The Avengers

This movie seemed like it would be the perfect match made in heaven. Marvel, in proper control of their own property, carefully shaping a superhero team movie having used a series of previous films to flesh out the world and the characters. The cherry on top being the masterstroke of having Joss Whedon, a perennial underperformer, as the director.

It all worked out PERFECTLY. The Avengers is the pinnacle of comic book superhero move making. It has an authentic feel about it in terms of truly realising the spirit of a comic book superhero, but appropriately adapting it to movie form. It grounds it enough to make it palatable in the big screen format, but does not lose sight of it's fantastical foundations.

Everything came together well. It is not a perfect film, the villain coud have been stronger, but in the context of a long arc, which it seems apparent Marvel are going for, this may not work out to be an issue at all. This is a great movie, and I only wish more of Marvel's properties were back in their control - particularly anything that Fox owns.

All my childhood fantasies are coming true with Marvel movies. Brilliant.

Mass Effect 3

A great immersive story driven series comes to a great conclusion. Almost certainly my pick for the game of the year this game delivered everything I could have hoped for and there is still surely more to come in the way of DLC later in the year to keep the experience going. In a few short weeks it's already my most played game ever, and I'm not done with it yet.

Loved it.

Battleship

They made a film based on the Hasbro board game. I have never stopped thinking this was as stupid as it sounds. However, even so, I really enjoyed this film. It's links with the board game are completely irrelevant. The association with the intellectual property was essentially a means for the movie to receive funding and for Hasbro to make large sums of money as they have already discovered they could do with their other major property - Transformers.

I can't be sure that this movie will be a huge hit, but it certainly deserves to more so than the last two Transformers movies. It is dumb, sure, no question - but it is fun. It has great, slick action, good laughs, and it doesn't take itself too seriously. It also has a lot of the positive hallmarks of a Bay styled action film, a beautiful cast, amazing special effects, explosions and high octane action, but without the annoying lingering shots of the female characters that make you cringe, or the crazy camera movement that made it impossible to enjoy the action. Peter Berg does it right, and quite frankly shows up Michael Bay.

Yes they make a reference to the line about "sinking my Battleship" and YES there is a scene where they target the enemy ship by way of choosing from an alphanumeric grid and hell, even the enemies artillery is SHAPED LIKE THE PEGS IN THE BOARD GAME - it's silly, but it's fun.

I liked this film.

Agent Vinod

My first Bollywood film, and it was a relatively easy introduction into one as it was a movie clearly made with a view towards emulating a Western Spy Action Thriller. Effectively an Indian Bond/Bourne/Bauer character, what was surprisingly to me actually was how inept Vinod was. He was caught, beaten or tricked A LOT of times, he eventually saves the day of course and there is only one song/dance routine - (not involving the Vinod himself).

I watched the movie in Hindu with no subtitles, so I didn't understand a word of what they were saying except for scraps of the odd English word they would say that said, it was easy enough to follow what was going on.

Wrath of the Titans

I really liked the original (Worthington version) Clash of the Titans, so I was looking forward to more of the same. I was disappointed with this one, it had some great effects but didn't have the same snappy pacing and set piece moments quite like the original.

The Hunger Games

I can't believe this is based on a book made for tween girls, the subject matter seems entirely inappropriate for them, or at the very least, not the sort of thing that girls would be into, but hey, who am I to judge, they clearly love it, and I guess so do a lot of other people.

It's an okay movie, seem a lot of it before though, gladiatorial fights to the death for the amusement of the masses etc. It is dense with world's fiction, and the movie is compelled to live within this world but there is no room in it to explain everything, so in many ways it's left to the fans of the book to truly understand why certain things happen, and for the casual movie goer they just have to accept at face value what is going on, despite in many cases it appear entirely arbitrary (and often unnecessary).

It is the first of a trilogy, I guess revolution is where the story will go to eventually. I'm sufficiently curious to see it through.

John Carter

A great film that was astoundingly poorly marketed. So much so, most of my friends had never heard of the film. Pretty bad when you consider Disney spent close to $300 million making it. It will undeservedly go down in history as one of Hollywood's biggest commercial failures and it does not do justice to the quality of the film. It is a classic, rollicking adventure, the effects are outstanding, and the action is intense and lots of fun. One of my favourites of the year so far.