Star Trek –a review from the midnight premiere

In short: Did I like it? Oh, yes. Did I love it? Doubleplus yes.
Reboot? Well... it does not ignore the events of the 700+ episodes and 10 other movies. Instead, we get a time travel story which changes the *whole* timeline. Original Series continuity? Gone. The Next Generation? Gone. Deep Space 9? Gone. Voyager… gone too. I frown at the thought that the only thing that seems unaffected is Enterprise which never lived up to its premise till season 4. As an avid fan, effectively erasing that much continuity to evade the words “reboot” is, well, a tad bit too much. As much as I hate reboots, I wish it was one.
Nero was an ok villain. I would have definitely liked to see more of him onscreen. He got a Star-Trek style explanation of his motives (which is: he is not just an evil megalomaniac genocidal creep), but we never really got to know him better, he remains too much in the back. I little more interaction with him would have served the movie better, because apart from his back story which takes up about one minute in the movie, he is never really more than your generic genocidal maniac. He doesn’t seem to have any doubts about his goals, any reflection on himself. Pity. 
The Vulcans are much, much more emotional than ever before, and this includes Spock (well, that’s one case I can understand) it just doesn’t really feel well with me, supposing we are talking about the same Vulcan from TOS.
The characters are all likeable (well, we know them already, don’t we?), the acting is generally solid, and the humor never fails short. The pacing is fast, but good, and you never start pinching in your seat. The effects are also very well done. 
I still don’t like the all-too sterile Enterprise bridge, or neither the redesigned ship itself. She just doesn’t seem to have good proportions in my eyes. The one from the TOS movies looks better any day (or for that matter, the 1960’s one too…)
Verdict:
8/10

A Question of Origin

Going back to Shakespeare, who is usually claimed as the greatest playwright ever born. But why is that? He hardly used any original plots! The plots were used and abused and in literacy terms, probably raped to death and then used a bit more. Is it the filling that made his work great? The composition? The new levels of character relationships, emotion, troubles and so on are what distinguish Shakespeare’s work? Just how important is it to be original? Is it merely enough to be able to form a pre-existent story mass into a beautiful final form? It is said that there are only seven archetypical stories that can be told. If it’s true is it pure delusion if we claim something to be original?

Pulp, Fiction?

It would be curious to see if we could go a few hundred years into the future, what would be treated as high art, a lasting value and quintessential of our era.
Superman? 12 Monkeys? Citizen Kane? 
And why is something treated as a lasting value today? Let’s see Shakespeare. Master drama writer. Comedy expert. The epitome of dramaturgical achievement.
Shakespeare, among other things, was a real crowd-pleaser. His works are filled with crude farce all the way through. The grave-diggers from Hamlet? The drunken doorkeeper fro Macbeth? You could write it off as pure pulp to keep the plebs from throwing apple cores on the stage. But what is Shakespeare only wanted to write a blockbuster without any deeper implications?

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. S.U.C.K.S.

***Warning: Ranting and Spoilers follow***




I finally managed to play Stalker to the end, and I honestly can’t recall when I last felt so disappointed in game after all the excessive waiting and all the praises I heard about it.
Bugs:
The game, even after the latest patch installed, tends to crash to the desktop-or do horrible swapping on every damned level despite the fact that the graphics were set to minimum and my machine has 1 Gb of RAM installed, in company of a GeForce Go 7400. After Googleing it up, it seems I was not alone with this problem. At the duty farmstead after the camp elimination and at Prijpaty following the squad of Stalkers the leader both got shot down- yet the game showed I should return to/follow them even after them being dead… and the problem remained after reloads, too. Ridiculous. Sometimes enemies tend to disappear after being shot down, and my favorite bug is when I save just after eliminating an enemy… it simply respawns every time after I load the savegame, to the effect of I getting shot in the back unless I manage to kill the zombie bastard turning aroud madly and shooting without aiming, only hoping to be faster in killing him than he does me. I also almost run out of ammunition after turning off the Brain Schorcher, despite the fact that I loaded up totally with ammunition at the bar… most enemies tend to drop about 8 pieces of ammunition for the “big guns”, and it forced me to clown around with my knife during the onslaught… pathetic. And I didn’t even mention how all the time my marker disappeared from the map randomly, only to come back after restarting the whole game, and how jawbroken-looking NPC’s tended to be during talking totally out of lipsync. At least it brought back nostalgic memories from Commandos 1, back from 1998. 
At entering one level, the game simply spawns you in front of 10 enemies, only to be shot down unless you are lucky to grab the right second to run after the intensive loading…way to go, dear level designers.
Many levels of the game feel rushed, and the overall feeling of the game is too linear and short–despite the side missions- the fact that the game is divided into smaller maps was pretty disappointing, I was expecting something like in Morrowind 3. More so, I felt the story to be unepic, incoherent and badly told which leads to my last and biggest problem…

The ending.

