(My Contributions to) The Dissolve's 50 Greatest Summer Blockbusters

Ricardo Montalban's Khan was Star Trek's greatest villain.

Nuclear Family: Eddie Furlong, Linda Hamilton, and Arnold Schwarzenegger fight the future in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Minority Report, Steven Spielberg's most Hitchcockian film, was all about not being able to trust what you were seeing.

It's only July 1, but thanks to the ever-accelerating start date of the summer movie season -- it kicked off the first weekend of April this year, when Captain America: The Winter Soldier came out -- summer movies are done. I still want to see Snowpiercer, which will roll out to Washington, DC this week, but the less-than-enthusiastic early notices from critics I respect has tempered my enthusiasm for that. There's no Dark Knight coming in two weeks. There's no Terminator 2: Judgment Day opening at midnight tomorrow night. Does that sadden me? It does, a little! Shut up.

Anyway, I was honored to be one of a dozen critics who determined -- through three rounds of voting -- the 50 Greatest Summer Blockbusters for The Dissolve. Numbers 50-31 were posted yesterday; 30-11 went up today. Tomorrow you'll all find out what we deemed the Top Ten.

I had the honor of writing the entires for three of my favorites: Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, from 2002, which placed 46th; Nic Meyer's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, from 1982, which placed 37th; and at lucky no. 13, James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which is probably my personal all-time favorite summer movie. (I still love you, Jaws, but so does everyone else, and you arrived before I did. Whereas I had the experience of discovering T2's greatness at the same as the rest of the world.)

The process of choosing our 50 from the initial list of 655, I think it was, was fairly agonizing. Like any exercise is winnowing, it forces you to examine your priorities in art. I'll probably try to write about that this week. UPDATE: I did write about it.

Pros and Khans, or Star Trek into Dorkness: How the new movie reflects a 32-year-old battle for a 47-year-old franchise's soul.

I once attended a midnight screening of the Cadillac of Star Trek films -- that would be numero dos, The Wrath of Khan -- wherein the projector bulb burnt out right in the middle of Mr. Spock's heroic death scene. If the theater hadn't given us four free movie passes to compensate for this effrontery against all that is good and decent, I would have suspected an especially cruel prank, perhaps orchestrated by a partisan of the bloodless, squeaky-clean Next Generation-flavored Star Trek, which I suppose is okay if vanilla is what you like.

Naturally, I had to dig up my Khan DVD at home and watch the final 10 minutes before I could go to sleep that night. Spock's grand and tragic expiration would soon be reversed in a not-so-good movie with the surprise-negating subtitle The Search for Spock, but whatever.​

All of which is to say that my love for The Wrath of Khan is mean and true. And it fascinates me that that film, more than any other of the hundreds and hundreds of subsequent Star Trek items (a great number of which -- like the entire Deep Space Nine and Voyager and Enterprise series, for instance -- I've never seen or read), remains the primary source document that continues to guide the cinematic Star Trek universe, especially in the heavily Khan-indebted new movie Star Trek into Darkness.

J.J. Abrams' second Trek film  takes a generation-old, backstage fight over the meaning and purpose of Star Trek and drags it right to the center of the camera-flare-buffered frame. I make my case today on NPR's Monkey See blog.

​On further reflection, I guess The Wrath of Khan is really more like the Toyota Corolla of Trek than the Cadillac. It was the lowest-budgeted of the theatrical films by a good margin, and yet it's proven, three decades on, to be the most reliable one.

Oh, and I really wanted to quote John C. McGinley's unforgettable, rhymed description of Keanu Reeves' character in Point Break to describe Chris Pine's portrayal of the young horndog Kirk in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek pictures. Unsurprisingly, that didn't make it past Standards & Practices at NPR. But I tried, you guys. I tried.​