Summer Schlockbusters Either modern summer movies are mostly ...

The thought occurred to me recently while watching the zillionth rerun of Back to the Future on TNT. Like many critics of a certain age (under 40), I've seen it more times than I probably should have, but I'm never bored by it. Watching it again, I appreciated its craftsmanship. Its blend of suspense, sentiment, slapstick, satire, time-travel conundrums and cultural criticism defines what a supposedly escapist Hollywood movie can (and should) be. Many of the gags that were funny in 1985 for certain reasons are funny today for different, perhaps better reasons. In the 80s, for example, audiences laughed smugly when the 1950s rubes mistook time-traveling Reagan-era teen Marty McFly's sleeveless ski jacket for a life vest; at the time, his jacket was considered way cool. Today, we laugh because McFly's jacket looks as dated as the poodle skirts and DA haircuts he presumably finds so quaint.

Back to the Future made tons of money and inspired two sequels that were shot?like the Lord of the Rings and Matrix sequels?back to back, for release in 1989 and 1990. The sequels weren't as cunning and peppy as the original, but as examples of clockwork construction and populist intelligence, they best most summer movies being made at similar budget levels today. I'd rather watch the weakest Back to the Future installment (the third one) four times in a row than sit through some recent summer blockbusters ever again. Future director Zemeckis, who also made Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Forrest Gump, Contact and other warm weather blockbusters, is sometimes rapped as a calculating, contraptionist filmmaker. But at a time when many summer action pictures look and feel like zillion-dollar Super Bowl ads?bright, shrewd, loud, empty?Zemeckis can look like Hollywood's answer to Robert Bresson.

In the 70s and then the 80s, Zemeckis, Joe Dante, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, hell, even Tim Burton were branded as sensation-mongers, overgrown boys, instinctive enemies of narrative and good sense. Accepting the Irving Thalberg award at the Oscars in the mid-80s, Spielberg made comments indicating that he felt partly responsible for the dumbing down of Hollywood blockbusters, but he was a misdemeanor offender taking blame for a wave of felonies. It's funny, isn't it, that many 70s and 80s summer blockbusters once decried as dumb, loud, cynical and insufficiently interested in plot and character now seem like models of classical narrative purity? The Rock, Con Air, Armageddon, Shaft, The Fast and the Furious, Mission: Impossible 2, Pearl Harbor, XXX, Tomb Raider?they all pull off the nearly impossible feat of giving you a headache while making you sleepy. Compared to any of them, Raiders of the Lost Ark is an oasis of human warmth, and the first Star Wars?one of the original summer blockbusters, a film knocked by Voice critic J. Hoberman as "a jet-propelled smile button"?might as well be The Magnificent Ambersons.

The newer summer blockbusters are, with rare exceptions, monotonously assaultive, made by people who confuse a visceral reaction such as audiences recoiling from strobe-flash explosions and eardrum-rattling digital sound with an authentic emotional response. Holes is well-crafted and touching, but it's no E.T.

Five years ago, when New York film critic Peter Rainer was employed by the now-defunct Los Angeles New Times, he wrote a massive, manifesto-like review of Armageddon claiming it signaled the death of narrative in Hollywood cinema. I thought he was exaggerating until I saw the movie. Dear Lord! It was like riding Disneyland's Space Mountain rollercoaster for 150 minutes straight while blasting Aerosmith and Richard Wagner through headphones cranked up to 11; then, it ended. The new Star Wars movies left a bitter aftertaste, too. I like them better than most critics, but I'd never defend them as great movies. They aren't as much fun as the weakest installment in the original trilogy, Return of the Jedi, a junky, teddy-bear-infested hack job that could be seen as the first in an endless wave of super-expensive, good-enough-for-government-work summer blockbusters. That wave culminated in 1989's Batman, a movie with great sets, a dandy villain and no sense of rhythm, direction or proportion. Like Jedi, it had such sensational advance p.r. that when viewers finally saw it, they spent all summer trying to convince themselves that it didn't suck. How do current blockbusters stack up? The current X2, like Batman Returns, is better designed, acted, written and directed than its predecessor, and I dig how it wallows in adolescent misfit righteousness. (That's a good thing. Most of the time, Hollywood panders to jocks, cheerleaders and people who fantasize about being jocks or cheerleaders.) The other current blockbuster, The Matrix Reloaded, has its flaws?some of the big action scenes go on too long, and it could have used more jokes?but conceptually, it's leaps and bounds beyond most summer movies. Every 10 minutes, there's a surreal, primally powerful image (Morpheus slashing an onrushing car with his samurai sword, like a bullfighter crippling a bull; Neo confronting several dozen televised, alternate-reality versions of himself during his meeting with the Architect), and throughout, the movie percolates with honest-to-God ideas.

