You'd think that having the merchandising rights to Star Wars and having metaphorically just excreted 3 new films, that George Lucas would have had enough money to be going on with... but apparently he needs another golden Jarjar or some such, which is the only reason they'd revive Harrison Ford from his slumber to make a new Indiana Jones film.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this film is the fact it doesn't suck. Yes - pretty much everyone was expecting it to suck harder than a legion of berserker fellatio kamikaze hooker but clearly someone made enough threats on the lives of Lucas and Spielberg to make sure it wasn't holocaustically bad. Let's not be hasty - it's not Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Last Crusade... not by a long shot... but it somewhat surpasses Temple of Doom - by far the weakest of the original three films.

The film doesn't really waste any time... it's not long before some commies are get Indy to try and find some relic, atomic bombs are blowing up and so on. The problem the film has is rather intangible... oh, there are some obvious ones - that there's a dramatic disconnect as soon as they transition to the jungle... and that there's an abundance of silliness toward the end... but it simply doesn't have the "magic". Oh, there's Indy cracking his whip... having fisticuffs... all the regulation stuff but somehow it's just never quite able to recapture the feel of the old films... maybe it all got lost when they stuck in an obscene amount of CGI in there... or the ridiculous interdimensional aliens... or perhaps it's the vaguely irritating Indy junior or the fact the jungle chase scene goes on and on and on and the... on and on some more.

Perhaps it just feels slightly less substantial than its counterparts... it's an enjoyable film but it's easier to think of it as a decent summer blockbuster than it is to brand it a successor to the original trilogy... fun but ultimately, feeling too... sanitised to be true to the legacy. Worth watching? Certainly but somehow falling short of being entirely worthy of the title Indiana Jones...

Time was, when the world was ending... it would end in America. Usually involving nukes, American soldiers or teens... or people and somehow, amazingly - things would clear right up when (their) red, white and blue was flying again etc. etc. Or not.

In recent years though, for some reason, it seems the British isles have become subject to the apocalypse. Be it infertility or viruses, the United Kingdom seems to be where it's at in terms of destruction and death... it makes a kind of sense. Britain allows for a contained environment for the apocalypse to play out but the rest of the world to be unaffected... or at least, such was the case in 28 Days Later...

Doomsday revisits the same basic idea as 28 Days Later - DEADLY VIRUS! Except this one just happens to be particularly virulent rather than turning people into flailing, murderous red eyed zombies... just kills them in a rather unpleasant way. So, after the outbreak in Glasgow someone thinks it's a great idea to just wall off Scotland and hope that fixes everything... Nuking Glasgow was probably a better prospect but oh well... Apparently this solution works just super until 20 years later, there's an outbreak of the virus in the now terminally overcrowded London and the PM sends generic crack troops in to find a cure.

As it turns out, things on the other side of the wall have gone Mad Max/Lord of the Flies... the total breakdown of social order and reversion of a sort of feudal existence... with some cannibalism thrown in... Plenty of the people die when the cannibalistic inhabitants of Glasgow ambush the APCs the team is in and naturally, they're on the menu but eventually the handy person on the inside lets them out and our heroine gets to go and see Malcolm McDowell, who was supposed to be finding a cure... when actually he's gone all kinds of batshit crazy. What is it with scientists in these situations? Do they go "Oh, well - time to go totally insane?" whenever this kind of stuff happens? Regardless, McDowell doesn't want to help Rona Mitra because he's got a castle now and pretty much set himself up as the king... oh and being batshit crazy, he thinks that technology is evil and that it's time for Rona to fight one of his nights.

Meanwhile, Bob Hoskins manages to accidentally cover Prime Minister Julian Bashir in blood when one of the infected magically enters what should probably be the most secure location in the country and subsequently the thinly veiled Gordon Brown scumbag underling takes over, planning to let the virus kill more people to thin the ranks... which for some reason he decides to tell Mitra "Oh, yeah - I was planning on getting the cure you slogged your guts out for... then sitting on my hands to effectively seal my grip on power. Kthxbye!"

Idiotic to say the least... and Mitra hasn't exactly found a cure. She knows that the people who survived had a natural immunity but there are people with a natural immunity to AIDS. That doesn't mean to say you take a litre of blood from someone with that immunity and magically get a cure. Oh, it would definitely help but this isn't like some GCSE science project you can knock out on a weekend.

Of course, when you've got someone who's saying that they're going to let a bunch of people die after you put your life on the line to save them - it's fairly clear that common sense isn't a plentiful resource in this film... Anyway, Mitra gives Bob Hoskin's a recording of evil not-Gordon-Brown saying he's going to let a bunch of people die, kills the punk who has been busting her chops for the entire film and decides to show his head to his old gang... which apparently means she's their leader.

A few logical asides here... The Reaper virus is supposedly deadly because of it's virulence... and yet somehow there was time for them to rebuild Hadrian's Wall AND outfit it with some fancy defence mechanism? Not to mention the logistics of an effective patrol around the coast of Scotland.

