Powered armor, that makes you superstrong and really hard to blow up or shoot, without being born on another planet, or being exposed to radiation when whoever is in charge of the consequences for that sort of thing isn't paying attention, is one of the coolest science fiction concepts ever, and is almost never seen, because that would be too awesome, and a film industry that has Cameron Diaz, Charlize Theron & Angelina Jolie but prefers to put Drew Barrymore, Julia Roberts and Gwyneth Paltrow in movies, hates us.

I get why the artsy types are going to be disappointed with a filmmaking paradigm that appeals to the lowest common denominator, but how does increased capacity for violence and destruction NOT DO THAT? Even when they get all the elements handed to them on a silver platter by a previously successful property, they screw it up by giving us things nobody asked for. When they made Transformers, instead of giant robots fighting each other, they focussed on a stammering loser and his relationship with the only Transformer that couldn't talk because the filmmakers and only the filmmakers arbitrarily decided he couldn't. Given that you can't show all robots and only robots, I am given to understand that Michael Bay who made "The Rock" wanted to focus on the soldiers, but Steven Speilberg who never made anything a fraction as good, important or socially relevant, much less ever had a successful film idea he didn't steal from a book, wanted to take a step back from badass alien helpers and protectors to remake E.T., about an alien that was useless baggage, and went home after screwing up everyone's life. This is the kind of brain that's allowed to make the calls in Hollywood, while Michael Bay, who at least has a vague glimmer of a clue, is universally ridiculed, despite being a much more original filmmaker. In a similar vein, Pacific Rim, KNEW its appeal was giant robots fighting giant monsters, spent way too much of its running time on MORE nerds running around stammering and pilots being forced to learn how to work together, because the filmmakers, again arbitrarily, decided that was how their giant robots worked, in service to nothing other than their sybaritic lifestyles so deadening their pleasure centers and emotions that they felt the need to invent a motivating issue for their "characters" when for normal people "punching a giant alien monster in a multi-story robot, and using a cargo ship as a bludgeon" is a motivation complete and whole unto itself! That one was entrusted to Benico del Toro. When your entire film style is "inventing things that look wierd because the parts go together wrong", it's a good bet you're going to screw up something as can't miss as "Voltron vs Godzilla, without fucking around as lions". If you are trying to appeal to an international market, why force in a subplot to create a romance between the Asian character and the American? Asians and Americans are the most racist & xenophobic people on Earth! You don't appeal to them both with miscegenation! Russians are close behind them, and you are not going to please a Russian audience by wrecking their characters' robot in one fight, so you can satisfy your art-school urges to have the characters whine about their loss, instead having the robots STAY in the movie to fight more monsters.

And then, there is powered armor. All the violence of giant robots, but with none of the mistrust-worthy alien robot brains, and no room for a second person in there to require teamwork. It's superpowers, without appalling science or tedious children. It's combining superpowers and war movies. It lets you make badguys as tough or huge as you want, and still be plausible, and letting the humans be human, even getting out of the armor or the walker machine to bone if you really must explore relationships.

So now they are coming out with a film called "Edge of Tommorrow" where Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt do all that, including, presumably, getting out of the armor to bone, except I have a really bad feeling about it. First of all, look at that picture: http://collider.com/wp-content/uploads/edge-of-tomorrow-poster.jpg/

You know what it's missing? ARMOR! It's just an exoskeleton. So he can, what, carry a gun? Soldiers do that without things that make them taller and less able to hide. Punch harder? You know the problem with that? It's where the enemy shoots you in your exposed crotch, abdomen, shoulders, arms or inner thighs, where the fastest bleedout artery in your body is located!!!! A much better use for the strength presumably offered by that exoskeleton is ARMOR plating! And now the latest trailers show Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle through the countryside, which is shot in a kind of wistful, war-torn, yearning for the boring shit that was lost when we had a war involving something approximating powered armor kind of way.

It's not like they have any kind of history of getting this right.

First, they adapted Starship Troopers, which had two things going for it. Some interesting philosophizing, and awesome awesome powered armor, operated by the most thoroughly, brutally and rigorously trained soldiers in the history of the human race. Obviously, you can't have much of a movie with the first thing, at least without drastic rewrites of the script. Okay, what's left in the book should make an awesome action movie, right? Wrong. No powered armor, just crap ripped off from the Colonial Marines in "Aliens" to remind audiences of a much better-done film, with scarier aliens called 'bugs'. Oh, and the largely hispanic cast was replaced with WASPs who can't act. ALL that movie had going for it was powered armor, and they wasted their CGI budget on making insects that looked like ordinary bugs, but bigger. The whole POINT was that powered armor allowed a human infantryman to go toe to toe with the most perfectly evolved physical organism ever encountered and win. The book was exclusively about the infantry, because the powered armor made artillery, tanks and ground-attack aircraft obsolete. Take away the powered armor, and the "heroes" are just a bunch of morons who fight an enemy only capable of hand-to-hand combat on their own terms.

Then there was "Avatar". After a bunch of awesome films about soldiers who fight aliens and killer robots, James Cameron made ALL the money from a lame, trite love story about two morons with the survival instincts of lemmings dressed up with a bunch of CGI. He learned it so well that he did it again with "Avatar", and while luring people into the theater with shots of all the cool future hardware, that rarely got used, or deployed stupidly so that naked hippies could take it all down. They had this awesome-looking walker vehicle, except the entire FRONT (you know, the part that on REAL military vehicles is the most heavily armored? ) was glass. And the focus of the awesome future hardware in the movie was some lame-ass clone-telepathy thing that could let real people pretend to be aliens. It's like Cameron took a look at Warhammer 40000 and asked himself "How can I gay this up, AND come up with enemies even more silly than Space Cockroaches, Space Elves, Space Orcs, Space Demons and Undead Robots?” And so Space Indians were born.

