pro_crustes

Amazed that there are no ratings for this, nor any (other) reviews. Saw this once on TV. Maybe that's the only time it's ever been shown. I remember it well, though, and thought Laurence Luckinbill turned in a fine performance. Originally a stage production, I believe, this version defies the norm of TV remakes of plays looking kind of flat and feeling kind of dry. Luckinbill's LBJ is fully three-dimensional, perhaps because he fearlessly seeks to re-create Lyndon Johnson's bigger-than-life persona. The perfect choice for a one-man show, as Johnson didn't need anyone else to share the stage either.

Hope this is available somewhere. It's really too good to lose.

Good continuation of last season for the most part. But... Gillian Anderson's stratospherically over-the-top parody(?) of Margaret Thatcher is wrenchingly dissonant. Not only is she over-made-up, over-coiffed, and over-acting, she is doing all of that as if she thought she were supposed to pretend she was Meryl Streep miscast as Thatcher, instead of herself. Indeed, she comes off as if she thought she were supposed to pretend to be Streep playing Thatcher for laughs, and doing a bad job of it.

The rest is fine, albeit a bit slow at points. We will wait to see how the character of Diana is developed. Her first appearance was pleasant enough, but the potential is there for treacle, and we really don't like treacle. Time will tell, and we will watch.

A mix of "The Seven Samurai" and "High Noon," this story is a familiar, yet impressive, take on the "we must work together to defeat our common enemy" plot.

Good acting, lots of fun visual callbacks, and Boba Fett. Whom you would have to guess at if IMDB didn't name him in their credits, despite the fact that he is not named in the actual credits at the end of the show. How come they're allowing themselves to do that, when they profess a zero-tolerance rule for spoilers?

Very impressive opening sequence that is the equal of any professional film. A spaceship breaks up over another planet. On the ground, we see a couple of astronauts. The imagery here is enigmatically anachronistic. Will this be an homage? Alternate history? Time-travel?

Alas, it is ultimately nothing, as the start of what could have been a great story is followed by no story at all. Some have said you are supposed to make of it whatever you want. Well, I wanted to know what was going on, but I wasn't able to make that of it. Instead, I watched a series of short scenes that did not feel really all that connected to each other. What began as Good Ol' Science Fiction became some kind of surreal Art House Impressionism (I guess). The production quality remains high though the last frame. But it is all wasted as any sense that it means anything is quickly replaced by pretty much random, at best oddly metaphorical, moments.

Feels like a lost opportunity for a filmmaker who could have made a great mark, if only there had been a good story.

Meh.

At almost 2-1/2 hours, A:IW is a mish-mosh of tangled story threads that have no place in the same film, barely able to justify their absurdly overlong fight scenes, each of which includes ludicrously inconsistent strengths and weaknesses on both sides.

Early snarky dialog gave me the impression that there would at least be the edgy humor that characterizes the best of the Marvel films, but the gaps between instances of such writing are huge to the point of boring.

The story is thin, hard to believe (even for a Marvel film), and will be largely incomprehensible unless you remember almost everything from the eighteen other films in the franchise (or, as I was, are willing to pause repeatedly to Google up the answers to your questions).

My teenage son often watches videos on his iPhone while simultaneously playing a game on his Nintendo Switch. I find it hard to believe he can really pay enough attention to know what's happening in a video while also playing a game. After watching "Infinity War," however, I would recommend having a toy in your hands if you plan to see it.

A beautiful white family with Latino and African-American friends lives in a world oppressed by alien overlords. Assisting the aliens are turncoat quislings who operate an "authority" that carries out the actual oppressive acts that keep most of humanity effectively enslaved.

A particularly high ranking quisling turns out to be Alan Snyder, the first and only apparently Jewish character in the pilot.

I found this blatant stereotype to be a jaw-dropping exploitation of a trope I thought we weren't going to see anymore, but there it was. Some have suggested that I should watch more of the series, to see if Snyder has redeeming qualities. I won't do that because it is not Snyder's flaws that disturb me. It is the use of a racist and disgusting stereotype to create a context that disturbs me. No revelations that might come later about the character can undo that initial usage. Others have pointed out that Snyder is played by a Jewish actor, one who says he brings his ethnic identity to every part he plays. Well, if that's so, it raises disquieting questions about whether or not that actor is something of a quisling himself, but it likewise does not reverse the effect of the story he has helped create.

