On Screen

...But not before some entertaining mischief that has been introduced by making the T-X a gorgeous, curvaceous supermodel (Kristanna Loken) with a heart of steel...

...Yet stop motion at its best is still superior to poor computer generated imagery (CGI...

...Stevenson's Mr...

...If they know their dominance is inevitable, don't they know that all three films prove resistance is just as inevitable...

...It is hard to imagine him joining the team...

...The most mysterious member of the group is its one woman, Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), the heroine of Bram Stoker's Dracula...

...Harryhausen gave life to clay figures through a painstaking process, moving their bodies ever so slightly and shooting them one frame at a time...

...But the filmmakers dumb down the original authors' conceptions of their characters, draining them of life and turning them into so many photogenic action stars...

...On the whole, T3 is as engrossing as X2, despite its reprising many elements of the second Terminator...

...The first two movies, written and directed by James Cameron, each ended on a note of hope...

...Squeezing humanity out of their imagery, these movies let ticket buyers enjoy carnage in decadent passivity...

...Armed with knowledge of how the machines would take over the world, the heroes of the second film not only destroyed their enemy, they crushed the company that produced the evil automatons...

...The Matrix exults in exploding skyscrapers and decapitation exercises...

...But their plots are full of twists, their characters bigger than life, their action sequences and special effects imaginative...

...Last year's biggest moneymaker (Spider-Mari) and one of its most critically acclaimed pictures (The Road to Perdition) were inspired by what today's aficionados refer to as "graphic novels...

...government is trying to locate them and wipe them out...

...But because the filmmakers never heard a $ 10 word they didn't like, the debates on these decisions stretch into lengthy disquisitions...

...Hanyhausen's goal was to put his creatures in the human world by making them look as real as possible...

...I doubt that Mark Twain's Tom would sign up for the U.S...

...Set in 1899, it gathers heroes from famous 19th-century novels to do battle against a megalomaniac bent on world domination...

...Because Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and Pirates of the Caribbean adopt similar techniques, their attempts at levity fail...

...In The Matrix Reloaded, Neo (Keanu Reeves) faces off against 100 evil agents out to kill him...

...they are loyal...

...As in the first Matrix, the directors often freeze the action in the middle of fight scenes, suspending characters in midleapjustbefore they kick some sucker in the face...

...the triumph at the end of 72 merely postponed it...

...Wells' protagonist (Tony Curran...

...These satiric postapocalyptic tales about the dangers of modem technology recall the strips of the late Jack Kirby, perhaps our greatest comic-book artist, whosel970s works, like Machine Man and Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, I read avidly when I was young...

...Cyclops (James Marsden) must wear heavy, suspicious-looking protective goggles at all times to control laser beams streaming continually from his eyes...

...At the end of Stoker's novel, Mina is released from the vampire's spell...

...No matter how often the scantily clad stars of the former grin, no matter how brashly the rogues of the latter swagger, all their human energy is processed and canned by effects shots as labored as they are flashy...

...The filmmakers leave Haggard's Quartermain little to do except teach Sawyer how to shoot people in the back...

...But the yarn is engaging and the filmmakers cleverly complicate it along the way, stretching the tensions of the first X-Men movie...

...While the effects were state-of-the art at the time, the use of matte shots and rear projection is not hard to detect...

...The animators of Hulkand The Matrix deliberately do the opposite, drawing their audience into areality that is distinctly virtual...

...It is astonishing how well a movie like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad holds up visually...

...Naturally, he is stopped moments before he can execute his plan to start World War I a decade and a half too early...

...Much of their tension does not involve special effects...

...Their awful verbiage, however, only extends them to intolerable lengths...

...Hanyhausen's 1958 work has a lot in common with today's comic-book movies: The acting is indifferent, and the crises are trivial...

...Our killer babe can transform her arms into laser cannons or flame throwers...

...The T-X possesses the same abilities, but the focus is on the hardware invented for this outing...

...Secret Service, and I don't remember Verne's Captain Nemo having expertise in martial arts...

...The initial stands for "Moriarty," the nemesis of the Sherlock Holmes stories...

...After a few sessions of such gabble, I experienced a sensation I had not felt since the last Quentin Tarantino movie: I wanted the characters to shut up and start killing each other so I could pack up and go home...

...I think this excess keeps the film fresh...

...Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), a powerful telepath who runs a school for so-called "gifted" youngsters, where he trains mutants to do good, must join forces with his rival Magneto (Ian McKellen), who believes mutants, as superior beings, should eliminate humans and rule the planet...

