VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

Friday, April 17, 12:40:17pm [ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, [4], 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: Thursday, May 30, 04:23:48am
Author: Lij
Author Host/IP: adsl-108-67-88-197.dsl.bltnin.sbcglobal.net / 108.67.88.197
Subject: Was it really that bad?

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Yesterday, 29 May, 2013, 10:04:03 PM | PZ Myers

I was off in the big city (Alexandria, Mn) to run some errands, and I figured as long as I was there, I’d catch the latest summer blockbuster. I went in with low expectations: I’d heard it was just a fun action movie, mere mindless entertainment. The reviews underestimated the movie; it wasn’t just mindless, it was in a vegetative state. This movie was so stupid it was stillborn with acephaly. This movie sucked so bad it was a miracle that the Hawking radiation didn’t kill the audience.

I will tell you a few of the annoying inanities that made it impossible to enjoy the movie. Spoiler warning? Maybe. I’d be doing you a favor if I spoiled this movie for you.


-- At the very beginning, a protagonist is being lowered into an erupting volcano on an alien planet. No, not lowered — careening at the end of a cable dangling from an out of control, damaged shuttle craft. His cable melts, he falls. Does he fall into magma, aaaaiee, hisss, die? No, he lands on a solid rock floating in a lake of magma. Does he splatter, bounce, break, fall into magma, aaaaiee, hisss, die? No, he drops his tools, gets up, gathers them, goes about his business.


-- Meanwhile, two other protagonists are running frantically away from alien primitives who are throwing spears at them. Why were they even in the village? Don’t know. All the important action is going on in the volcano. This is something the movie often does: if a problem does not require gratuitous physical conflict to solve it, people will be thrown into it anyway to flail and thrash around.


-- This volcano, which is actually on the smallish and mostly unprepossessing side, has a small village of aliens at its base. When it erupts, it’s going to destroy the entire world and the aliens will go extinct. It makes no sense. Somehow corking up one volcano while two crew members run through the jungle will save the planet.


-- The aliens are doomed anyway. They all seem to be male.


OK, that was just the opening scene. It has no bearing on the rest of the movie at all. I’ll be less specific for the rest.

-- The bad guy can make a bomb with a ring and a glass of water that will explode with enough force to destroy a city block with a giant eruption of flame. He does this to get Starfleet leaders to congregate in a conference room…which he then plinks at with some guns in a plane, killing one or two. Hey! I bet there are glasses of water in that conference room!

-- No less than three times, we get dialog along these lines:


----- “Get him/her/it out of there! Use the transporter beam!”

----- “I can’t get a lock! But…say, I could beam someone to those coordinates…”

----- “Do it! Right away!” “I’ll just beam one person to the danger site!”

-- Next: one person shows up at danger site with new swirly transporter effects, proceeds to engage in thrashy stupid fisticuffs for a prolonged period of time.

-- Lens flare. So goddamn fucking much lens flare.

-- Listen. If you’re on a flying vehicle weaving at high speed through the sky, don’t stand toe-to-toe with someone else and punch them. Especially not with the flailing haymakers that everyone tosses around in this movie. You’ll fall off.


-- If you jump off a flying vehicle weaving at high speed through the sky, planning to land on another flying vehicle weaving at high speed through the sky, you probably won’t. You’ll miss, fall thousands of feet, and go splat. If you do fall 50 feet and land on top of another flying vehicle weaving at high speed through the sky, you will bounce, slip, and fall off to go splat and die. You will not land, scrabble a bit, catch yourself and stand up, and then start punching someone.


-- Giant interstellar spaceships can get shot up, suffer massive internal explosions that tear them up internally and rupture their structure, and then fall out of the sky to crash on earth. They can be of a grossly non-aerodynamic design in addition to having massive structural damage, but they will still manage to skid into San Francisco Bay, bounce a few times, then go sliding into San Francisco, shattering skyscrapers and leveling entire city blocks, before coming to a stop.

-- Then the sole occupant will jump out of a hole in the side to jog through the city. He will have one small scratch on his cheek.