This issue has been addressed by literary critics ad nauseam, so I won't go on any further about it here. I will just say it is a device that has no place in the dramatic product of a decent society, and that i am going to watch something else.

I loved The Karate Kid, but the absence of the lead character's mother from most of his affairs didn't let me believe in the story as much as I'd have liked to. In this film, father/daughter interaction, portrayed pretty convincingly, is an important part of the story. This is still a coming-of-age piece, but it has more depth than Kid did, while retaining an excellent sense of humor, as well as showing a mature respect for the subject matter.

The filmography is beautiful. The score is uplifting. The acting is compelling. This is truly an amazing debut by many of those involved.

There are a few flaws, and they make it hard to follow the sequence of events here and there, but it all makes sense before the end.

We watched it with our fourteen-year-old son, who liked it. A good family film for middle schoolers.

If you watch this kind of show, then you know which one this series is attempting to copy. As my thirteen-year-old son told me, after we saw the first episode, "master" is a synonym for "lord."

In a forced attempt to make this one somehow different from Greg Berlanti's other three shows ("Arrow," "Flash," and "Supergirl"), this one apparently includes attempted comedy. It doesn't work very well because, first, all four of these clones have their characters tossing snarky lines around, so the contrast isn't very stark, and, second, the silly things they say do contrast internally: with the serious things they say. It's as though the characters alternate between short speeches about the grandeur of their individual destinies, and the silliness inherent in asking a nerd if he's ever played football.

On top of all that, there is a serious plot flaw that appears at the end of the first episode, which (no spoilers here) forces the viewer to accept the idea that all of these people will agree to something that at least a few of them would realize might be a very bad idea. It is simply not believable. (I know, that's a word with little application to a show about comic book superheroes, but there are lines, and there are lines, right?)

For context, I would score the foursome this way:

Arrow, 8.0 (trending down)

Supergirl, 7.5 (trending up)

Flash, 7.0 (trending flat)

Legends of Tomorrow 4.0 (but I'll watch two more, at least)

Note: I went to a science fiction convention a week ago. One of the discussion panels was about how so many of us are suffering from "superhero overload" from TV shows like this one. It was a popular panel, with the consensus being very, very one-sided. I sense the end is near for a lot of this stuff, at least on TV.

Uptight, insecure, nerdy, intelligent FBI agent is forced to work with a foul-mouthed, street-wise, arrogant, rude Boston cop. Both are women, but that's (rather refreshingly) irrelevant. This is a classic odd-couple pairing that should have been fine grist for that particular mill.

But, the joy in odd-couple stories is that the viewer can see both the weaknesses and the strengths of each member of the team, even though the members don't (at the start) see them. As the story unfolds, the nerdy character and the oafish one are each supposed to find out that the other actually has some virtues and, along the way, that each also has some faults of their own. By the end, neither agrees to give up their own identity, but each accepts the other as an equal. It's a fine formula and can be the basis of an infinite number of tales.

Alas, in this story, although you will _want_ both members to find that common middle, they don't. One member wins all the fights, scores all the points, and becomes the archetype that the other finally aspires to. If you think the "winner" was in the right all along, you'll think this is a great film. But, if you prefer balance and a sense of personal growth in your human-interest stories, you're going to see this as another one that got away.

This film devotes itself to a series of increasingly unbelievable escalations that are more about out-of-school criminal behavior than about school-bully problems. The theme is endearing, but the delivery is way, way off-topic. Worse, a fair amount of this movie seems almost comedic, which makes it hard to be sure sometimes just whom to feel sorry for.

The script was hard to follow and the direction literally seemed to leave out moments that one had to infer or guess at. Our twelve-year-old son kept asking questions that started with, "Wait! Why did he just say...?" An amazing number of characters are played by actors who look rather a lot like each other, too, so it wasn't always even clear who was whom.

