Re: Gravity.

My reading is that she's supposed to be suffering chronic depression - the monologue about doing nothing but working and driving around aimlessly is the major indicator. I think the dialogue is also trying to imply that she wasn't a career astronaut - NASA came to her and trained her to fly because it was her technology, thus circumventing the story problem of how someone with depression has the gumption to become an astronaut in the first place. Of course, it doesn't really work that way, which is one of my beefs with the film, but that's what I think the movie was trying to do.

As Trey pointed out, there's a difference between being depressed (aka really sad because something sad happened) and having depression, which is something that hits for no reason at all.

Yes, but chronic depression can be precipitated by an acute cause. Sometimes something bad happens, people grieve, and they eventually move on. And sometimes they don't and end up in the downward spiral of chronic depression.

Also a possibility, but I still think her "I drive" answer to the "what do you do?" question precludes it from being something that she had put behind her.

Uh, sure.

I never saw Bullock's character as a person dealing with depression.  I saw Bullock portraying a character that was going through mourning (dealing with loss and grief).

To me she was not in the state of depression but moving through the process of mourning.

That's an incredibly simplistic comparison.

Nero wants revenge against a group of people that had absolutely nothing to do with a natural disaster that destroys his planet (ignoring for a moment how bad science the supernova thing is and how it portrays the Romulans as idiots for not, I don't know, evacuating) and specifically Spock - who appears to have been the only one who was doing anything about it but simply failed (because of time, whilst in a time-travelling ship). With a crapload of years to him due to a time jump, Nero does nothing about saving his planet and merely goes around blowing up Klingons and Federation ships. And then he kills billions of Vulcans because and leaves Spock to die presumably stranded on a planet because? Thus guaranteeing the destruction of his planet again. Nothing he does makes sense because, I don't know, he's "mad".

He's a rip-off of Wrath Khan without any of the backstory and with a nonsensical fridge logic motivation. What's more, he's not much of a danger at all - his ship is the threat. That makes him a weak villain (even Nemesis' ripoff of Khan had a clone who posed a worthy counterpart to Picard).

Abrams Khan, who is also derivative of Wrath Khan but only really in name, is motivated by trying to free himself from the blackmail of the Admiral, who's holding his family hostage, and to kill as many of the section whatever people as he can. Immediately, we can at least understand this, and that makes it better in my view. He's not deranged by a desire for revenge. He's not targeted people who have nothing to do with his greivances. Heck, the Enterprise joins him because they agree it's fucked up.

The Admiral wants to start a war, and that's also something we can understand. We have hawks in our world too. The movie doesn't really explore the why, and that's why it's not a great film.

I think you're giving far too much credit to 09 Trek for its forward momentum and characters. Last year, I watched the first season of the Original Series Trek, and absolutely loved it. An unexpected side effect of watching these great characters on the small screen was a diminished appreciation for their old movie adventures, and particularly for these new versions, who are absolutely nothing like the originals. Everyone is a pale shadow of what they were, and in some cases a parody version - Kirk is a pop culture perception of the character from someone who seems to have never watched the show, Spock has none of the nuance of Nimoy's version and is in a relationship of all things, and Bones (like a prequel Yoda) is just delivering his lines in the way Bones would do.

Trey's fond of saying how the reboot is more akin to the original series, and I could not disagree more. This is emphatically not our fathers' Trek. This is quite possibly the further from Trek any depiction has gotten!

I think the main reason why STID gets such a bad rap is its climax. It's terrible, with all the wrong decisions being made. Change that ending, with the ship crashing, Kirk dying and the magic blood, and it would improve significantly.

I agree with this. The opening to 09 is superb.

Dumber than a hammer full of sacks. This is all I remember of it...

I think this...err... "movie" would have made your top-three of the year, Trey...

As someone who genuinely suffers from 'Clinical Depression', I am often surprised that some people make this distinction for some reason. You can have times where you feel a bit sad or there can be days on end where you just can't drag yourself out of bed because you feel useless and pathetic and you just want to curl up in a ball forever away from everyone else. Unfortunately, for the past two years or so I have been going through the latter. There are some people who hear I suffer from depression and their first instinct is to say 'cheer up' which while annoying can be attributed to them not knowing the full story so I understand. I have no choice to really as so many people use 'depression' as a catch-all term for having off days, those of us actually suffering from it can often get ignored. Which, on my off days suits me fine as I want to be left alone. Depression humour for you there, ladies and gents.

Anyway, tangent, much? I didn't see Bullock's character as suffering from depression in Gravity

In short: NOT all films are created equal.

Would have been nice to have done that for everything else discussed here that needed it, like Gravity.