Fincher has said that he wanted to make a “franchise movie for adults,” and that’s a noble ambition; but, at times, the film seems more like it’s part of an adult-movie franchise. All the intrigue surrounding right-wing political conspiracies (the thriller material concerns a family of reclusive industrialists, and the mysterious disappearance of one of their relatives, 40 years earlier) is a MacGuffin for the putative enigma that is Lisbeth Salander. She’s the ink-stained super-genius of the title—a bisexual bad girl who’s fluent in source code and dismal at small talk. I found her unflappable competence tiresome—more convenient than mysterious—but Mara grabs one’s attention like a teenage drama queen whose period is verging on an exclamation point; her flat voice eeks out low on the register, filtered through a pout, her tongue not enunciating at full capacity, as if it has recently been pierced—by a lawn dart. But Lisbeth’s rape-revenge number, whatever its original intentions, comes off as embarrassingly crude: Sucker Punch feminism, furnished by Ikea. Her vengeance is a perfectly designed s&m fantasy; it titillates one’s prurience and then rewards it in the form of righteousness—which is even more perverted. Lisbeth is what repressed older men must think punkish young women are like. However, I should give Larsson and his fans some credit; his readers must be more than grown-up Twihards. (Should we call ’em Dragoons?) The novel is the first in the Millenium trilogy, and must have been written long before its author’s death in 2004. Its idealism both harkens back to the 1990s—when the Internet was still the Wild West, before the likes of Google and Facebook arrived to tame it—and resonates with the Year of the Protester. For Larsson—an investigative journalist like his klutzy hero (Craig), who recruits Lisbeth as an assistant—the enemy was the “financial mafia”; and, in his vision, this ubiquitous cabal with unlimited means can be beaten by an anarchic outsider armed with technical knowhow and an appetite for justice. That alone may be compelling enough to get past page five for. I guess it’s about time.

If the mad-scientist tragic inevitability doesn’t hook you as much as Shakespeare’s sometimes does, then maybe you’ll be sated by the way the insurgents break free of their monkey bars. The movie is sly only when it winks at its audience by nodding at its progenitor; but when one of the zookeepers sees Charlton Heston playing Moses on TV, it’s a genuinely clever joke. Caesar—the name really does flummox the historical allusion—doesn’t part the sea, but he does aim a fire hose at Dodge, who’s compromised by his own weapon of choice. The director, Rupert Wyatt, is inhumanly square when trucking purely in live-action (even Franco, stiff as a squiggle in 127 Hours and Howl, carries rigidity like a contagion); but he seems to have stored his imagination on a Mac hard drive. With Serkis as their ringleader, the motion-capture actors would’ve been impressive even without the state-of-the-art trimmings, covered extensively elsewhere; performers playing humans are rarely tasked with such gestural acting, and there’s certainly some kudos due to the techies who helped make their individuation possible. Predictably, the police called in to corner the apes on the Golden Gate Bridge are foolhardy, and their weapons technology is easily outmatched by the physical strength of their adversaries, and their cunning. (As well as by a convenient cumulus of Bay Area mist, and a little unconvincing writing: Since when are gorillas bullet-proof?) There are, however, two instances which, if they’d been sustained, might’ve made for a really stylish blockbuster: 1.) A shot of newspaper boys and joggers looking up at the palm-tree canopy when leaves start to fall unseasonably, and see the apes advancing; 2.) The sound of the apes trampling their way to Rodman’s slick corporate laboratory. The latter, a very simple special effect, might have been used to better advantage as a leitmotif for the apes’ rising action.

