Basically, the idea of the film is that a Romulan ship from the future gets thrown back in time hoping to destroy Vulcan to take revenge on Spock who failed to stop Romulus from being destroyed by a supernova.  In the opening scene, he kills Kirk’s father (who was in command of the USS Kelvin) and creates an alternate universe in which no one has the same lives that they would have had in the original universe.  He then manages to destroy Vulcan and almost destroys earth before Spock’s ship from the future (I think it was called the USS Deus ex Machina) is able to blow him to smithereens.

There are too many things wrong with this movie for me to go into depth, so I will try to be concise on the ten biggest ones that I can think of right now.

Gripe #1: Idiotic science

J.J. Abrams does not know or does not care about science. Black holes are not literally holes.  They are massive objects that suck in all matter and energy in their reach. You cannot escape one by detonating antimatter inside it. You cannot travel through time just by falling into one. (See also: #2 and #7)

Gripe #2: Internal inconsistencies

When the Romulans attack Vulcan, it takes the Enterprise 3 minutes to reach Vulcan from earth at maximum warp.  Since Vulcan is 16 lightyears from Earth, this means that they were traveling at nearly 3 million times the speed of light (1500x faster than the Enterprise-D).  On the return trip, they have time to dick around and drop Kirk off on Delta Vega (a planet on the edge of the galaxy, by the way) and then pick him up again quite some time later and they still show up at Earth before the ship from the future with a much more sophisticated warp drive has time to do anything.

Gripe #3: Goofy character introductions

Sulu leaves the parking brake on.  Scotty is crazy.  Chekov has a monologue peppered with as many “V” sounds that he can turn into “W”s as possible (example: “ewacuate”).  The computer fails to recognize an access code because he can’t pronounce his “V”s.

Gripe #4: Sexism

This movie has been updated out the wazoo, but the women are still wearing miniskirts.  Uhura has a very thin excuse for being involved in the movie, but mostly she’s just there to take off her clothes and make out with Spock every once in a while.  She wasn’t treated that badly in the ’60s and that’s saying something.

Gripe #5: Unnecessary monsters

J.J. Abrams seems to have some kind of monster fetish.  Keep your Cloverfield out of my Star Trek!

Gripe #6: BOOOORING

All in all, there isn’t a whole lot of action that takes place in this movie.  There are a couple of little space battles and a fist fight or three, but mostly it’s just a bunch of talking.  Abrams tries to distract you with the blinding lens flare so that you think that something is happening.  It’s also possible that John Carpenter was hiding just off camera.

Gripe #7: Did I mention Delta Vega?

So Delta Vega is on the outskirts of the Milky Way galaxy and Vulcan is about 16 lightyears from Earth (orbiting 40 Eridani-A).  This puts Delta Vega about 75,000 lightyears away from Vulcan.  When Vulcan is being destroyed, however, Spock is standing on the Delta Vega surface, watching the event.  Vulcan appears to be hundreds of times larger in the sky than the moon is in our sky.

Gripe #8: Madea’s Starfleet Academy.

Who let Tyler Perry into this movie?

Gripe #9: Man-sized blender

Who designed the ship’s plumbing? Why was it the only futuristic thing in the factory floor of an engineering deck? Why was it designed to puree anyone who got stuck inside?  Why did J.J. Abrams make us watch that scene?

Gripe #10: Sabotage

I’m sorry, but in the enlightened utopia that Gene Rodenberry imagined, there is no chance that they would still be listening to The Beasty Boys.

A bonus nitpick

When Kirk jumps to a lower platform in the Romulan ship, you can see a disruptor pistol on the ground.  After a Romulan picks him up and begins strangling him, he pulls out the guard’s gun and shoots him, dropping it as he falls to the edge again.  This is the gun we saw on the floor before and it is now in the exact same position it was before the tussle.

UPDATE: Gripe #11: Spock’s hot mom

Julie pointed out in her comment below that I forgot to mention Winona Ryder as Spock’s mom.  It was actually quite distracting, because the whole time, I kept thinking, “why the hell did they cast Winona and then put old makeup on her?”

