Red Mosquito

McParadigm wrote:

BurtReynolds wrote:saw it. I thought it was ok. I mean, its not Star Trek, well in some ways it is, some ways it isn't, but it is a decent action flick. Most of the little twists worked for me.

Its like watching a modern PJ show. Still entertaining and not lacking on energy, but you wish they would just slow the fuck down.

Everything above.

As summer popcorn goes (that's a qualifier worth rereading, folks), this movie was pretty ace. It had all the top components....a villain who wasn't just some middle management miner dude with a poorly written grudge and a ship with no lights, more flash and bang than a nudist colony during swinger season, Peter Weller looking (but, sadly, not sounding) like an unexpected Tom Waits cameo, some surprisingly emotive acting that mostly redeemed a hit and miss script, and, finally, fun and unaffecting action sequences packed with amusing one-liners and a great Hollywood love of both physics ("We're literally like a mile off the moon and the power just went out so what the hell we're FALLING INTO EARTH'S GRAVITY LOL") and shortcutting ("We're almost at war with these people just fly straight on in oh a year later we're not at all so whatevs").

None of that bothered me. Some of it probably even helped a bit. I just didn't think of it as Star Trek...more like a random post-2000 summer scifi blockbuster with a lot of Star Trek jokes tossed in....and it was fun. In fact, even though I pretended it was called "Two Guys With a Lot of Eyebrows Save the World While Simon Pegg Rethinks His Career Choices" (copyright), some of the Trek stuff actually worked in their favor. Outside of the ham ending, they mostly did Spock better this time than they did in the first one, even explaining his newfound walling off and inner turmoil pretty well when they weren't KABOOMKABOOMWAPOWing up the place. They also built the movie as a pretty good setup for why the Enterprise crew would be so loyal to Kirk during the exploration mission. So, even though it wasn't much Star Trek and wasn't worth measuring on that level, you could still lean a little on the basic ideas of those characters (not the characters themselves, mind you, as they have yet to show up in this reboot franchise).

The only things that chafed my ass were as follows:

It was so fucking proud of how nostalgic it is. It' s kind of sad when a rich and textured idea is worth little more to its new owners than as a nice backdrop for explosions and a chance to put a lot of "Hey you old fuckers remember this fucking shit because you're not 20 anymore?" stuff in. Nostalgia is just fine in very small doses...when you reach the point of aping a majority of the dialog for the pinnacle emotive moment of the movie, literally taking huge portions word for word from a completely different movie just so some person in the audience who deserves to never know happiness again can say, "Oh, dude, that's so cool, that's from...," then you've stopped having an idea and started to just sort of owe other people money. And speaking of apes, "I need to action up EVERY sequence, or people might notice that I've got nothing, so...Chris, act like you're a very angry monkey and that bit of electronics is a place where you wish you could poop. It'll play out as really powerful on film. I promise."

JJ continues to be the quintessential factory-film creator. He isn't interested in finding HIS voice....he's just assuming that you'll get moist and musky over his ability to be kinda Spielberg like in that one scene did you see how I was almost Spielberg guys I was almost Spielberg for real I

I still miss (my old man picture probably belongs here) the way that, when sets were physical events with matte paintings for wide shots, actual thought went into things beyond "What would look cool?" A ship crashes into a city (because JJ Abrams' basic Star Trek message is "fuck San Fransisco....fuck it right to death"), and it destroys more property and previously functional human meat than can currently be found in the entire Midwest. So then, in yesteryear, what would happen next? We might zoom in on this great smoke-filled disaster area, squaring off and having our big confrontation inside the ruins.

Why? Because it's visually arresting. Because it connects the significance of the two events. Because it gives weight and power to the massive loss that just occurred.

In a CGI world, however, long distance running and long jumping are apparently the new battle mode. It's like Super Mario Brothers taught an entire generation how to fight. So you, the hero, chase the bad guy for half a city block, while both of you deal with such elaborate problems as "I just broke an old woman" and "that's a big jump nevermind already made it," and suddenly you're in a place where the glass is completely unshattered and people are STILL GOING TO WORK. Fight here? Ha ha, no thanks. So you hop into a city space traffic scene so tired and corny it might belong in a Star Wars prequel, if that in turn wasn't lazily borrowed from the Fifth Element.

Why does this happen? Because, if you have to work your nuts off for your visuals, you have to think about them first. When you can literally get whatever the fuck you want by hiring some software junkies, you stop asking questions like "A million people just died an Englishman's sprint away....so why is everybody just sitting in traffic and heading in to work?" and start asking ones like "How do we keep these attentionstroke defitards from taking off their 3d glasses and going home to touch their peepees, because my god I must loathe humanity to be doing this?"

So, yeah. It IS a fun film, so long as you pretend it's just some silly nameless rollercoaster ride....which, hell, is what it is anyway, I suppose.

Right Peter?

TheDapperGent wrote:I'm a Trekkie. Abrams does not "get" Star Trek. Maybe it's just modern day hollywood. The essence of Trek isn't explosions. It's an interesting story and drama.

B wrote:

TheDapperGent wrote:I'm a Trekkie. Abrams does not "get" Star Trek. Maybe it's just modern day hollywood. The essence of Trek isn't explosions. It's an interesting story and drama.

The essence of Trek was quickly becoming movies and tv shows that no one watched.

bada wrote:Seems the basic critique is its a fun movie but not Star Trek. Makes me wonder if people really remember the original show and the movies. The original show outside of a few undeniably classic cerebral episodes was a whole lot of Kirk in big fights getting his shirt ripped with some cuts on his head with minimum blood flow.

Really anything someone could point to in the new movies as not being Star Trek you could find with the original show.

McParadigm wrote:

bada wrote:Seems the basic critique is its a fun movie but not Star Trek. Makes me wonder if people really remember the original show and the movies. The original show outside of a few undeniably classic cerebral episodes was a whole lot of Kirk in big fights getting his shirt ripped with some cuts on his head with minimum blood flow.

Those cerebral episodes, though, remain the most popular and impactful of the series. Anyways, it's a gross exaggeration to imply that most of the other episodes were basically action vehicles with little else going on.

Really anything someone could point to in the new movies as not being Star Trek you could find with the original show.

Pretty much everything found in The Phantom Menace could be linked in some way to what was in the original trilogy,....that didn't make it good, and it certainly didn't make it Star Wars.

BurtReynolds wrote:and those shit looking Klingons, amirite?

Human Bass wrote:I just watched the original Wrath of Khan, and it's a good movie and all, but the new Khan feels much more ruthless and cunning than Montaban Khan, sorry guys. Cumberbatch voice and demeanour worked way better than Montaban pectoral muscles.

McParadigm wrote:

Human Bass wrote:I just watched the original Wrath of Khan, and it's a good movie and all, but the new Khan feels much more ruthless and cunning than Montaban Khan, sorry guys. Cumberbatch voice and demeanour worked way better than Montaban pectoral muscles.

A lot of that comes down to the era. In the 80's, villains were often built to stand out or be memorable (and frequently filtered through a hint of theatricality). These days, 'scariness,' pro-wrestling-like displays of power, and dark visages are preferred. Ricardo played a fantastic 80's villain. Cumberbatch plays a modern one.