The plot has its own built-in simple special effect: its by-now familiar apocalyptic chic is compounded with a horrifying reversal of fortunes. If the only edge we humans have is our technical ingenuity—whether in the form of imagination or opposable thumbs—and we lose that to those species closer to nature who, by implication, we’ve mistreated, well—basically we’re screwed. There’s something primally unnerving about seeing a police cruiser wiped out by some refugees from the zoo—thwarting our so-called superiority with the very primitive bars we’ve caged them with. (It may be PETA propaganda, but they may have a point….) At the same time, however, this doomsday scenario puts us at a safe distance; to put it in the demotic: We’ve got 99 problems, but a baboon ain’t one. The prospect of nuclear war was the subtext back in ’68—it’s by no means incidental that Rod Serling, who’d already strolled through that territory many times before on The Twilight Zone, was one of that film’s writers. Nowadays, with our hopped up end-times expectations distended to the point of abstraction, it seems perverse that at our entertainments (not just our art and literature) we can sit back, relax, and take comfort in a mercifully quick bloodbath that leads to our everlasting oblivion. (If I had a crack team of researchers at my disposal—or at least a Netflix account—I’d love to see how much more often the world has ended in the past five-to-10 years of filmmaking than it did in the five-to-10 years prior.) I may be taking liberties with this movie’s climax, which makes it about as much a prequel to Contagion as it is to Planet of the Apes. But, even without subscribing whole-heartedly to the inevitability of man’s impending demise, I’m unsettled by the notion that we’ve become like terminal cancer patients envying gunshot-wound victims for the suddenness of their destruction.

Captain America is somewhat remarkable, however, as a milestone of sorts: It and Thor may be the first film franchises explicitly bred for crossover. Aliens and Predators coexisted peaceably for years before being dragged into conflict; Freddy and Jason probably admired one another’s work from afar; and the Flintstones were extinct millenia before the Jetsons came aknockin’. But this is a whole new world of husbandry. Would square Captain America have found his way to the screen without being obligated to cross streams with irreverent Iron Man in The Avengers? It isn’t only a question of brand differentiation or minority appeal. The character reeks not just of just World War II, but of a more tender wound, the post-Sept. 11 nationalist zeal, when black & white was once again cloaked in red, white, and blue. (This hasn’t totally ceased to happen; but it’s found other cloaks.) So, in an era of shady military contractors, of dribbling support for wars in Libya and Afghanistan, and reticence about Iraq, would such freestanding patriotism still play? Propaganda is the material’s essence, an infusion of Spidey’s wish-fulfilling transmutation with a jingoistic twist. This ’40s fish may need to be plucked from its water and have Tony Stark spew acid rain on its parade—not an anti-American shower, just a cynical drizzle. Steve Rodgers (Chris Evans, via digital diminution) is a morally strong weakling from Brooklyn who is allowed into the Army because, unbeknownst to him, his native virtue makes him the perfect guinea pig for being turned into a human Panzer: Captain America. A weaponized shrimp. This furrows the brow. Is he now property of the Army—lock, stock, and new barrel chest? Will he be mothballed in peacetime? When his body was enhanced did everything grow, you know, proportionally? Like Tony Stark wouldn’t ask that question! Maybe, in The Avengers, he will.

They always put the best scenes in the trailer, don’t they? (Look, if Pitchfork can do this crap, why can’t I?)

Other things are taken too too far—in the decrepit S.N.L. tradition—like a repeating joke about the ’90s girl-group TLC, a reference point now old enough to have mildewed in the pop-cultural cellar. But the film has a great cast, including Michael Keaton—happily dusted off as the guys’ chief—and sharp enough shards of the real world snuck in—like the chief’s having to moonlight at Bed Bath and Beyond to underwrite his son’s bisexual explorations at N.Y.U.—to buttress the unstable plot. The plot is the problem. Trying to tap into that anti-corporate anger that rippled briefly through the national psyche before being bought out by its target, the filmmakers have essayed a storyline about Ponzi schemes that just doesn’t cut close enough to the bone. It’s a personal tragedy when one’s anger can’t match up with one’s talents, especially when one has popular appeal and a really deserving subject; it draws the line between parody and genuine satire. The other guys may have had better luck if they’d partnered with Charles Ferguson. But Ferrell and Co. deserve credit for trying, and for doing what they can do so well.

