SOME HEROES SAVE US, OTHERS NEED SAVING

“It’s not my war,” says Shia LaBeouf’s Sam in “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” “I fear it soon will be,” replies the heavy-hearted towering steel of Optimus Prime. And we know, in that moment, that despite his wish to be just an ordinary guy, Sam will become the reluctant warrior. For us, sacrifices will be made. The world will be made safe. We will be saved.

And that is one reason why I love summer so. Sci-fi and super-charged heroes once again rule. Conjured up out of fantasy rather than the heightened reality of a Bourne or a Bond, they range widely and wildly through darkly imagined places saturated by menace, where treachery lurks in unexpected corners and even more unexpected shapes, and destruction rains down with a fire-and-brimstone force. All that is alien and strange nevertheless eerily echoes the everyday with a sort of video veracity that can induce chills.

Then magically, like Prozac with popcorn, the lights go up and I can shake the devil off my shoulders and walk away. The stories may disappear like vapor, but the images of the heroes linger for they are, after all, really what it’s all about. Done right, the fuel-injected worlds they stalk and the battles they wage -- whether the enemy is an entirely different species or comes courtesy of our advancing technology -- make for satisfying cinema and not just for you Y-chromosome carriers. Inside all of that roaring testosterone there is much that is appealing, amusing and moving for the rest of us, as box-office numbers would suggest.

This summer’s heroes may go boldly, but in every case, someone has gone many times before: three earlier “X-Men” and “Terminators”; one earlier Michael Bay “Transformers,” a 1984 animated film and the pervasive TV series; and countless iterations of “Star Trek” on every size screen known to modern man.

It hasn’t been easy to be the fresh prince this year.

Yet on they came in their own distinctive ways. For “Terminator’s” Christian Bale and Sam Worthington, martyrdom drips like sweat from their brows. Others swagger with a cocky smile and an endearing arrogance, as Chris Pine does in director J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek.” There is the tortured struggle with a darker animal nature, as is Hugh Jackman’s fate in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” or, like LaBeouf’s Sam, there is the boy David facing off whatever Goliath happens to be tearing up the town.

Most of us have long since gotten past the notion that superheroes and the comic books and graphic novels they’re so often rooted in are merely kids’ stuff, having intellectualized their political and social undercurrents to death in recent years. But it’s always interesting to look at our current boys of summer to see who we’re looking to save us these days, why certain actors carry the mantle so vividly and why others struggle.

Consider Bale. One of the most intensely interesting actors around, he must have seemed the perfect match for the gritty, deconstructed post-apocalyptic future director McG and screenwriters John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris envisioned for “Terminator Salvation.” But he isn’t. The interior force field that works so well for him underneath the “Dark Knight’s” mask is exactly what is working against him in “Salvation,” a rebel-with-a-cause story that has Bale’s John Connor leading an underground resistance.

Unfortunately for John Connor, to say nothing of the resistance, a leader of men Bale is not, or at least that’s not a role he’s been able to get his head around. His very essence seems to be solitary, which is why he was far better as Batman with that no-friends-are-required existence than as Connor, the man destined to save the human race from the “Terminator’s” relentless killing machines, embodied by Arnold Schwarzenegger before he went political on us.

Bale’s appeal is the icy certainty of survival that you feel deep in your bones any time you see him. That steel is at the center of his pilot in Werner Herzog’s “Rescue Dawn.” You believed he could survive the impossibly harsh, torturous Laotian prison and an escape into an even more unforgiving jungle. Though others start the journey with him, he walks out of the jungle alone.

But cold never draws men close, and that is why it is Sam Worthington’s man/machine hybrid Marcus who emerges as the one you want to follow in “Salvation.” The accidental hero, charisma hanging easy on his broad shoulders like an old coat, Worthington claims every scene he is in. His is an empathy you can feel -- he did good not because it is right, which is Bale’s motivation, but because he cares.

One of Worthington’s strengths is that ability to make his vulnerability accessible, that sense of a shared humanity easy for the rest of us to embrace. Cut from the same action/fantasy cloth, his next films -- “Avatar” and “Clash of the Titans” -- feel filled with promise.

