Which is how a lot of people feel about Iron Man 3, to be fair.

Here's what I treated it as:

Star Trek Into Darkness is a sci-fi adventure with some great action setpieces, great character work, a balanced script, and some interesting things to say about justice and morality.

To me, that outweighs all these minor plot nitpicks. Whether or not

made any sense doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Would the film be better if these small details were fixed? Maybe. But not majorly. This should be the very last thing we look at when we talk about film, in my opinion.

So here's just an example, and it might be the most controversial thing I've ever said on this forum. A lot of people on these boards disliked Looper but loved Primer. And why? Because the time travel in Primer is so much more intricate and well though out. Pretty sure someone actually said on the podcast, when discussing Looper, "Best time-travel movie ever? No, you're thinking of Primer." Primer might have a plot free of holes, but that's all it's got going for it. The characters in Primer are so one-dimensional it's like they don't even exist. Sure, Shane Carruth put a lot of thought into the science, but what was the point? And that's why Looper is a much better movie overall than Primer. And that's why Star Trek Into Darkness, despite little plot problems, IS a good movie.

Not to turn this into a discussion about the purpose of film criticism. That's deserving of a whole other thread. I just wanted to make my viewpoint a little clearer.

Last edited by Doctor Submarine (2013-05-26 03:34:41)

Just got back from seeing this a second time in IMAX.  God, it looked awful.  I think they just mastered this in 2K, transferred to 70mm, and then shot it across a 6-story screen.  I think it's safe to say that this is the worst looking movie I've ever seen in IMAX.  Just horrible.

-- Branco

How big a fan of Imax is JJ?

They only shot about 30 minutes of the finished movie natively in IMAX, as I understand it. So, at best, three-quarters of the movie will be from non-IMAX footage anyway. I don't know how this interacts with the 3D conversion either, but I imagine the worst-case scenario is that you can have the IMAX projection making the flaws in everything look more obvious, while nothing is allowed to look its best because everything was scribbled on in post.

Doc Sub: You, I like you

It doesn't help that I saw it within a week of the new Fast and Furious movie, which managed to do a better job of incorporating a large ensemble cast, grounding the action in character relationships, and being progressive in gender and race.

Calling the people in FF6 "characters" is extraordinarily charitable.

And he'll be some augmented super-villain that can punch extra hard.

And he'll fly around in a super-duper big black ship full of henchmen.

And he's planning to build Death Star v3.0. He'll do this by going back in time and extracting the first and second Death Stars through a worm hole just before they were destroyed and then combining them into an overclocked turned-up-to-11 Death Star.

Last edited by avatar (2013-05-28 12:21:33)

Whatever schlock it ends up being, it'll earn $1B+ with the Star Wars title card slapped on the front. In a world where Iron Man 3 and Transformers 3 can sail past $1B+ without breaking sweat, Star Wars 7 could be a festering PG-13 turd that makes no sense, and still dominate the box office. So the incentive to get the script right is negligible. Kathleen Kennedy, call me.

Code named: "The Alan Parsons Project"

Also, anyone remember how Hayden Christensen had to remind Lucas about "I've got a bad feeling about this."? Anyone?