There were also early rumors that the villain was Harry Mudd. Did anyone else catch the little shout-out to him? I giggled.

I've never been so completely in-line with a review before. This guy totally nails my feeling of the thing.

My big takeaway from the film, in a nutshell, is the classic case of "we had a thousand scenes we wanted to use, from thirty different drafts, and we picked our favorites and put them in order." The throughlines are weird and inconsistent, plots fall by the wayside or go nowhere, it's just kind of a mess. See Crystal Skull, for instance.

Which was also the case with Star Trek, but I didn't care as much. I'm interested in trying to figure out why it didn't bother me last time and did this time.

But my initial post above refers to the idea that - whether or not it works - the decisions to

are all incredibly unusual, and may well be the decisions of an insane, misguided or, indeed, retarded person. I'm switching to the word "dumb," now, because I'm uncomfortable with the alternative. I'm not saying I think the implementation was dumb - I do think that, but it's not my point - I'm saying that that he made that decision at all is terrifying. I'm questioning the judgment of a director interacting with fan-beloved material.

Think about what it means that JJ made those decisions, separate from how they played out and if they worked for you. Those are the decisions of someone who is way too comfortable fucking with the holy moments of a franchise. Obviously if the director of a reboot like this feels trapped by the scripture of the series to date and doesn't want to mess anything up, we end up with a stagnant, tepid piece of shit movie. You need to be able to make a hard call once in a while and say "yep, gonna have to mess with this very important thing to tell the story I want to tell." That's a necessary quality. And bear in mind, I don't care about Star Trek that much.

But I know that getting elbow-deep into one of the most iconic, moving and memorable moments of the entire series and seeing what happens when you cross the wires - in a context completely separate from what made them good decisions that worked the first time around - is not the behavior of someone with an abiding respect for the material, either. It also smells suspiciously like someone who didn't understand why they worked in the first place.

Imagine I had told you last year that the

What does you, one year ago, say to that? At best you say "are you... are you serious? I really don't think he can pull that off." Because your instinct there is that that is way, way, way insane. That's not a guy out to tell his own story in a universe he respects. That's a drunk at the wheel. At best, that's a guy making unmotivated, major story decisions "because they rhyme." See what I'm sayin'?

My opinion of the movie aside, which I'm still forming anyway, those decisions being made at all scare me. Because now I have no idea exactly how much... heh, entitlement, I guess, JJ feels when he directs these things. I'm worried he's gone too far in the opposite direction of being a slave to the material. I think he might consider himself the master of it, in some odd way.

You know white privilege? Male privilege? My concern is the possibility of some latent, below-his-own-radar "JJ privilege."

See, I don't feel that way at all.

Dont talk about my outfits that way!

I feel like Into Darkness fell into the same trap that (as I understand it) Superman Returns did, where the movie is a squeal, the story is a remake and the characters are a reboot.

But Bryan Singer did apologize for essentially not keeping his ego in check with Superman, So maybe JJ will lighten up in a few years. Or not.

Devin Farraci, who I normally vehemently disagree with, has a dead fucking on spoiler write-up as well about why its a terrible movie: http://badassdigest.com/2013/05/14/star … er-review/

Last edited by bullet3 (2013-05-17 01:14:37)

Well, even without having seen the thing, I'm confident it's not "terrible" on the scale of Battleship or Transformers.   

I suspect the added outrage may be due to the first one being not-perfect, but at least fun, and a promising start for a new direction for the material.   Promptly followed by a face-plant.   

But it's early yet, too soon to know for sure if we've got another Matrix Reloaded or Iron Man 2 on our hands here.

No no that sounds about right to me 

I'll put it in Matrix Reloaded territory, though its better than Iron Man 2 on the strength of its action sequences.

I think the disconnect is happening because most of the action sequences are impressive and well staged, and most of the throwaway character banter is fun and works. This, combined with the story approach of keeping the audience in the dark until 60% of the way into the movie, allows it to feel like the movie is working as you're watching it, because you're giving the movie the benefit of the doubt that it will all make sense and that the movie knows what its doing. I think this is why its so high on RT (I hope that number goes down after the weekend, lest the bar for what a "good" movie is drop even further).

Of course, what you realize when you walk out, is that basically everything related to the actual STORY of the movie is an absolute mess and fails miserably, and the stuff they pull in the 3rd act is such awful fan-wank bullshit that it kills any good will the movie may have built up. This REALLY feels like Crystal Skull in the way that there's multiple plotlines and character arcs that go completely no-where or just disappear from the movie.
I think the movie will only get worse on repeated viewings, and it seems dumber and dumber the more you think about it. So many stupid choices.

Could you be more specific? Besides the fact that the 3rd act stuff didn't bother me at all, the plot made perfect sense to me. To compare it to Crystal Skull is being extremely unfair.

You guys can nitpick all day long, but it's a fun summer movie, nothing more and nothing less. And it certainly doesn't have any higher ambitions, so I can't fault it. Like The Mummy!

Last edited by Doctor Submarine (2013-05-17 02:36:18)