Trashtacular

Remakes are Hollywood’s solution to not having an idea. But there’s a difference between creatively riffing on the bones of a classic and crawling out of the swamp with a sludge-soaked carcass, propping it up Weekend at Bernie’s-style, and calling it War of the Worlds. This “modernization”—a screenlife spectacle starring Ice Cube as the world’s most bored Department of Homeland Security desk jockey—isn’t so much an adaptation as it is an accidental satire of everything cheap and vacant in our streaming age. If the aliens had any taste, they’d have vaporized the production server before the rest of us were subjected to this deranged corporate sizzle-reel.

If the original Jurassic Park was the cinematic equivalent of hearing Beethoven's Fifth for the first time, disruptive, awe-inspiring, and strangely primal, then this seventh fossilized entry, Jurassic World Rebirth, is what happens when you ask an algorithm to remix that symphony using only elevator chimes and the incessant crinkle of a Snickers wrapper. That wrapper, tossed by an over-caffeinated, under-written scientist in this film’s opening moments, is perhaps more memorable than anything that follows, a literal flake of trash that signals the lazy entropy setting in, not just in the movie’s security system, but in the script, direction, and spirit of this once vital franchise.

Let us all give a moment of silence—not just for what once was the luminous Star Trek franchise, but for the unsuspecting audience, who, wandering into Section 31, finds themselves trapped in a malfunctioning holodeck, gasping for escape. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when corporate storytelling steers a beloved odyssey into the black hole of mediocrity, look no further: Section 31 is a galactic punchline with none of the set-up, and all the pratfall.

There are dreadful movies, there are glorious ones, and then there are those—like this laugh-riot of a mockbuster—that leap into the yawning abyss between, flailing their cardboard limbs, and come up gasping, ridiculous, and (miraculously!) alive. Planet Dune isn't just bad. It's an epic car crash, a filmic yard sale, a Walmart-brand space opera that dares—gallingly—to sidle up to the grandeur of Villeneuve’s Dune and ask, “Can I copy your homework?”

I went into Elevation knowing it would be bad—there’s something liberating in having your low expectations met so precisely, like watching a car accelerate off a cliff with immaculate predictability. George Nolfi’s latest exercise in post-apocalyptic hand-wringing arrives already embalmed, wheeling Anthony Mackie and Morena Baccarin out like two alluring mannequins about to be discarded. It is a feat to make actors this lively feel this bored; by the end, you could almost hear the cameraman nodding off.

By all rights, Borderlands should have been a pyrotechnic delight—a giddy, over-caffeinated bullet-train of pulp chaos and gonzo world-building, driven by the acid irreverence of its video game namesake. Instead, what Eli Roth has delivered is an improbable feat: a science fiction action comedy that is simultaneously cacophonous and catatonically dull. Sitting there, under the suffocating weight of so much squandered star power, I found myself awash in a unique mixture of irritation and melancholy—a sort of cinematic Stockholm syndrome, except nobody falls in love with the captor. I simply prayed for release.