I think Roger Ebert's great. I love Your Movie Sucks and Scorcese by Ebert. Especially in the former book he demonstrated his honesty and thoughtfulness as a critic in his opening essay comparing his experiences reviewing The Brown Bunny and Duece Bigelow: European Gigolo.
Though Ebert's always been fairly critical of Star Trek, his criticisms have been usually broad, but fair. With Nemesis he was generally sick of the "Sheilds down to 47%" type of dialogue and with Insurrection he thought the movie didn't have high enough stakes, that it was too much a typical episode of the series. With this movie his criticism is a general critique of the tropes that are Trek's stock in trade. Some of these issues, the "much of muchness" are being addressed directly by the filmmakers by shifting this to a tangent reality. The whole point of that is to make the movie accessible. And it seems to be working, because it's been getting an overwhelmingly positive response.
I'm going to see this on Saturday. I think I'll like it better Ebert did, because it's hard to be a fan of Trek and not be forgiving of its lapses in scientific logic that have been a part of its DNA since the beginning. I also have incredibly high hopes for the, probable, sequel. I think that once this world is set up, we can move on to something of The Dark Knight caliber, or at least Spider-man 2, or X2: X-Men United.
Though Ebert's always been fairly critical of Star Trek, his criticisms have been usually broad, but fair. With Nemesis he was generally sick of the "Sheilds down to 47%" type of dialogue and with Insurrection he thought the movie didn't have high enough stakes, that it was too much a typical episode of the series. With this movie his criticism is a general critique of the tropes that are Trek's stock in trade. Some of these issues, the "much of muchness" are being addressed directly by the filmmakers by shifting this to a tangent reality. The whole point of that is to make the movie accessible. And it seems to be working, because it's been getting an overwhelmingly positive response.
I'm going to see this on Saturday. I think I'll like it better Ebert did, because it's hard to be a fan of Trek and not be forgiving of its lapses in scientific logic that have been a part of its DNA since the beginning. I also have incredibly high hopes for the, probable, sequel. I think that once this world is set up, we can move on to something of The Dark Knight caliber, or at least Spider-man 2, or X2: X-Men United.
Even when they claimed to, they were so far off the mark that their stories were totally irrelevant to the topic; ENT never found a good idea that it couldn't completely miss the point of (i.e. its 'AIDS' episode was so far off that it boiled down to "only 'those' people get the disease." 
)
