misho-29395

The premise is downright absurd, but there are Star Trek episodes with stupider ones that I'd sooner watch than this.

The details of most of the scenes are nonsensical. Spock is human and has all of his memories, presumably including those of learning to control his emotions, but somehow can't control his emotions. Fine, I guess, because otherwise there's no story, but then he has to be taught how to speak like a Vulcan again? And they have only the women on the ship doing it by trying to drop their voices in ridiculous ways? I know this is meant to be funny, but everything about it is so blatantly stupid that it's hard to look past.

The way Vulcans act is nonsensical throughout. Like, if you want to portray a person who's trying to prioritize reason over emotion, there's more to it than making them rude and having them use the word "logic" a lot. Having them do and say things that actually make sense would be critical, I would think, but that doesn't happen.

Honestly, this feels like it was written by 12-year-olds for 12-year-olds. While watching, I was thinking back to DS9, which had episodes that were pure comedy, really, more so than this, but they worked while this is awful. I think a key reason for the difference is that DS9 had characters who reacted in a manner that was true to who they were no matter how ridiculous the situation was. Here, they just turn into blithering idiots until the plot needs them to be trained professionals again, and then they're back to being idiots for the next gag.

Dial of Destiny is arguably less stupid than Crystal Skull, but it's inarguably more boring. Compared to the original movies, it's more of both.

It doesn't feel like a coherent whole, just a bunch of strung together sequences. It's as though somebody had a checklist of Indiana Jonesy things and felt the need to tick every item off. This not only makes it feel disjointed, it also makes it feel like a cheap imitation of what came before.

Another issue is with Indy's agency over the course of the film, which is barely there. Now, Indiana Jones being behind the curve and just trying to keep up has been a thing since Raiders of the Lost Ark, where it works very well. It happens in this one, too, but because there's a second protagonist who is ahead of the curve for most of the film, he ends up the supporting character in his own movie. This especially sucks since this other protagonist is basically Indy from Temple of Doom with more or less the same character arc, so she's not interesting because, well, she's a cheap imitation of what came before.

The acting is good, but the rest is kind of awful. Ejiofor, as usual, is fantastic.

The dialog is just painful to sit through, which is about par for the guy who wrote it.

To show us that the main character is a thirsty alien unaccustomed to being human, they have him deep-throat a hose, which is easily one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. My dog understands that water comes out of the end of the hose so there's no need to consume the hose itself, and I'm pretty sure the alien's supposed to be smarter than a dog. Like, the dude managed interstellar travel but got confused by a bendy tube?

The intro is also some of the most visually dull stuff I've ever sat through and it's riddled with completely unnecessary and trite expository dialog. Who would have thought you could make an alien stumbling about after crash-landing on Earth boring? The same thing's been done a thousand times before and, to the best of my knowledge, never this badly.

The story is kind of all over the place, and certainly, the villains are just bland and it's never quite clear what they're trying to achieve. From what I gathered, there were three evil factions/individuals, and to be to be honest, I'm not even 100% sure which of them was the one threatening the protagonists in the final act. I've seen movies fail thanks to poorly written villains before; I've never seen one with villains so poorly written I couldn't tell them apart.

There's basically nothing interesting about a single one of the new protagonists either, aside from their hairstyles and sunglasses, which really doesn't help with building tension. They're mostly just there to talk about how awesome Neo and Trinity are, as far as I can tell. The end result is that the action scenes are so boring because you really couldn't care less about who lives and dies.

Also, occasionally, there's just pauses to talk midway through fight scenes, and other times scenes kind of just end with a pretty Zack-Snyder-inspired slow-mo shot and then we lunge forward to the next thing, which really messes with the pacing.

And, finally, I'm not entirely sure, but I think they were trying to parody the previous films while also being respectful of them, so you get these weird comedy and meta-commentary scenes here and there. Tonally, it really doesn't work very well.

There are plenty of worse movies out there, so it's not necessarily a waste of time to watch this, but it's not good either.

The world of Abigail is really interestingly put together. There's tons of practical and CGI sets and effects, and they all really look very good. The character design is fantastic, too.

They do something I don't think I've ever seen in a live-action film. They had actors who mostly don't speak English, at least not without an accent, do the whole performance in English, then they had English-speaking voice actors dub over them. As a result, the lip movements more or less sync up. It's a bit weird, though, because the phrasing sometimes sounds off and the words the original actors stress are the ones that would be stressed by a Russian speaker. The voice actors then had to match that to keep the lip movements synced up. It is very noticeable when they're shouting or excited. There's also this effect where some sentence seems like it would sound normal when written down, but then it sounds awkward when said aloud by the actor. Normally, the actors could just paraphrase, but in this movie, this is all still in there. Overall, I wouldn't say the result is great, but it's not so bad, and it really is a unique approach.

Otherwise, the story is about a revolution against an isolationist Fascist state. The parallels to Nazi Germany are obvious, both in the storytelling and many of the visuals. There's also an aspect of adventure, where you get to discover the world along with the characters, and an expansive world beyond what you see is hinted at, which is always nice. And, of course, in the vein of The Hunger Games and whatnot, it's young people driving the revolution. I wouldn't say anything mind-blowing or surprising happens, but it's a good fantasy tale.

All in all, it's a solid film. I would not have thought someone could put something like this together for 7 million USD.

Kung Fu and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues were interesting primarily because there was this one outsider, Cain, with a strong moral code about being kind to others, but who didn't really understand the world around him especially well. Cain would always zero in on some simple truth or flaw that lied at the heart of the episode's conflict, and explain what this was with an outsider's wisdom.

