Tim here. Oscar Season is about ready to officially kick off, with the first Gurus of Gold listing landing today, and the massively important Venice, Telluride , and Toronto film festivals all starting within the next week or two, but before we move into the last phase of the movie calendar year, I’d like to spend one more moment eulogizing the year that has been, nodding one last time in the direction of the summer that, just about everybody agrees, has been the absolute pits.
We’ve already gone over that, so instead of belaboring a point, I’d like to ask the question, was summer, 2013, really the worst ever? I’m pretty confident that the answer to that is no, and to prove it, I’d like to offer up three possibilities for the title of Worst Summer Movie Season of All Time that put 2013 to shame. Or, y’know, make it look good. Whichever way you want to put it.
Three terrible summers after the jump
The Summer of 1998
Now, if the way you want to approach this question is by counting up the number of movies in a given year that were good, 1998 ends up looking pretty great: in North America, the highest-grossing film of the year was July’s Saving Private Ryan, a movie with its unmistakable flaws (that graveside framework narrative is, legitimately, my least-favorite thing in any Steven Spielberg movie), but one that certainly holds up as worthy filmmaking and far more thoughtful and challenging than your usual popcorn fare. And it was preceded in theaters by such titles as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Truman Show, the former of which would surely be relegated to a limited arthouse release nowadays, and the latter of which has proven to be unusually prescient for a satire.
But the mere fact that a super-violent R-rated war movie could win the yearly box office race is enough to suggest that something was amiss with the more traditional audience-pleasing spectacle, and the tentpole films that year tell a much different story than a survey of the films which have hung on to their appreciative audiences since then. There’s the pair of asteroid movies, starting with Deep Impact, which looks good almost solely because it was better than Armageddon, the film where Michael Bay officially became Michael Bay, to the dismay of everyone who likes some level of legibility and clarity to their mindless explosions. Even those look like sterling cinema compared to the likes of Doctor Dolittle, ghastly even by the standards of Eddie Murphy’s family-friendly phase, the moronic sequel Lethal Weapon 4, the aimless TV spin-off The X-Files, and the legendarily unwatchable The Avengers, in which Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman avoid humiliating themselves solely because Sean Connery gets to pull all the focus by parading around in a bear suit. And reigning over everything else is the utterly terrible Godzilla, which only became a minor hit even on the wings of the most intrusive and unavoidable ad campaign of the 1990s, and whose achingly boring plot is an insult to the dignity of giant rubber monsters everywhere.
The Summer of 2007
A year of constant, irredeemably bad sequels: the overstuffed May that bore witness to Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End also bore witness to three of the most unliked threequels in modern memory. Later on, the morally ugly Hostel: Part II stank up the multiplexes, followed by Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (quite possibly the cheapest-looking A-list comic book movie of the last ten years), the utterly stupid Evan Almighty, and eventually the hugely unnecessary Rush Hour 3. In the non-sequel realm, we find gems like the hideous gay-mocking of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and Bay’s very first Transformers, a movie that unleashed a howling new vortex of evil into the world.
Standing opposed to all that: Ratatouille. And maybe The Bourne Ultimatum, if you’re not one of the people who dislike its shaky aesthetic. A few other decent movies besides, but the sheer numbers tell the tale.
The summer of 2009
I don’t need anything besides Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra to make my case for me. Certianly, nothing else that came out that year to reach such mystifyingly wretched depths, but the whole season was just desolate: Up is the absolute pinnacle as far as wide releases go, and that’s already a step down from the Pixar films that immediately preceded it. The big Marvel movie – usually a reliable, if frequently unimaginative annual tradition – was the hellish X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and even that’s respectable compared to the like of Terminator: Salvation, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, and the deathless guinea pig spy movie G-Force. Compared to the other years I’ve cited, 2009 was stronger in limited releases: The Hurt Locker, Moon, The Limits of Control and Julia all saw release that summer. But then we have to factor in Woody Allen’s putrid Whatever Works, if we’re going to bring up limited releases, and nobody wants to think about that.
Suddenly, doesn’t 2013 look that much brighter? The enjoyable if unexceptional Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness, the tepid but hardly rancid Man of Steel and The Wolverine, and a pretty fantastic slate of limited releases from Before Midnight to Frances Ha to, just under the wire, Short Term 12, making its New York/Los Angeles bow this very weekend. Could popcorn cinema be in a healthier place? Undoubtedly, but it could also be a lot worse.
Regardless, it feels good to put it behind us. Farewell, mediocre blockbusters, and good riddance! Bring on the Oscarbait!