Friday, June 05, 2009

Movie Reviews: Star Trek & the Matrix Sequels

A current theme in my movie theater-going these days is the switcheroo: I show up to watch a movie only to find it's gone and I have to substitute another.
Miss Wendy and I went to see 'Wolverine' (yes, that would be the 4th time in a month for me...), but it had gone away and we decided to see Star Trek, which was cool as we both wanted to see it.
This movie covers the very beginnings of the careers of Kirk, Spock, Bones, Checkov, Sulu, Uhura, Scotty.....and the Enterprise. Lots of fun effects, but the plot was......disappointing. As in 'We'll fix all the holes in the plot by using time travel to change the future!'-ok, I see this on Dr. Who and it works- came across as lame in this setting. I did like that the characters physically were a nod to the originals and there was some slap-stick type humor that was silly enough to be fun. (Oh, and if 'Bones' looks really familiar, it's because he was in LOTR and Xena....and, believe it or not, Winona Ryder is Spock's mom......)
Oddly, the one really distracting element was the bad skin on everyone except Uhura- I mean, c'mon, it's Stardate 2388- don't they have nuclear-strength Clearasil by now and razor blades that give a clean, close shave??
For the record, you'll only really like this if you've watched the original TV show fairly regularly. There were plenty of inside jokes and I was able to demonstrate my carefully hidden full-on geekiness to Wendy during the movie. I don't see that it would create many new fans, but it was a treat for old ones.

Rating: 3 crowns out of 5, because I only saw it once - I doubt it'll hold up to repeated viewings.
Matrix: Reloaded & Matrix: Revolutions- wow, the incredible suckiness of these two movies is almost beyond words. I know I will be lying on my deathbed at some point regretting the 4 hours I wasted watching these movies.
Where do I start? First of all, it was basically one big movie that could have been edited down to 2 hours instead of 4. The plot was flogged like a dead horse. And the story went from good vs. evil to a ridiculously heavily christianized version of the same. Both movies were boring, so much so that the fight scenes barely revived one's interest, and it seemed that each scene was shot several times and two takes were kept and inserted...wherever....so you see the same thing over and over and over.....zzzzzzzz.........and any decent acting accomplished by Fishburne and Weaving was completely overran by the ponderous plot and editing.
Rating: 0.5 crowns out of 5, the half a point awarded to Trinity's awesome costumes.

2 comments:

Hsin-Yi said...

Though I haven't seen the Star Trek movie (but probably will at some point), I'm with you on the Matrix movies. I took me forever to see the first one, but then I was blown away by how much I liked it! The next two were worse than sucky. The only redeeming factor to my experience for the 3rd one was that we were in a theater full of people who thought it was just as bad and started heckling it. They were as funny as the movie was awful. Such a shame really, they should have been great.

matrix costumes said...

i love the story of the matrix movie