-- Said occupant will then be engaged in slap-happy hand-to-hand combat by a single guy transported to his location. Of course.


-- Someone in a small craft that gets blown out of the sky and goes spiralling down in flames will manage to escape by use of the magic transporter beam, which will zap him all the way from his burning ship on Earth to…the Klingon home planet. Why do they have spaceships anyway?


-- Related weirdness: A ship somewhere near the Klingon home planet enters warp drive, is immediately chased by another starship which shoots at the first ship, knocking it out of warp. The occupants of that ship are stumbling about to figure out where they are, which happens to be…somewhere inside the orbit of Earth’s moon. It’s a very small universe.


-- The warp core of a giant starship can get “out of alignment”, which can then be fixed by a guy going into the core and kicking it back into place.


-- The writers are so bereft of any trace of creativity that they just juggle around the ending of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan in horrible arbitrary ways. I was offended. It made no sense.


-- Benedict Cumberbotch plays Khan, the classic role played in the original by Ricardo Montalban with awesomely hammy panache and brio. Benedict just looks spoiled and sullen through the whole movie — it’s a role the corpse of Montalban could have played with more liveliness. There’s a moment where one of the good guys reprises that iconic scene where William Shatner shouts “KHAAAAAAN!” — and it’s pitiful, tacked on, dully performed. It’s a defining moment — there is no life in this movie.


I could go on. This was a movie that lost me with its stupidity in the first scene and never got me back, just getting worse and worse. There was no intelligence to any of the solutions to any of the problems — in a universe with spaceships, every problem was resolved by someone getting in a fistfight.

I hope they never make another one.

I do hope this one makes buckets of money, though, because I want JJ Abrams to get disgustingly rich. I want him to be so rich that he retires to some fabulous villa in Tuscany, or a lovey cottage in the south of France, or perhaps a glitzy condo in Cabo. Or all three! I want him to settle down and live a long, contented life with a loving family and good friends to keep him company.

And then, many many years from now, as he lies dying painlessly of natural causes, his family gathered tearfully around his deathbed, I want him to think back with regret to his last movie. I want him to realize that in his life, he made negative art, art that sucked a little beauty and joy out of the universe and made millions of people less thoughtful and less aware. He will feel a deep existential remorse. And then as he begins to fade, he will feebly gesture for his loved ones to come closer, and a fat tear will roll down his cheek, and he will whisper, “into…darkness…” before slipping away.

And his family will be baffled and wonder what it meant, because they never watched his shit movies, and don’t even give a damn for the titles. And then they’ll go off and waste their inheritance on overpriced champagne and ridiculous little sports cars.

It’s the only just fate.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

[> I loved the first one but Darkness failed at least one critical test with me. -- AurraSing, Thursday, May 30, 10:46:13pm (d154-20-56-169.bchsia.telus.net/154.20.56.169)

Was it good enough to buy a copy once it comes out on BluRay?

Nope.

I think a fair number of complaints noted by the reviewer are valid. Like any Trek movie, science and logic do get bent sideways and leaps of faith are needed in order not to start muttering loudly or indeed even cursing loudly at the screen. In some cases (Wrath of Khan's world builder, etc) the story is engrossing enough that fans are willing to just accept and move on. Sadly, JJ just kept going back to the fractured science pot a few too many times for some viewers to stomach.

However, I think what I was noticing most was the lack of forward momentum caused by fresh faces and canon changes from the first movie. Truly, aside from the death of Kirk's mentor and the realisation that buying real estate in that era's San Francisco would be a bad move, nothing really important happens in this movie that doesn't have a neat resolution wrapping it up nicely. Throw in the fact that Cumberbatch was wasted in the role (I think he was hired for his voice and acting but instead he came across as a slightly doughy looking mess having a bad hair day) and then the NERVE of the writers to fall back on the best movie of the original universe movies....it was a lazy way to try and draw emotion into the situation.

It wasn't as bad as it could have been (think Iron Man 2) but it didn't have to be Khan and Carol Marcus all over again.


[ Edit | View ]


[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-5
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.