Are friends electric?

Just a couple of days to go now until Hollywood unleashes its latest vacuous time-waster on an unsuspecting public. The two years that have elapsed since Transformers 2 have not been kind to the franchise's first sequel. Those of us unlucky enough to have sat through the last installment will remember very little of what went on, aside from some gross racial stereotyping and a retired robot with a giant pair of clanging bollocks - an apt metaphor for the series to date, if ever there was one.

So what can we expect from the final part of Michael Bay's epic trilogy of grinding mechanical hardwear? Well, if you enjoyed the previous films' endless scenes of whirring widgets and spinning cogs, you're in luck. The newest installment promises to be as enjoyable as working your way through a cutlery canteen with an angle grinder. With two and half hours of cyborg-on-cyborg action, there's enough hardcore engineering on display to give Isambard Kingdom Brunel a doughy.

And if you're already starting to feel that the sight of two twenty-foot robots smashing seven bells (literally) out of each other, is all getting a bit samey, this one's in 3D. Imagine that - it's going to be almost as much fun as laser eye surgery performed by Edward Scissorhands.

When the studio originally announced its plans to bring the Automats and Decepticons into the third dimension, Michael Bay proudly declared: "You can’t just shit out a 3D movie". And he should know, having staked his claim as the cinematic equivalent of a coprophiliac. Why polish a turd, when you can just distract audiences by showing it in three dimensions instead?

After a summer of big-budget disappointments, the pressure's on for Bay to deliver a genuine blockbuster. The marketing teams have been out in force, making sure that the press are covering every angle of the film's imminent release. And so far it seems to be working, as Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is rarely out of the papers.

It doesn't matter that her own parents would struggle to pick her out of a line-up, or that, by all accounts, she makes viewers long for the subtle nuances of Megan Fox - this generation's Katherine Hepburn. Fox has even popped up in the news coverage, despite having been dumped from the franchise, thanks to a timely leak that suggested Executive Producer Steven Spielberg had told Bay to fire the troublesome temptress. Career tip number one: don't compare your boss to Hitler if you want your contract to be renewed.

Hopefully, Paramount has learned its lesson after the marketing debacle that surrounded Revenge of the Fallen. Activating a bunch of fake Twitter accounts to talk up your movie is fine, but not if you're just going to cut and paste the same inane review. And someone should have pointed out to the new media intern given the thankless task, that Tweets only work if you have followers. Otherwise you're just wanking into the wind.

This time around, they're hoping to target the fanboys by announcing an official team-up with Chevrolet. If you've got 30 grand to spare, you can splash the cash on an exclusive 'Bumblebee' special edition of the Camaro. Available in two different models, the car features an authentic yellow paint job, with black stripes and a high-wing rear spoiler, plus Autobot logos throughout. Snazzy.

The radio won't select songs that articulate your interior monologues, and it's unlikely to be much use defending you against aerial attack. Even so, at least there's a chance that it might help you land yourself a hot girlfriend. But if you're spending 30k on a piece of movie memorabilia, you probably wouldn't know what to do with her, even if you were able to coerce her into the passenger seat. There are some things that even an extra-terrestrial intelligence can't fix.

Silver screen, golden moments

J.J. Abrams has a problem. His new movie Super 8, which opens next week in the US and over here in August, is something of a gamble. Despite being a big budget adventure movie, it’s not a sequel, there are no superheroes in it, and its biggest star is the little sister of Dakota Fanning. Not exactly an easy sell. However, Abrams does have one ace up his sleeve, in the form of executive producer Steven Spielberg.

The film is set in a small town, and follows the adventures of a group of tweenie would-be film-makers, who witness the crash of a train carrying a mysterious cargo from Area 51. Its late-seventies small-town location, combined with the pubescent world-view of its protagonists, have understandably drawn comparisons with Spielberg’s genre-defining output. And although Abrams claims that his film is not an homage to his producer’s back catalogue, the big guy’s DNA is all over the finished product, like presidential spunk on a cocktail dress.

When I look back on my own formative years as a movie-goer, Spielberg’s influence also looms large. Whether as a writer, director or producer, the bearded mogul’s distinctive viewpoint was responsible for many of the definitive scenes that fueled my love of film. Not least because he understood how to root the fantastical in the ordinariness of suburban adolescence. So in advance of Super 8’s imminent release, I wanted to take a look back at some of the moments that fostered a life-long belief in the power of movies.