Overall, this wasn't really a story about bullying. It seemed more like an episode of one of those cookie-cutter Disney Channel shows that all seem to star the same adolescent kids, with an unconvincing set of problems dealt with by absurd solutions, all coming together in a silly ending.

If you're looking for a way to connect with your child about this topic, I really would stay away from this one. It unintentionally makes light of a serious issue, and confuses the phenomenon of bullying with complex (and over-the-top) criminal conspiracies. If you even suggest to your child that bullying is similar in school to what it is in this movie, expect to hear the words, "You just don't get it."

I've been involved in politics for over ten years, having run twice, been elected once, and worked on a half-dozen campaigns. Except for the large part of the story where the two main characters have direct contact with each other, this is, by far, the most accurate movie made about the process of political campaigning. Not, mind you, because it shows candidates to be shallow, or dumb; the percentage of candidates who are shallow or dumb is about the same as the percentage of people generally who are shallow or dumb. Rather, it is accurate because it mines for its humor many of the silly and absurd aspects that all campaigns tend to have. From candidates who think awful ads make them look good, to public gaffes having reverse effects on popularity, to the ceaselessly vulgar language that is the base vocabulary of every campaign staffer, this movie made me laugh at things I am not at all sure most people would even recognize as intentionally funny.

A lot of the film involves the candidates interacting with each other, and their family members, in ways that don't ever really happen. Those parts weren't as good. (Although a scathingly funny exception is the moment when the two of them shake hands just before a debate, and have a moment to exchange a few pleasantries that only they will hear and, yes, we actually do that.) Overall, however, this movie must have been made by someone who has been on the inside for a few real campaigns. If you want good fiction about politics, see "The Candidate." If you want light humor and you don't care about honesty, maybe try "Welcome to Moosewood." But if you know campaigns from the inside and you need a moment to laugh at yourself and the process, this is your movie.

It hurts to say this, but Doctor Who appears to be getting old. The series, I mean, not the character. We all know the character is ancient, which helps add credibility to the poignancy of his situation. But, the 2013 season is showing us that even a Time Lord, with all of existence as his canvas, ends up painting the same pictures, eventually.

The high point of this episode was, for me, a throw-away reference to the pre-21'st-century version of The Doctor (going all the way back to the original, actually, and good for you if you caught it). But, what disappoints about that tiny moment is that it seems like it might be the start of another arc that builds on the grand structure of the Doctor's backstory, yet that's not what happens.

What happens is, yet again, the Doctor coincidentally finds himself in yet another apparently mundane situation that, yet once more, turns out to implicate extraordinary forces, dangers, and events. When these things are ultimately explained to have some connection to the Doctor and his mysterious past, they make a kind of sense and also make a kind of promise (that this is all _going somewhere_, and we'll find it satisfying when we arrive). But, when the Doctor seems to encounter them by dumb luck, one tends to feel that, when the story is over, one pretty much ends up where one started. (If one is inclined to cosmic thinking, one also ends up wondering just how many other similar situations turned out differently in other parts of the universe, for lack of the Doctor's random-chance involvement.) Successful TV series often suffer from the problem that is eroding Doctor Who: they bring you back every week because you want to know the answers to the questions that make the whole thing so fascinating, yet once you get your answers, you may not ever come back. Doctor Who is avoiding the questions in, apparently, an effort to hold off giving us the answers. Watching retreaded stories like the first two 2013 episodes, when we would prefer to be getting closer to just what it is the Doctor means when he talks about his senses of guilt and loneliness at being the last Time Lord, is starting to feel like a waste of time.

Yes, the Doctor is back. The musical score is as thrilling as ever, the Doctor is as manic as ever, his companion is as cute and wise-cracking as ever... Sadly, this all means we've pretty much seen what the Doctor has to show us. The new companion's back-story is different from the others, but it's also incomprehensible, so "different" isn't so much "new" as it is "frustratingly confusing." Yes, this is a show about a time-traveling Jack-of-All-Trades, so it's _bound_ to be confusing. But the great joy to be found in the 21'st century's version of the Doctor has been that, if you paid really, really close attention, it always made sense. This time... well, it might still make sense before they're done, but I'm already lost. I'm not even sure I know what to be making sense _of_ at this point.