So I climbed to the Wish Granter (after running around in circles on the damned last level, and wished, only having a perfect reputation to end up being blind.

WHAT?

Oooooh yes, my friend told me what I was “supposed” to do to get a proper ending.
The game is simply being a total dickwad expecting you to pick up a totally uninteresting looking, and pretty damn hidden quest disguised as a side mission to get to the “happy ending”.
What on Earth were the developers thinking?

This game is the biggest letdown in recent years for me.



Overall score: 73%

Deat Cult

It has been inside me for a while, might it not be so actual anymore.
 I am quite simply sick of the Heath Ledger overhype in the recen Batman flick, “The Dark Knight”, especially when it comes to trashing Jack Nicholson’s performance from Tim Burton’s 1989 original Batman movie.
Had he not killed himself stupidly with the abuse of his medication, would he have got the same insane hype? I guess not. He is caught in the “better say nothing about a dead man than bad things” effect.
 I never once laughed at him (which, as later I found out, I was supposed to.) Well, personal tastes may differ.
And people claim the new joker is more believable. The character creates an aura of frenzy danger around him, but quite simply it is because you can never, ever tell what his next move would be. His insane, ad hoc plans almost always work, which is highly incredible. He survives and thrives on chaos, yet he seems to have plans and plans and plans within plans. He lacks a motive, or even a basic background story. He is quite simply a madman bent on destruction, creating mayhem and misery. His goal is without a grain of motivation.
More believable? I guess not.

The Restraints of Telling a Story

The “Tale of Tales Graveyard” is quite possibly the most morbid video game ever created. There is nothing more to do than walk in a straight with an old woman in a graveyard. You can sit down on a bench. You might die (but only if you paid for the full version).

That’s it.

Have a look at the text copied from the official website of the game: “The Graveyard is a very short computer game designed by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn. You play an old lady who visits a graveyard. You walk around, sit on a bench and listen to a song. It's more like an explorable painting than an actual game. An experiment with realtime poetry, with storytelling without words.”

Story? Bah! Gameplay? What for!
No restraints. Pure art. The mind flows free from mundane nuances.
Why does it sound like an awfully bad joke, still?
If you won’t hear from me for a while, don’t be alarmed. I am developing a game simulating paint drying on a wall.

The Sound of Music

Someone once said that if he can remember or notices the music in a movie, something is wrong with it. This always struck me as a load of B.S., with all due respect. I can’t believe that a scene in a movie is only good if the music is completely forgettable, and remains in the background. Heck, if I find myself listening to bland, uninspired music crawling in the shadowy background of a scene, that’s not going to earn good points for the movie. The mediocre score of “Superman Returns” will never, ever live up the original film’s. And believe me, since I got some OST’s I absolutely love to listen to, I have found myself constantly probing for good music in movies.
Allow me to demonstrate, soaring and powerful music carrying though a whole act stealing a complete starship:

Extra Added Attraction!

Shiver! 

Thrill!

Scream!

Weekly Webcomic Mayhem, from now on, in the right coloumn!

I cannot be held responsible for anything!

Lost in Translation - Dune

Adapting complex, “talky” books is seldom a grateful job. Movie scripts are much shorter than many books in length, and adapting complex, non-visual themes is problematic at best.
I have chosen Lynch’s 1984 film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic Dune as a textbook-case (pardon the pun) explanation. The book is six hundred pages; the film is two and a half hours in length.
Just a few examples in where the movie fails:
The Bene Gesserit becomes bald-shaved and telepathic, instead of the hyper-awareness possessing “witches” in the books. However, we get to see the Spacing Guild’s navigators, resembling giant floating and talking vaginas.
LANDSRAAD is pretty much eliminated, and the “instable tripod of power” goes with it. The whole delicate balance of power found in the first book is all emitted, the emperor is little more than a puppet of the Spacing Guild, who fear Paul, the main character.
The Harkonnen-Atreides blood feud is never the least bit explained.
The “weirding way”, instead of a mental discipline, becomes a kinky new weapon amplifying its user’s voice.
Paul, the main character, defies every single law of probability and common sense in the very last scene in the movie, instead of the much memorable final spoken line, which was something I always remembered ever since I read the book in 8th grade.
Granted, such things would have been hard to translate for the screen in a reasonably lengthy movie.
Creating a trilogy would have been a much better choice, in all due probability. No rush to tell the story.

