Fuck the plot. The plot is just a framework to hang the parts of the movie I actually care about on. Give me texture. Give me emotion. If there’s a big moment between two characters, let’s sit with it a minute. Make me feel something.
Not saying every movie needs a sex scene, but they shouldn’t need to be excused or justified. The idea that adult viewers are getting squeamish about this is disturbing to me.
I feel like Spock’s interest in plants in this episode is both a call back to The Cage (the way Spock grips the office plant before melding with it felt very similar to the way he gripped the signing plants in that episode) and possibly a call forward to TAS The Infinite Vulcan, where we learn that Spock’s ultimate fate is to live among a planet of sentient plants in a giant cloned body.
(It’s interesting to consider that a copy of his consciousness was returned to his original, diminutive body at the end of that episode. I wonder what adventures that small version of Spock might have had? We may never know…)
That was Trek V. VI was Nicholas Meyer, who also did The Wrath of Khan, so actually a very talented director. But I guess we all make mistakes.
Oh no, I’d die before I pay to watch an american movie.
Glad to hear it, the less money being sent to that country the better. The only money I’ve given to any film or TV for the past year or more has been to CBC Gem and BritBox.
I imagine most movies would suck if I watched them the way you do, though. Podcasts or talking head YouTubers are my preference for choring background.
If you aren’t having a good time either way, the theatrical’s 90 minute running time is a huge advantage. But then you should probably just walk away, rather than try again with a 4 hour cut. I enjoyed Snyder’s version well enough once, but I’ll likely never rewatch it just because of the time investment required.
Star Trek VI. The director’s cut interrupts the extremely dramatic mind-meld interrogation scene with another obnoxious flashback every time a character is implicated. I suppose between releases the director must have lost faith in his audience’s ability to follow the story without having their hands held.
The theatrical Justice League has two things going for it: brevity, and Batman’s “just save one” mentor moment with The Flash, which was nice.
Everything else about Snyder’s cut is better. It looks better, it sounds better, each scene in isolation plays better, it has fewer cringy jokes. Most importantly, it retains Cyborg’s story arc, which it turns out was the heart of the whole damn movie.
Kind of ironic that the art here is so much better than the joke. Really well done caricatures.
There’s a similar fun fact about the ‘60s Addams Family house interior being mostly pink. It worked perfectly well for a show filmed in black and white, but obviously no one would argue that that’s how Gomez and Morticia actually decorated their home.
But for the purposes of a meme, it’s fine.
Sam says they’ll die in space, “alone… like Kirks are born to do.”
We know about Jim’s premonition from Star Trek V, but for Sam to refer to it as though it’s some kind of family curse you’d think there’d be some history behind it. George Kirk is alive and well in this timeline, as they reminded us in the episode, so this seemed like a strange line to me. Maybe there’s a history with generations prior to George? I don’t think it’s ever come up.
I knew I’d have a good time with this one. I’d heard we were getting a horror themed episode directed by someone who worked on The Haunting of Hill House, which is one of my favourite horror projects from the past decade. (Checking Google now, and I see it was actually Bly Manor. Close enough.)
You can certainly see the same approach at play, and I thought it was very fun to see in Trek. I also loved the nods to other sci-fi horror, including that one scene in TNG Night Terrors that really hit hard when I was 7.
I feel like a bit more backstory on the Griffen might have been nice. She was the last ship built in the Pyris shipyards, which mined its ore from an ancient alien graveyard, and all ships built there met a bad end. Or something better than that. But I see those in this thread unhappy that it wasn’t all explained with the sci-fi equivalent of a gas leak, so maybe the simple mystery approach is a good compromise.
Apart from the horror of it all, some nice character work, with Kirk being the stand out. Nice to see his early relationship with Carol. Or lack thereof. I wonder if they’ll ever have occasion to cast her or if she’ll be forever offscreen.
Oh, the wastes! The magnificent wastes! When I was a lad I knew a man who visited the wastes and brought back such beautiful things! Real salt from the dry riverbeds, pieces of rubber that would burn for hours and give us such marvellous dreams! One day I’ll earn enough to take you to the wastes myself, young one. One day.
One person isn’t the majority of the entire cast.
When it’s The Devil Wears Prada and we’re talking about Streep, she may was well be.
Moranis is an amazing get, I’ll give you that. I’m not trying to write this movie off, I just don’t automatically write any of these things off. I don’t think the glut of backwards looking projects is good for the industry as a whole, but most do have potential on an individual basis, and a couple of them deliver on it. I’m certainly hoping this will be one of them.
This one gets a moment in time. It’s pretty much the last chance to do something with most of the original cast and creator.
You can say that for most of these reunion/reboots. Meryl Streep is pushing 80, so The Devil Wears Prada 2 had to happen now. We’ve already lost one Ghostbuster, so we really needed to make Afterlife happen stat.
Not that I want to harsh anyone’s buzz. I’ve enjoyed some of these things, and this may turn out to be one of the good ones. But I’m not seeing anything setting it apart from the others, either.
Possibly. Most people’s first thought when they heard “Batman” at the time was probably still the '60s series, but Dark Knight Returns had gotten a bit of press already pushing back on that. But really, Burton’s sensibilities just work with the character. Maybe it’s whoever convinced him to give the job a chance we have to thank.
Eeh. Most of the complaints I see in this thread about Trek 2009 would apply as well to TWoK if people were being even handed. It’s a pew pew action film. There are no deep philosophical questions being tackled. It’s not utopian – Starfleet is portrayed as a straight forward space navy that works with real scientists only begrudgingly.
There’s kick ass high drama and a decent character study of an ageing Kirk, but the character work on Kirk and Spock in 2009 wasn’t all that bad, either.
Burton’s Batman films are top tier, though. If I get a great director with a solid vision for the character/story, I don’t care at all if they were a fan before hand or not.
Indeed. Nicolas Meyer was the same, and most fans seem to love his contributions to the franchise. Being a newcomer isn’t a bad thing. Sometimes a fresh perspective can be a great thing.
Not to say I love Abrams’ work, but in the end he did more harm to Star Wars than to Trek, and by all accounts he’s a life long Star Wars fan.
That’s a reasonable position. The movie industry has definitely been weird about sex in a lot of ways, especially with regard to the women in front of the camera.
But I’m really not advocating that we need some particular quota of sex scenes in our media, I’m more disturbed by the reason that number is decreasing. It’s not because the creatives making these movies are pushing for it. In this case the director was forced to cut out his sex scenes because the test audiences immediately started squirming in their seats like a bunch of school kids. To me that seems like an extremely unhealthy relationship with sex. And that’s in line with a general trend I’m sensing of the world getting increasingly prudish and puritanical.
Doesn’t help that the other two responses I got here are acting like I should be self flagellating for enjoying Pillion last week.