Either I’ve undergone a corporeal swap of my own in the last few sentences or I’ve simply neglected to add the other key variable to the Source Code equation: the 2009 movie Moon, the first directed by Duncan Jones, and the only—before he moved on to this. Moon was an all-too-rare hybrid: a sci-fi epic that’s indie in scope. Despite the shift in setting, from lunar surface to Midwestern metropolis, there’s a remarkable overlap between Sam Rockwell’s astronaut and Gyllenhaal’s commuter—who’s slogging between realms of reality courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, as embodied by Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright. Don’t let this cast trick you: Source Code, released by Summit Entertainment, is not “indie.” But its larger scale redounds to the filmmaker’s ripening technical skills; he’s not yet a master, but he’s found solid footing on the film industry’s own two realms of reality: artistry and commerce. (“Mastery” looks more like 12 Monkeys.) It shows in his special effects—the shorthand editing (by veteran splicer Paul Hirsch) and unusually expressive computer graphics; the lovely Venice-on-Lake Michigan skyline that seems to be smiling for him and his cameraman, Don Burgess—as well as in his handling of the cast.

Gyllenhaal has had a boyish buoyancy, along with a healthy taste for the deranged, since playing Donnie Darko; and Jeffrey Wright, as he’s proved in Angels in America and elsewhere, is a maestro of made-up dialects. (He’s doing “unctuous nerd” here: a computer programmer caught in the military-industrial complex, like a gadfly that doesn’t know it’s stuck in a spiderweb.) Farmiga, playing his subordinate, is chastely brunette—her commuter was butter-blonde in Up in the Air, to enhance her status-symbol standing—and mostly hides behind a monitor; but her immobility highlights her dexterity. She gets more out of guardedness, and the way she flicks off coworkers or shifts in her seat, than some actors can cull from effusion. Only Michelle Monaghan seems a little slighted. As Sean’s lady friend—who sees Stevens as Sean—she has a deliciously feisty grin. But she’s also, technically, D.O.A., and dead love interest ≠ happy vibes. Like The Adjustment Bureau, Source Code is a formalized Twilight Zone episode fatted with thrills. (This one’s also part Quantum Leap.) But nobody, not even Jones—a marksman who aims at melancholy—can make a bull’s-eye when trying to hit both a Hollywood ending and “hard” sci-fi.

The wrap-up is a doozie, but it doesn’t spoil the good will wrought by the first 80-or-so minutes. The filmmakers work to individualize the other passengers; so when they have Stevens cajole a comedian (Russell Peters) into performing an impromptu set, the movie may seem to be close to derailing: turning into the populist cheese that drove Frank Capra’s busload to break out in song in It Happened One Night (1934). But such consideration for subsidiary characters has sunken so deeply into desuetude—at least in most big-time genre flicks—that viewers may be surprised to find it here. Even touched. (If only they’d give it a chance….) Still, I’m happy to see that sci-fi movies are doing a little time travel of their own: Jones and Ripley, like Neill Blomkamp or George Nolfi, are putting brains back into a genre that’s been bankrupt by commercialism. Audiences are permissive now in terms of form, if not content; but popcorn movies that are both thought-out and felt might make for a happy medium.

Depending on the hermeneutic you use, the real world of the film centers around either a.) a quartet of fetching young ladies (Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, and Vanessa Hudgens) trying to escape from an insane asylum on the outskirts of Gotham City; b.) a quartet of fetching young ladies—orphans who’ve been snatched up by mobsters and conscripted for exotic dancing—trying to escape from a harem on the outskirts of any film noir; or c.) a quartet of Charlie’s Angels engaged in combat with cybernetic Nazi zombies on the outskirts of Middle Earth. I think it’s d.) none of the above. The realities in which the girls are abused and molested are oppressive and maudlin, and yet no less cartoony than fantasies in which dragons collude with Germans. Snyder, like Tarantino, contrives to use a feminist gloss to pump his exploitation flicks full of high-minded airs, but that only makes them doubly exploitive; his girls are kicking ass to fulfill young boys’ dirty-old-man dreams. (Maybe man-children have such trouble emerging from their cocoons, and even more difficulty getting laid, because they’re being bred to think that dolling up like Sailor Moon while slaying baby dragons is the substance of real girls’ reveries.) Sucker Punch is an homage to Kill Bill, and Kill Bill was nothing but homages. At least Tarantino was building on his prized collection of esoterica; Snyder seems to have never set foot outside a multiplex, just as he seems to have never picked up a novel that wasn’t graphic. (And his ear’s as dull as his eye. I’m not sure which is worse: that all of his musical choices are obvious or that half of them are emo’d covers.) There’s no imagination under this movie’s baroque surface. One might say that to heap all this slag together takes talent; but the cyborg-Nazi-zombies do nothing that their non-hyphenated brethren don’t do in other video games—err, movies. And people often confuse talent with creativity. Creativity is having ideas; talent is knowing what to do with them.

