TV/Movies Megathread

[CountDeMoney]

"Fred, she's gotten her boobies!"

[garbon]

I did not gravitate to that one.

[HVC]

Star Trek into darkness. Meh. Looks pretty, but the plot holes appear often and run deep. [spoiler] not really spoilers, but to avoid any possible bitching, the made the Klingons look weird. And masks? A culture that's built on military prowess and bragging rights wouldn't hide their faces with identical masks. [/spoiler]

[CountDeMoney]

[spoiler] not really spoilers, but to avoid any possible bitching, the made the Klingons look weird. And masks? A culture that's built on military prowess and bragging rights wouldn't hide their faces with identical masks. [/spoiler]

That's pretty fucked up.  That's fucking with canon.

[garbon]

That's fucking with canon.

[HVC]

Then you'll be pissed how they switched up some of the pop culture stuff, though I found it somewhat original.

[Neil]

Except First Contact is not a great movie, but a bad movie.  The only ones worse are Insurrection and Nemesis (and Nemesis only arguably).  Pretty much all the TNG films are trash; Generations I give a pass only because it's nostalgic trash.  I would not trade the existence of all four of the TNG films for the first ten minutes of Star Trek V.  And it's not even that I don't like TNG; I just really, really dislike the TNG movies.

But that is, like, the only good part of First Contact.

Ide, I once had respect for you.  Now it's over.   

Seriously man, we don't agree at all on this 

If All Good Things had been a theatrical release, I'd give it an A+.

Star Trek Into Darkness, by contrast, I do not.  Can discuss more later, but for now I'm trying to figure out whether it was kind of bad or quite bad.

The problem is that they made the TNG movies in the mold of the original movies.  You could do a version of Kirk where he punches out the bad guy and gets the girl, and have it be in-character.  With Picard, it doesn't work.

[Neil]

"John Carter"

A quite enjoyable film.  I rather liked it.

That's what I've been saying.  Haters should die.

[Ideologue]

The only good reboot/comic book/tv adaptation is one that makes fans of the original weep hot tears of frustration.

Wrong.  It's completely uncorrelated.  Fanboys hated Watchmen, the best of all superhero films, but they loved the Dark Knight trilogy, which despite the softened heart I've developed for it, is problematic at best and produced only one movie worth praising without heaps of qualification.

***

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013).  There is a scene, toward the climax of Star Trek Into Darkness, where the Enterprise is rendered powerless to escape the gravity well of a planet, and plummets to its doom (it doesn't really, of course, but you knew that, or, if you watch it, you will).  During this scene, we see extras careen across hallways and principals use walls and ceilings as floors as up, right, and left become down, down, down in turn.  This sequence serves as summary for the whole of this film: its creators believe that it has weight, but it's really in free fall.  I saw Star Trek 11--I know they never understood it scientifically--but dramatically, Abrams and his screenwriters seemed to once have an understanding of gravity.  The one surprise Star Trek Into Darkness holds is that sometime between then and now they lost it.

This movie is such that each subsequent scene is worse than the one before it; it follows that the first scene in Star Trek Into Darkness should have been its last.  Kirk and McCoy are in the process of escaping the natives of breathtakingly alien world while Spock toils to save it from an erupting supervolcano. This is amazing to behold and your expectations rise and you believe that this will be a great movie.  You do not realize yet that they do not know what they're doing.  For a while, it is still salvageable; and there is abundant hope that they salvage it.

The turning point comes at the big "reveal" halfway through, which separates the good and sliding part of the movie from the precipitously worsening part.  Curiously, the "reveal" could only matter to those who are familiar with the Star Trek of old, and anyone new to the franchise will wonder why he's saying his name like that and why the score seems so damned interested.  It also involves some faintly hilarious casting, and while Benedict Cumberbatch's performance as a big meanie is serviceable, he's undercut by an underwritten part.  [spoiler]And, it must be said, not least by his alabastery corpse-like hue. He wasn't a Punjabi Sikh either, but at least Ricardo Montalban wassomewhat brown.[/spoiler]

After Cumberbatch blows some things up for evil [spoiler](but not really! but yes really; did we get you?)[/spoiler], a few vaguely interesting ideas about how to fight a war on terror are bandied about, and I am both excited and saddened momentarily as I realize that this is the closest I will ever get to a Deep Space Nine movie.  Then, naturally, a great deal of understaked action ensues, some of it well-choreographed,  and much of it rather badly shot.  Looming threats loom and then dissolve back into the ether.  Then some more twists happen that aren't really twists both because you've seen them before, and because you can see them within the fabric of the plot immediately as they begin to turn; inevitably, they become tiresome.  It would honestly be more surprising and probably more entertaining to have read a list of spoilers about the film than to actually watch the film and have each upcoming plot point spoonfed to you ten to twenty minutes before it occurs.  The movie leeches your natural excitement and gives back nothing of value except some laughs and the occasional prettiness.