In this version, the new Cain, Nicky, is not an outsider at all. In the first episode, she returns to her childhood home to live with her large family and catch up with her friends. There is no real reason her perspective should be much different to that of the others, and it really isn't in any significant way. She's just a woman who fights well, occasionally with mild superpowers like in the original. The end result is something that's barely different to any other procedural with some mystical MacGuffins thrown in, and it's so very dull.

It's a neat steampunk story with some superheroes thrown in, which seems like a really fun idea, and maybe it could become that in the following episodes. The characters are kind of dull, though, and there are these incredibly drawn-out scenes that ironically almost look like they belong in a film by Zack Snyder except they're not quite as pretty.

There's also, like, echoes of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer in the characters. The main villain, in particular, is just Drusilla. The protagonist also feels a lot like Buffy from later seasons in how sure of herself she is, except without the years of character development, so it's a bit hard to buy into it. I suppose with Whedon, Espenson and Petrie being involved, that's not surprising, but I'd rather I weren't constantly being reminded of a better TV show while watching this one.

This is a Whedon show, so the female characters are all reasonably fleshed out, as are maybe one or two of the male ones, but they also do this thing where a bunch of the men are callous and awful to everyone around them, ready to blackmail, violate and mutilate anyone at the drop of a hat. I think this is so that no matter what the protagonists do to them, it will feel justified, but they don't feel like real characters. They're just kind of there to be vaguely menacing and it comes across as absurd.

Anyway, I'm a bit disappointed. The people who made this show have done better work in the past.

You can't go more than 5 minutes without something absolutely absurd happening, but the actors are giving it their best even though nothing makes sense and their characters are completely uninteresting. The effects are great, the action sequences are exciting, and the director generally seems to have a good idea of what kind of movie he's making. A few individual shots are absolutely gorgeous. I really can't stress enough how stupid the plot is, even for a movie about a giant monsters beating on one another, but the film is otherwise well made and a lot of fun to watch.

Discovery's computer is now magic and all-knowing. There's a magic man with a newspaper in a scene that looks like it would fit perfectly into an episode of Doctor Who. A character travels into her own past body when she steps physically through a magic door, which is a fantasy trope, rather than a sci-fi one because in sci-fi you really should address what happens to the extra body. There's a play-within-a-play scene, which basically plays out like the one in Hamlet, which is certainly an allusion, although not an especially good one. If anything, I'd say it's absurd and out of place, but so is almost everything else in this episode. I know Discovery gets a lot criticism about not being like other Star Trek series, and this episode definitely isn't, but it's also not like other Discovery episodes. It's just plain weird, if anything.

There's a lot of overacting in the latter half, I think intentionally because the actors look like they're having fun, so that's nice, I guess. Doug Jones is really good throughout, which is nothing new, but it's also a sharp contrast to the other performances. Oded Fehr is a very talented actor as well, and he was certainly there for a little bit for some reason.

I'll disagree with some of the other reviewers who say this is the worst episode of the series so far, since the previous one is not remotely better, but this was nonetheless pretty painful to watch.

Just a few examples:

Stamets spends a long time talking about Adira, who's standing right beside him, in the third person. This comes across as really rude, so naturally Adira calls him out on... not using their preferred pronouns.

While dealing with a locust infestation, they take time to discuss the importance of the right to liberty and self-determination... of the locusts.

Saru is worried about sparking a war by attacking an enemy ship, so Tilly decides that they should have another ship carry out the attack... which they openly launch from Discovery's cargo bay.

At one point, they do fly a ship with a joystick, though, a clever and fun nod to... one of the dumbest scenes in one of the worst Star Trek movies.

The premise is stupid, the general story makes little sense, the dialog is cringy, the characters are all awful at at what they do, there are B movies out there with significantly better acting, and the direction and camerawork are, at best, lazy. I honestly don't understand how the writers could possibly have thought that anyone who's been inside a hospital for more than a few minutes would be able to suspend their disbelief enough to become invested in this drivel.

Watching this, it feels like a twelve-year-old wrote the screenplay by tacking together scenes that might look cool without giving any thought to what the dialog would sound like when spoken out loud by human beings. Ian McShane does his best to sound convincing, while some of the other actors don't seem to see the point in even doing that and it's hard to blame them. There are plot holes throughout and segments that make little-to-no sense and add nothing to the story, although would maybe look neat if the effects were any good. The whole thing generally feels like someone slapped together at least four or five stories and tried to turn them into a coherent whole, which wouldn't surprise me, although I don't know enough about the comics to say for certain.

I'm not sure where to place the blame for the awful pacing, but the movie is just unrelenting. There are times when things should wind down, but then it's just more noisy stuff happening. For example, at one point a character is in need of specialized medical attention and they find out it'll be a fairly-long and "treacherous" trek to get it. The character is then cured within 1-2 minutes of runtime, the trek portion being a few seconds of that, then we jump straight into some exposition, then we jump straight back to what we were doing before, presumably after a long and treacherous trek back that also happens instantaneously. To get an idea of how jarring this feels, imagine if Gandalf told Frodo about what it would take to destroy the ring and the next scene was at Mount Doom.

The direction is mostly just odd, and I have no idea if it's because the director couldn't figure out what was happening in the script or because someone was meddling with his work.

Finally, the CGI monsters look terrible. There are some impressive uses of practical effects, but the transitions between those and their CGI counterparts are blatant.