Meanwhile, the story in this particular episode is actually rather hum-drum by comparison to many we've seen for the past few years. Another peril, another show-down, another moment of truth for the Doctor. Stuff like this has to be _headed_ somewhere, eventually, or it all just starts to feel like copies of itself. The "Amy Pond" arc had that sense of direction. Alas, that's in the past now, which is kind of an ironic indicator that a show about a creature called a "Time Lord" may, after fully half a century, have reached the limits of its time and space.

Fabulous! By relying on tropes so familiar he doesn't need to contribute a story, Snyder justifies over-the-top visuals and gives us a gang of kick-ass warrior-women without one close-up shot of a bosom or one ripped skirt at the thigh. Think "Aeon Flux" and that style of "cool," instead of "Black Scorpion" (and that style of trash), and you get what Snyder has to offer.

Drill down on the IMDb ratings and take note of the fact that, except for the IMDb staff, the highest rating comes from females under 18. A number of critics mistakenly dismissed this movie as being aimed at men, because the heroes (the right word for these women) wear a lot of black leather and fishnets. But look closer at what you _don't_ see: there's not a lot of bare skin, nor even much hinting at anything racy. In the "club," they wear the same practice leotards every professional dancer has. In the fighting scenes, their outfits cover almost their entire bodies, and in ways that are no more demeaning than how most male action heroes are dressed. Closest thing I could see to adolescent fantasy stuff was one character's black leather nurse's cap, which frankly looks pretty jaunty, kind of like the winged cap of the Italian carabinieri. Amazing that the teen-aged young women seemed to get this, while the middle-aged female professional reviewers mostly missed it.

Extra fun for those of us who remember Scott Glenn for the similarly plot-less, equally atmospheric, ultimately inferior (though almost as satisfying) 1983's "The Keep." He is equally enigmatic here, though a bit more sly as he leaves the combat to the main characters.

Don't look for a story. Look for something you kind of partly wish were real, if only it weren't so likely to hurt you, and then say, "Gee, that looks so _cool_!" You'll be glad you did.

I believe this film is a preview of what the best to come from the future of film will be. It's short, but every moment of it shows what can be done with talent and modern technology. A longer film would require a bigger budget, but even this outstanding seven-minute production would have been impossible to create a few years ago without major resources.

As editing, sfx, and other capabilities continue to find their way onto the modern auteur's desktop, expect to see more of this kind of creative, ground-breaking, and (not to leave out) entertaining stuff.

If you're as tired as I am of retreads like yet-another-Batman movie or the seemingly endless stream of interchangeable Tom Cruise films, be patient: this is the kind of movie you've been waiting for, and there's a lot more about to be created where this came from.

There must be a stock process now that all film-makers know of that makes your exterior shots all resemble blue-steel gingerbread houses trimmed with frosting. I don't know what it's supposed to do, from a dramatic point of view, but it's just everywhere lately and Scorsese uses it so much in "Hugo" you could end up believing that Paris just needs a rub-down with a giant chamois skin to become the world's biggest Hall of Mirrors. Maybe it's a side-effect of replacing genuine photography with CGI. I don't know and I don't care. It looks silly and I'm tired of it.

Likewise, I am tired of tales like this one that involve a young child on his own, overcoming false obstacles that mostly take the form of curmudgeons you hope will all love him before the story is over. This film is just one tired cliché after another of such stuff. The full cast of modern "Dondi" films is present, with the innocent boy, precocious girl, multiple dubious authority figures, whimsical elders, and so on. You've seen every last one of them over and over.

Sure, there's plenty of steam-punk pseudo-wonder intended to keep the lips of your inner seven-year-old pursed into a little "o" for over an hour. Brass keys, spinning gears, and wind-up contraptions of every kind are in almost every frame of this film, all to make you think that something oh-so-magical is going on in front of you.

Ho.

Now add to that: hum.

While I can't say this one lacked for anything original, it lacked for anything surprising. Each and every set-up is, soon after, resolved in precisely the way you most expect that it will be. Original, perhaps, but familiar all the way.

Your inner seven-year-old will love it. Your actual seven-year-old will probably love it too.

