Those two clips were quite enjoyable, and insightful. Overall I give it an A-
I gave the reboot a B+
I think it was a subpar review when compared to his other stuff (his worst so far)…but overall not bad.
After watching only the first part, he hasn’t convinced me that I really did like it, he just explained why they did it, which everyone already knew. Hopefully the second part is better.
He’s still an idiot for not liking First Contact. Not that people who don’t like are all idiots, but his reasons were terrible. He just wanted to say he didn’t like it.
I didn’t like First Contact for pretty much the same reasons Plinkett didn’t, though his deconstruction was far more detailed and he didn’t focus as much on kidnapping hookers as I typically do.
Good review.
I like Star Trek (2009) in so far as I don’t think about it.
I came across his critiques of the Star Wars prequels first – “Attack of the Clones is the worst thing ever made by a human.”
What reasons were terrible? I remember his not liking it due to the filmmakers trying to make the movie too action-packed with Picard as one-man army. Also there was the bit with the big plot hole of the Borg time travel plan.
travelling in time wasn’t the original Borg plan. Their first plan was just to attack Earth in the present time. Then when they got to Earth that plan failed, so they changed the plan on the fly to the time travel thing
And as “Mr. Plinkett” actually takes time to illustrate, that’s stupid. He quite specifically points out that if the Borg had the ability to time travel, they would simply have travelled backwards in time somewhere away from the Federation armada, unbeknownst to the Federation, then gone to Earth totally unopposed and assimiliated the Earth. Attempting a balls-to-the-wall attack first doesn’t make any sense; it was unnecessary and invites the possibility of failure.
As “Mr. Plinkett” admits, time travel stories are hard, but this logical hole is particularly idiotic.
you can’t go back and mess up time except as a last resort.
Plinkett’s reviews have consistently been more entertaining than the movies he’s reviewed, with the exception of **Avatar **and First Contact. He’s one of the rare internet reviewers that doesn’t sacrifice all that much in the way of honest insightful critique for cheap laughs (he sacrifices a little, but surprisingly little). In fact, I bet you can base a film class (Introduction to Modern Science Fiction Films or something, since he doesn’t really delve into anything from before the original Star Trek movie) on the ideas from his reviews.
He nitpicks the hell out of things that are explained in the movie. He likes to compare stuff in the movies and the series, but he made it one sided. Watch the TNG episode “Starship Mine” if you want to see an action Picard. It was like Die Hard in Space. Picard killed a lot of people, not Borg, in that episode (even Tim Russ!). Truth be told, he could give all 11 movies the same treatment that he gave the TNG movies and make them all look bad. He’s funny, but he could do that to every movie if he wants to nitpick things to death.
Well, if we’re going to cherry-pick elements from the TV show to make First Contact seem less stupid, sure, you can cite one instance of Picard going all McBane, but I can cite twenty or so instances where the characters have travelled to the past and tried like hell not to intervene in historical events, or at least minimize their footprint. Contrast that to “Zephram Cochrane, wow! They’re gonna build a statue to you over there! And can me and my buddy be your co-pilots?”
Actually, aside from the one scene where Troi gets hammered, I don’t think I have a single positive recollection of that film. I wrote a fanzine review at the time titled “Timidly Going”, lamenting the film’s determined retreading of past Trek ideas and its general plot-holiness.
I can’t decide about his reviews. I like the analysis he does but at times the voice can get to me. I like the little quirks, like the mis-spelling or unable to pronounce something and even the homicidal things. They amuse me. I do wonder if they need to be as long as they are to get the same content, though.
If anything, he seems to like TV better than movies for precisely the reasons he gives for why they did the Star Trek movie. In TV, you don’t have a huge budget, which he doesn’t seem to recognize that budgets are different from TV shows to movies, and so you might write to avoid F/X instead of going out of your way to insert them. (His example of an action scene from a Trek review where it’s people walking from ten forward to a cargo bay, which he likes as a big scene, is an example of this.) He doesn’t seem willing to admit that writing for a different medium means doing things differently.
Having said that, he has some very good commentary about Stark Trek (2009), some of which I noticed in the theater. (the planets, the distances traveled, the simulator test of fear and the casualness to it) I also liked the comparisons between this show and how much of what they used was done in the series before. The hypercharging of the characters was also spot on and funny.
What I found the most interesting was his reason for Star Trek vs Star Wars. So, Star Trek was about the science fiction and Star Wars was about the action? Okay, I can see that. If that is the case, why is there fighting about the two? Seems to me it’s even more compatible to be both!
vislor
I finally watched part 2. I agreed with all of the stuff that he didn’t like, so why am I supposed to like it? A big reason that I didn’t like Star Trek V was because it turned Star Trek into Star Wars. He pretty much said the new Star Trek has become Star Wars. I don’t like Star Wars, so that doesn’t help him convince me to like Star Trek 11. When I ranked the movies in another thread, I put it at #6. As a movie, it’s entertaining, but as a Star Trek movie, it didn’t work for me. I’ll post my current list. Why not?
- First Contact
- The Undiscovered Country
- The Wrath of Kahn
- The Voyage Home
- Generations
- Star Trek
- Nemesis
- The Motion Picture
- The Search for Spock
- Insurrection.
- The Final Frontier