Then of course, one has to ask why people are still hanging out in cities... it would be beyond Captain Obvious levels of obviousness to state that society has broken down in the hot zone... yet cities by their nature require civilisation to sustain them. Even though the population was decimated, even relatively small numbers of people need a considerable amount of food and as it has been 10 years since the quarantine

And of course, the usual silly things - like retina scanners working for someone dead/unconscious... That situation was entirely stupid anyway. We're supposed to believe that there'd be a whopping 2 guards protecting the door to what should probably be the most secure location in the country? If you're that incompetent - you pretty much deserve everything you get.

Of course, films like this aren't meant for logical analysis. It's essentially a romp. The virus serves little other function than to offer a post-apocalyptic environment for our heroine to run about and fight in. The rapidity with which her team is disposed of is hilarious, they might as well have just shot themselves in the head the second they went through the gate... The film owes a depth of gratitude to the inevitable comparisons of Escape From New York and Mad Max... but it's clearly derivative but no less enjoyable in the typical action romp manner.

Marvel Studios - the film arm of Marvel - made its first real foray into the superhero movie market with Iron Man... a character who (despite his recent prominence in the Marvel comic world) is far less well known than by the general public... while this claim could equally be levelled at Daredevil, Constantine, The Punisher and so on... none of them were hyped up to anywhere near the extent of Iron Man (even the new Incredible Hulk movie has been quiet by comparison)...

Most superhero origin films have felt a little weak... there's some need to build a character up before they fall into a bath of radioactive goop that gives them great powers and the ability to fit into incredibly tight costumes. In other words - you're spending a significant amount of time pretty much sitting around waiting for the person to go "OMG SUPERPOWERS!" Of course... perhaps by the nature of Iron Man... there's none of that. It's a more logical process... but then, that makes sense as there's a lot more logic to a guy building a big, bad ass power armour suit than there is to someone getting bitten by a spider and getting spider and emo superpowers.

So, anyway... the story goes pretty straight forwardly. Genius billionaire arms dealer Tony Stark - played by Robert Downey Jr. - goes off to Afghanistan to show the American military just how spiffy his new missiles are... why this can't be accomplished in America isn't ever explained because there are plenty of mountains to blow the hell out of in the USA... but there are fewer Afghani militants in the USA waiting to ambush the American military... So, Tony Stark gets taken hostage and is coerced into building his super duper Jericho missile because if there's one thing Taliban types want to do, it's blow the ever loving snot out of the mountains that cover their country.

The Taliban types aren't very bright because Tony Stark has an epiphany and realises it's time to repent for being an arms dealer and right wrongs... How does he do this? Well, he makes a big suit of power armour... quite how you can confuse a giant suit of armour with a state of the art missile is never explained but such plot details are neither here nor there. After a bit of heart to heart with a fellow captive, Stark gets his act together and runs off in a giant metal suit having killed a lot of people - naturally, his fellow captive heroically sacrifices himself to allow the armour to power up and kicks the bucket after a few last words to Stark.

As you'd expect, Stark skeedadles after setting a lot of stuff on fire. Somehow surviving a considerable fall and the disintegration of his armour on the way to moments later be fortuitously rescued by an American army chopper. He seems pretty fine when he gets home - despite having had the trauma of some time in captivity and so on. As you might guess - his business partner is all smiles and sunshine when he returns... until Stark says they won't be building weapons anymore... Of course, his business partner was responsible for Stark's imprisonment in the first place and selling weapons to the Ten Rings - a very unsubtle reference to the Mandarin for anyone that has any knowledge of the comics.

So, Tony jets off to save his dead friends village in another fairly cool action sequence which climaxes in the Tonster facing down to F-22s. Then, naturally Tony finds out that his business budy Stanes has been the one pulling the strings all along and that he has reverse engineered Stark's original powersuit. Which naturally leads to the climactic finale battle. No prizes for guessing who wins... and for those who choose to endure lengthy end credits, Samuel L. Jackson pops up to tell Downey that there's another film in it for him.

All-in-all, it's a good film. The action is slick and the effects all work, the look of the suits especially seems to work very well and while the "arc reactor" may in effect be just as magical as spider bites resulting in the ability to hang from walls, it seems much more plausible... so this film will likely be a lot more acceptable for people who find the notion of people firing beams from their eyes or acting like giant magnets to be rather childish.

In fact, Downey himself sells the character of Stark as rather relateable. There's no specific way to pin it down but he's very much the playboy and yet still, personable and human and not in the Bale's Batman is... with him, it's an act - as necessitated by the character... and that gives Downey more room to manoeuvre. He has that drink welded to his hand, sleeps around and yet, goes out and saves the day... oh, certainly we can't deny the comic book nature of his suit and his brawling antics... but he feels more real than most.

The real issue seems to be villains... It is important to have a villain (or villains) to face off again... and no one likes Darth Maul syndrome... actually, no one likes George Lucas anymore... but he can just play with all the Ewoks his money bought him. But beyond the final minutes, Iron Man has no real opponent... Sure, he gets away with the appearance of his business partner in the Iron Monger suit... but he's more of a finishing piece than someone who has been there all the way through...

Still, it easily surpasses Spiderman - if not in box office receipts than at least in interest and action... while it may not quite match Batman Begins it seems proof that Marvel can produce films that are more than just box office hits... it seems that it's own production studio has allowed it to be GOOD... whether The Incredible Hulk will prove this to be a trend or a fluke, remains to be seen.