The final act puts the corpse in the space coffin and shoots it right out the torpedo tube as Abrams and co. fail to recontextualize any of their stolen ideas into anything even approaching a fulfilling whole.  While Abrams' first Star Trek shocked when it destroyed Vulcan, this one bores as it baldly steals its moments, hollows them of any meaning or much interest, but never lets you forget how clever its purveyors quite inorrectly believe themselves to be.

I would have welcomed with open arms a well-executed remake of the source material so casually ripped off here.  Likewise, I would have adored a true reimagining that held novelty and surprise.  I don't much care at all if they understand why the old material was important to so many people--in fact, given the truly obscene level of fan service involved in the climax, I think they may have an inkling of that--I just wanted them to understand why the material they're reusing was good.  Then maybe they could have made something good too, instead of using famous lines nearly out of context and recycling famous scenes bereft of any of the emotion they held in their original form.  To me, it's not any kind of sacrilege; it's just shit.

Star Trek Into Darkness shares with its predecessor something of a saving grace, and that is the dialogue (at least the dialogue not lifted from elsewhere) and the performances of the principal cast, and their characters' interactions with each other.  Furthermore, this movie is extremely funny.  It's strange when a movie might have been significantly better if it had had no plot at all.

But a plot it has, however poorly unfolded, and while one must acknowledge that it escapes the sheer nonsense that somewhat undermined Star Trek 11, that's easier to do when you're turning it someone else's work.  That said, it's definitely a recommend if you like the idea of a movie made from a piece of garbagey Star Trek fan fiction with somewhat clever dialogue (though I sincerely believe much of it must be misspelled in the script) and a great cast of funny and well-meaning actors delivering it on the screen.  I hope you do like that, because that's what you're no doubt going to pay $10+ to go see.  C

P.S. Indeed, it's a  significantly worse movie than Iron Man 3--[spoiler]what they did with the Mandarin may have been a tragic mistake, but at least it was something new, interesting, and unexpected.[/spoiler].  The grade reflects that.  Buuuuut... I enjoyed it more.  The grade as it stands may be too high.  I may even buy it to support the franchise.  That's the Star Trek fan in me.  That's the part of me that's seen Insurrection three times.  That's the part that's full of shame.  That's where Sheilbh's thesis falls apart--if this were anything else, I'd dislike it much more.

[Barrister]

I'm going to see Into Darkness in a couple of days.  If you fucks spoil it for me...

[Ideologue]

Except First Contact is not a great movie, but a bad movie.  The only ones worse are Insurrection and Nemesis (and Nemesis only arguably).  Pretty much all the TNG films are trash; Generations I give a pass only because it's nostalgic trash.  I would not trade the existence of all four of the TNG films for the first ten minutes of Star Trek V.  And it's not even that I don't like TNG; I just really, really dislike the TNG movies.

But that is, like, the only good part of First Contact.

Ide, I once had respect for you.  Now it's over.   

Seriously man, we don't agree at all on this 

If All Good Things had been a theatrical release, I'd give it an A+.

Star Trek Into Darkness, by contrast, I do not.  Can discuss more later, but for now I'm trying to figure out whether it was kind of bad or quite bad.

The problem is that they made the TNG movies in the mold of the original movies.  You could do a version of Kirk where he punches out the bad guy and gets the girl, and have it be in-character.  With Picard, it doesn't work.

It sort of kind of could have worked in First Contact, if the Borg weren't crapified.

It was at its worst in Insurrection.  Nemesis is really bad too, but there was the seed of an idea there, planted in the extremely arid soil of Stuart Baird and John Logan's talent.

[Ideologue]

I'm going to see Into Darkness in a couple of days.  If you fucks spoil it for me...

TL;DR review: it spoils itself every ten to twenty minutes.

[Barrister]

I'm going to see Into Darkness in a couple of days.  If you fucks spoil it for me...

TL;DR review: it spoils itself every ten to twenty minutes.

I don't fucking care.  It is not as if new Trek movies come out every other day.  I've read the spoiler-free reviews, which indicate it is fun but with plot holes.  Which sounds like the first movie now that I think about it.

Just don't spoil it for me until I can line up a babysitter.

[HVC]

i didn't love the movie (see my meh above), but your review makes me want to like the movie, to root for the movie, hell watch it again just to spite you... and i don't know why

[HVC]

BB i think you'll like it. it's more action movie then star trek movie. really, the only thing that makes it a trek movie is the character names and throw backs.