My face hurts after smiling for the last 50 minutes!

Having recently rewatched this, I was struck by something in Spock's narration. How can a supernova pose a threat to a galaxy? That's what Spock says, that a star will go supernova and 'threaten the galaxy' - huh? He then says that he promised to save Romulus, and then when en-route the supernova's wave destroyed Romulus.

This to me doesn't really work as a set up. Stars don't just go supernova overnight. The Romulans would have foreknowledge long before that destructive wave hit their planet and, logically, would have moved their population off world. I suppose you could argue that they didn't do so because they thought Spock would solve the problem, but it doesn't seem intelligent not to have some sort of back-up plan. Especially since Spock's timing is so off. What was his plan, to wait until after the star had gone supernova before creating the black hole - isn't that cutting it close? Also, where was this star? Because it's clearly not in the same system as Romulus, because without their own star the planet would be screwed anyway. So how many light years away was the star? Why didn't they evacuate the planet in between the star going supernova and the wave hitting their planet? Maybe the line 'then the unthinkable happened' is meant to hang a lantern on the improbability of the whole thing.

And the years haven't really changed how I feel about Nero and his murky motivation, or the tasteless destruction of Vulcan and billions of its inhabitants. I still find Nero's anger towards Spock to be entirely misplaced given what we are shown in the film. I chalk this up mainly to the fact that the writers were looking to recapture that Khan dynamic.

Also, I noticed that there are parts of the film where it seems like the characters have all read the script and know what's just happened. Kirk and Sulu give appropriate sad faces and seem to know Spock has lost his mother, seconds after it's happened and without even knowing who the blip on Chekov's monitor was.

I've been reading Mike Mullane's memoir, Riding Rockets, and he paints a really dismal picture of John Young's leadership during his tenure as Chief of the Astronaut Office (and also of George Abbey, who was director of flight operations at the time). It seems surprising to me that someone with such guts (he took arguably the most dangerous trip of all on the first launch of the shuttle) could be so bad at being a leader. From Mullane's description, he sounds reclusive and timid, and not at all what you'd expect from a test pilot with those qualities expected in someone with the Right Stuff.

Superb book by the way for anyone interested in the Shuttle years. It's astonishing to read of all the near misses they experienced. Sometimes it seems that almost every shuttle flight came close to being a catastrophic accident.

Great review. Your intro sets up the story much more clearly than the film ever does. To someone completely new to the series, I found the first 20 minutes of this film to be a confusing mess, and done in a most peculiar Japanese manner (one might say out of order). Having seen the first episode of the brand spanking new Yamato series, I can see where they get it from as that too thrusts you right into a battle without any sort of set up.... only later filling you in on the situation on Earth (also in seeming reverse order). I don't think it quite works in the live action version.

I didn't think it was literally the WW2 battleship (just design inspired), believing the Yamato to be just the Japanese equivalent of Enterprise, but having read more on the Wiki in the original series they did re-build the sunken Yamato from WW2. I'm ok with this, as it's pretty heavily rebuilt and not just had a new layer of paint slapped on.

I agree that the scope feels small. To some extent that works for the story, this is humanity's last ship and they're heavily outnumbered, but it's difficult to get a sense of how many are in the crew and what certain events mean in terms of causalties.

One of my principal problems with the film is its handling of the antagonists and the way information about them unfolds, it just doesn't flow very well and happens in occasional bursts of exposition heavy scenes. Such that the film goes from extreme subtlety to extreme obviousness frequently. The ending also unfortunately has this Wizard of Oz ring of 'you could have gone home any time you wanted to' due to some subtle thing that happens to one of the characters at the beginning. Also, I wasn't really convinced by what we did learn about the aliens.

That said, the special effects are pretty darn good and there's a superb scene featuring a space ace going up against an armada that's awesome (even if it does stretch plausibility).

My other experience in the Yamato universe has been the Resurrection animation, I thought this was really good but also suffered from a similar problem with the antagonist - perhaps it's the fact that their nature and/or motivation is just slightly too bizarre?

Yeah, they are rather prominent.

The TV stuff.

The Chinese/Japanese/Korean shelf.

Then the Blurays and HD-DVDs.

No District 9 here, sorry fellas.

I love both Seven Samurai and Hidden Fortress, as well as Sanjuro and Red Beard, and Ran and Kagemusha. To a certain extent though, I feel that High and Low might be more amenable to folks than the historical pictures which is why I always try to list it first when recommending Kurosawa. Some of the folks I run into (my parents regretably among them) tend to think samurai = chopsocky kung fu, so they don't really embrace the idea of watching Seven Samurai.

I agree, whilst I like Godfather, I don't think it's the best movie ever made. It has some really powerful scenes, but the story isn't that great (compared to something like Wizard of Oz or Casablanca). And I was really unimpressed with Godather Part 2, which admittedly I watched only a few years ago following years of raised expectations. I'd heard it being touted as one of the rare instances where the sequel was considered better than its predecessor.

I really liked Lawrence of Arabia, and recommend tracking down and seeing those last 20 minutes Faldor. David Lean's a master of scope, and he's definitely in my triumvirate of favourite classic directors along with Akira Kurosawa and John Ford - any of their films are a great balance between art, entertainment and story. What would I pick for each to represent them best? High and Low for Kurosawa, The Searchers for Ford, and Lawrence of Arabia for Lean.

I tried watching this last night, and I turned it off after about maybe 20 minutes. Really unfunny, haphazard and just... weird, in that 'is this the real film? I can't believe how badly this is edited and put together' way.

And really, a piss take of that scene from Downfall?

I had a similar experience watching Prometheus as I had with Mission Impossible 4. It's a thoroughly enjoyable movie (most of the time, I'd argue Prometheus completely falls over itself in the second half) as you're there in the darkened cinema. You're entranced by the lights and sounds. But the moment you exit and start to apply thought to what you've seen, warts and all start to show and you realised that you've been had.

So rather like a great Chinese takeout that later gives you a bout of food poisoning.

Well... it's actually more to do with the energy required for interstellar travel. Those needs are quite literally out of this world. A practical journey to our nearest star using current technology would take thousands of years and require substantial amounts of fossil fuel energy, and to accelarate a craft close to light speed would require more energy than is on our entire planet. So the idea is that if a civilisation was able to make interstellar journeys quickly, i.e., solve it, they would be using something equivalent to dark matter energy, and not something that could affect the environment. Ergo they'd have solved that problem as wel.

Going to the Moon, or anywhere within our solar system, pales in comparison.

What a fantastic idea. I'm definitely in.