Surprise everyone! I don't have a specific film to review this week, because I need to get something off my chest. Summertime means one thing for movie lovers like me. It's the season of sequels. But this season feels depressing and monotonous to me.
The Fast and the Furious franchise released its tenth film, Fast X, in May. The second animated Spider-Man film, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was released at the beginning of June. Transformers released its seventh film on June 9th, the fifth Indiana Jones film will come out June 30th, and the seventh Mission Impossible film will come out in July. Even the silly shark movie The Meg (from 2018) has a sequel scheduled for release in August, and the horror franchise Insidious will release its fifth film on July 7th.
Many of these films appear guaranteed to to fill theaters this summer, but they also appear to be made for the exact same audience. This audience being 15-year-old, restless, feverish boys, thirsty for violence and large-scale special effects centered around different, muscular, straight men fighting bad guys (or bad sharks).
I'm referring to such men as Tom Cruise (Top Gun: Maverik, 2022); Harrison Ford (Blade Runner 2049, 2017); Vin Diesel (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, 2023); and Jason Statham (Fast and the Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw, 2019); all of whom are at the center of big movies I've mentioned.
I guess I'm too naive expecting a different forecast for summer sequels this year. But didn't the COVID-19 pandemic show viewers the excitement of a more diverse range of releases when giant action adventures are not the number one priority?
I'm not trying to sound like an old-fashioned grump. Action adventure films and science-fiction films are fun when done right. The Batman film from last year was great. Dune from 2021 was a wonderful science-fiction epic, and I enjoyed parts of the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel from last month.
It just seems like many of us will feel overstuffed this summer from the same kind of content and the same kind of narratives that are more concerned with the technological look of a film and not concerned enough with a meaningful story. But maybe I'm wrong, because only time will tell.