Grown-ups, on the other hand, may wonder before it's over just what it is that $170,000,000 can buy anymore.

I can't rate this gripping show about a bunch of idiots talked into risking their lives so Paul Watson can get some air time, because it is great TV that no one should be watching. Capt. Watson says he prefers to use amateurs over professionals, because the former have more heart for the mission. What he leaves out is that the latter wouldn't make (I'm guessing) two-to-five life-threateningly stupid mistakes per day. None of his worthless tactics (glass bottles of smelly acid thrown at the whalers, ropes trailed across their bows to foul propellers, running intercept courses in his slower-than-the-target fragile ship) do diddly to stop the Japanese whalers, but the bumbling landlubbers he lets break, ground, or crack up many thousands of dollars of maritime gear are guaranteed to put on a good show. Very disturbingly, one gets the idea that Watson's preference for amateurs is due to the fact that they will ignorantly endanger their lives where professionals would just know better, and watching people almost kill themselves is something he thinks we'll all be eager to do.

At first, their passion is endearing and their methods seem mildly Ghandi-esq. But, not long after the first time you watch, their monotone recitals of the shipboard party lines ("we only use non-violent means," "we're here for the whales," "we're ready to risk our lives for Paul- I mean, for the whales") start to sound like hypnotic mantras, giving way, eventually, to plain old whining. For example, when the Japanese return "fire" to the Sea Shepherds' glass bottles full of acid with metal nuts and bolts, the environmentalists complain that theirs was a "harmless" attack, while the Japanese are clearly out to do some personal injury. Frankly, the difference between being hit in the head with a thumb-sized bolt and a glass bottle full of liquid is lost on me. Likewise their insistence that fouling the prop on a single-screw ship in antarctic waters is "non-violent" seems pathetically naive. If the Japanese can't clear their propeller, any disabled ship's crew will have to transfer to another craft, over water so cold it kills by hypothermia in minutes. Yet, when circled by Japanese ships so the factory craft can escape, the Sea Shepherds suddenly grow acutely aware of how dangerous any hazard to navigation can be in the far southern ocean.

Watching these knuckleheads capsize boats, knock off outboard props, lose their way, nearly run out of water, oil, and fuel, and commit every other possible screw-up with the millions of dollars' worth of toys apparently bought for them entirely by television celebrities is fun for a while. But only until you realize that the one man on board who knows what he's doing never takes any of those risks himself, happily standing firm at the helm, while a passionate crew of Keystone Kops insures his real purpose: to get himself on TV.

A Twitter post said it well, "If these guys are their best hope, the whales should start voluntarily swimming towards the Japanese." Sad fact is, saving the whales is neither Watson's purpose, nor is it the act of saving this show most demands. What needs saving is Watson's crew and, if we have any integrity at all, we'll do our part and e-mail Animal Planet that we've decided to watch something else.

My eight-year-old son and I love the animated series, so we eagerly awaited this movie. I saw it today without him, to decide if he'd like it. I think he would, because it shows what Aang and his friends might be like if they were real. Alas, where I had expected that MNS might depart too far from his source material, the first of his big problems seems to be that he stuck too close. Still, there is a surprising positive feature about this film that might make it a minor cult classic. More on that later.

First, some math: the original was set in three seasons ("books"), and consisted of 20 episodes per season, at about 20+ minutes each (after you take out the commercials and the opening narration). That's 400 minutes. The film is only about 100 minutes, so if MNS was going to tell the same story, he'd have to have gone at least four times as fast. Pacing like that would have been absurd. Alas, he kept too much, while leaving out some of what made what he left as meaningful as it was in the original. For example, toward the end, one character must make a great sacrifice for the sake of the others. In the series, this was spread out over two installments, so it got 40 minutes to develop. Here, it just can't be given the same time, so all its poignancy is lost in what ends up feeling like a forced sub-plot item. And that happens a LOT in this film. Which leads to the second problem.

