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10

I knew I'd have to get through it in order to proceed with my rewatch, but oh boy did I keep putting it off as long as possible.

This is awful. It's a shining example of how to take a great premise and run it into the ground, repeatedly.

All things considered, the makeup effects used on Paris aren't that bad, I guess. But if we take a step back and think about the science of how he gets there, none of it makes sense. Keeping in mind that humans originally evolved from, essentially, lizards, how could our future evolution taking us right back where we started possibly make sense?

Add on the nonsense of Paris and Janeway starting the "evolutionary" process 24 hours apart yet somehow ending up at the same stage of "evolution" within a few days, and managing to have offspring in that time… Just no. There's no way that happened, not in three days, not ever. The shortest known mammalian gestation period is 12-13 days (some species of opossum). Generally speaking, lizards take longer just to lay eggs—then the eggs have to incubate before hatching. So this part of the story is patently absurd, even without considering Chakotay's absurd decision to leave the offspring behind on an unsuspecting planet to possibly alter the course of events in the Delta Quadrant as they grow into a flourishing civilization.

What a pile of dreck.

There's an argument to be made against the predictability of this episode, and I acknowledge that. But there are so many layers to Caylem's character that I never really caught in previous viewings!

Before tonight, I just remembered Caylem as "the hat guy" because of his little routine with the Mokra guards early in the episode. I didn't pick up on it the last time I watched this episode (several years ago), but it seems clear to me now that Caylem is suffering from a form of dementia. Perhaps I'm projecting that onto him because my grandfather recently passed after spending several years fighting his own battle with Alzheimer's, but it's really striking. His struggles to recall recent events like the letter he (presumably) forgot to write coupled with his strong, robust recall of the distant past are uncannily similar to the way my grandfather would spin his wheels sometimes trying to remember something. The way Caylem gets stuck on a topic is identical to how conversations were with my grandfather a few years ago, when he was still able to hold them but was suffering the effects of memory loss.

I tried to watch an episode of Enterprise but the hotel wireless is throttled too low to stream it, so rather than try to limit the quality or anything I just picked the next episode of Voyager in my queue instead. It happened for a reason.

Compared to the first Star Trek feature film—a first effort that almost felt like watching grass grow—The Wrath of Khan delivers a real Star Trek experience in movie format. Traces of some of the original's flaws remain, but they are appropriately contained in sequences that make heavy (re)use of footage from the first, very sedately paced film.

It was probably inevitable that this second film would make a bigger splash. After all, its very title invokes one of the Trek fandom's favorite villains, and promises to bring him back. And back he comes, Ricardo Montalban performing splendidly—perhaps even better than he did in the TV series episode that introduced Khan.

There's also just more meat to this plot than the first film. It has character development, it establishes additional backstory, and even introduces a new technology (the "defense field") never seen again in a Trek production. Joking aside, Kirk and Spock get to explore real emotion, and we see just how far Spock will go for logic. (Stopping just short of a spoiler here so I don't have to flag this.)

Keep an eye out for an egregiously bad cut near the end—it's notable because it's the only truly bad edit in the film (that I've noticed). I'll say only to keep an eye on Kirk when he's in Engineering—anything more would be a spoiler.

So, apparently anyone on the ship can just waltz into any quarters they like without any permission required from either the occupant or Security? I always thought the door chime on Starfleet ships was because you actually couldn't enter someone's quarters without their consent, but maybe ringing the doorbell is just good manners. But then, Neelix does require a security authorization to access Tom's computer terminal. And it works, even though "Engineering authorization Omega-4-7" shouldn't work with Neelix's voice print because he isn't (or at least, shouldn't be) in the "Engineering staff" user group. Starfleet security is, apparently, a mess.

Speaking of Engineering, why does Neelix go there for help with comm logs? Wouldn't Operations be a more logical choice? It seems like 90% of what Harry Kim does on the bridge is manage communications. Of course, the plot of this episode wouldn't work if Neelix went to Harry (because Jonas the mole wouldn't overhear him), so there's your reason. But it still doesn't quite make sense!

As unsatisfying as the resolution was, it was still nice to actually have a bit of ongoing plot for several episodes with this whole "spy on board" thing. Would have been nicer to have the spy in the ship's brig for interrogation at the end of all this, instead of him being vaporized by a plasma leak (or whatever that bullshit green smoke was meant to be). At the end of the day, though, the writers were probably quite ready to just move on from this "traitor" thing completely, and killed off the spy to avoid dealing with the aftermath.

It amuses me that sometimes, Starfleet ships can be remote controlled by people who know their command codes or whatever, and sometimes they can't. Clearly they just wanted an excuse for Dax's tractor beam shenanigans, rather than just transmitting an "all stop" command to the Rio Grande remotely. (The warp tow actually makes sense, though. It's probably cheaper, fuel-wise, to run only one warp engine and have that runabout tow the other, than to run both warp reactors. Post-scarcity society or not, efficiency is still valuable.)

Wow, Alixus is a totally unlikable character. There's actually no reason whatsoever to sympathize with her. If this episode has a flaw, she's it. Good villains (and she's worthy of the appellation, I'd say) have a hook for the audience to see things from their point of view and understand why they do the things they do, however evil they might be. Alixus is just a flat, sociopathic plot device.