Insanity, like irony, began to seep into the mainstream in its it’s-all-in-your-head, you’re-not-crazy-the-world-is form during the counterculture ’60s; there’s a reason they called it “freaking” out. But, as Jack Shafer implied a few months ago—in an appraisal of how the edgy ontology of Philip K. Dick, the Tucson gunman’s favorite writer, has affected our pop culture—the cray-cray is here to stay. The year 1999 was a sort of watershed for Dickheaded schizophrenia: The Matrix, Fight Club, and The Sixth Sense all became über-mega-hits. American Psycho and Memento followed in 2000, proving that even mind-fucking indies could cross over and make the big bucks. Just in the past year alone, Shutter Island, Inception, Tron: Legacy, Black Swan, The Adjustment Bureau, and now Sucker Punch have all skied down the lobes of slalomed brains, bouncing between realities the way you change your socks, and viewers have sucked this brain candy down like popcorn. There may well be a kernel of hipster snobbery in this—the mentality that dictates that my favorite (Brooklyn) band loses its caché of cool if you’ve heard of it. But Dick, who died in 1982, was the underground’s man; his vision was paranoid yet critical. Sucker Punch doles him out like baby food—and reduces him to a spoonful of empty calories. If we accept “insanity” as mere entertainment, then we begin to take sanity for granted. The Dickian vanguard is valuable because it lets us look outside the box. It teaches us that taking “reality” for granted is the insanest form of complacency.

The fate of the Ninth is the subject of the movie Centurion, which came out last year and which I have to mark as a subject for further study—okay, whatever, I missed it. But The Eagle, which is based on The Eagle of the Ninth, a children’s novel by Rosemary Sutcliff written in 1954 (another subject marked for research), hurtles us to the next generation; it also makes the historical parallels perpendicular—impacted. (I don’t mean this obstreperously, mind you; the legion’s legend of has been disputed in recent years.) Cohort Centurion Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum) has volunteered to take a command in that backwater the Romans call Britannia. His ulterior motive is to reclaim the honor that his father lost with the Ninth; his dad was the dude in charge. Much of this is ceremonial: Marcus Aquila wants to return the Legion’s eagle emblem, sculpted in gold, to Rome. It symbolizes the honor and glory of the Empire; and, more importantly, it helps to shape the story into a handy quest narrative.

Now, if you razzed at the mention of Channing Tatum, I’ll have you know that he looks like a brooding bust of Caesar (or Daniel Craig) and has the physique that the legionnaires’ armor was molded for; moreover, he gives the part nothing less than an honorable good try. However, when he kisses his Roman-era rosary, his halo is too dim to pass for devout, and his high-pitched voice betrays him in one key scene. The screenplay (by Jeremy Brock) betrays him and nearly everyone else in others. But Brock, and the director, Kevin Macdonald, have themselves been let down by movie conventions that have been elusive for nearly 50 years. Old-school historical epics look stodgy, square, and fake, and new-style camera free-for-alls come off like a bone-headed Hollywood arrogation. (That said, some anachronisms are infinitely less tolerable than others: say, the soldiers’ “hup 2-3-4!” marching orders, or Marcus Aquila rolling over in his sleep to reveal a freshly laundered pair of tighty-whities.)

