Ten Most Anticipated Unreleased Films of 2012

UPDATE: The Dark Knight Rises has hit $732 million, putting AA ($1.46b) , Hunger Games ($684m) and TDKR at a staggering accumulation of $2.88 billion...finally overtaking James Cameron's behemoth 

The Year of Our Lord 2012 has certainly had some cinema dynamite, and so far we've seen... a black and white silent film sweep Oscar glory, Michael Fassbender go long-shlong-phooey in Manhattan, Katniss become the new Bella, superheroes assembling against some evil intergalactic mofos downtown, R-Patz get fruity in a limo, Ridley Scott return to sci-fi in all his glory, and most recently, Batman rise to face his biggest threat. 

Producers and Studios are certainly laughing all the way to the bank - it's been a helluva year for blockbuster success, with The Hunger Games grossing $682 million, Avengers: Assemble took $1.46 billion, and The Dark Knight Rises (still rising hugely) accumulating  $550 million thus far - a grand total of $2.69 billion, which will likely break the $3 billion mark after TDKR finishes its run and DVDs hit shelves (by comparison, Avatar has made $2.78 billion to date). It's been a good year, and I have to say that my movie of the year so far is Prometheus, with The Dark Knight Rises, Moonrise Kingdom, Avengers, Carnage, Headhunters and The Raid to follow. Despite the three big-hitters having already played their hands, we still have some really exciting films to come - with Skyfall, The Bourne Legacy and The Hobbit being the next three big contenders. Note that some films scheduled for a 2012 release at the start of the year, have now been given a 2013 UK release...such as The Gangster Squad, Django Unchained, Zero Dark Thirty (previously Kill Osama Bin Laden), Welcome to the Punch, World War Z and Parker. 

Here are the ten best to come (Ted is released now)...

REVIEW: The Dark Knight Rises

 

Chris Nolan's conclusion to his Batman opus hit UK screens yesterday, and like its main villain, it's a beast to be reckoned with.  The Dark Knight Rises is a mega-blockbuster on every scale, although surprisingly this instalment is more reminiscent of Inception as opposed to its predecessor The Dark Knight. This time round, most of the action is shot in the daylight, yet Nolan's conclusion is the darkest film in the trilogy, with a scary gimp-masked terrorist up front and centre. This is the grand exit audiences were searching for after the most adult and critically successful comic book franchise to be adapted to film. Aside from the huge set pieces (only rivalled by  some of the pop-up folding dreamscapes in Inception) and a stellar ensemble cast, Nolan has decided to focus on huge worldly issues such as the instability of nuclear power, sustainable energy, terrorism, the economic crisis and it's impending insurgency typified by Occupy Wall Street. He has given us an entirely new spin on the comic book movie, and this comic franchise is the most important to come out of Hollywood. As far as comic adaptations go, it's the closest thing we have to adult thrillers or crime dramas, instead here we have masked vigilantes and eccentric villains.  Nolan's Bat-opus is more reminiscent of the works of Michael Mann or the James Bond films than any other comic book films, and that is part of what makes his trilogy so enthralling - it's sheer realism. He has created a world utterly believable and similar to our own, even when we see Gotham raising a dark, monolithic statue of Batman we are compelled into truly believing in this mysterious hero. On top of Nolan's political undercurrents, there have also been some horrific incidents from fans and general psychopaths over the last week, including a shocking massacre of 14 people during a midnight screening in Aurora on Thursday night, as well as critics receiving death threats and personal attacks after revealing too much plot or dissing the film, and website Rotten Tomatoes disabling comments on the film due to fan harassment. Either way, The Dark Knight Rises is in the spotlight right now, just like the themes within. 


To the chagrin of the blogosphere, Nolan decided that Bane was to be the villain up against our hero of the night, and what an inspired choice this was. He wanted someone to match Christian Bale's size and strength, and Bane is as big and mean as they come, played with perfection by British actor Tom Hardy (who recently got to bulk up for some very physical performances in Bronson and Warrior). Although there was some very promising chatter on the blogosphere of Phillip Seymour-Hoffman as the Penguin, or Guy Pearce as the Riddler, Nolan would have perhaps struggled to avoid the anarchists overlapping with the Joker's antics, whereas with Bane we have a different specimen, more terrorist than anarchist, and also trained by the League of Shadows, so a terrifying foe for Batman.  He is the villain to end all villains, and the fights between he and Batman are hugely engaging, sheer behemoths pounding the living daylights out of each other. This aggression between the two leads is the force that drives the film to the end, until the climactic final showdown between the heavyweights. Hardy gives Bane the formidable on-screen presence needed for the role, and he speaks with an educated sneer completely juxtaposing his ferocious appearance, displaying a fearsome intellect to match his size and power. 


