Time actually equals money in Andrew Niccol's (Gattaca, The Truman Show) latest adventure, starring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried. That analogy is about as heavy-handed as you can possibly imagine and even if you can get past the social commentary, you'll still have to sit through nearly two hours' worth of enormous plot holes, uninteresting mysterious backstories and what is essentially a shoddy mash-up of Logan's Run and Bonnie and Clyde.

I'm sure you've heard of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots: The Movie by now, but just in case you haven't, Real Steel is a family-friendly(ish) action flick set in a near-future where BattleBots is no longer confined to early '00s Comedy Central lineups but instead is all the rage in modern society -- think boxing with more theatrics. The film follows has-been Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) and his estranged son Max (Dakota Goyo) as they compete in the wild world of competitive robot fighting with their long-shot junkyard-found machine boxer, all while coincidentally building their father-son relationship. Now, whether you think that premise sounds amazing, campy or absurdly terrible when translated to film, you are correct. I went into the movie hoping to have some fun and see a few dirty robots get the motors kicked out of them, and I'm happy to say Real Steel delivered the goods. Here's what else I got just for sitting through it:

Full disclosure: I, like many of the people who will go to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes this weekend, have never actually seen an entire Apes film from start to finish. I have, however, watched the famous clips, know the plotlines and have all of the Simpsons references committed to memory. I tell you this because instead of going into this film as a fan of the franchise, I wanted to view it more as standalone summer blockbuster. I believe that even if I was a diehard Aper (that's what y'all are called, right?), I wouldn't feel a substantial amount of yearning to know the complete origin story of exactly how the apes came to take over earth by the year 3978 -- or, I suppose, 5021, if you're a Tim Burton fan . The premise makes sense and everything as a movie, but it can also just be summed up in two words: crazy science.

When you're watching a high-concept summer blockbuster with a seemingly can't-miss title like Cowboys & Aliens, the emotion you least expect (or hope) to experience is boredom. But that's the central feeling inspired by this surprisingly pedestrian and unimaginative combination of a square-jawed Western and an alien invasion-themed science-fiction picture. For all the admittedly impressive firepower on display onscreen and the many talented folks working in front of and behind the camera (including stars Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, director Jon Favreau, and a screenwriting team that includes Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof), Cowboys & Aliens is remarkably uninvolving. It's not just low-energy -- at times the film barely seems to have a pulse.

The superhero Green Lantern was original created way back in 1940, while a 1959 update cast Hal Jordan as the lone human representative of the galaxy-spanning Green Lantern Corps. Made up of a physically diverse group of aliens, the Corps acts as a sort of interplanetary police force, with a pair of partner Lanterns assigned to each sector of space. And while I've been reading the comics for years, it's only with the onslaught of footage from the upcoming Ryan Reynolds movie that I've started to realize how much another movie borrowed from them 25 years ago.

Despite their subject matter, dystopic, post-apocalyptic films can be a lot of fun if you let them. Doomsday, for instance, took the nightmare concept of Escape From New York and wisely inserted the manic action and crazy characters of Road Warrior. But when your world is already ridiculously bleak, there's no need to drain the color out of it as well, both literally and figuratively. In Priest, the world is all blacks and greys -- the cities, the desert, the vampire hives, even the vampires are all shades of bleh. And the dialogue is so cookie-cutter that it might as well be grey, too, along with the leaping-through-the-air and-throwing-bladed-weapons-in-slo-mo action sequences. But, while it all feels done to death, it at least touches on a variety of genres, and occasionally has a flash of quirkiness and inventiveness that hints at what the movie might have been, if it wasn't a mostly generic sci-fi flick.

The first trailer for the Planet of the Apes prequel/remake/reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, has hit the Internet, and it looks pretty great. That's mostly because it looks nothing like Tim Burton's overwrought remake of Planet from 2001, but also because it seems to borrow as much from recent horror films as it does Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the 1972 film that it partially draws on. Here are the other movies I couldn't help but think of as I watched the trailer.

Time travel movies always raise such interesting paradoxes. Would you kill Hitler as a baby? Would you attempt to profit from your knowledge of the future? Or would you prevent some of the worst movies ever made from coming to fruition? The science-fiction genre has long been a haven for the mediocre, even the awful, usually due to the belief that everything else is secondary to the sci-fi concept, and while the 1950s and '60s are famous for their goofy schlock as well as their timeless masterworks, there are plenty of high-profile targets from the past few decades that could disappear, and nobody would care. The day we get perfect our source code technology, we're going back and killing these in the script stage.

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are like the geek community's Laurel and Hardy. After Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, putting them together in a movie -- even without Edgar Wright at the helm -- is like mixing up a batch of nerd Kool-Aid, and we're all gonna drink it. But while the Greg Mottola-directed Paul is packed with plenty of references to comic books, Comic-Con and science fiction, it's also a raunchfest worthy of the Superbaddirector. So if you're a nerd who likes dick jokes, you'll be McLovin' it, but otherwise it's just a fun road trip comedy that somehow manages to be less than the sum of its parts. Think of it as Fanboys with two Brits and an alien, and minus Kristen Bell.

Los Angeles has been defeated. Yes, there were aliens involved, but that doesn't matter. The Marines at the center of Battle: Los Angeles could have been fighting the Girl Scouts of America, and they still would have fallen prey to the three classic villains of Hollywood: bad writing, bad acting and poor cinematography. Actually, Girl Scouts would have been an improvement over the alien invaders of B:LA (pronounced "blah") because I would actually have to give a writer credit for daring to pen a battle between Marines and Girl Scouts. Plus, I would understand the limitations of child actors, and I wouldn't be so disappointed in the movie's inability to clearly show me what a Girl Scout looked like. Also, the Girl Scouts probably would have been much scarier and more effective opponents than the bumbling, yet somehow successful ETs in this film.