STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS - Grading & Discussion [SPOILERS]

(For the record, Bethesda game bugs are a wholly different entity than most games bugs because they're almost uniformly hilarious, such as the backward-flying dragons, home-run hitting giants, and chickens that report crime.)

Bioware actually lost me on ME2, so I haven't played ME3, but the ending to ME3 is almost universally reviled because it renders every choice you've made up to that point pretty much pointless. Bear in mind that "your choices make a difference" is one of the biggest selling features of the franchise. Also, most of the ME series tapped into a Lovecraftian "extra-galactic evil" motif that took a lot of inspiration from the Cthulu mythos. The ending of ME3 had more in common with a bad sci-fi anime.

The problem with the critics in this case is that hardly any of them mentioned the ending as a bone of contention, but when the public got their hands on it, there was universal nerd-rage the likes of which has rarely ever been seen.

 

When did you buy Skyrim? I bought the game when it first came out. The game was notorious for being glitchy. Between 2011 and 2013, there were nine major patches to fix problems. And there are still glitches. These glitches weren't small. Some were quest breakers.

The ending is the last thing you remember about a story. If the ending is poorly written, it may leave the audience perplexed and frustrated. For Mass Effect 3, Bioware was forced to create an Extended Ending to assuage their loyal fans with a ending that makes sense. Reviewers have a job to critique the whole work, from beginning to end. If they chose not to review the ending, they are ignoring one-third of the story.

Here is an article on how to write an ending:
http://thewritepractice.com/ending-rules/

 

Bought it on release day. Just because a patch comes out doesn't mean that the issue it is fixing is game-breaking.

 

I didn't say game-breaking. I said quest-breaking. There is a difference. With one, I can continue to play the game with the caveat that I won't be able to continue that quest. The other - I have an expensive paper weight.

Here is the latest example. In the quest Daedric, during the Dreamstride Portion quest of the Waking Nightmare, when saving the game automatically or manually, the game will freeze on consoles or crash to desktop on PCs. A patch was created to fix this error. (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Waking_Nightmare)

You may be one of the lucky ones who didn't experience glitches. If you do experience a glitch, go to www.uesp.net/wiki. They list all the known glitches for this game.

 

Considering what happens early in the film, why does Starfleet send Kirk and the Enterprise after Harrison.

 

No.

 

STID: 93% at RT [moved to G&D thread]

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_trek_into_darkness/

13 fresh, 1 rotten. From what I know with other movies, the rating tends to only change just slightly after the movie comes out. Looking forward to STID!!!

 

Well, yeah, but it's not as distinctive as the TNG makeup.

 

Variety has posted a very positive, glowing review of STiD.

 

Re: STID: 93% rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

Sweet!

But there will be a helluva lot more reviews coming out in the next couple weeks!

 

I don't necessarily equate 'huge' and 'epic' with 'good entertainment'. All that means is that it had a big budget. There's plenty of mindless blockbusters to satiate that market.

Nor do I feel that we should be grateful simply to have any Star Trek available. I have almost every episode on DVD; they don't go away just because it isn't being made any more. We're not compelled to like something with the Star Trek label just because it's all that is being made these days.

I'd rather have no Star Trek than a bad Star Trek film, regardless of how big its budget is. Whether it is bad or not, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.

 

A bad Star Trek film would be a box office failure; we've had examples of that.

 

I loved the Netfix review. It perfectly encapsulates everything I felt about the movie, particularly Pine's performance, the Kirk/Pike scenes, the Kirk/Spock scenes. After being a little cool on the 2009 reboot Kirk, I was amazed how incredibly fond I was of him by the end of this movie, and that's despite him still being an immature jerk at the beginning. I attribute this to Pine's performance. As the reviewer said, Pine's Kirk is somehow simultaneously cocky yet self-effacing, focused yet irreverent, independent yet needy. He's not the Kirk of Wrath of Khan, who has friends and experience to back him up. In fact his crew challenge him just as much as the circumstances. I like how this movie tears James T apart, shuts down every option and sifts through his soul to see what he's got left.

This film didn't give me the same intellectual orgasm I had with say... Arcadia. It has its problems and some dramatic devices just get in its way. But it's more earnest and familiar and Trek-like than I ever expected it to be. That was a pleasant surprise.

 

Sorry, that's HITfix.

 

It's all about context... The franchise was nearly extinct, the studio gave it another try and put resources behind it, not only was it a financial success, it was nominated for 50 awards. considering it's success, yes we should be grateful for a franchise were fans of at this level.

 

By that logic, Blade Runner is a bad film and Transformers is a good one. I know which I'd rather watch.

Obviously films are made to make a profit. In that sense, the last film was an unquestioned success. This one will probably be too.

However, I do not feel compelled to like it because it is a commercial success, nor simply because it carries the Star Trek label - particularly when you have people involved with the film saying publicly that they strove to make a film which was nothing like Star Trek!

