SHUT UP! SHUT UP! JUST TELL US WHO THE GODDAMNED ACTORS ARE AND WE CAN ALL GO HOME!!!
please
I agree.
But first:
WRATH OF KHAN is a great space action flick, and it spends the right amount of time on character. Thare's no need for a review here; anyone with any interest in STAR TREK thinks it's just the best.
THE MOTION PICTURE is flat and boring, too long for its paper-thin borrowed-from-tv plot, and weak on character, seeing as most of the development goes into new characters who both disappear by the end of the show and who have nothing to do with the original cast. The extras and bit parts were obviously the producers' girlfriends, and the film wasted a lot of time playing in nostalgia, lovingly photographing the Enterprise from every angle, when it might have been advancing its thin storyline. That said, it was the only STAR TREK film I was ever excited to see in a movie theatre. I rushed out, I bought the McDonald's Happy Meal, and I was awed by the film at the time, so it gets points for being a part of my childhood not later ruined by George Lucas.
All of the remaining STAR TREK movies are a tie for dead last. They are all dreadful and cynical
shit, none worth watching twice. So in chronological order:
THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK reversed one of the greatest film deaths in science fiction. Spock's sacrifice in WOK is about as emotional as Roy Batty's last words in BLADERUNNER, and he pulls it off without the slow-motion pigeon. Nimoy insisted on resurrecting Spock, and for that I credit him with killing the franchise irrevocably. He took a series already pretty inconsistent and weak and declared that anything goes.
THE VOYAGE HOME is cute, and there are jokes. There is also an environmental message that would embarrass a 12-year-old, but wait! There's also lame comedy about Spock's memory loss and learning to swear! One damn minute, admiral; I thought I paid five bucks for this!
THE FINAL FRONTIER is a nightmare, and not because Sean "I can ruin anything" Connery isn't in it. It's a nightmare because Uhura is still asked to be a sex symbol, because Kirk wins in a bar fight, because Kirk is still asked to be a sex symbol, because there are horses for no God-damned reason other than director Shatner thinks he looks sexy on one, and because now Spock has a brother. In a move that would have made Laurel and Hardy proud, he defends twenty years of retiscence on the matter with "you never asked." Sweet fucking Jesus. Oh yeah, and they get to the origin of the universe at warp 9, and meet something that may be God. Life is but a dream.
THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY was like a two-parter on the new tv series, and strong for that. It also had a mystery plot that was written for the the Kirstie Alley/ Robin Curtis character and off-loaded to Kim Catrall out of fear of upsetting fans. This change was pretty damn transparent, however, and the revelation lost all potential drama. The Klingons going about quoting Shakepeare was just enough to tip the scales in favour of the "this is crap" argument. And it wasn't the Hamlet that did it for me, like it was for a lot of people. The line between the movie being good mystery/sci-fi/action and crap was the "dogs of war" quote from Julius Caesar. Great guest stars, but I couldn't help but notice that I wasn't actually watching Julius Caesar, which might have been something with that cast.
GENERATIONS is awful. The Enterprise crashing was NOT dramatic; it was desperate. I could actually see through the screen to the writers begging one another to come up with something as exciting as the destruction of the Enterprise in SEARCH FOR SPOCK (only real moment in that whole film). "We got Kirk in a cabin cutting wood; what can we do here?" Another episode where Guinan has mysterious powers even she doesn't understand, yawn. Kirk and Picard together in a fight with Caligula! Hooray! Two of the hammiest actors ever in one scene! Awful introduction of the new cast, stupid premise, terrible execution, and worst use of a go-back-in-time wish ever in the history of such plot loopholes.
FIRST CONTACT makes the cynical play of taking all of the lame characters and putting them in a "B" plot on the surface of the planet. Something about convincing a drunk rocker to do something he's already done, since it's history. Fantastically stupid for an episode of SLIDERS, and here it is on the big screen without that hot chick from Maxim magazine. The "A" story isn't half bad, and it's got all of the cool characters in it, except that the writers cheat in two key ways: a) they realize the villains lack character and so create a completely unique "leader" for them (absolutely out of chracter with their collective mind), and they try to make her sex up the robot; and they write in a nonsense character to counsel Picard on his emotional baggage, when they already have a character, Dr Crusher, in whom he would naturally confide such things. That they make her a stereotypical wise black woman is just embarrassing, since it's about the biggest screenwriting cliche since openly quoting from old movies (which they also do, in a lame holodeck sequence). Not the worst TREK ever, but bad bad bad.
INSURRECTION is terrible, I agree. So bad I can't remember enough to even comment. Except that I recall it was a story I thought they might have treated well on tv, but I knew damn well they were going to botch up in a movie. Didn't Data turn invisible in this one?
NEMESIS has a villain identical to Commodus in GLADIATOR, which shouldn't be surprising since both films share screenwriter John Logan. Nemesis is frankly the most embarrassing STAR TREK film of them all, since it even attempts to borrow the death of Spock from the beloved WRATH OF KHAN, here killing off fan favorite Data. He dies, in fact, disarming a superweapon, which fans of the series will remember is how Spock dies in the hands-down favorite STAR TREK ever among the majority of fans. However, Logan doesn't have the courage to keep him dead, so we also get the resurrection from SEARCH FOR SPOCK, sorta. Lacking some bullshit mystical mind-transfer, they literally find a head buried in the sand on a planet they had no business being on, and by the end of the show it has turned into a replacement Data. And the comedy of the proto-Data is so much like the memory-addled Spock in VOYAGE HOME that I really felt like I was watching a producton of "Star Trek For Dummies."
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Anyway, by some demand, I will reveal the answers to Mike's big questions Not wanting to spoil it for anyone not wanting to know, I will tell all in links.
The First actor is this guy: http://imdb.com/name/nm0935067/ who if you look you'll see was in a TREK episode or movie one time, and who played a very small pat in the STAR WAS saga (not enough to make the credits!). You'll see, too, that all of my comments about his are bang-on as are Mike's clues.
The second actor is this guy: http://imdb.com/name/nm0720890/ who if you look was in a TREK episode, but not a back-in-time one as Mike claims (it's more like a holodeck episode, but it's not that, either). Anyway, he plays a role similar to actor one in the STAR WARS series, but he got the benefit of actually being in the credits, so alot more people should have been expected to know him.
The third actor, the one I added, is Carel Struycken ( http://imdb.com/name/nm0835393/ ). He played "Mr Homm," Troi's mother's manservant, in several episodes of THE NEXT GENERATION. He also played an urelated character in an episode of VOYAGER. He was also King Terak in EWOKS: THE BATTLE FOR ENDOR (1985), which I certainly wouldn't call a STAR WARS movie but which WAS written and exec-produced by George Lucas.
This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 07 April 2004 - 02:31 AM