Persistence of Perception

“A charlatan prophet cast a client’s horoscope and told him he could never have children. 
"But I’ve already got seven!" 
"Then you’d better take good care of them!"”
Ancient Roman joke, circa 4th CE.

Good comedy does not seem to age, the jokes usually convey something about the human condition. I admit I have never seen the classic 1931 Frankenstein movie, and I have seen Young Frankenstein. The sign of a good parody is that you can laugh at it even if you have no grasp of the source material; it is funny in itself. 
Alas, allow me to demonstrate:
Frau Blücher! (Sound is required)


There were times when the genre used to spoof a target genre in general, as opposed to what runs today under the title of parody: recent blockbuster’s disjointed spoofs. Good classical comedy has characters you care about as much as you do for in an engaging drama. It’s a shame Gene Wilder never even got an Oscar-nomination for his performance in Young Frankenstein. He was brilliant. I hope comedies will manage to redeem themselves one day from the MTV-generational attention deficit syndrome.

Who Watches Watchmen?

Holy Richard Nixon’s oversized nose!

I will try to keep it shorter this time.
I admit, with all the “cult-comic” movies recently, that I would choose Alan Moore (V for Vendetta; The Watchmen) over Frank Miller (300; The Dark Knight Returns) any day in matters of storytelling and characters.
I loved the introductory montage invented by the director. (Extra added attraction: Watch it here!)

I also didn’t feel that the movie was overly long, but that’s me. Now on to the parts I found objectionable:
Gore for gore’s sake. The director seemed to add severed limbs for the sole purpose of… wait, I have no idea! The comic was about masked heroes not working in real life, among other things. What does our director do then? He expands every fight scene pointlessly, and makes them a bloodbath. Ummmh… does not compute.

All the subtle humor that made me giggle in the comics about the very gentle character of Nite Owl and his gadgets is thrown out of the window, which was all too apparent in the fire rescue scene. It got mutilated; the very meaning stomped out of it. The “Spirit of ‘77” was missing altogether, which is another thing I wouldn’t want to spoil for anyone (just take the bait). While the comic supposed to show how futile masked heroes were, here we get an all-too sugar-coated ending, with the message “Oh well, wanna beat up bums tonite?”

The ending. I don’t want to spoil it, but needless to say, the movie changes the b@tshit crazy plot-twist-climax, which in retrospect worked so much better, for one that would never work, simply because while the “solution” remains the same, the “sickness” becomes all too severe for the same medicine. 

And please, please, get rid of the woman playing “Silver Specter II”. She was painful to watch. The guy playing Ozymandias also, but he was a tad bit less severe.

You might rate the movie higher if you have not read the comic beforehand; it is also possible you will rate it lower for the same reason.

Verdict: 

6/10

Fahrenheit 1024

Classic sci-fi books have been often criticized for showing technologies that quickly became obsolete. Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953. In this dystopian novel, books are banned, and they are burned by “firemen”. The author, Ray Bradbury, could not foresee (of course, no-one could) the advancements in the field of microcomputers, and the information-revolution; the concept of banning literature by burning paper books at 451 Fahrenheit is obsolete in an era when you can carry whole a library on a piece of plastic sized your thumbnail, and distribute it in seconds all around the globe.
 I will not talk about suspension of disbelief for now; as for myself, I never had a problem enjoying a fiction just because its technological predictions are obsolete. I try to focus on the ideas and creativity presented by the author, instead. Solitary planetary supercomputers, their vast capacity only used by a selected few scientists? Nifty. Aforementioned computers operating with data tapes? Charming. Input handled by punch cards? Delicious.
But other times, they make chilling predictions, and not on the technical side:

"More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don't have to think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before." 

Dead on. Can you name a country where the football coach of the university earns more than the dean?

The Day the Brain Stood Stupid

Beware, spoilers!

