well, mostly.

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“Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning”…or IS IT?

June 1, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Ethan Hunt telling the President, "I need you to trust me one last time."

Will Ethan Hunt join James Bond in that great big top-secret spy base in the sky?

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: star/producer Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series reboot of the old TV espionage drama just keeps going and going and going and going and going. We were all assured the eighth entry Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning — delayed multiple times and with an ending price tag rivaling the GNP of most nations — would be the grand finale to end all grand finales and that this was totally it for IMF Agent Ethan Hunt, the stubborn jack-of-all-trades, honorary Olympic athlete, and indefatigable Chosen One whose rotating teams keep saving the world from every former spy turned evil mastermind — all sixteen million of them, whichever ones didn’t go after James Bond first.

Cruise, now 62 and eligible for discount-level Social Security, has prided himself on performing as many of his own stunts as possible, but cannot keep doing this forever, or so we all keep trying to tell him. Whether it’s his unconditional love of making blockbusters or the rewards of heading the Church of Scientology’s most effective outreach program, something’s fueled his deep desire to keep going bigger, faster, louder and jumpier. From the fifth one onward he’s synchronized with writer/director Christopher McQuarrie and all but buried the earlier, wobblier installments. The oft-thrilling conclusion to the saga (supposedly) doesn’t quite take the throne of Best Mission Ever, though it isn’t for lack of effort, ensemble, effects, or eagerness to excite.

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“Final Destination Bloodlines”: Death Returns to Delete Entire Ancestry.com Pages

May 25, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
tony Todd in the final months of his life, playing coroner William John Bludworth one last time, sitting at his desk at police HQ.

William Bludworth! Kurn, son of Mogh! Candyman! Zoom! Adult Jake Sisko! And more, more, more! R.I.P., good sir.

Once upon a time the original Final Destination was my favorite film I saw in theaters in the year 2000, outranking other notable releases such as the Best Picture-winning Gladiator, the higher-budgeted X-Men, and the even more intricate Chicken Run. Created by screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick and flown to the finish line by the X-Files/Millennium writer/producer team of Glen Morgan and James Wong, the supernatural slasher-flick was more than its novelty of teens being hunted by the voiceless, incorporeal force of Death Itself via ludicrous chain-reaction accidents. Sure, those grotesque executions were more unpredictable than your typical arsenal of cutlery and farming tools, and as a comics fan I took some pride in knowing Rube Goldberg’s work before I saw it and name-checking him for comparison’s sake before everyone else was doing it.

Taking a peculiar place in the post-Scream slasher revival, the imaginative precursor to 1000 Ways to Die posed a loftier pretension than psychopathic B-movie slaughter. Death’s unspoken yet swiftly inferred motive for its Most Dangerous Game kill-spree was, arguably in the strictest sense, not motivated by pure or even petty evil. From a higher plane of perspective, the entire cast was “supposed” to die in the first twenty minutes, which would’ve made for a fairly pointless short. As the students who escaped the opening plane disaster soon find themselves perishing one by one, their increasingly frantic debates and rationalizations explore the time-honored thematic conflict of destiny versus free will — the integrity of maintaining The Grand Scheme of Things versus the Terminator series’ philosophy of “There is no fate but what we make”, which in turn was backstabbed by Terminator 3‘s contrarian stance that some catastrophes are a fixed point in time, no matter how hard we push back.

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My 2024 at the Movies, Part 1 of 2: Starting at the Bottom

January 5, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
IMAX poster for Madame Web in a theater hallway. Visual elements include five eyes in separate circles surrounding a falling body. In the middle there's a tiny spider. There are concentric circles and some cluttered webbing.

NEVER FORGET.

It’s listing time again! In today’s entertainment consumption sphere, all experiences must be pitted against each other and assigned numeric values that are ultimately arbitrary to anyone except the writer themselves. It’s just this fun thing some of us love doing even though the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

I saw 29 films in theaters in 2024 that were actually released in 2024, a 20.8% increase over 2023, steadily climbing post-COVID. That number doesn’t include ten Academy Award nominees I caught in theaters in 2024 that were officially 2023 releases, but which I saw later outside the house as part of my annual Oscar Quest. It also doesn’t include the 2024 films I watched on streaming services, which will receive their own listicle.

Of those 29 releases, 16 were sequels, prequels, or chapters in an ongoing universe or venerated popcorn-flick IP. Only five were superhero films because Marvel sent themselves to the penalty box. Two were animated. Five had scenes during or after the end credits (again, blame the low tally on the MCU hiatus). Seven were screenings at the 33nd annual Heartland Film Festival, some of whose makers are still seeking an American distributor. In young-adulthood I used to scoff at critics who’d fill their year-end Top 10s with films they saw at festivals that none of their readers would be able to watch for another few months, if ever. Now that I’ve participated in a festival these past two years, those seven totally count and I’m not cheating by including them. This is, like, just different.

Here’s the annual rundown of what I didn’t miss in theaters in 2024, for better or worse, starting as always at the bottom. Links to past excessively wordy reviews and sometimes bizarrely construed thoughts are provided for historical reference. On with the countdown!

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Yes, There’s a Scene During the “Moana 2” End Credits

December 15, 2024 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Moana holding an oar, Maui holding his giant hook, both standing on a boat and looking upward.

They’re back! And they brought their favorite tools!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in Walt Disney Pictures’ century-long quest to devote at least one major animated feature to every human community or geographic region ever, they turned their attention to the Pacific Islands for Moana, a rousing high-seas mythical adventure that featured the lyrical stylings of Lin-Manuel Miranda during his post-Broadway movie-musical phase and a strong duo at its core — Auli’i Cravalho as the titular heroine whose connection to her environment brought an end to her home island’s cursed isolation; and Dwayne Johnson (on break from like twelve other acting jobs) as the vain demigod Maui who helped save the day with his magic tattoos, animal shapeshifting, and enchanted Saw-hook.

Moana and Maui are back with Moana 2, which was conceived as a Disney+ series before execs remembered movies can make way more money than TV, especially if the movie doesn’t suck. The reworking of that proposed material may explain why we have three credited directors and only two writers (the latter of which include Jared Bush, who was one of eight on the first one), but it works well enough for anyone who simply wants more Moana and Maui and isn’t finicky about the rest. The tremendously upgraded budget helps, one befitting a Disney theatrical release rather than simply stapling together whatever rough animatics were already in the can. It isn’t perfect and the first one’s better, but it’s better than the dregs of, say, The Fox and the Hound 2.

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