Bingowings said:
Star Trek (2009).
...hopefully Chekov will have less of a comedy accent in future episodes).
Unfortunately, no. Saw a several minute long preview when I went to see the Hobbit in 3D. new Chekov's fake accent is as comedic and over the top as ever.
The Chekov accent was always a horrible idea. In the future when the world has shrunk even more than it has now and we are all under one government, will we really have such over the top accents? But that horrible idea was easier to forgive back in the 60-80's. Fresh start and reboot, I don't get why they thought it would be cool to make it even thicker than Walter Koenig's just for the sake of some sort of dumb and redundant comedy relief. That film had so much comic relief in it, it is practically as much a comedy as it is a sci-fi or action film. Of course, it does all three genres poorly.
I think J. J. Trek 2009 makes a good case for how painfully dumbed down our movies are becoming. At the risk of sounding like skyjedi, it is somewhat offensive, it is hard for me to go see movies like that and not feel like the film makers are talking down to me.
Next up was Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (2011).
A film of two halves one of which was totally redundant the other rather good actually.
The apes in this film are the stars. The humans were wasted or plain awful.
There is a thread over on the Star Wars discussion boards about what Hayden would have been without Anakin.
James Franco out planks Hayden in this film.
The camera hates him, he is as emotionally engaging as a thimble of sand and his character could easily be left on the cutting room floor.
Oooooh, but he is so damn HOT!
;)
Freida Pinto is prettier and smiles with conviction but in every other respect has as less of a right to be there than Franco.
Tom Felton should have done something different after Potter instead of playing a pantomime nasty person with a fizzing taser wand.
David Oyelowo wins the award for the most pants unsympathetic character in any film of this kind.
David Hewlett plays a terribly hamfisted creation. He would stick out as being annoyingly cartoonish even in a Resident Evil movie.
John Lithgow is nice as always but isn't in the film enough and doesn't do enough to save the human side of this film.
Brian Cox literally spends the film sitting near a door (presumably waiting for the paycheck to arrive).
Patrick Doyle's score is obvious and dull not a patch on Goldsmith's or Elfman's.
When the apes rise it's a bit crap that they leap around San Fran pointedly avoiding killing people while wrecking everything in sight.
But the section in the holding cells is a revelation.
True that.
It deserves to be in a separate film.
After a while I began to forget it was CGI and the ape characters without any dialogue conveyed more variety and human warmth than any of the human characters (Lithgow aside).
I could easily have watched a feature length presentation with just those characters with perhaps the occasional doping up from a faceless human resulting in their growing intelligence and eventual escape.
What we have here is a bizarre Harvey Dent of a film which on one side is fantastic and the other side actually worse than Tim Burton's film.
Watching it made me love Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes even more.
Now there were humans you could love and hate and laugh at.
Ape Story (Enhanced)/Human story (Gelded).
As an old ape fan, I actually really liked this film. In a guilty pleasure sort of way, not a "that was a great movie" sort of way. It was kind of a gleeful romp for me through and through. I think if the Burton film hadn't been such an unbearable and painful to watch pile of steaming crap, I would have been a harsher critic. But as it was, HOLY CRAP, a new PotA film that was not only watchable, but also fairly enjoyable! I look forward to seeing more new Ape films that are better than Burton's.