The second problem is simply that if you haven't seen the original, you will have no hope of following this convoluted, summarized, narrated, series of set pieces. Not much better is that, if you HAVE seen the original, you're going to be infuriated over what's been left out. The sweetness of the original was largely in watching the slow, oh-so-familiar-to-us-grownups process of children becoming adults. Here, the characters don't really change much, though we do see evidence of progress in their skill sets; it's their level of maturity that seems static. And, speaking of children, we come to the third problem.

The third problem is that the kids are adequate actors, but the script is mostly absurd, worst by far when the characters speaking its lines are the adults. Believe it or not, the quality of the acting appears to be almost perfectly inverse to the ages of the actors. It's almost as though MNS felt that he could make the young actors look better by having the older ones look bad. Dude, it wasn't necessary! All three young heroes are pretty good. Ringer, as Aang (and, yes, they all say "Awng," or "Ahng," or "Ong," and that rhymes with "Wrong"), is the weakest, but his slightly smoldering dead-pan actually works for a character coming to grips with being the very last of his kind, whose friends are all dead, who has to save the entire world, while multiple enemies are trying to destroy him, and, oh, yeah, while he is only twelve years old. I bought Ringer's Aang. Rathbone (not really a kid actor, at well over 20) was a pretty good Sokka (yup, it's "SO-kah," rhymes with "Mocha," and, no, I didn't order that). But Peltz as Katara (she gets to keep her name, yay!) was actually quite fine. And that brings us to the good part.

The most positive thing about "The Last Airbender" is that it's actually mostly about The Last Southern Waterbender. Katara is the main character in this movie. And, while it gets a reliable 4.3-or-so from almost every demographic group, look at the breakdown on the IMDb voting details page. Women under 18 (you know, "girls") give it a 6.7. Not a high score, but substantially higher than every other age or gender. Once you see it, you'll know why. It's because of Katara, the fighter. Katara, the mother-figure. Katara, the leader. Katara, the brave, the strong, the compassionate, and the patient. She is every bit as much the hero of this film as is Aang, and he couldn't do what he does without her.

There are some very, very good moments in this very, very uneven film. The plot holes and exposition lumps are ghastly. The breathless pacing is overwhelming. But, some of it is beautiful, like the scenes where Aang and Katara are practicing their waterbending forms together. Some is exciting, like the fight scenes that outdo "Crouching Tiger" by quite a bit. Some is sweet, or bittersweet, like the flashbacks to Aang's early years. But best of all is the hidden jewel of a story about a young girl who, it would seem, delivers on the hidden dreams of a lot of young girls. A solid character doing extraordinary things, perhaps as all young girls aspire to be and do. Seems like maybe Hollywood could learn a bit about an untapped market from this, and meet the wishes of many a member of the future ticket-buying adult public.

If you haven't seen, or didn't like, the series, give this movie a 3 or 4. If you did see it and liked it, give it a 5 or 6. But if you have a daughter who still lives in your house, take her to see it. Out of respect for her and her peers, this 51-year-old father of his own little Aang will give it the same grade she probably will: 7.

When "Tin Toy" and other animated shorts first appeared from Pixar, it was like a breath of fresh air in the world of CGI. Instead of more robots, they boldly took on the challenge of rendering natural subjects, including human beings. The slightly drunken-looking wobbling of some characters (maybe, again, to avoid the precise, laws-of-physics appearance of most other computer animations of that time) was a bit distracting, but the images of flexible objects (like babies) were break-through accomplishments.

Now, almost thirty years later, the technology has advanced considerably (close-ups in "Up" of fabric, fur, and hair, are stunning). But, it looks as though Pixar has hired one set of CGI characters and now has them all fulfilling their multi-movie contracts. If you saw "The Incredibles," you will feel as though you've seen these characters before (perhaps, if you've also seen "Toy Story," the same way you felt you'd seen those characters before when you saw "The Incredibles"). In a way, even "Finding Nemo" and "Cars" look like they all came from the same factory as this film. Well, they did, but... why should they? The exaggerated features, cartoonish proportions, and overstated gaits (a kind of bunny-hop if the character is young, a Frankenstein's-monster sort of lumber, if elderly) are starting to look very familiar. (Although, inexplicably, given how far the technology has come, the designers feel compelled to include elements, such as Mr. Frederick's slightly polygonal ears, that appear to be concessions to the computer's historical role in films of this kind.)

