The whole cast was impeccable imo. Chris Pine, Zachary Quinton, Zoe Saldana, Anton Yelchin (RIP), Simon Peggy, Leonard Nimoy, John Choice, Winona Ryder (!!!)
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Terminator is a good shout. Canāt remember if Narnia was this decade or a little less recent. Avatar sequels are going to bomb hard.
A lot of IP is in a weird place where they want a specific tone, donāt want a ton of risk, but also need it to be critically and commercially successful.
Agree except for Simon Pegg, who does not at all do justice to James Doohanās Scotty. Doohan was one of most badass Canadians of all time and he deserved better. Seriously, read his Wikipedia page.
To be fair, itās hard to build up that Kirk/Spock/McCoy chemistry in the course of a two-hour movie. I think Trek is just fundamentally best as a TV thing and not as a movie thing.
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I went in with low expectations. Knew/had heard nothing except saw a few headlines that said it was terrible. And even with that I was pretty surprised how bad it was. I donāt even really care much at all about Star Wars, but this movie was a mess from the first 30 seconds.
There were a handful of moments that made me smile, but a lot of the āfan serviceā stuff made me groan audibly. Like
When Lando pulled off the mask at that festival. And the ewok thing made me want to throw food at the screen.
But my son loved it.
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Star Trek I is very underappreciated imo, has some obvious problems but I liked it. Star Trek II is a lot better but moderately overrated and for the reasons you say, although II cashes in on the emotional impact of Spockās death that the franchise did creatively earn over its existence to that point.
Iāll stop there and I take most of your point, I guess my take on the awfulness of JJ Abrams reboots is proportional to my expectation that heād at least have tried to engage with the original material in a meaningful way. I can accept people enjoying these movies on different terms, but my butthurt is that itās not exclusive. They can make it Star Trek and make it a good movie, itās possible.
And I get it too, how people feel about TFA is going to vary based on their previous relationship to SW. Iād have no idea how a 8 year old kid watching an SW movie for the first time received it, maybe it was great for an 8 year old. I can even somewhat understand that if A New Hope blew your mind in the theaters in 1977 and you just wanted a visceral connection to it and thatās what they gave you in The Force Awakens, like fine, maybe it worked on that level too.
But I have a visceral connection to SW too, so please donāt take a really cool and iconic part of the original movie, whose coolness was that it was just this perfect, inspired realization of the ultimate space weapon that fit the mid Cold War zeitgeist; and now 40 years later you justā¦ make it bigger?
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The trailer spoiling the desert chicken scene was criminal.
Iām starting to think I had more fun than most people. The 50 year old man that went alone and sat next to me yawned ten times. I canāt imagine many pieces of art that would take more effort than something like this so even if itās not perfect I think weāre a little spoiled these days.
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Agree about Terminator. The best sequel to T2 was Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles. S1 got hit by the writers strike, but Fox decided it was less expensive to renew the show than replace it with something new, and voila, we got an incredible S2. I loved seeing John Connor as a normal teenager who honestly doesnāt understand how heās supposed to grow up from a barely-functional young man into the greatest military leader the world has ever known. And that s2 finale!!! What a cliffhanger.
Narnia is a damn shame. Did you know those were written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely??? That blows me away. Those are the guys that took a swing with Captain America: the First Avenger, and since then became the screenwriters for the biggest MCU movies, eg Thor: the Dark World, GotG, Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame. A shame they couldnāt bring the same success to Narnia.
That is all more than fair. Agree about Doohan. I think you might have gone into detail about him before.
His episode of TNG was GOAT.
Man, this is such a good point. I guess fair enough that my praise for Star Trek (2009) depends on me taking the movie on its own terms, and if I think of it as you propose, yeah, itās not really faithful to Trek as we knew it. Part of why people loved it and part of why JJ Abrams was offered The Force Awakens was because he turned Star Trek into Star Wars.
Did you see Star Trek: Discovery? I was really worried given the creative shakeups behind the scenes. Bryan Fuller (creator of Pushing Daisies, Hannibal, Dead Like Me and writer for DS9) left over creative differences, then the new showrunners were fired for being toxic to the writers, so they brought in Alex Kurtzman.
Kurtzman has really struggled. His resume includes:
The Island
Cowboys & Aliens
Now You See Me
Enderās Game
The Amazing Spider-Man 2
The Mummy (2017, the really awful one with Tom Cruise)
I thought that was the kiss of death LOL, but despite it all, I think the show is pretty good!
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One of the very sad things about the whole Disney Star Wars franchise is that no one seems to care what actual kids think of the movies. Itās a grand exercise in making fanservice movies for 30-40-year-olds.
And how dumb it is that BB8 is just a cuter version of R2D2ā¦
Watching RoS today, the motherfuckers did it again! Spoiler alert: thereās an even smaller and supposedly cuter droid than BB8, named Dio. Like a puppy at a shelter it flinches when you try to touch it because it was likely mistreated. Has to be some sort of sick joke.
Next up, Baby Baby Yoda.
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I have so much TV to watch next year itās nuts. Iām going to time getting the CBS free trial to dip into Star Trek Discovery and Picard, I think thatās supposed to be early next year? Iām probably going to go through a month of Disney+ first, hitting up that Mandalorian and whatever Marvel fare that catches my eye. Then I need to do Prime again to go through Mr Robot and The Expanse, none of which Iāve watched yet.
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Fetal Yoda. Uterus all around me there is.
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I thought difficult times inspired great art? jfc the times we live in can get nothing correct
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One of the background aliens made a funny sound and a little kid behind me imitated it for a few seconds and I was like oh yeah thatās what joy is supposed to feel like.
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Like Iām happy enough to say that this is just for nerds, but in the pre Internet age the first time I heard of a Dyson sphere was from watching this episode. How cool is that for a TV show to achieve that. What did we learn about in Star Trek 2009, the casting department was admittedly very good? Ok, soapbox off.
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how old is your son?
You should watch The Boys when you get back around to Prime. Highly recommended.
Google āphilosophy of kreiaā, and watch at 1.5x speed.
My expectations were rock bottom and this significantly exceeded them. Probably better than TFA and worse than LJ. Better than all the prequels for sure.
That YouTube significantly changed my reception of the series, particularly a clip of Lucas describing the grander narrative as patterned, like echoes or a poem that rhymes (the episodes being stanzas, or something). Thus we get multiple death stars / uberweapons, multiple whiny adolescents, etc.
Thereās a sense of something like ābeing destined to return to the same struggles (same only different)ā as certain ideas continue to occupy various agents. The Hindu solution to the eternal struggle was to seek the end of reincarnation, which is interesting given the Palpatine thing & Kylo Renās ālet the past dieā agreement w/ Luke/Yoda burning the Jedi tree.