Or maybe it just feels that way looking back, with Iron Man on the horizon.

Some people thought Dane Cook could lead a movie.

Norbit came out and nobody tried to pretend otherwise.

They tried to insert Vincent Hanna into an open world Phone Booth (88 Minutes), convince audiences Kevin Costner (Mr. Brooks) was some kind of inverted Mr. Ripley, create a pre-cog's vision of a Reddit thread with Ocean's Thirteen, turn Shia LaBeouf into Brian DePalma's vision of John Travolta (Disturbia).

Even more, they applied an ultimately fruitless EKG to the "urban musical" (Stomp the Yard), continued to reckon with (yet ultimately learn nothing from) how effortlessly (both in budget and amount of written script that made it to final edit) Knocked Up, Walk Hard AND Superbad proved it wasn't comedy that was dead so much as financiers' rapidly developing, unexplainable fear to back other movies like them.

They had to imagine a world in which Jim Carrey and Joel Schumacher freestyling over beats from A Beautiful Mind and...not even beats from, but Shutter Island-type beats (© Youtubers) could work when even his comedic turns were flailing (and unlike either the prior or following movie, they had no source material to take notes from).

Meanwhile, Gosling is believably in love with a sex doll he doesn't fuck. Elliott Page is believably playing a young woman stuck in a snark-laden game of political theater regarding her accidental child.

The Coens and PTA are battling in the Texas desert for the movie of the year, both of which resemble dozens of character dramas and epics The Town loves to valorize but from here on out quickly seemed to fear, I guess because in just a few short years DVD sales were dryer than Lake Meade? No wonder the powers that be, despite said powers being Brad Pitt and Warner Bros., had no language to help cineastes and weekenders alike that The Coward Robert Ford was ACTUALLY 2007's best cowboy epic, let alone feel the need to mount a fight against Zodiac, the most disrespected best picture nominee that wasn't of my lifetime (please don't fetishize Michael Clayton around me!).

All while Spider-Man 3 is raking in all the money almost as an inside joke amongst movie goers who expected anything other than a movie almost entirely built on how baffled (in as many good ways as bad) Sam Raimi was by the success of his Spider-tales and Sony's attempts to tamp down his self-deprecation with, like, every single significant Spider-story they imagined they couldn't tell without Raimi and Maguire on the marquee?

Insert thoughts about Haneke inexplicably getting Hollywood money to remake Funny Games, the composite majesties of Atonement and Darjeeling Unlimited, and I suppose Sweeney Todd and it's clear this ramble has gone on far longer than necessary, with the point being...

This year looks like an absolute scramble to course correct hits that were flops, flops that were hits, completely miss that at least two, in my opinion three and I still think pretty irrefutably the strongest FOUR movies in a single calendar year EVER were getting screened (but I'm a Nebraskan and thus soft on cowboy tales).

In the midst of all that, somewhere, some small crew of people had to figure out whether this movie would better serve audiences as an adventure, a thriller, a creature feature, a morality play, a workplace drama but in space? Can't envy that. Totally makes sense it came and went.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz