Despite complexities, summer heroes still find time to save the world

"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.