The Christmas TV Strategy Guide 2021

It the realms of live action adaptations of other media, this stands right up there. Masters of The Universe was a difficult thing to adapt, with the toys and comics and cartoon all never quite lining up so the film striking its own path makes some kind of sense. The look doesn’t exactly match the iconic cartoon but taken by itself it has a great sense of design, even down to Lundgren’s mullet. It does stray a bit far from the source material in ways that hurt the film somewhat (like crowbarring in Earth as filming in cities is cheaper than the sets) but it doesn’t outstay its welcome. And honestly, that mullet. Just glorious.

We had a couple of Whoopi Goldberg films back to back, so why not a load of Hanks? It runs the full gamut, from early Hanks with Splash through the slight change of tack at the end of the 80s with Turner and Hooch before landing at post-Oscar Proper Actor Hanks. What a journey that is

Early classic Michael Caine here, with him almost being out iconic-ed by his own glasses. Its a great spy film as well, one that deals with things at the street level rather then the posh hotel level you get with Bond

Not content with stealing one major US film, Alan Rickman returns to thieve another film right from under the nose of Kevin Costner. Of course, old Kev tried to get Rickman’s role cut down in the editing room clearly not understanding that these kind of films are won or lost depending on how good the villain. And Rickman is a REALLY good villain despite all the efforts against him

More Michael Caine, this time in an adventure war film. Its also a good way to remind yourself of the time when Donald Sutherland was a go to guy for these kind of films

Look, you have to accept that the film exists because it does and its not terrible? I mean, it has bad bits (monkeys! LaBeouf!) but it still has some great set pieces. And yes, it has aliens but is that any different from the wrath of God saving the day at the end of Raiders? Point is, this is far from a bad film so maybe time to cut it a bit of slack

So if we’re cutting Crystal Skull slack then its probably time to accept how good this film is; there was some chat going around last year where opinion was turning on the Raimi Spider-Man films which is nuts. I mean, except for Spider-Man 3, that one is real proper bad. But the first two are excellent films that truely get the character. The first one suffers a bit with having to tell the origin story and an over designed villain, both things fixed for the superlative sequel. But this remains a great film, a proper Summer Blockbuster in the best possible sense