Pete Moye’
Arts Button

When one hears the word, ‘blockbuster,’ one would generally think of must-see big budget movies.

This year, that philosophy was the most relevant in the history of the summer blockbusters. Three of this year’s films, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean and Transformers, all cracked the top ten highest-grossing films of all time.

With that being said, here are year’s summer blockbusters stood out the most to me:

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

Everyone expected that this was going to be the movie of the year and it may be just that so far into the year. The final chapter in the Harry Potter franchise easily grossed over $1.2 billion worldwide, making it the third highest-grossing film of all time (behind Avatar and Titanic). The film contained an epic battle between Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). Movie critic website Rottentomatoes.com has given the film an overall rating of 97 percent, which reflects the average of multiple movie critics. That’s hard to argue with, especially when the film’s action and story delivery was incredible, regardless of if you’re a Harry Potter fan or not.

2. Rise of the Planet of the Apes

A phenomena makes my top five of summer blockbuster films. The prequel of the 1968 Fox Century’s classic Planet of the Apes reminds its audience why the concept of an ape revolution has excited moviegoers. This version catches the attention of its audience with a powerful opening scene in which apes are captured from their natural habitat and put into a lab to be used for scientific testing. James Franco plays a scientist who tries to create a cure for Alzheimer’s disease and tests it on chimps. With amazing powerful scenes, the movie contains action until the very end. My favorite scene is where the main chimp, Caesar yells “No!” at a brutal primate facility guard played by Tom Felton. It not only shocked the guard but everybody else in the theater, and how can you disagree with audience reaction?

3. X-Men: First Class

X-Men: First Class makes it to number three because of its action and psychological premise. The movie takes us back to when Professor Xavier discovers other mutants and they have to choose who to follow, either Xavier (James McAvoy) or Magneto, played by Michael Fassbender. The movie contained plenty of action, but it also had a lot of emotion. The action was obviously a humans versus mutants battle, where mutants wanted to defend their natural mutant way of life while the humans wanted to fight what they didn’t know and might threaten their civilization. The emotional issues some mutants had was with not fitting in with “normal” society.

4. The Hangover: Part 2

A comedy makes it to number four. It just seems that watching others being drunk and seeing how they deal with their hangover can be quite entertaining. The guys from the first film returned with pretty much the same concept of trying to find out what they did during a wild night. Only this time, they’re not in Vegas, they’re across the globe in Thailand to celebrate Stu’s (Ed Helms) wedding. Four of them, including Stu, Phil (Bradley Cooper), Alan (Zach Galifianakis) and Stu’s future brother-in-law, Teddy (Mason Lee) are drugged. An unfortunate chain of events follow their hangover morning, including encountering a drug-dealing monkey and getting beaten up by monks. The hysterical film proves that it can get much worse than just a hangover; that can be the start of a wild day.

5. Captain America: The First Avenger

Captain America will finish off my top five. A New York City citizen is rejected for World War II military service for important issues, including his health and his physical stature. With passion and hard work he becomes Captain America (Chris Evans). The movie contains some historical facts of the World War II days and the Nazis. The evil villain that Captain America has to fight eventually is not Adolph Hitler but the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), and they too have an epic battle.

Why Other Blockbusters Did Not Make My Top Five

I did not forget about The Green Lantern and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. They were okay to watch for the special effects, but overall the terrible storytelling and acting kept them from being on the list. Ryan Reynolds and Shia LaBeouf fail to impress in their blockbuster roles. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Strangers Tide was a close sixth, but did not cut it because of its wacky “evil mermaid” concept and overused adventures of Captain Jack Sparrow, played by Johnny Depp.