Though it’s not the last Marvel movie — not by a long shot — Avengers: Endgame is the final chapter in the saga they began eleven years ago with Iron Man. But what you realize about midway through watching it is that Avengers: Endgame is also the culmination of everything Marvel has been doing since Iron Man, and brings this saga to an even more satisfying conclusion than anyone could’ve imagined.
While the Star Trek novels have always adhered to the canon created by the TV shows and movies, they’re not canonical themselves. But they do, ironically, have their own canon, complete with their own ongoing storylines. In the following email interview about his new Trek tale, Star Trek: The Next Generation: Available Light (paperback, Kindle), science fiction writer Dayton Ward not only discusses the inspirations and influences on his sci-fi space opera story, but also how it serves to connects David Mack’s Star Trek: Section 31: Control and Mack’s upcoming Star Trek story, Star Trek: The Next Generation: Collateral Damage (due out October 8).
There are a lot of reasons why the 1954 monster movie Creature From The Black Lagoon is a classic, not the least of which is the Creature itself. Sadly, the real-life origins of that iconic character were made even murkier than his fictional home by sexism. In The Lady From The Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters And The Lost Legacy Of Milicent Patrick (hardcover, Kindle), writer Mallory O’Meara — herself a screenwriter and movie producer — explores the influential life of the titular special effects pioneer.
While the Marvel movies introduce new characters with almost every installment, it’s been a while since they’ve done an origin story that’s as exciting, clever, and just plain well done as Captain Marvel. In fact, you’d have to go back eight years, to 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger, to find an introduction that’s this effortlessly exhilarating.
In The Making Of Star Wars: A New Hope, The Making Of Stars Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and The Making Of Stars Wars: Return Of The Jedi, writer J.W. Rinzler went deep into the stories behind the original Star Wars movies, and emerged with books that were as entertaining as they were informative. In the following email interview, he talks about his newest movie making tome, The Making Of Planet Of The Apes (hardcover, Kindle), about the making of the titular sci-fi movie.
Though uneven, the 2012 animated movie Wreck-It Ralph still managed to be a good time thanks to some inventive and insightful jokes about video games told by multilayered characters with real chemistry. Not surprisingly, the sequel Ralph Breaks The Internet has many of the same qualities…and many of the same flaws.
While Han Solo has long been one of the most iconic characters in the Star Wars saga, he’s also been one of the more mysterious, with his backstory left largely untold. But that all changed with Solo: A Star Wars Story, a biopic that showed what Han was up to a few years before he agreed to give a ride to some old guy and a cocky teenager. And while this epic sci-fi space opera works well on the new Blu-ray and 4K editions, they are missing some key extras that would’ve made them even better. (There is also a DVD version, but it seems to have no extras, and since I wasn’t sent a copy of it to review…)
The original Ant-Man is one of Marvel’s lesser movies; a fun action movie that was undercut by bad and obvious jokes and a predictable plot. But while Ant-Man And The Wasp isn’t a complete reversal of course, it is a notable improvement in many ways.
Over the course of the original Star Wars movies Harrison Ford so perfectly embodied the role of Han Solo that watching the iconic space smuggler die in The Force Awakens was like losing an old friend. But while Alden Ehreneich [Rules Don’t Apply] isn’t as spot-on as a young Han in Solo: A Star Wars Story, the action-packed sci-fi space opera is so much fun that you won’t really notice.