Breaking the mold

Pine’s James T. Kirk, on the other hand, has to search for the good inside the bad boy, and he does it brilliantly, without question my favorite hero this summer. In Kirk, Pine embodies the kind of confidence-infused machismo that made Harrison Ford’s Han Solo so appealing in “Star Wars” years ago. Even before Pine’s Kirk beats the Kobayashi Maru test, you know behind those startlingly blue eyes is a strategic brain to be reckoned with, to say nothing of the sexual potency that vibrates around him.

It is always a risk to take on a deeply familiar character, particularly one like Capt. Kirk, whom William Shatner breathed a very specific life into beginning in the ‘60s with the TV series. Even John Belushi’s “Saturday Night Live” satire of Kirk couldn’t have been so rich without the Shatner blueprint. Pine has to figure out how to create Kirk anew without alienating the cult of the old and is greatly helped by a fine-tuned script from Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.

Though Pine has been around since 2003 in smaller roles -- remember him in last year’s “Bottle Shock”? -- it took “Star Trek” to launch him into the public consciousness. From the moment he settles into the captain’s chair, a new Kirk is born. This Kirk feels as if he has just run off the football field after executing a flawless Hail Mary. He is the jock who can deliver in a tight spot and go home with the prom queen after the game.

There is a special place in the movie universe for those who find vulnerability inside the brawl, Brando in “On the Waterfront” being the epitome. True, Pine never has to dig all that deep, but the power of those eyes make you long for a movie that will demand it.

Everyman as hero

The thin reed of LaBeouf comes with a very different sort of power. Not unlike Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man, LaBeouf, as “Transformers’ ” Sam Witwicky, embodies the boy next door. He’s the not-quite-grown kid who shouldn’t have to carry so much on his still awkward shoulders, but then that’s just the hand he’s been dealt.

Sam is the sort of hesitant hero that requires LaBeouf to keep his feet firmly planted in both the ordinary and the exceptional at all times, something that LaBeouf pulls off with aplomb.

It’s there in his panic-stricken eyes as he faces off against a 10-story machine that appears to be indestructible, and it’s still there as he fends off the advances of a too-hot-to-handle blond. LaBeouf has figured out how to let Sam live in that netherworld where he never pushes past his fear but never runs from it either.

His is the sort of hero who seems most like the rest of us and it is much of why we embrace him, this Clark Kent without benefit of the cape and tights. But there is strength in that attenuated face and the set of his jaw that is always reassuring. It’s as if we’re watching him grow into manhood before us. And there is the pure charm LaBeouf brings to the moments between the mayhem when the brainy boy with a goofy sense of fun can emerge again.

One great disappointment of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” written by Ehren Kruger, Orci and Kurtzman (yes, Orci and Kurtzman are having twice the fun this summer), is that Bay makes so little room for LaBeouf to move. The actor loses precious screen time to the relentless machine versus machine battles, and the movie suffers as a result.

And then there is the curious case of Jackman, whose strange hair and retractable adamantium claws are the heart and soul of director Gavin Hood’s “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.” He is undeniably powerful, with abs so six-packed they cast shadows, and handsome in a crisply, clean-cut kind of way. The problem is he needs to get his sexy back or to find it in the first place.

Although superheroes don’t really have time for intense relationships and they’re seldom caught taking secret trips to Argentina for steamy rendezvous, they still need to generate the heat of sexual possibility. We want them to concentrate on saving the world, but for that to be believable there needs to be a deep well of passion doing some kind of slow boil somewhere underneath the cool, hot, cocky or not exterior.

In this, Jackman is not just too cool, it’s as if the pilot light were turned off long ago. Yes, everything in “Wolverine,” written by David Benioff and Skip Woods, is set off when his nights with Lynn Collins’ Kayla Silverfox end with her apparent murder. But still . . .

When we first see him rolling out of those tangled sheets, you have the sneaky suspicion he’s gotten up hours ago to brush his teeth and mousse his hair. A super superhero he is not.

But never fear, there are more prospects on the way. “G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra,” with Dennis Quaid and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, lands next month; James Cameron’s “Avatar,” with Worthington, comes in December; and in just a few weeks “G-Force” hits with a gang of guinea pigs out to prove you don’t have to wear pants, much less have a cape, to save the world.

I can’t wait.

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betsy.sharkey@latimes.com