The story itself is flawed, alas. No spoilers here, but it did seem that the main character's emotional responses to events around him were inconsistent, as were his physical abilities. He chooses sides in the (dramatically necessary) conflict, but not the one it seemed that he would have, at least not at first. Also, while the idea that he can fly his house via thousands of helium balloons is well within the accepted tropes of the cartoon genre, it lingers on way too long and becomes an intrusively absurd aspect of the whole film, with scene after scene making it harder and harder not to say, "Oh, come on now!" In fairness, there are a couple of moments that will bring tears to adult eyes, proving that this medium really can deliver emotional content. If only there were more of that, and less of the outright nonsense, I'd have scored this film much higher.

Pixar broke the mold, decades ago. But now they've replaced it with a new one. What once seemed so daring and new, has become ho-hum and commonplace. A cynic, just maybe, would say, "Hey, they know what sells." A shame, given that an animator--using a computer or not--is, in the end, not limited by the laws of physics, but only by our willingness to suspend our disbelief.

If you remember the original, you will find this one a remake in name only. None of the sly cat-and-mouse interplay the eponymous character engaged in can be seen this time. The new Six is much more of a castaway than a prisoner, not knowing how he got where he is, nor having any sense for sure that escape is possible. In a bizarre and inconsistent variation from the source material, Villagers appear to have had their memories erased, but not completely. The new Six is such a victim, yet also deliberately tries to get some of his suspected captors to admit to knowledge of things he himself is supposed to have lost.

The notion that the Villagers mostly don't know they are prisoners robs the entire story of its most poignant element: that everyone's cheerful demeanor is an act of submission to their captors. That was the original's metaphor to describe how many people felt about their relationship to government at that time, so viewers related easily and shared that Six's wish not only to escape, but to best his captors locally when he could not escape. This time, we only have mystery and enigma, with nothing resembling our own experiences or woes.

This is what you would get if you wanted a remake as tied to its source material as the 2009 "Star Trek" was to its progenitor, but your investors said your target audience were the people who liked the first season of "Lost."

I really wanted to like this movie since it might have been (and its early mini-trailers hinted that it would be) the restart of my beloved characters I have waited for since 1969.

Nope.

This movie simply has nothing to do with Star Trek (The Original Series). Oh, it's got a character named "Spock" who has pointed ears and comes from a planet named "Vulcan." But the similarity between "Spock" and Spock is about what you'd get if a twelve-year-old watched a dozen TOS episodes, then tried to describe Spock to a grown-up director or writer who had never seen TOS. And "Spock" is the closest to the original of the main ensemble.

Okay, so it didn't _have_ to be the same, I know. But it captures _none_ of the original's feel or charm. Indeed, where it tries to do so, the film gets in its own way. To put them in the familiar setting and context of the commander/first-officer/doctor, the script has forced situation after forced situation calling upon the viewer to strain their willingness to disbelieve the absurd to its breaking point.

Also absent were any familiar sounds. But for a few, almost swamped, beeps and chords, most of the sound effects, and all of the score, again fail to connect us to the source material.

There were lots of exciting scenes, and I think this could have been a worthwhile entry into the sf genre of movies (but for that annoying habit the director has, as several others have noted, of shaking the camera for no apparent reason; actually gave me a mild headache, at one point). However, by calling it "Star Trek," some reasonable expectations were cultivated. Alas, no reasonable expectations were met.

I'm sad to say it, but, although this movie is sure to spawn at least a couple of sequels, it's time to face the fact:

Star Trek is dead.

Visually stunning film that manages to show a credible view of a dystopian future without being the same ol' same ol' of either the many "Max" clones, nor a pure CGI immersion. Think "Logan's Run" done very, very right.

I would have predicted that Aeon could not be played with anything like the barely-concealed-passion demeanor of the animated character, but Theron (with, I suspect, effective direction) pulls it off. She doesn't look precisely like AF (who could?), but she looks the way AF _feels_. When I commented to my wife that she was actually appealing in her cat-suit, whereas Seven of Nine never was, my better half explained it to me: she doesn't just look sexy, she looks _cool_. AF is about more than sexy. She's about speed, control, focus, moves, and determination. Oh, _and_ she's about sexy. As a total package, it works.

