Decades-old found footage from NASA’s abandoned Apollo 18 mission, where two American astronauts were sent on a secret expedition, reveals the reason the U.S. has never returned to the moon.
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Final Destination 5
Moviedom’s most fatalistic franchise returns in efficient form in Final Destination 5, an installment that goes for broke in its big opening set piece. This time the initial disaster happens on a suspension bridge that turns out to be all too vulnerable to high winds and an over-aggressive repair project. The employees of Presage Plus (ha ha) are in a bus crossing the span when Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto) pre-envisions the bloody disaster to come; panicked, he urges his friends to scamper off the bridge just in time to avoid the collapse. You know what comes next: the survivors face certain death as Fate demands its deferred payment, and a coroner (Tony Todd, thankfully returning to the series) intones dark wisdom about the price that must be paid. Director Steven Quale understands that the audience expects the horrifyingly convoluted deaths of the previous pictures; each new demise is like the result of a crowd at an improv theater shouting out different ideas to weave together (hmm, what can we do with a leaky air conditioner, a loose screw, and a set of uneven parallel bars?). The results–shot for 3-D release, no less–will not disappoint die-hard fans, and even the actors are bearable this time around: D’Agosto, from the underrated Fired Up!, pairs nicely with Emma Bell, P.J. Byrne gets off a few unctuous one-liners, and David Koechner does his clueless jerk routine as the Presage Plus boss from hell. The final sequence, while not making any sense according to the rules we’ve been watching, does tie up the entire series in a neat bow. Until the next sequel, anyway. –Robert Horton
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Captain America: The First Avenger
The Marvel Comics superhero Captain America was born of World War II, so if you’re going to do the origin story in a movie you’d better set it in the 1940s. But how, then, to reconcile that hero with the 21st-century mega-blockbuster The Avengers, a 2012 summit meeting of the Marvel giants, where Captain America joins Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk and other super pals? Stick around, and we’ll get to that. In 1943, a sawed-off (but gung-ho) military reject named Steve Rogers is enlisted in a super-secret experiment masterminded by adorable scientist Stanley Tucci and skeptical military bigwig Tommy Lee Jones. Rogers emerges, taller and sporting greatly expanded pectoral muscles, along with a keen ability to bounce back from injury. In both sections Rogers is played by Chris Evans, whose sly humor makes him a good choice for the otherwise stalwart Cap. (Benjamin Button-esque effects create the shrinky Rogers, with Evans’s head attached.) The film comes up with a viable explanation for the red-white-and-blue suit ‘n’ shield–Rogers is initially trotted out as a war bonds fundraiser, in costume–and a rousing first combat mission for our hero, who finally gets fed up with being a poster boy. Director Joe Johnston (The Wolfman) makes a lot of pretty pictures along the way, although the war action goes generic for a while and the climax feels a little rushed. Kudos to Hugo Weaving, who makes his Nazi villain a grand adversary (with, if the ear doesn’t lie, an imitation of Werner Herzog’s accent). If most of the movie is enjoyable, the final 15 minutes or so reveals a curious weakness in the overall design: because Captain America needs to pop up in The Avengers, the resolution of the 1943 story line must include a bridge to the 21st century, which makes for some tortured (and unsatisfying) plot developments. Nevertheless: that shield is really cool. –Robert Horton
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Transformers: The Dark of The Moon
A mysterious event from Earth’s past threatens to ignite a war so big that the TRANSFORMERS(tm) alone will not be able to save the planet. Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and the AUTOBOTS(tm) must fight against the darkness to defend our world from the DECEPTICONS’(tm) all-consuming evil in the smash hit from director Michael Bay and executive producer Steven Spielberg.
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Green Lantern
A test pilot is granted a mystical green ring that bestows him with otherworldly powers, as well as membership into an intergalactic squadron tasked with keeping peace within the universe.