Red lilo yellow lilo

First rule of making a family-friendly blockbuster – kids and dogs have to survive. Someone obviously forgot to point this out to Steven Spielberg, as he unleashed his mechanical monster shark on an 11 year-old boy. Even more shocking was the fact that the attack happened in broad daylight, under the watchful eye of aquaphobic police chief Martin Brody.

By the time I finally saw Alex Kintner turned into churning chum, I’d already made two aborted attempts to sit through Jaws. The first time, I got no further than the clanging buoy in the opening scene, before my parents switched off the TV and sent me to bed. On my second attempt, I made it as far as the autopsy – the severed arm turned my eight year-old stomach and once again I was packed off for another sleepless night.

The third time was clearly the charm, as I made it all the way through the film. There are countless classic scenes in Spielberg’s famously troubled adaptation, from the quiet mimicry of Brody and his son at the dinner table, to Quint’s unforgettable S.S. Indianapolis speech. But the one that stayed with me the longest, was young Alex’s ill-fated return to the water. Watching grown-ups being eviscerated by a raging mass of teeth was no big deal, but seeing a child my own age being hastily devoured was enough to instil a life-long fear of lilos.

Up, up and away

Close Encounters of the Third Kind shouldn’t have worked. Slow, ponderous and fragmented, it’s a film with a protagonist who chooses to leaves his wife and kids behind, in order to follow his dreams of intergalactic travel. Then again, having witnessed the chaos of his home life, you can hardly blame him. His wife is a nagging shrew who spends most of the movie in a shabby housecoat, and his children would have Jo Frost arrested on child abuse charges.

Looking back, it’s also amazing to think that this big-budget alien movie featured no explosions or aggressive invasions. Just a bunch of grey-faced extra-terrestrials who came to Earth in search of an impromptu jam session. A few years later and they’d have been booked to appear on Jules Holland alongside Alison Krauss and Meshell Ndegeocello.

Much is made of the spectacular climax, with its awesome light displays and Richard Edlund’s extraordinary effects work. But I've always felt that the film’s most magical moment is a throw-away gag. Would-be deadbeat dad Roy Neary stops at a level crossing to consult his map, and waves past a car waiting behind him. Moments later, another car appears to pull up in the background. Only this time, when Neary waves for the driver to go around him, the lights simply elevate and disappear into the night sky. Where he’s going, they don’t need roads. Simple, magical and quietly haunting, the scene’s greatest strength is its lack of reaction from our oblivious hero.

All white on the night

Steven Spielberg broke my seven year-old heart. E.T. is a desperately sad story, focusing on broken homes, the loneliness of childhood, and the grief of separation. By the time the wrinkly spaceman’s heartlight was finally extinguished in the quarantine tent, I was a helpless ball of snot and tears.

But the most disturbing image, the one that stayed with me long beyond the film’s temporarily uplifting dénouement, was the scene where E.T. was discovered lying unconscious in a woodland creek by Elliott’s brother Michael. White and desiccated, like the chalky dog shit of yesteryear, the intergalactic botanist looked as though he’d placed his last collect call.

Even as the kids were excitedly racing through a partially built housing development on their BMXs (Dear Santa…), I couldn’t shake the image of the sickly, inanimate alien on his back in the sludge. Spielberg always intended for his eponymous creation to be lovably ugly, but with a deathly pallor he was downright horrifying.

Keep on running
It’s almost thirty years since Poltergeist was first released, and even now debate still rages over who directed it. Spielberg may have written the story, co-authored the screenplay and played executive producer on the haunted house classic, but he hand-picked The Texas Chain Saw Massacre auteur Tobe Hooper to direct, since he was tied up on E.T. Even so, Steven’s influence is clearly felt in every scene.

The film is a great showcase for much of Industrial Light and Magic’s early work, but the most impactful special effect was actually a practical camera trick. Following one of the greatest fake endings of all time (“This house is clean…”), the triumphantly reunited family settle in for one last night in their home. Unfortunately for the Freelings, their domestic bliss is short-lived as the malicious entities make one last grab for dimension-skipping moppet Carol-Anne.