...In the film he appears as a monstrous troll, bursting with muscle, a second-rate Hulk...

...Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr...

...The new Sinbadmovie, though entirely animated, mixes different technologies even more ineptly than these live-action pictures...

...T3 succeeds as a long, well-choreographed chase in the spirit of Mostow's earlier, and better, Breakdown...

...The summer's foremost blockbusters retain some of Kirby's harsh poetry...

...The best of the genre, which includes George Miller's Mad Max movies and Paul Verhoeven's Robocop, are certainly crass and violent...

...One aspect of T3 leaves a bad aftertaste...

...What does it mean when the only warm, gentle American movie of the season concerns the tribulations of cartoon fish...

...an invisible man who stole the formula from H.G...

...The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is equally logy, but the idea behind it is so thrilling that for a while I was willing to excuse the awkward tempo and clunky dialogue...

...The same cannot be said for The Matrix Reloaded, Hulk or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen...

...But the clay figures had the advantage of being as three-dimensional as the performers...

...Like the Wachowski brothers, Lee is so obsessed with hackneyed ideas that he drowns the film in portentous gloom...

...and Alan Quartermain (Sean Connery), the adventurer in the novels of H. Rider Haggard...

...a grown-up Tom Sawyer(Shane West...

...Thankfully, this time out he plays down the first film's trivializing references to racism and the Holocaust...

...While modern animators can easily delete the seams from shots that integrate different technologies, their computer graphics still fail to interact convincingly with actors...

...When spectators are constantly reminded that the brutality on screen is fake, they can view it without sympathy or identification...

...When he wreaks havoc, we focus less on the damage he does than on how fake he looks...

...In 72, the special effects crew made much of the adversary's capacity to take any shape and to reconstitute itself after being riddled with bullets or slashed to pieces...

...For example, the evil machines that rule the earth in the future again send a killer robot back to the present with orders to eliminate the leaders of the human revolution while they are still young and unable to resist...

...Every time Rogue (Anna Paquin) touches other people, they wither in her grasp, a talent that comes in handy during a fight but puts a crimp in her love life...

...As derivative as their titles sound, X2 and T3 stay afloat because their craftsmanship does not rely on CGI alone...

...Luckily, this irritating paradox is not a central concern...

...Its Victorian trappings notwithstanding, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is merely another bastard child of the Bond franchise...

...I don't think I have ever heard dialogue as convoluted as that of Larry and Andy Waehowski, who wrote and directed The Matrix Reloaded...

...Based on a superhero magazine created in the early 1960s by Kirby and his longtime collaborator, the writer Stan Lee, X2 reflects the recent vintage in taking itself too seriously...

...Their directors and technicians use animation sparingly and choreograph action sequences credibly, so viewers can tell where the characters are moving from shot to shot...

...The characters are hand-drawn, but various CGI technologies were employed to create backgrounds and creatures...

...Nor would anyone who has seen The Matrix Reloaded be surprised to leam that it was written and directed by former comic book writers...

...Though slightly less talky, Hulk also features nonsensical dialogue that confuses the proceedings...

...A well-done comic book movie can be fun...

...The amazingly agile Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) can vanish in a cloud of smoke and reappear instantly in another spot, but his mutant genes have given him pointed ears, a tail and blue skin, so that he has the appearance of a devil who has been holding his breath too long...

...T3, directed by Jonathan Mostow, revokes Cameron's concluding optimism...

...Director Bryan Singer's casting of powerhouse performers brings credibility to the film's contrivances—although Stewart is a little stiff from too often playing the fearless leader, and McKellen, a great actor, does not relish his villainous role as much as he ought to...

...The state of American literacy has fallen so low that when Hollywood gets a hankering to spend serious money on a familiar title now, it turns to subliterary sources...

...There is acentral plotline: Because mutants are (justifiably) feared by most of the populace, the U.S...

...ut I have a confession to make: Of the summer's blockbusters, my favorite is the only film animated entirely by computer...

...The picture is based on a strip by Alan Moore, a legendary writer of graphic novels who has lately become obsessed with Victorian England...

...The collection consists of Jules Verne's Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah...

...The slimy Hulk, a CGI creation, looks more claylike than Harryhausen's Titans...

...The heroes are a group of mutants, beings with genetic irregularities that endow them with unusual powers...

...It is appropriate that Connery, the original James Bond, addresses the mastermind who assembles the team by the code name "M...

