That movie removed all the patience and ruthlessness of the character and let the story devolve into a simple sword fight. In the book, which is just too freakin' long to make a two hour movie, Dantes spends years systematically destroying the very things that make his enemies themselves. That takes balls.

But when I said the story had never been done justice, I forgot about oldboy. Shame on me.

This movie is the Batman & Robin of the Alien series. It's two hours of nipples on the bat suit and Brad Dourif as Mister Freeze. If they really think this is a "franchise" and not just two good movies with the same actress, the studio killed it dead with this mess. I personally think we need more new IP, but if you have to go back to the well, give Ridley Scott back control to maybe get our "Alien Begins."

This movie is basically a demo reel for the production designer, a series of images not required to abide by consistent logic. For many people, that seems to be fine, but being the kind of writer I am, I can't not think critically about the situation.

If you're making a fantasy world, even to the degree we're signing up for with every movie, the rules of the world should be clear, or at least internally consistent. There's a tradition in myth and in fairy tales, when you meet a guide and they tell you the rules, they're right. In other movies, it's just called exposition. It's generally the only information we have about the situation, so we have to take it as fact.

Am I giving the movie too much credit if the point was an unreliable guide to the fantasy world? They seemed to imply the faun was lying all along for some reason, which would have been interesting if it had built up to that twist by stages of her figuring that out before making an informed decision at the end.

Just the number of times in the commentary you guys say "they did that so the next thing in the movie could happen" convinces me that nope, this movie was just making up the rules as it went along. In Jan Svankmajer's Alice, that's cool, but PL tried to eat its gritty realism cake at the same time.

"Fantasy" doesn't mean you have total freedom to change the rules as you go along. That's the whole point of magic beans.

My favorite commentaries are the movies where there are mixed feelings, and everybody has a slightly different view to bring to the table. Getting as off topic as the commentary did, I loved the conversation about the original studio system, but I wonder, why can't the new digital filmmaking wave be just like those early days of cinema? Someone has an idea for a movie, gets a camera, gets some actors, maybe a tortilla factory, and makes a movie. Then they can put it on youtube for the world to see. Nobody has to give them permission.

Also, you left out one of the biggest reasons Hollywood chooses movies the way it does. Sure, there's development people middling around, executives who think "Die Hard in a building" is a fresh idea, and there's the conservative choices anyone would make when putting a hundred million dollars on the line, but there's also exhibition contracts:

Maybe this isn't true across the board, but what I heard during the time I worked at a theater was that studios get the highest cut of the opening weekend grosses. The second weekend, they get a smaller percentage, and it diminishes after that.

Think about how this ruins everything. To maximize profits, studios actually want a movie that's going to open huge based on the title alone, or the fact that it's 3-d, and then bomb when people realize how terrible it actually is. That way, people will forget about each one in time for the next blockbuster. They don't want word of mouth to spread so the numbers can peak later in the release, when those ticket sales are going to the theater owners instead. There's financial incentives against making good movies, except to save appearances when awards are on the line. It's better business for the studio to have one absurd flashy and forgettable train wreck for every week of the year.

As a side effect of this practice in filmmaking, movie profits bottom out before theaters can make their profits, so the only way they're able to stay open is on concessions. That, boys and girls, is why they charge us seven dollars for a box of Red Vines.

Brian, thank you for being in that room. Represent. I happen to think this film was shades of The Phantom Menace ten years later, and I feel ironically like Simon Pegg telling Jar Jar fans that they're watching "a jumped-up fireworks display of a toy advert."

Star Trek was created to be the opposite of Flash Gordon, which is specifically why they chose not to have rocket exhaust come out the back of the ship. It was an attempt to bring hard sci-fi to prime time television, stories that probed the limits of what science could imagine while simultaneously being metaphors about our own world. It was a show about exploring the frontiers of space, of our knowledge and of our beliefs, and if that didn't fill the seats, there were usually hot girls in loose outfits that needed rescuing.

The three main characters represented different basic viewpoints, so each situation would challenge at least one of those. They'd make fun of that guy the whole time, so at the end he could get one good one in before the credits.

Here, nobody seems to believe anything. We have a villain who's irredeemably bad for reasons they had to come up with in post, a story that seemed to have no point except to set up a franchise and a series of action scenes for the mere sake of action. "Nothing's blown up for a few minutes. Let's have Scotty get stuck in some tubes or people are gonna fall asleep." Where were the oompa loompas in that scene?

I heard there used to be an edict from Roddenberry in the writers room, that the Enterprise would never succeed by sheer strength or violence. Kirk ran around punching guys all the time, but in the end, he saved the day by understanding something about his adversary, or by learning the rules of the situation and figuring out how to manipulate them to the best result. When he fought the Gorn on Vasquez rocks and built a cannon out of bamboo, that wasn't the victory of the story. He could have killed the Gorn captain, but he didn't. He overcame his violent instincts, impressing the god-like race that had forced them to fight for some reason… Whatever. Say what you want about that cheesiness, but old Star Trek seemed to be about something.

This movie hired the guys who had two movies to explain what the evil transformers were even mad about, and they never even tried.

True, with the hundreds if not thousands of writers who've worked on the franchise over the years, the continuity has gotten so complicated, they should have thrown all that out, but the whole alternate timeline thing is like asking for fanboys to find the inconstancies. They should have started over like Battlestar Galactica, not some bizarre "crisis of infinite Earths" that makes things even more confusing than they were before.

The original concept is simple. Every week, Kirk gave it to us in about 45 seconds. They should have cast new actors in the parts, put them in the Enterprise deep in space and given them compelling conflict to resolve in ways that reveal and develop character. For bonus points, they might uphold ANY philosophical ideals. Once they have that, with all their money, they could still include all the striking visuals they had here and have ILM throw in a bunch of explosions to bring in that Transformers bank. There's your appealing to both demographics.

Okay to go. I'm okay to go.

I had a unique experience watching this movie. I was at my local Bad Movie Night, and the DVD started up with some big action scene, hardly a surprise for a Michael Bay film. Then there were single title credits on black for each of the main actors, but the style and music seemed more like closing credits... strange. Then, there was another action scene, which seemed more like it belonged near the climax of a typical action movie, but, you know, Michael Bay. Our opinion of this thing was already so low going in that it must have been 15-20 minutes before we were even sure the disk had somehow been set to shuffle.

It was just like Memento. Every few minutes, a totally different part of the movie would start with no indication who anybody was or what they were trying to accomplish. Some of these jarring leaps came in the middles of scenes, sometimes after only thirty seconds to get your bearings, then sometimes we would have the misfortune to sit through longer chunks of the movie intact. For me, it became an excercise of imagining where in the structure of a good movie we might be at any particular time, but after a while I just gave up.

After a couple hours like that, more credits came on, and we turned off the DVD. I walked away with no idea what had just happened, but I never bothered to rewatch it, because I figured my experience couldn't possibly be any worse than the actual movie. Judging from this commentary, it was probably about the same.

I wanna adress the idea that there's somehow this missing scene where Luke comes to believe that he even has the force. Sure, he blocks a couple of laser blasts on the Falcon, but Han sits right there watching and justifiably calls it luck.

From that point on, what does Luke ever really do with the force? At the end, he presses a button at exactly the right time, so accurately that even a computer couldn't get it right, and he only does that because he believes the disembodied voice of a dead crazy old man enough to "let go" in that one moment.

The whole story is Luke coming to believe what this mentor character was trying to tell him all along. It's not a moment they skipped. That's the movie.