The first half of the film was a delight to me as a lover of the two animated incarnations. The energy is there, as is the visual creativity. The music was a big plus, but doesn't quite capture the bittersweet tonalities of the originals. The second half slows down and crowds in some exposition in a mostly successful effort to "explain" it all. There's even a subtle homage to the original series built in that took me quite a while to notice, but it felt like a big gesture of respect to the source material once I got it. (See the spoilers in the Trivia section to find out what it was.) In the end, this adds up to a rarity: a live-action movie version of something most of us thought could not be filmed, but it proves that we were wrong. The screenplay fleshes out the slight AF back-story, as it has to for a 90-minute feature. But it doesn't get dreary or depart too far from its origins. And all along, it's exciting, fun to watch, and combines its original elements respectfully with its progenitor.

Cool.

Imagine what seeing this film would have been like if you had known the ending in advance. All those oh-so-clever scenes where Willis's character alternates dialog with the character of his wife... they'd be about as gripping as a magic trick when you already know that it's done with mirrors.

Well, that's how it was for me. At the moment he meets the boy in the church, I turned to my wife and said, "He's ____." Honestly, I had not seen any of the promos, nor heard any of the hype, for this film. My wife picked it. So, when I got the "punch line" early, the next hour or so became a dreary, repetitious slog, with me dumbfounded by the inability of the rest of the audience (I spent about as much time watching them as watching the screen) to see what, I thought, was so blazingly obvious.

Great idea(s) in this film, but hanging so much of it on one "surprise" at the end was a dumb move, in my humble opinion. For those of us who saw it coming (and, really, I'm not the most perceptive fellow around; can so many folks have actually been fooled?), the surprise was that we were still awake to hear our neighbors gasp.

This is a silly movie and not for those who want credibility, realism, SFX, CGI, or The Rock. But, it is about some of the more exalted aspects of what it means to seek the limits of what you can do with a combination of your spirit and your self. Karate, kung-fu, la savate... they're all just ways to fight. This film is for those who know that ways to fight are stepping stones to something greater. It follows a man who does not know, but who is learning, that punching and kicking merely create freedom to explore and to learn; the benefits of his quest will come from something more than his physical self can achieve.

It's not a great movie, but it addresses great questions and, if you look at it through the lens of metaphor, it can point you towards an answer or two. As well as that, it's a punctuation mark--if not a prose passage--from the '80s era of movies that asked us to keep believing things we knew were probably not true, but would be oh-so-cool if they were.

Remember "Mission: Impossible"? The TV series, not the movie. It was always fun to watch the team pull off one of their stunts, because they balanced their Rube Goldberg concepts with NASA-quality planning. This movie is cut from the same cloth. It's about a casino robbery engineered during one of the gambling hall's biggest celebrations. The eponymous crooks must work in synchronized unison to fulfill their plan. Unlike the MI series, though, they aren't all quite equally devoted to their mission or, at least not to their particular roles within it. Still, they have a clever series of steps that get more interesting to watch, even as it seems increasingly likely that the plan will succeed.

Along the way, there are some interesting mixtures of personality types, some mysterious backgrounds waiting to be uncovered, and a degree of slipperiness that make it hard to be sure just who we should be rooting for. Indeed, part of the charm of this film is that there are _no_ "good guys," yet we want the thieves to get away with their crime.

A nifty, thoughtful piece, with little action and no sfx (in the current sense, anyway). An added plus for some of us is a pair of fairly sexy dance numbers a 27-year-old Joan Collins does "nearly naked," as her character puts it. She was at her physical prime in this film, but don't underestimate her acting ability. She carries the sole female role with every bit as much mastery as Wallach, Steiger, and the oddly endearing Edward G. Robinson carry theirs. John Beradino (the original "Dr. Hardy" of TV's "General Hospital") has a small role, and Marcel Hillaire appears as more or less the same character he would play dozens of times in TV guest spots for the next few years.

7/10, recommended if you've had your fill of explosions, CGI, or Tom Cruise.