Alongside Bane we ask see Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle (aka Catwoman, but never referred to as so), a cat burglar who crosses paths with Bruce Wayne and Batman.  Her intentions remain ambiguous a lot of the time (and appear mostly selfish), and for fear of exposing anything spoilerific I'll leave the plot details there, but Jonah Nolan (scriptwriter brother of Chris) said that Hathaway was at risk of stealing the film, and he might just be right. She certainly has one of the best written characters, and she gets some of the best lines, although arguably Bane gets some gems as well 'when Gotham is in ashes, you have my permission to die'. Although we find out very little about her past, she was still a hugely satisfying character - a devilishly charming professional thief looking for a thrill - whereas Bane could have done with some more backstory because he is just so damn intriguing. He remains something of an enigma, and although some of his past comes out in a final reveal, and we hear snippets of conversation about him, his story is never really told; although we can be sure its as dark and sinister as they come, as we hear him proclaim that he was born in hell on earth and lived in darkness, never to see the light until an adult. When all the pieces come together at the end, the questions raised in the film are thankfully answered, but it'll be your own questions which'll have you reeling afterwards (I want Bane's full backstory from Nolan!!).
Christian Bale's performance as Wayne/Batman was at its strongest, nailing the psychomachia of Bruce Wayne and getting the gravelly Bat-voice just right (it was verging comical in a couple of the trilogy's previous scenes). This time round he also gets more gadgets from the franchise's Q equivalent, (Morgan Freeman as) Lucius Fox, who unveils the Bat plane known only as the Bat, along with some uber-cool power-cutting weaponry and even a small palm-sized gadget to kill all nearby electronic equipment seen being used on a load of paps trying to snap Bruce Wayne's entry to a charity ball - genius. Alongside Fox, we also have film regulars Michael Caine return as Albert the butler, now even more distressed at Bruce Wayne's impending fate, and Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon, as well as newcomers Marion Cotillard as Miranda Tate, a board member and backer of Wayne Enterprises' sustainable energy project, and also Joseph Gordon-Levitt as John Blake, a tough young cop with good intentions who gets hand-picked by Gordon to join forces (both the latter two must've impressed Nolan on the set of Inception). The acting chops on show are great, and so interesting to see in the performances of such caricatures from a comic book adaptation, albeit one which takes itself as serious as The Godfather. It must be said that Hathaway and Hardy are the standouts, and they certainly have the most interesting characters to play with. 


Nolan has gone balls-out on his finale, and after the acclaim of the 'Heat of comic book movies' that was The Dark Knight, (the death of its star, an Oscar-winning performance, hitting the $1 billion mark) he had a big shadow to rise out of, and he did it with aplomb. For me, The Dark Knight Rises wasn't as good as The Dark Knight, where I preferred the script and lead villain, but it certainly demands a second viewing as it is such a rich fabric Nolan has weaved. TDKR is on a grander scale than the previous outings, with more explosions, more fights, more villains, bigger set pieces and more plot twists, making it, like it's principal villain, a tour de force to be reckoned with, and a satisfying close to Nolan's epic trilogy.

Japanese Star Wars

Flicking through some great movie poster websites I came across these Japanese renditions of the Star Wars characters by Steve Bialik. I've never seen anything like these and thought they were extremely cool - a mythical Samurai/Ninja take on the famous sci-fi trilogy would be epic. I particularly like the Darth Vader one at the top....like some kind of fierce evil Japanese warlord. In order - Darth Vader, Obi Wan, Han & Chewie, Luke, Jabba, Emperor, Akbar, Leia and Boba Fett.

   

     



   

The Questions of Prometheus....

With the help of 'unexceptional' on the Guardian film blog, below seem to be the big unanswered questions from Ridley Scott's latest sci-fi outing. Some of these are fanboy questions relating to the Alien universe, some are just actual gaps from Prometheus. Either way, please know that these are SPOILERS if you are yet to see Prometheus (hurry up!).

1. If the Engineers used their DNA to create us, how does that explain other life-forms on Earth, including birds, dinosaurs etc?
2. How did Fifield and Millburn get lost in the spaceship/structure when they had just finished mapping out the insides using Fifield's geological mapping tools (red flashing flying baubles)?
3. Why did Filfield and Millburn get scared and run away when they came across an alien corpse, then get scared and move away from the life signal readings, only to move towards, and play with, a sinister looking snake alien?
4. What killed the Engineers 2000 years ago? It wasn't the black substance or foreign aliens killing now, because that came from the pristine vases....? Whatever it was piled up the bodies.....WTF was it?
5. Why did Holloway decay and die when he was exposed to the black substance but Fifield become some kind of mutated double-hard bastard who decides to come and kill everyone? (maybe because Holloway's infection hadn't progressed enough before he was killed)
6. Why did they engineer's head from 2000 years ago explode when running tests? Did that have any relevance?
7. How did David know of the the other engineer ships on the moon, and where were their engineer crews?
8. Why did David poison Holloway? (other than as a redundant plot pusher simply in the hope that he'd then have sex with Shaw and create a beast which would then face-hug an engineer to create the alien design that the engineers had on their wall in the head room? Seems convoluted)
9. Why did the engineers build a big statue of their face?
10. How does the Xenomorph get to planet LV-426 (featured on Alien)?
11. If the installation was an Engineer military base to genetically engineer aggressive species to wipe out life on Earth, why did they leave maps to it on Earth? They didn't need humans there to collect it or stow it back home; they could've just flown back and released it on Earth themselves...
12. If the Engineers intended to wipe us out, why create a new species to do so?

I found this great poster which goes someway to expelling the origins of certain creatures, and answers question 5.

Here is an explanation to the strain of aliens featured....

• Engineer creates black substance which one uses to decompose himself and create mankind on Earth through a biogenetic reaction
• This black substance is said to be a biological weapon of mass destruction created on a massive scale at an Engineer military base on LV-223. It started mankind, and will be used to destroy us
• The black substance, when put into external contact with human mutates them (Fifield)
• The black substance, when nurtured in a womb (after Shaw and Holloway's sexual encounter) is born as a squid like entity with vagina denta teeth - the trilobite
• The trilobite becomes the ultimate face-hugger, or Mother 
• It's egg when nutured in the Engineer begets a prototype xenomorph