A little praise

Overall, the acting was pretty good.  I think that most of the problems with the characters were thanks to the writing and directing.  I really don’t mind that cast as the new interpretations of the classic Star Trek characters, though they really need to get George Takei to record Sulu’s voice in ADR.

• Push = .9 Blarts
• The Pink Panther 2 = .4 Blarts
• Coraline = 3.3 Blarts
• The International = 2 Blarts
• He’s Just Not That Into You = 1.6 Blarts

Special award: Most hilarious cast 

Now, obviously, any video game movie directed by Uwe Boll is not going to have anything to do with the game, so I don’t really care about that.  I’ve never even played the game.  What makes this movie so unbelievably bad is the casting.  Burt Reynolds (who does not attempt an accent) is the king of a medieval country? Jason Statham is his son?  That guy that looks like Steve Odekirk’s thumb is Legolas?  All of these pale when you see them next to Matthew Lillard’s portrayal of a sniveling nobleman.  I think his might be one of the worst fake accents I have ever seen in a film.  Of course, the the strangest choice of them all is Ray Liotta as a Gary Glitter-esque evil wizard with the power to control books and presumably give the hero really bad paper cuts.

Doomsday

Special Award: Most confusing mix of genres

Doomsday, starring Rhoda “Kate Beckensale’s replacement in Underworld” Mitra, starts out a as mix between Escape From New York and 28 Days Later, only way crappier.  It then transitions to a cannibalistic Mad Max-esque ruined society.  As Mitra escapes, she stumbles into Camelot and faces off against Malcolm McDowell as King Arthur.  It is all very confusing.

The Happening

Special Award: Least enjoyable movie

This movie had the easiest title to make fun of.  You should avoid naming your crappy movie something that can easily have the word “crap” substituted in (i.e. The Crappening).  Seriously.  The latest Shyamalan film is squarely at the bottom of what I like to call “The Mediocre Valley”.  If a movie is good, or if it is terrible, it can be very enjoyable.  There is, however, a region where a movie can be fairly competently made, but utterly unenjoyable.  I don’t think there’s a single movie that represents the Mediocre Valley as well as The Happening.

Bangkok Dangerous

Special Award: Lamest action hero

One of the main problems with Bangkok Dangerous is that it takes itself totally seriously.  It is this super artsy fartsy action movie, but falls completely on its face.  At some point, the assassin, played by Nicolas Cage, falls for a young deaf Thai pharmacist.  This of course leads to a scene where he blows away two muggers without her knowledge until she gets splattered with blood.  Most of the scene is in slow motion and is just about as boring and infuriating as it possibly could be.

Twilight

Special Award: Sparkliest vampire

Fans of the book seem pretty split on the movie.  Some are so blindly in love with Edward the Vampire, or as I like to call him “Sparkles”, that they believe that this movie is the best thing they’ve ever seen.  They just wish that Sparkles would stalk them creepily and fantasize about draining them of all of their blood.  They don’t care that the story is sexist (about both men and women) or that Edward looks like a geisha.  They just want him to stand in their bedroom and watch them sleep.

The Spirit

Special Award: Best black Nazi

I went to the movies last week, thinking that this list was all wrapped up.  Boy howdy was I wrong.  The Spirit is shockingly awful.  It’s like some kind of exercise in absurdist torture.  This is probably the worst comic book movie I’ve seen since Batman and Robin.  Frank Miller seems to have taken someone else’s comic book and ineptly imposed his own style ontop of it.  I wanted to go see Doubt, but Julie thought we should go see a fun movie.  She apologized as we were leaving.

Worst movie I saw in 2008: Bangkok Dangerous

Least enjoyable movie I saw in 2008: The Happening

Speaking of the intervening years, Brenden Fraser’s son is now full grown and discovering his own mummies and yet, Fraser hasn’t aged at all.  Not even one gray hair?  That’s really lazy, movie.  Yes, your audience will notice.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the first Mummy movie, and even had a good time at the inferior sequel.  I even cheered for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in his spin-off movie.  The new follow up has none of the charm or appeal of the old movies.  When the yeti scores a field goal and raises his arms in victory, you know what kind of movie you’re watching.  One that can’t come up with something clever for the yetis to do, like rip the arms off Rachel Weisz’s replacement.