Sisko is my favorite part of this episode, even though Avery Brooks isn't quite at the top of his game yet. (It takes him a few seasons to really hit his stride with the character. At this point in the series, he's still delivering a fair few lines in odd ways that don't feel right.) Him climbing back into the "hell box" is the best moment of the whole thing.

I was pleasantly surprised by the layers of parody and homage in the screenplay.

On the surface, this is Yet Another Animated Superhero Film. Deep down… well, it's still that. As it's targeted at younger audiences, the plot is neither complex nor filled with unpredictable twists. Older viewers like myself will see everything coming from miles away—but it's a fairly enjoyable ride.

Something about the vocal performances, and/or how they were tied into the character models, felt "off" the whole time, unfortunately. Other animation studios have a better handle on melding the elements of an animated character into one cohesive whole, but I should also cut DreamWorks Animation some slack on this ten-year-old film.

What makes this a solid 7/10 for me despite the predictable story beats and technical production values was the core of this story: Megamind's development as a person. In the end, he's the only important thing in the movie. Sure, the action sequences were pretty well done. Yes, Minion was a great (riff on the archetype of) sidekick. But if Megamind didn't grow and change as the story progressed, this would have fallen flat.

In a perfect world, the deus ex machina part of the ending when Metroman "came back" would have been real, but I'm nitpicking again.

Worth a watch. Maybe don't buy it for your permanent library, but Megamind is certainly good enough for some evening when you want something decently amusing to watch that won't require a ton of focus to understand.

TNG starts climbing out of its rough first-season writing here. Character interactions are still pretty strained compared to the later years, but we get a good hint at the depth of storytelling to come. Picard has his first true "Star Trek dilemma" in this episode, the first of many.

The one element I must seriously question is why the Enterprise visited what appears to be a pre-warp civilization. Given that the Edo seem to have a complete apparent lack of awareness regarding space vessels or interstellar travel, it's unquestionable that the Prime Directive would have forbidden any contact with the planet at all. They somewhat regard the Starfleet team as gods after becoming aware of the ship's position in space near their own god, even.

Starfleet's general prohibition against interference or contact of any kind with civilizations that have yet to develop warp capability is long established at this point—at least as far back as "The Omega Glory" (TOS 2x25), which aired nearly 20 years before "Justice". Ironically, the Prime Directive should have prevented Picard's Prime Directive dilemma from ever cropping up in the first place. In a way, he ended up having to break the Prime Directive in the end because he broke the Prime Directive…

Paul Cicero's cigar is magic, it disappears in between shots (the scene at 25 minutes-ish). That's one of a few truly glaring continuity errors in this film. (IMDB lists a remarkable number of "Goofs", but most of them are so small you'd have to really be looking for them. Not so with the cigar—that one practically slaps the viewer in the face and says, "Hi! Just wanted to remind you that this is a film.")

Having just finished the film, my foremost thought is that Henry's parents kind of disappeared. They were important at the beginning, and then suddenly they vanished from the narrative when it was convenient. Bit disappointing—not that there weren't enough characters to keep track of as the story continued.

The other thing on my mind, a bigger-picture thought, is that the movie feels both long and slow, and quick, somehow. At roughly the one-hour mark I was surprised how much time had gone by. But that's where it began to feel like it slowed down, too. The remaining 60% or so of the film increasingly dragged on until the last 20 minutes. A lot of it had to do with the sheer number of times Tommy was shown to be a careless, hot-headed asshole with a gun. Most of those scenes didn't add anything new to his character.

GoodFellas is an impressive piece of cinema, but at times it gets bogged down in atmosphere for atmosphere's sake, needlessly extending the run time without contributing to the film (whose world is already quite well defined even without those scenes). If the whole film was as engrossing as the first hour, it truly would be a masterpiece. 8/10

Mockingjay Part 2's biggest mistake is being completely faithful to the book, considering that it is the worst one of the trilogy. They had the chance to make the story better but chose to stick to what they had. Being the final chapter of the story, it has emotional bits, but miserably (and unfortunately) fails to sell them, rushing the scenes which we were supposed to remember the most.
— @aag's review (https://trakt.tv/comments/62697, and we need proper internal link markup on Trakt!)

Seriously. The big dramatic moments are unbelievably rushed—there's no time to dig into them. There's too much focus on bad CGI and not enough on characters. Basically every character is 2D at best, except maybe Katniss and Peeta. But that's also due to sticking true to the book. None of the characters in the books were particularly well fleshed out, either, as I recall (from reading them 3 ½ years ago).

I also found the story very predictable. Obviously there's some amount of subconscious influence from having read the books, but it's also just absolutely clear when the big surprises/twists are going to happen, and what they'll be. They end up not being surprising at all. (Not to belabor the point, but the book had this problem too.)

My other big issue—which applies to the whole series—is that we barely see anything that happens away from Katniss. I know it's quite common in YA novels to present a limited first-person perspective from the protagonist's point of view, but in a big political saga like this I feel like that severely limits the storytelling.