Amazing that the budget was $190M - with no A-list cast, no big sets to build, no international filming locations, nothing much practical, no epic army battles, no CG creatures, and only a 2-hour runtime. The VFX budget must have soaked up most of that.

To be honest, I can't say that it looked like a $190M picture. It looked more like half that.

Only Phantom Menace and Transformers 2 belong in the lowest circle of hell with Prometheus. This Star Trek film was just out of same sausage-factory as all the other Marvel/DC or recent summer blockbusters, with the same quality control. No more, no less. It ticked all the boxes. It'll ultimately earn 2X-3X its budget to get another formulaic forgettable sequel greenlit.

Now that we're in the 20-teens and the PG-13 tentpole for this era is becoming well-defined, we're seeing that all these movies have the same basic structure and same basic flaws.

The ratio of action to humour to romance to spectacle to exposition is roughly the same. The $100M+ budgets are roughly the same which get spent on cast : FX : production in a certain formula. The returns of $500M-$1B are virtually guaranteed for the brand franchise instalments. Scriptwriting never seems to get a high priority, and so plot holes abound. But plot holes don't prevent box office, because you only notice them after you've spent your money.

The metaphor I reach for is the iphone and the changeable skin. The underlying movie is always the same, but the skin is different. Guy Pearce wants to be a war-profiteer in Iron Man 3. Marcus wants to be war profiteer in STID. Avengers and Dark Knight Rises ends the same way, with a bomb being carried off. Skyfall, STID, ST2009, TDKR and a million others have some villain that's been aggrieved in the past and now 'demands satisfaction'. The last 10 minutes will always involve a WWF punch-up.

Final Draft should have a PG-13 Tentpole template.

JJ Abrahms seems to have internalised 'the Hollywood PG-13 Tentpole Formula', His temperament is well suited to Star Wars. They'll be teenagers running, shoot'n, jump', fight'n against a background of sparks and 'splosions for 120 minutes. Everyone will breathe a sigh of relief that it's not as bad as the Prequels. There'll be predictable nods to the original series with repeated catch phrases, just like Star Trek did. The hard core nerds will whine about breaches of canon. At the end of the day, we'll have seen it all before.

I think someone on this forum nicknamed these types of films "McMovies", and that's an appropriate phrase.

Some questions / points:

Question 1.
What's the collective term for adult sons and daughters? That 90-year old has eight great-grandchildren, 4 grandchildren, and two..... children? But the 'children' are 70 years old?

Question 2. We got through all of 2000-2009 without agreeing on a term for the decade. Are we in the twenty-teens?

Question 3. You're ordering for you and your partner at a restaurant. You say to the waiter... "and [blank] will have the salad". How do you refer to your partner? Your sexual/married relationship is none of the waiter's business. You can't say their name as they haven't been introduced to the waiter. My friend? My partner? She?

Blakes 7 had a similar problem (old British 1970s SF). The Liberator ship they had was too powerful. It could outrun, outgun any Federation ship, so the writers had to concoct situations to make them vulnerable.

Well I look forward to Iron Man 4: Noth'n but Tony Snark. That'll take the franchise in a new ballsy direction.

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/inside-oblivion/

Thought experiment: What would it be like after landing?

Let's assume a perfect trip to Mars with no zero-gravity or comic radiation concerns...
And I'll further concede a perfect landing with unlimited air and food and no solar radiation concerns...
You touch down, you don your suit and open the hatch...

You see a plain of red rocks. In all directions. Average temperature is about -100. Atmosphere is a near vacuum. Land surface area = Earth's land surface area. So what do you do?

After the initial euphoria, you kick some rocks around. Hit a golf ball. Send some twitpics.

You wonder what's over the horizon. You're an 'explorer' after all. And this is so 'cool', right?

Except you ALREADY KNOW what's over the horizon as the entire planet is mapped in 30cm/pixel resolution. MRO HiRise and Mars Express and subsequent missions have scanned the entire planet in HD. You can Google Mars it. So you're not really exploring unknown virgin territory. So what could you possibly do that warrants the $100 billion price tag?

Collect some rocks for sample return? Sure. But a rover could do that too. Slower, sure, but 1000X cheaper.

After Day #3, when you're sick of wearing the suit and breathing an artificial atmosphere and eating freeze-dried food and the sight of endless plains of red rocks, the 'cool' factor will surely start to wear thin.

How long before you're longing for the green and blue of Earth? Beaches. Bikinis. Real food. Variety of company. The wind on your face as you're driving a convertible?

For $100 billion, I'd want Pandora, not a barren monochrome frigid wasteland.

Here's a recent discussion between Krauss and Neil deGrasse Tyson about manned v unmanned. Krauss is a big advocate for unmanned, and Neil also concedes that unmanned gives you more science. But Neil's point is that only war or profit-motive will get governments to fund a Mars mission, not 'exploration' and certainly not 'it'd be cool'.

The discussion commences around the 22min mark...

Nice jpg. I'm seeing it right now. For free.

Two points about the validity of analogies with prior human exploration:

1. In the golden era of exploration (16th - 18th centuries), humans didn't have cameras on probes to do their seeing for them. They had to go there personally to see. Now we can send instruments far more sensitive than the human eye to capture every aspect of the place. In principle we can fly through the Valles Marineris at home anytime using HFR 3D 8K once we've scanned it. There's no scientific reason for humans to be there.

2. Whatever realms humans explored on Earth in the past - they could breathe the air. Gravity remained constant. Radiation was low. There was fresh water. Once you're about 20km off Earth's surface, you'll die in 1-2 minutes (at the most) anywhere in the solar system. Your equipment has to be 100% failure-proof with multiple levels of redundancies. Which is heavy. Which is expensive. Which needs greater justification than 'it'd be cool'.