Some of the criticisms are valid.  It does have silly, Saturday morning humor.  Some of the criticisms are idiotic.  The characters don’t look realistic?  Did the humans in any of Pixar’s movies look realistic?  Did that make me love those movies less?  Pixar settled on a stylistic representation of people that it was comfortable with.  The Clone Wars has done the same thing.

And before I let you go, I would remind you that the last three theatrical installments of the Star Wars movies were huge crap fests.  Their dialog was cloying.  They took themselves seriously, yet they had humor that was a lot more idiotic than anything you’ll find in The Clone Wars (see R2-D2′s encounter with the battle droids at the beginning of Episode 3).  I think people have forgotten how bad the prequels were, and have failed to see how refreshing a silly little movie for kids can be if it doesn’t take itself seriously.

P.S. Can someone besides George Lucas be in charge of the Star Wars galaxy from now on?

Now, flash forward to 2008.  An entirely new “creative” team tackles the franchise.  A man who has directed exactly two films (The Transporter and The Transporter 2) has been allowed to direct this version.  Instead of Eric Bana’s nerdy passive Bruce Banner, we get Ed Norton’s brooding, lean and muscular Banner.  Instead of Connely, we get Liv “looks too much like her father” Tyler.  Substituted for the interesting characterizations in Lee’s film are extremely long scenes of smashing, interspersed with references to the TV show.

Honestly, I don’t remember too much about this movie.  If you are nostalgic for the TV show, or think that “Hulk smash” is as complex as this movie needs to be, you just might like it.  Basically, it seems that all this movie set out to be was a setup for the Avengers movie.  Sadly, it follows another Avengers setup movie that actually stood on its own (Iron Man).

Spoilers ahead as I will probably reveal almost every retarded plot point in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to tell you exactly what is wrong with the latest Indy installment.

The movie opens on a sour note… CGI prairie dogs.  Is it so hard to find actual prairie dogs that they had to rely on CGI?  Perhaps not a big deal, but Indiana Jones movies are supposed to be full of campy old fashioned effects.  Not creepy unrealistic rodents.

Next, for no reason that appears to have any bearing on the rest of the movie, Russians, posing as US soldiers, attack some secretive base in what appears to be Nevada.  Nuclear testing is going on, so Nevada is a likely candidate.  They break into a hangar to steal stuff from the Roswell UFO crash.  This is when you say, “Dear lord, this movie had better not be about aliens.”  Don’t hold your breath.  The doors of this massive warehouse/hangar are covered with a giant “51″.  At this point I, being a huge nerd, first got really mad at the movie.  Everyone knows that (Area) “51″ is the secret base in Nevada where the Air Force tests UFO technology, it’s not a hangar designation.  It also goes without saying that the Roswell crash remains are kept in Hangar 18 on an airbase in Ohio.  And I shouldn’t have to tell you that the Ark of the Covenant (seen briefly as Indy makes his escape) is stored in an Army crate in an Army warehouse (See Raiders of the Lost Ark) and that the Roswell remains would have been kept by the Air Force.

After some silly fighting in what appears to be Jabba’s palace with some old knobs and switches, Indy makes his way into a small town.  Sneaking past the commies, he slips into a house only to find that all of the people there are mannequins.  He seems puzzled until an air raid siren anounces that it’s time for personnel to get the hell out of Dodge as there is only one minute until a nuclear test.  Indy stumbles awkwardly over a few plastic people until he blunders his way into a lead lined refridgerator.  The bomb goes off in the distance and the town is vaporized, except for Indy’s fridge.  It is thrown miles away and our hero escapes unharmed to turn and stare into the giant fireball he so narrowly escaped from.  Let’s review the facts:

• Being 2 miles from a nuclear bomb, you need more than a few millimeters of lead to protect you from the radiation.  In fact, you need more than that to protect you from an XRay machine.
• Lead has a very low melting point, about 620 degrees Fahrenheit.  The initial flash from a nuclear bomb can burn your shadow into concrete.  We’re talking thousands of degrees.
• No matter how much shielding from heat and radiation you might have, the resulting shock wave would turn a fridge into dust, not propel it to a safe distance.
• Whoever came up with this scene should not be allowed to breed.