After being thrown around the room in her Sigourney Weaver-patented hipster underpants, Diane races down the hallway to rescue her screaming children. But as she staggers towards the kids’ room, an audacious reverse zoom creates the illusion that the hall is increasing in length even as she picks up speed. For all the spider monsters, floor-rupturing corpses, and facial peels in the movie, this is the closest that Poltergeist comes to visualising a real nightmare.

Appetite for disgusting

Don’t take this the wrong way, but I didn’t really like Raiders of the Lost Ark when I first saw it. Maybe I was a little too young to appreciate it at the time; I’ve certainly grown to love it in the intervening years. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, on the other hand - now there was a movie I could get into.

Seeing it on the big screen in Filey’s only cinema, I was entranced by its relentless energy, and blind to its casual yet egregious racism. More importantly, I revelled in its disgusting detail. At the time, I was going through a phase where I was drawn to anything gruesome or gory. My parents had even been called into school to discuss a particularly graphic representation of King Herod’s slaughter of the innocents that I’d produced. In retrospect, the teachers might have just been concerned that I’d worked my way through four expensive red marker pens in creating my masterpiece.

Either way, the banquet scene in Pankot Palace, was just what my nine year-old self wanted from an adventure movie. Snakes swallowed whole, eyeball soup, giant lickable beetles – I laughed hysterically through the entire segment, feeling Willie’s pain but kind of wishing even more indignities to be heaped upon her. By the time the monkey brains were served, I was convinced that I’d found the greatest film ever committed to celluloid. The fact that they were served chilled was just the icing on a particularly inedible cake. I may have devoured the movie but my popcorn went untouched.

Never say ‘die’

In 1985 Spielberg tried to make up for the darkness of Temple of Doom with a more kid-friendly adventure, set in the rundown dock area of Astoria in Oregon. He crafted a story about a mismatched bunch of adolescent outsiders who find a long-lost treasure map and embark on a health-and-safety worrying quest to locate a pirate ship buried in an underground cavern.

Looking back on it now, there’s still plenty in The Goonies to upset parents, from the mortal jeopardy that the kids constantly find themselves in, to the fact that one of the pre-teen heroes tells the maid (in fluent Spanish) “The marijuana goes in the top drawer. The cocaine and speed go in the second drawer. And the heroin goes in the bottom drawer. Always separate the drugs.” You won’t find that kind of dialogue in Alvin and the Chipmunks.

For me, the definitive moment in The Goonies came as the young explorers reached the end of their quest, throwing themselves into a conveniently placed waterslide that dumped them into a lagoon right next to the pirates’ galleon. Even at the time, I questioned the believability of a bunch of scurvy-addled pirates being able to construct a series of tricks and traps that would put The Crystal Maze to shame. But that waterslide looked like so much fun, there was no limit to the belief I was willing to suspend in the name of adventure.

Do-you-think-he-saw-us

When Jurassic Park opened in July of 1993, it marked the end of my adolescence - school was over, and I was getting ready for university. And yet here was a film that managed to reconnect me with the wonder of youth, as it showed dinosaurs in all their flocking, sneezing, shitting glory. Rejecting Phil Tippett’s innovative stop motion animation in favour of Stan Winston’s practical effects and ILM’s breakthrough CGI, Spielberg’s gamble turned into box office gold. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who went to see Jurassic Park five times that summer.

Much has been made of the terrifying T-Rex attack, heralded by those evocative concentric rings in a water glass. But that muddy showdown took place an hour into the film. For my money, the signature moment in a film full of breathtaking set-pieces came much earlier, as Doctors Ellie Sattler and Alan Grant first touched down on Isla Nublar.

As they speed through the jungle in gaudily branded jeeps, Ellie grabs a leaf and begins to wax lyrical about the fact that it’s from a plant that’s supposed to be extinct. If you want scintillating dialogue, make sure one of your characters is a paleobotanist. Thankfully, these prehistoric Percy-Throwerisms are shortlived, as the convoy speeds into a clearing, giving our heroes a close-up look at a Brachiosaurus chewing on a treetop. With John Williams’ melodic score reaching a triumphant crescendo, Grant stands and stutters “It’s…a…dinosaur”, as he turns Sattler’s head towards the gigantic herbivore. And it’s this inarticulate shock that instantly transforms the character from potentially aloof egghead, to another Spielbergian everyman. Suddenly, we actually care about whether he’ll live to dust another fossilised vertebrae.