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Bridesmaids
The delightful Kristen Wiig, who’s shone in dozens of supporting roles and on Saturday Night Live, hits a bull’s-eye with her first lead role in Bridesmaids. Annie (Wiig) isn’t doing so well; her bakery failed and she keeps sleeping with a good-looking louse (Jon Hamm, Mad Men), but she’s always had her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph, Away We Go) to buoy her up… until Lillian gets engaged. Annie becomes maid of honor, but another friend of Lillian’s–the rich and lovely Helen (Rose Byrne, Get Him to the Greek)–wants to take over that position. Misadventures with bad Brazilian food, dress fittings, an unfortunate flight to Vegas, and a sympathetic traffic cop (Chris O’Dowd from British TV comedy The IT Crowd) follow, with increasingly hilarious results. Bridesmaids successfully balances raunchy comedy and character portrait. The embarrassing and socially catastrophic stuff, which in too many movies balloons into absurdity, is here kept in check just enough to allow Annie and the other characters to be multidimensional people–without the movie losing its comic capacity for cringe. (Actress Melissa McCarthy, of Mike & Molly, works miracles with a character than in most hands would be pure cartoon.) Wiig’s enormous appeal keeps Annie sympathetic, even as she becomes more and more of a train wreck. Bridesmaids is both smart and dumb, raunchy and earnest, and altogether enjoyable. –Bret Fetzer
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X-Men First Class
When Bryan Singer brought Marvel’s X-Men to the big screen, Magneto and Professor X were elder statesmen, but Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass) travels back in time to present an origin story–and an alternate version of history. While Charles Xavier (Laurence Belcher) grows up privileged in New York, Erik Lehnsherr (Bill Milner) grows up underprivileged in Poland. As children, the mind-reading Charles finds a friend in the shape-shifting Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) and Erik finds an enemy in Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), an energy-absorbing Nazi scientist who treats the metal-bending lad like a lab rat. By 1962, Charles (James McAvoy) has become a swaggering genetics professor and Erik (Michael Fassbender, McAvoy’s Band of Brothers costar) has become a brooding agent of revenge. CIA agent Moira (Rose Byrne) brings the two together to work for Division X. With the help of MIB (Oliver Platt) and Hank (A Single Man’s Nicholas Hoult), they seek out other mutants, while fending off Shaw and Emma Frost (Mad Men’s January Jones), who try to recruit them for more nefarious ends, leading to a showdown in Cuba between the United States and the Soviet Union, the good and bad mutants, and Charles and Erik, whose goals have begun to diverge. Throughout, Vaughn crisscrosses the globe, piles on the visual effects, and juices the action with a rousing score, but it’s the actors who make the biggest impression as McAvoy and Fassbender prove themselves worthy successors to Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. The movie comes alive whenever they take center stage, and dies a little when they don’t. For the most part, though, Vaughn does right by playing up the James Bond parallels and acknowledging the debt to producer Bryan Singer through a couple of clever cameos. –Kathleen C. Fennessy
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Source Code
Director Duncan Jones made a stellar first impression with 2009′s Moon, a stylish, gratifyingly deep science-fiction movie that favored heart and soul over flashy special effects. Source Code, Jones’s much anticipated follow-up, proves that his debut was far from a fluke, blending techno-thriller and character study with deceptive ease. Shot in a clean, no-frills fashion, Ben Ripley’s script follows an MIA soldier (Jake Gyllenhaal) who awakes in a mysterious capsule, with contact with the outside world limited to a video feed from a shadowy military officer (the fantastically poker-faced Vera Farmiga). As events unfold, he learns that he’s the participant in an experiment that lets him relive a stranger’s past life in 8-minute chunks, a process that will hopefully allow him to avert the terrorist bombing of a packed commuter train. Jones, aided by Chris Brown’s wonderfully overt ’80s homage of a score, wrings an impressive amount of tension out of the constantly rewinding story, with each time jump revealing another small piece of the overall puzzle, as well as deepening the relationship between Gyllenhaal and fellow passenger Michelle Monaghan. Clocking in at a just-right 93 minutes, this is a funny, tense, and surprisingly moving film that perhaps never quite reaches the ingenuity that its premise suggests. If this counts as a sophomore slump, it’s of an extremely mild, very entertaining variety. –Andrew Wright
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