The Eagle does not capitulate too much to “modernity,” as Ridley Scott’s action-heavy Robin Hood did; and it’s devotedly sword-and-sandal, rather than lightsaber-and-Crocs. Although at times I wished that maybe Terrence Malick or Francis Ford Coppola or Kathryn Bigelow were behind the camera instead, Macdonald and Anthony Dod Mantle, the cinematographer, sustain the illusion of a magically barbaric Great Britain with mauve sunsets unblemished by smog, lochs swaddled in the mist, russet branches that seem to be tortured into spindly shapes, and mosses that grow green like emeralds. When Marcus Aquila, fervid, weak and wounded, trudges through these exotic brooks and streams, you feel the pull of the tides, the chill of the rains soaking into him. This isn’t Apocalypse Now, or even apocalypse way-back-when—it’s The New World. And yet, during this Roman’s holiday, he only comes to trust one Briton—his loyal slave, Esca (Jamie Bell); and the filmmakers’ overview of the tribe possessing the eagle (the “seal people”—not to be confused with fans of the musician Seal) is wide rather than deep. These warriors sport mohawks and wear an algae-colored paint on their faces even during downtime. (And you thought kilts were a faux pas!) But their only real individual is a freckle-faced child. Tahar Rahim, who plays their prince, has a tragic look that is never allowed to live up to its potential. When the centurion lifts his paw from the limp throat of the royal he’s drowned, the war paint washes off, and there’s something deeply upsetting about seeing this boyish mien laid bare: something that Macdonald seems to sense but fails to articulate.

I think that may be what we have here: a failure to communicate. In lieu of any real female presence—even mentioned in passing—we get a master-slave bromance that would have probably been more historically accurate if consummated; after all, when in Rome… (Maybe I’m thinking of Ancient Greece. Same thing…) But the failure of that dynamic is dwarfed by the god-awful final scene, which should’ve been tossed to the lions; the city of Rome itself looks like a cheesy high school production of Julius Caesar, complete with actors doing tableaux vivants of Renaissance paintings. The senate decides to mobilize a new Ninth with Marcus Aquila at the reins; the centurion and (freed) slave unflinchingly accept the job. Have they learned nothing?! The saving-daddy’s-honor device falls apart if you modernize it at all: Imagine a son of General Custer infiltrating an American Indian tribe to take back a Union Army flag; the Indians being shown as brutes by having their chieftain slaughter his own son; and then Young Custer being valorized for kicking some Injun ass! The horror, the horror. And all of this undercuts the soft core of Esca’s hard-on for Marcus Aquila: His condemnations of imperialism and sermons about the dignity of man are supposed to pierce through eternity like a sword. But, all these problems aside, The Eagle deserves better than its box-office blues. This failure to communicate denotes something far more apocalyptic than anything in the film: It gives harried Hollywood bigwigs yet another excuse to push for brand names and gimcrackery.

The mere act of Stathamian intervention isn’t quite enough to make The Mechanic as fun as, say, Crank, but he’s got a good deputy in Ben Foster who, even blondied, looks more like Ryan Gosling than Kiefer Sutherland, but is nonetheless playing the bad-boy son of a paraplegic Donald. Sutherland, Sr., plays Statham’s mentor, who’s also an embezzler. And so Statham, playing an ace hitman, has to ply his trade on his father figure, and then, omitting that fact, take on Foster as his apprentice. (Perhaps out of fealty, perhaps out of shame.) Foster, who gave a great performance as a soldier who took things so seriously in The Messenger, still delivers his lines like Jack Nicholson during his dervish-hipster days, circa Five Easy Pieces. The actor gives the crackerbarrel-badass role better than it deserves: He’s like super-soigné moonshine. If Statham’s schwanky mansion in Louisiana backcountry and collection of Schubert records seem familiar, it’s because they’re Charles Bronson hand-me-downs: Richard Wenk and Lewis John Carlino’s script derives from a ’72 Bronson vehicle, also written by Carlino. (Not to mention a long tradition of action-flick noble savagery.) The director, Simon West, gives us a nice shot of a guy getting it through a two-way mirror and a bad guy’s black Beamer gets eviscerated by a garbage truck—though I wish they’d gone further, and put him into a trash compactor. (In that case, of course, he’d have to be a better baddie—he’s just a smug suit.) West also has a boom mic crashing into what seems like half his shots. Come on! And yet he has strength in Statham, who actually saves black-leather dusters from the spoofing they get on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. What other white guy, except maybe Sean Connery, can make balding seem so cool? Baad. Assss.