There we have it. Keanu Reeves wearing a suit and beating up “agents” in the rain once more. We also get him naked in a fetal position once more, covered in goo. Where have we seen this before?
The original movie, released in 1951, was one of the true landmarks of science-fiction filmography. It was carrying, for its time, a very timely anti-nuclear, anti-war message; all in the middle of popular alien-invasion movies depicting the general feeling of the era about an impending soviet invasion and soviet spies everywhere (general paranoia also plays a great role throughout the movie). The aliens in this movie have the message that if we don’t stop playing around with atomics as weapons when we enter outer space, they will have to destroy us in self-defense. The image of the kind alien was thoroughly new to the cinemas, the plot was nicely and intelligently written and put to screen by the solid directional skills of Robert Wise, focusing on morals and not on wanton destruction. It carried a message not just for its time, but it is relevant even today with the ongoing terrorist craze and paranoia, too.
Klaatu, despite his superior technology appeared to be a compassionate person seeking understanding and common ground. The 2008 Klaatu doesn’t seem to care one bit. What’s the point of Klaatu visiting Earth in this new adaptation anyway? Here, the aliens have already decided to eradicate all human life because we trashed the environment. The 1951 aliens sought not intervention as long as we kept our grudges on our planet, and they sent Klaatu to warn us. In 2008 they act like landlords, suddenly showing up out of the blue: You screwed up the place, so now you get your ass busted royally, mister. No warnings, no second chances. Shoot first, ask questions later. How fitting for our times with Patriot Acts, water-boarding and so forth! Yet, I believe the parallel is accidental, it’s the public mind that changed. Their president must be some sort of cloned Bush, who goes for endangered planets instead of endangered cheap oil. So, in detail about the great plan to save Earth: Have two specimen taken from every species on Earth in big water bubble-spaceships already hidden throughout the planet (I assume that goes for air-breathing species too…), and no, taking a DNA sample like they did with the scientist at the beginning of the movie would be just too easy (also hurray for future inbreeding). These bubbles then just conveniently sit around on the surface of Earth, even the ones that should be sub-water, allowing to be moved around by humans and letting the scientists figure out the fact that humanity is doomed, because they are “Noah’s Arks”. Then an automatically triggered release of a swarm of self-replicating nanobots on Earth which devour *everything* indiscriminately in their path, so what’s left after them is “scorched Earth”. Allow me to deduce:

Killing everything = Saving the planet

Seems like a sound plan to me! Superior alien intellect, my ass.
The few bits and pieces torn from the original movie and squeezed into the new script hang out horribly; the end of the discussion with the professor about need bringing change was the only minute I enjoyed in the picture, as it showed distinct signs of brain activity from the people responsible for scripting. I could not bring myself to care for any of the characters in the film. All the “big emotions” in the picture are placed awfully and the character reactions themselves are unnatural more often than they are not. I simply failed to care for any of them. Klaatu had no emotions whatsoever. The scientist chick just acted badly in her underwritten part. The kid, played by the privileged son of Will Smith, has achieved a new level of annoyingness in movie history accompanied by sub-par acting, I believe, wanting me to reach into the screen and give him a good, proper smacking. And yet, a horribly acted moaning and spoiled crying at his father’s grave is what changes Klaatu’s mind about saving humanity in roughly ninety seconds. Even then, he is not sure if he can stop the process. Why on Earth (pardon the pun) is he there, then, if I may ask once again?

Does it make any sense?

Undercover alien agents meeting in a McDonald’s. The camera obediently showing the LG logo on almost every mobile phone for a long time. Pentagon computers running Windows Vista, and even using Microsoft Surface. Give me a break. This movie is about global warming. (Yet, the term is never uttered onscreen, but it’s painfully obvious.) This movie also features a shameless amount of product placement from global corporations not really giving a dime about the environment. The cautionary tale about human violence and stupidity must have deemed unfitting for the 2008 audience. Global warming is coming for you!
The effects all look cheap. Particularly the water-spheres look bad and the new Gort, who is very obviously bad CGI, but for some reason he was enlarged to be five stories tall in this film from the original. The designers tried to make him look like the 1951 version, but they also gave him what appears to be “muscles”. The essentially 1950’s design simply look ridiculous compared to the rest of the movie.

Random nitpicking:

-If the new Klaatu is all-powerful, why does he need a woman in a car to carry him all around in a car?
-A thoroughly crushed body can be revived with a few grams of alien goo, a fatal shot wound healed with the aforementioned material, yet when the alien’s kidnap Klaatu’s “template” they leave a huge scarred spot on his hand. Even today, extracting a DNA sample can be achieved by scraping under your tongue without even penetrating the skin.
-The nanobots can dissect a truck with a trailer and a huge stadium in seconds, but suddenly they slow down when our heroes try to make their way through roughly 250 billion of them swarming around everywhere, and hide under a bridge which is also spared.
-Destroying Earth to save it, ‘nuff said.

The whole movie script is disjointed, illogical, lacking a proper direction and substance, heartless and an utter atrocity to the 1951 original movie.

Verdict:

1951: 8/10
2008: 0.5/10