As Adam Gopnik observed in his very astute New Yorker piece, the film dredges up an ancient fear (the world as we know it isn't real!) and updates it in piercingly modern terms. In a world where "reality tv" means science experiments with people, wars are covered like NFL games and the White House is occupied by a president appointed by the Supreme Court, it should be no surprise that viewers (particularly young viewers) would respond to a sci-fi trilogy that says the world as we know it is a simulation covering for totalitarianism, and "free choice" is an opiate meant to take the sting out of mental slavery. (The series is Star Wars reconceived by William Gibson?but it's still not as imaginative as Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, a film of which the entire budget probably wouldn't pay for Keanu Reeves' leather overcoat.)

It's hard to get excited about any blockbuster that isn't out already. Riding the subways and looking at posters for upcoming movies, I'm already dreading 2Fast 2Furious; the original stunk, except for the nighttime photography, and the fact that it's directed by Shaft auteur John Singleton, whose mentality appears to have been fixed at age 16, only increases my anxiety. At a theater last week, I saw a trailer for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, another comic book picture, this one starring Sean Connery. The trailer made it look grandiose and incoherent?Highlander 2 with better sets. It seems hard to believe that Connery won his Oscar costarring in a summer movie, The Untouchables?a needlessly bloody but superbly crafted cops-and-robbers thriller from Brian De Palma and David Mamet. I remember thinking the last act of that picture stunk at the time, and watching it again recently, I stand by my opinion. But the rest of it is damn near perfect, and I'll take The Untouchables' substandard last act over nearly anything starring Vin Diesel and his biceps.

Spielberg and his fellow blockbuster ringmasters now seem like black-and-white 1950s European artfilm directors compared to some of the giddy bruisers pummeling our eyeballs now. For that matter, Spielberg and company weren't as bad as many of their contemporaries. Think of Paul Verhoeven, who gave us summer movie hits like RoboCop (which featured the dismemberment-by-bullet of a police officer) and Total Recall, wherein Arnold Schwarzenegger's hero used a random innocent bystander as a human shield against bullets. Or testosterone-poisoned producer Jerry Bruckheimer and his late partner, Don Simpson, who gave the world Top Gun, Days of Thunder and other Super Bowl ads disguised as movies. Or Sylvester Stallone, the man most responsible for the Rambo sequels and Cobra. Or Joel Silver, the action movie producer who made a few defensible blockbusters (including the peerless, original Die Hard and the Matrix pictures) but also oversaw brainless macho bloodfests like Commando, Predator, Lethal Weapon 2 and Die Hard 2. Sensation-mongers all.

Jaws, the razor-toothed 1975 hit that started the summer movie craze, was never so crass. More than one critic noted that when ichthyologist Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) described a shark as a single-minded predator that existed only to eat and to have little sharks, he might have been describing both Jaws and its inevitable sequels. The characterization wasn't fair. Jaws was thrilling and violent but never crude, monotonous or trashy. It suggested more than it showed us; between setpieces, it found time for character development and grace notes. (Remember Chief Brody trading goofy, affectionate glances with his son at the dinner table?)

Except for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, whose unrelieved grossness and sadism helped inspire the PG-13 rating, Spielberg's summer movies were usually more witty than grueling: He's often one of the only bright spots in an increasingly grim summer movie landscape. (Saving Private Ryan, A.I. and Minority Report were summer movies; none of them were perfect, but they were ambitious, peculiar and fitfully brilliant; thinking grownups could sit through them without shame.) There's no Spielberg this summer, and I can't help thinking that misfit mutants and cyber-rebels can't compensate.