Shyamalan ding-dong

It all started out so well. After a couple of low budget misfires, M. Night Shyamalan finally exploded into moviegoers' consciousness with his audacious not-quite-debut film The Sixth Sense. Back in 1999, expectations were pretty low for a film whose only marketable commodity was a man who'd managed to parlay an expression of smug self-satisfaction into a Hollywood career.

But despite all the odds, Shyamalan's ghostly tale ended up winning the summer box office battle alongside an even lower-budget horror movie about three student film-makers with a hysterical aversion to foliage. As well as an incredible performance by a pre-teen actor with eyes so large he could have been animated by Studio Ghibli, the film boasted a genuinely surprising twist ending that blindsided its audiences.

Admittedly, the denouement was a little disappointing for me, having diligently avoided any spoilery reviews, only to pick up the soundtrack CD and see that the final track was called 'Malcolm is Dead'. Imagine if, instead of covering 'The Crying Game', Boy George had presented Neil Jordan with a song called "My Girlfriend's Got a Cock". Nonetheless, the careful plotting, interesting dialogue and exceptional performances were a million miles away from horror convention. Shyamalan was able to evoke a sense of fear from a handprint on a table, rather than cramming an agitated cat into every available closet.

His follow-up, Unbreakable, attempted a similarly melancholy approach to the superhero movie, with Bruce Willis once again mooching around in a long coat, like a man who'd forgotten to submit his tax return. Signs was no happier, this time applying the director's now patented downbeat technique to the alien invasion genre. Audiences were keen to get a glimpse of the little green men, only to be treated to innumerable scenes of ex-priest Mel Gibson asking people to stop calling him 'Father'. Would he have preferred 'Sugar Tits'?

Put it down to the law of diminishing returns, or the perils of increased expectation, but each successive film seemed to score a little bit lower with the critics. They accused him of being a one-note egotist, which might be OK if it weren't such a low, bassy rumble of a note.

By the time The Village came along, audiences were losing their patience. This time, the set-up was contrived, the performances over-the-top (don't bother taking a bow, Adrien Brody), and the twist as ridiculous as sending a blind girl into the forest to get help. It seemed as though Shyamalan's Midas touch was turning everything into pyrite. Then came the double whammy of Lady In The Water and The Happening. Take your pick - do you want to see Paul Giamatti cleaning a pool, or Mark Wahlberg trying to outwit a plant? It's like some kind of twisted Sophie's Choice, where Meryl takes the bullet herself, rather than suffer the lesser of two evils.

After a decade of perpetual disappointment, it looks as though the fans have had enough. A new website has been set up by a bunch of disgruntled movie-goers asking for donations, in the hope that enough money can be raised to send M. Night back to film school. The site explains: "Certainly, there must be 150,000 of us film lovers out there who are tired of his schlocky plot twists, canned dialogue, and over commercialized image as an 'auteur'. If we all donate just one dollar, we can send M. Night back to NYU so he gets the help we all so desperately need." Given his reputation for surprise endings, it's likely that the sting in this particular tale will involve him turning down the generous gesture. So the site's organisers are also prepared to take whatever money is raised and set up a scholarship in Shyamalan's name for budding film-makers.

Crowdsourcing money to finance M. Knight's re-education is all well and good, but the problem is, he already knows how to make films. And truth be told, he's actually pretty good at it. It's just that he peaked so early, it could only go downhill from there. When The Sixth Sense first opened, critics heralded him as the second coming of Spielberg. Unfortunately, he's following in the footsteps of the director of Hook and 1941, rather than the visionary who gave us Jaws and E.T.

Instead of going back to school, Shyamalan should simply learn to embrace his status as the filmic equivalent of a one-hit wonder. Which isn't to say that his follow ups weren't money-makers - even last year's The Last Airbender managed to turn a considerable profit, despite being about as coherent as Serene Branson's report from the Grammys. He should simply bear in mind that one awesome film is still more than many directors manage in a lifetime. Just ask Michael Bay.