Friday 31 May 2013

New Direction & Trekking Into Darkness

So that weekly update thing... yeah that's probably not going to work anymore. Not that it was a horribly idea. It's just that I missed two weeks and now I feel a little behind with it all.

The weekly update was providing another problem too. The length of the post. I'm personally not a fan of reading long blog posts or news articles, so trying to keep one weekly update with several different topics into as short a post as possible was posing a challenge. I always felt like I ended up ranting on a little too long about everything.

So with that being said I'm going to no longer commit to one post weekly. Instead I will try to trim it into smaller, more frequent posts regarding a single topic.

This one will still be a little sporadic though.

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I've finished watching all of the movies in my Ebert's Top 10 list and I'll have a post up regarding that in the next week or so. I won't bother adding a summary of the last two films, Vertigo and Tree of Life. They were both great, watch them if you can, and I'll have my full thoughts in that coming blog post.

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I've only seen a couple movies in the past couple of weeks. Pain and Gain and the new Star Trek. I'm only going to do a review for Star Trek. In a quick rundown, Pain and Gain was a fun movie at times but it was slow to start and bloated with Michael Bay's over stylized camera work and some annoying narration. It picks up about halfway through and turns the remainder into a good bit of ridiculous fun but it's never enough to rise it above being good. Mark Whalberg is great playing an ignorant muscle head oblivious of his own stupidity and was probably one of the best parts for me. I gave it a 5/10 on IMDB.

That's basically all for now. I'll end this off with my thoughts on Star Trek Into Darkness and will be back in the next few days with a review of Fast and Furious 6 (hint: it's awesome) and my thoughts on Ebert's Top 10.

Star Trek Into Darkness 7/10


I'm going to open this review by stating that I've never seen any of the original Star Trek movies or TV shows. I recall passing over them as a kid while flicking through the channels and just thinking they looked silly at the time. With their drab outfits, odd looking characters and cold, dark sets the franchise always seemed a bit of a joke when I was a kid.

I jumped on the Star Trek bandwagon, as many others probably did, with the recent reboot. It brought color and life to characters I shrugged off in my youth. It had a great director at the helm with J.J. Abrams. It was fun and exciting. And most importantly it was smart. It used the gimmick of time travel, which is starting to get overexposed and stale, and simplified it to help open up the franchise to a whole new direction without alienating the fans of the original material. It is, in my opinion, one of the best examples of how to reboot/restart a franchise.

Warp to 4 years in the future and here we are staring the excessively hyped Star Trek Into Darkness in the face. The story this time around follows the crew of the Enterprise as they return to earth from a near fatal mission on a foreign planet. With the consequences of this mission looming over Spock and Kirk, a new threat appears and hits them where they live. Fueled by vengeance, Kirk leads the Enterprise and his crew to the reaches of space to hunt down the man responsible and end up finding more danger than they ever bargained for.

I can't say too much more as far as the plot goes without spoiling anything. One of the things I want to praise about the movie is the clever advertising. Once again, can't say too much, but I've complained a lot recently about the quality of trailers and the amount of information they give regarding plot and spoiling key moments in movies. Well, everyone needs to step back and start taking notes from Mr. Abrams on how to make a trailer because what I thought I was getting, and what I actually got, weren't quite the same. In a good way of course.

With the same cast and crew, the film carries over a lot of the same humor and style as the one before. It does, in typical blockbuster sequel fashion, take on a darker, more serious tone this time around though. This shift works in adding gravity to some elements of the story that would not have worked if it tried to keep with the same upbeat tone and colorful scenery as the first one. They still manage to squeeze in plenty of fancy special effects and explosions to brighten everything up, and the locations they visit at the beginning and end of the film are vivid and colorful to even it all out.

The 3D in this movie was terrific as well. I highly recommend watching this in IMAX 3D if possible. There's a lot of beauty going on here and this is one of the rare movies lately where I actually feel like the 3D added to the experience. I haven't seen it in 2D yet to compare but at no point during the movie did I find it distracting or gimmicky. It helped add depth to the environments and immerse me into the movie as 3D should.

While the cast and acting was good overall, I did feel that it spent too much time around Kirk and Spock. It's not the worst thing because Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto carry their roles well and the chemistry between the two characters is great. Chris Pine is turning into the charismatic action star that Ryan Reynolds wishes he could be. But I would have enjoyed it if more screen time was given to the rest of the crew. The relationship between Uhura and Spock is supposed to be one of the bigger parts of the plot but it never seems to get past childish, teenage bickering between the two. I never really felt their relationship was strained or played a vital part and at no point does the movie make me care enough about it even though it continued to be brought up. The one standout with the rest of the cast, and my favorite part of the movie was Benedict Cumberbatch. That boy can act and he can kick ass with the best of them as well. One particular action scene with him had me grinning from ear to ear and was one of the standout moments of the movie for me.

My biggest problem and fault I found with this movie is in the direction it took as a whole. The whole time I was watching the movie I had the sense that something was missing. It was loud and action packed and it was all done well but it just constantly nagged at me that the movie should have been smarter. It felt like it was slowly fitting into the same mold that so many senseless, generic summer blockbusters fill. Which is disappointing when you think of the potential available here. Space exploration should be groundbreaking. We should be seeing things that we've never seen in a movie before. New planets. New characters. That all seems to be sacrificed here to make room for unnecessary scenes setting up a bromance between Spock and Kirk. I feel this is a hugely missed opportunity and something that could set Star Trek above your typical summer blockbuster fare.

Hopefully in the third installment they expand more into the exploration portion of the series. Less time (if any) spent on earth and on the ship and more time running into danger on undiscovered planets and meeting some new and colorful characters we've never seen before. Why go through the trouble of giving a clean slate to the franchise with the alternate timeline plot point if you don't take advantage of it?

Anyway, until that time, Star Trek Into Darkness will entertain anyone who's a fan of your typical blockbuster eye candy. It's a worthy addition to a series that's at the top of it's game right now. And even if the franchise turns into your standard, run of the mill, summer popcorn flick, then it will still be one of the more entertaining options out there.



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