...Still, Singer cleverly juggles the adolescent angst of the teen mutants and a love triangle among the adults as all fight to make the world safe for mutantkind...

...In June the cable television station Turner Classic Movies ran a festival devoted to Ray Harryhausen, a master of stop motion animation...

...Again, too, the humans of the future send back a cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course) who is programmed to protect their younger selves...

...Dialogue stirs the excitement...

...His trolls, dragons and skeletons were then superimposed on live action...

...A pair of pirate pictures, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas and Pirates of the Caribbean—adapted, respectively, from an oft-filmed Arabian Nights story and a Disney theme park ride—also employ the techniques of comic book films, albeit less successfully...

...This cynical revision of Cameron's open concept of destiny renders the machines' time travel irrelevant...

...Finding Nemo is the latest in a series of excellent pictures from Pixar studios that has included the Toy Story films and A Bug's Life...

...Its human elements, the actors who voice the creatures, have been selected marvelously...

...Wilde's Dorian Gray is an esthete who wouldn't care one way or another whether the world were destroyed...

...Though less sophisticated than the opposition's killing machine called the T-X, it nevertheless manages, through self-sacrifice, to carry out its mission...

...Those abilities have rendered them social outcasts, however...

...Hyde is a diminutive, spidery creature, agile and creeping...

...Furthermore, besides simulating the natural movement of living beings better than some of the other films I have mentioned, Finding Nemo presents characters who behave in socially positive ways...

...It serves the savage impulses of its viewers without allowing them to associate its simulated mayhem with reallife problems like terrorism at home or war abroad...

...Not to be outdone, the sequels Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines rely even more heavily than their predecessors did on smashbang effects and busty conceptions of the human anatomy (both male and female) typical of the cartoon mentality...

...The actor leaps into the air and is abruptly replaced by a computer mockup...

...She can stick a probe into any machine and reprogram it to do her will...

...When Schwarzenegger returns, he reports that the rise of machines is inevitable...

...The brilliant scientist Bruce Banner (Eric Bana), pelted by gamma radiation, finds that whenever he grows angry he is transformed into a huge, rampaging monster...

...Even stripped to the vestiges, the group might have generated considerable excitement if director Stephen Norrington and screenwriter James Dale Robinson knew what to do after putting it together...

...Into this story director Ang Lee (no relation to Stan) drops a load of New Age psychobabble about Bruce's repressed memory, his abusive father (Nick Nolte) and his Oedipal complex...

...Jumping from motionlessness into slow and then fast motion, the film continually pulls the audience out of real space and time...

...Hyde (Jason Flemyng...

...Albert Brooks is a riot in the lead, and Allison Janney, Austin Pendleton, Geoffrey Rush, Ellen DeGeneres (as a fish suffering from shortterm memory loss), Barry Humphries (as a shark that is desperately trying to become a vegetarian), and the film's director, Andrew Stanton (as a turtle with a surfer's vocal intonations), acquit themselves brilliantly...

...they express love...

...Set almost entirely underwater, it concerns the adventures of a clownfish trying to rescue his son, who has been caught by fishermen and imprisoned in a tank at a dentist's office in Sydney, Australia...

...The result is a dim hodgepodge...

...Despite the presence of Bruce's luminous girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly) the movie's lugubrious pace and otherwise scowling faces sink it like a stone...

...Some critics have complained that an overflow of characters and storylines in X2 splinters its narrative and creates confusion...

...They make friends...

...Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend...

...The upshot of almost every explanatory speech is that the crisis at hand requires the heroes to make a choice...

...Once past the premise, they plunge into a string of poorly choreographed fight scenes, culminating in several drawn-out climaxes in the lair of the arch villain...

...Here she remains undead and violates Stoker's supernatural lore by surviving in daylight and controlling her thirst for blood...

...With the well of old television shows running dry, the next fount of ready material is the comic book...

...The film's foregrounds and backgrounds are entirely consistent, and it's possible to lose yourself in vast seas void of cinematic pops and glitches...

...Jekyll and Mr...

...LikeX?, it does not waste time batting about moral and philosophical ideas beyond the grasp of its creators...

...Maybe their screenwriters felt that by filling characters' mouths with pseudointellectual chatter they would gain credibility with more discriminating viewers...

...This season Hulk, X2 and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have continued the trend...

...The picture is based on another '60s work of Lee and Kirby...

...This single wry allusion reveals the film's true colors...

...The idea has great potential...