After that, came GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which ALMOST got it right, where the GI Joe team had awesome power armor, straight out of Heinlein, but expressed their disdain for it by only using it once, and making their two newest recruits wear it. When they made a much better sequel, that focused on ninjas and added Bruce Willis, Adrienne Palicki, Ray Stevenson & Dwayne Johnson, the powered armor was tainted by the stupidity of the first movie, and left out of this own. Though they DID show exactly how stupid Avatar’s ending was by demonstrating that putting the military in orbit trumps even nukes, much less Space Indians with rape-steeds, whose equivalent of a Death-Star exhaust port is a giant tree you couldn’t miss if you tried.

The closest they have come to getting it right has been the Iron Man franchise, where they pretty much ruin the armor concept by eliminating all the big badass armor in favor of something that looks cool on a comic book page, but with any sort of realism applied, is like trading a tank or armored hummer for a Ferrari. Sure, it’s a better pussy magnet (which to be fair to the filmmakers would probably be a major motivation for Tony Stark), but the other ones stop bullets better, which I kind of thought was the point of armor. And of course, they undermine a lot of the awesome of powered armor by leaving it exclusively in the hands of a douchey man-child with a drinking problem and appalling taste in women.

Sure there is an argument to be made about the wrong user misusing technology, but wouldn’t Captain America be trustworthy? He even is willing to take along a black sidekick in apparently slightly inferior gear, just like Tony. Also, I suspect Steve Rogers might actually notice if they swapped his black friend between movies. He might have been from the 40s but at least they don’t all look alike to him. Or, if Hawkeye is so cool, tough and badass, think of how much more effective he’d be IN POWERED ARMOR. Then maybe he wouldn’t be taken out of a fight when a skinny girl grabbed his weapon and forced him to wrestle for it!

But, no. Instead, the Iron Man series comes to the point where it might be better called, “Flesh and Blood Man” as Tony wanders around spending more time being tinkering with or carrying rather than wearing, his powered armor, and using it for nut-shots, parlor tricks or trapeze acts, while getting his ass whaled on by actual soldiers using only exploding steroids that seem to be more handicap than help. He also came close to losing to Jeff Bridges who was wearing his armor for the first time, suggesting that he either made superior armor, or was a superior fighter to Tony, indicating that either the suit could have been improved, or the wearer. Speaking of which, that last movie showed that Iron Man is not just one suit that requires Tony’s or Jim’s unique abilities to interface with it, but he actually has a whole platoon’s worth of the damn things, which he keeps to himself, before blowing them all up to appease his horrid girlfriend. When they are capable of fighting with no body inside, they are not so much “armor” as “hollow robots”, which Iron Man 2 and every genre movie ever, at least before “Transcendence” put me to sleep, has demonstrated is a bad idea.

Yes, I know I went a bit afield on Iron Man, but the fact that I have all those issues to address shows what kind of crap they are cluttering the movies up with, instead of focusing on powered armor and the cool stuff you can do with it. Didn’t we used to put comic book fans in lockers where they belong? Why do we insist on making movies ridiculously faithful to their source material to please them, at the expense of all verisimilitude and unexplored badassery, when fans of real books like “Game of Thrones” and “Starship Troopers” get a giant middle finger from Hollywood?

And now, we get “Amazing Spider-Man 2.” The trailers promised three villains. One was a weird blue ghost that looked like a racist caricature, the other was a rehash of the villain from the prior, inferior trilogy, and the third, was a guy in powered armor! With a rhinoceros theme and missiles! And played by the best actor of the three villains (much like Norman Osborne, who died without doing anything other than creeping out his son, who doesn’t look so much like his son as yet another Oscorp hybrid monstrosity, blending the genetic material of Leonardo DiCaprio and Jimmi Simpson)! Should be awesome, right? I mean, if the armor is designed to resemble a rhino instead of a sports car, that indicates a basic understanding of what powered armor should be doing, right? HAHAHAHAHA! Suckers!

The Rhino-Armor is the biggest scam from the Hollywood marketing teasers since “The Grey” which promised Liam Neeson punching wolves, and delivered a maudlin adolescent exploration of the idea of facing death! Every action shot of that guy is already in the trailers! Just like how “The Grey” trailer showed Neeson charging into battle against the wolves, implying you’d get to see the collision between an apex predator and a man with “certain skills” in exchange for the price of a ticket, only to cut to black after showing not one second past what you’d already seen. Same thing where Spider-Man uses a manhole cover on a web as a bludgeoning weapon, with the credits rolling an instant before it hits. And the armor is used in the best creative tradition of Hollywood (which is to say not at all, since all good movies are ripped off from books, plays, history or toys anyway), where the wearer repeatedly opens the front of it to taunt the police. I understand deBlasio is hell-bent on shackling the NYPD into ineffectiveness, but you’d think at least they’d be allowed to shoot the bad guy when he opens a three-foot wide hole in his otherwise impervious robo-rhino suit! Especially when he’s doing so while all but announcing his intention to do bodily harm to a small child directly in front of him.

You know what made that all the worse? The theater I saw it in showed a commercial for “Titanfall” an X-box game developed by people who at least vaguely grasp the awesome appeal of powered armor/walkers!