Moving on… we spend a long time with a lot of boring parts.  The FBI sends two bumbling clowns to investigate Indy, he gets fired, commies hate statues and we find out that the only way to make Shia LeBeouf less appealing is to make him a “greaser”.  Also, Indiana Jones was a spy?  WTF?  He’s not a spy, he’s a professor/archeologist.  That’s what drives him.  If I could revoke Spielberg’s right to the character, I would.  Oh, before I forget, the instant that LeBeouf reveals that he’s looking for his mother who knows Indy, you realize that he’s Indy’s son.  The movie will string you along for another 90 minutes, but it will be no surprise.

Some silly clues send Indy to South America to seek the Crystal Skull in Peru ontop of Weathertop.  While he and LeBeouf are poking around, they get attacked by Nazgul indigenous people.  I learned from this scene that poisoned darts are pointy and poisoned on both ends and if you just force the dart back toward the person holding the blow gun, it’ll poison him instead.  I also learned that this movie was going to be unrelentingly stupid.  Indy, of course, finds the crystal skull and learns that gold is attracted to magnetic substances.  The skull itself is obviously supposed to be an actual alien’s skull, not just a representation.  Nevermind that the jaw and cranium appear to be one solid piece that would allow no movement of the mouth.  In true Indiana Jones fashion, the bad guys stop Indy as he leaves the cave and capture him and the skull and LeBeouf (french for “the beouf”).

Their escape from Cate Blanchett’s (I’ll say this, this isn’t her worst movie, but it’s not much better than Bandits) nefarious clutches is possibly the most drawn out, convoluted fight scene I’ve ever witnessed.  Characters are jumping back and forth between vehicles so often that you feel like you’re playing three-card monte.  All is confusing and absurd enough, but the movie has to take it one step further.  Somehow, LeBouef finds himself dangling from a vine dozens of feet in the air after being yanked off a vehicle (some kind of magical vine).  Next to him, he sees one of his own kind.  A spider monkey.  Suddenly, everything makes sense to our confused greaser.  Shouting, “Monkeys go!” (ok, that part, I made up, the rest is true) he literally swings into action along with a gang of other monkeys.  He is suddenly one with the monkeys, swinging gracefully from tree to tree.  Maybe his father wasn’t Indy, but a spider monkey.  He and his new-found family attack Cate Blanchett’s vehicle, which is soon swarming with monkeys (still not making this up).

Because the movie hadn’t given us an absurd enough look at the fauna of the Amazon, the fight soon ends up on the hill of a fictional species of gigantor ant.  These ants don’t just eat people, they drag them whole into their lair.  I know that the Amazon has some pretty scary species of ants, but none of them will drag you off in one piece.  I think you can imagine how this action sequence goes.

From there, the movie follows a few more jumps in logic until all of the characters are implausibly brought before the council of crystal alien skeletons who use their eye lasers to burn out Cate Blanchett’s eyes.  By this point, I had lost the will to live. The End.

P.S. – Mr Spielberg, if you hand over the Indiana Jones reins to Shia LeBoof, I will never forgive you.  You will be dead to me.

Most of the movie is funny, exciting, gritty, and badass. One of my favorite parts was the detail on the suit. I don’t know if the “stabilization surfaces” were mentioned in the comic books, but it was super cool to see little plates on the armor opening and closing as he’s flying.

Then, suddenly, the movie starts to suck. The villain starts doing his best evil scientist impression, Gwyneth Paltrow stops being a charming, believable strong woman to being helpless, scared damsel in distress, and the plot turns from cool to downright silly.  It is really disappointing because I almost feel bad for enjoying the first half of the movie so much when the end is so generic and cheesy.

Good news is… season (sorry, “series”) four of Doctor Who has just started, so I can soon get more of my man-crush, David Tennant.