I went in hugely excited for the last film and came away disappointed; I will not make the same mistake this time.

 

Whether it is beyond the abilities or not isn't even the issue -- it is beyond the INCLINATION of anybody who chooses to get involved. If it weren't, then somebody would realize you could do a smaller budget film that didn't need to do 600 mil for breakeven and it could still be immensely profitable without being stifled with the need to be a studio tentpole.

But everybody thinks that an effective TREK movie has to have everything very big (yeah, that worked for Emmerich's GODZILLA didn't it?) And for right now I'm NOT talking about box office, because that is not the measure of success we should be addressing, although some seem to think that is the be-all/end-all, and maybe they should be discussing this on the wallstreetbbs.com boards ...

Several years back we discussed here how TNG's THE CHASE could have been a terrific feature film, and before that how you could do a variation of BALANCE OF TERROR for a restart TOS feature (and no, I don't consider the Abrams pic to be that by a long shot.)

You could do a riff on an ep like RETURN TO TOMORROW and have a movie that could be quite successful. You play up the horror element of the possessed officers and the responses of the crew to deliver the requisite 'chill' but you also have an interesting situation that puts it squarely in the 'do we choose to boldly go' corner -- you honor the notion of the show AND deliver the gut-twister ... and you up the action quotient with some of these meta-gods in android bodies doing whatever meta-gods in android bodies do, but keep the emotional hook on the fates of those Ecrew stuck in the meta-gods' balls (sounds awful but if you've seen the show ... )

Point of all this being that nobody is looking to deliver a SERENITY-level effort (a really good 2 hr movie that isn't looking to tick off boxes to guarantee an absurdly high return), and yet that is presumably what you and I would be wanting to see. You don't need to spend TRANSFORMERS dollars to get a good movie, but as long as audiences pony up for that crap, I guess more and more folks are going to try to play that game. But it is like having a lineup of 9 hitters who are ALL swinging for the fences ... you're getting a shitload of strikeouts along the way.

And everybody -- except the mob that accepts all bright noises and loud lights as entertainment -- is losing at least something as a result. The shows needing 2000 VFX shots are bankrupting the VFX houses left right and center, because they're having to deliver more and more, and since they're having to do this in much less time, the final product is also suffering a lot of the time for it. The backlash effect on this is already happening, because skilled artists who don't want to uproot their families every four months to go to Singapore or Bangladesh to whatever is the newest cheap VFX company are located are now getting out ... they're going with domestic computer game companies that are relatively stable by comparison, where if they have 80 hour weeks they may actually get paid for all of that time. Ultimately we will have less brilliant artists in the field and loads and loads of craftsmen working at various levels of competence -- and in terms of effects, that doesn't promise anything SPECIAL. So again, the audience will lose, and the studio will compensate with an even greater volume of eye candy and noise, because the mindset of bigger-is-better seems to be default thinking now, not just a conservative-amurrican dream.

Kinda makes me think the next CHILDREN OF MEN we get is going to be made by people working on their own with their own money and distributing themselves via one of the emerging models for small features ... cuz the studios can't seem to consider genre films as anything other than tentpole franchises.

It's weird, but Paramount's cheapness in the 80s with the TREK movies actually makes a LITTLE more sense now, because they were guaranteeing themselves a profit and at the same time not having to UTTERLY subvert the notion of TREK in doing so. I think it was shortsighted for them to go as extremeo-cheap as they did, but when you look at what you get when you throw a ton of money at TREK -- TMP, for all its virtues and good intentions, still a mess fascinating at times but a mess, and Abrams09, which I've come to think of as a a vat, probably because of the moronic brewery and because I want to drown myself to avoid seeing any more of those unmotivated fuckin' lens flares -- extreme funding doesn't seem to create a better product, just the need for more extreme marketing (sort of like superior ability breeding superior ambition, rather than the former breeding a superior endproduct.)

 

You shouldn't have even needed to say that. But I'm glad you did. (and not just because it would have saved me 15 minutes of typing either -- thank you.)

 

Hold on a second though. As a VFX artist, who works every day with other VFX artists, we're all excited to see this film, despite what is going on in our industry. Don't make this a JJ Abrams or a Trek problem, this is an industry wide issue that has to do with every major VFX film. Ya, we're the craftsmen doing this stuff (granted I did it for After Earth and not Star Trek), but we're also part of the audience. Don't sit there and try to blame the issues of the industry on us the movie goer who likes this film. I agree it's a fucked up system, hell I work inside it everyday, but it's not like if everyone smartened up and liked supposedly more intelligent and small budgeted films that all of a sudden this would fix a problem. It wouldn't.

If this was a $180 Million version of Trek that you wanted to see, would you still be making this argument? It's not what you want to see, so somehow you're trying to take the fact that we enjoy these films and use it as the blame for an entirely different issue. And as someone who sees it from both the person who makes their living from this, and as a fan, I think you're wrong.