Star Trek: Voyager (1995 - 2001)

Note: most of these are my posts copied over from a Star Trek group-watch going through the entire series in broadcast order, rather than properly written reviews. 

VOY S01E0 "title" Stardate  Broadcast date 1995-00-00
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group watch ongoing

Previous watch through notes:

I watched the Voyager pilot, and thought it was okay. Can't believe they also went back to the well of "trapped in an olde times recreation by a god-type being" for their opening episode, after TNG did Q and DS9 did the wormhole entities (albeit with memories), though!

am on S2. Voyager has been consistently entertaining.

I just watched Living Witness and it was absolutely fantastic.

Just watched the cold open for Relativity, and it's a very similar set-up to LOST's opening of Season 5

Seven Of Nine's uniform is fucking ridiculous, whatever exoplating excuses they want to come up with ("you're used to having big clunky armour on, so you'll probably be most comfortable getting sewn into a skintight one-piece"). Her tits take over every scene she's in, it's really distracting and feels pretty seedy.

Just watched Equinox, and I see what you guys mean by Janeway being so uneven - she's gone completely mental! Does this get followed up on at all, or just forgotten? Her actions are incredibly heinous in this episode and seem to have been forgotten about by the end of it because she pulled a sad face when SPOILER that captain died.

I'm on the antepenultimate episode of Voyager and have generally really enjoyed the (skiplist episodes of the) series. I just finished Author, Author, which went back to the alt-crew holo-sim well, but was still entertaining. It also was indeed very reminiscent of the Data trial.

The series finale was rather unsatisfying. It felt very similar to that one where Chekotay and Harry find Voyager on the ice planet, plus there never felt like any peril except from crazier-than-usual, genocidal future Janeway until she does what she should remember is always the best thing to do: stop fucking about for half an episode and just tell Janeway the truth. It certainly had high production value, though, and I liked the future stuff.

(Enterprise notes start on page 12 of that Thumbs thread.)

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993 - 1999)

Note: most of these are my posts copied over from a Star Trek group-watch going through the entire series in broadcast order, rather than properly written reviews. 

DS9 S01E0 "title" Stardate  Broadcast date 1993-00-00
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group watch ongoing

Previous watch through notes:

Just watched the opening scene of DS9 and it was brilliant! A cool idea and a dramatic start to the series, the visual effect shots are a lot more dynamic and integrated (something that started happening towards the end of TNG - an example that caught my eye was Yar and Picard approaching the Enterprise in All Good Things), and it's very energetically directed.

the DS9 intro does reflect the series, i.e. BORING. I'm about to move onto season 3, hopefully it'll start picking up.

I did enjoy the Kafka-esque elements of Tribunal. It got a little slow in the second half, and O'Brien didn't have quite the same gravitas as Picard in his "four lights" episode, but overall it was pretty cool.

am on S4. DS9 is finally starting to get bearable (the changelings tend to perk everything up a bit, especially as they introduce the ever-reliable The Thing plot-mechanics, and Sisko definitely improves along with his hair stylings)

I'm giving up on DS9. Perhaps it's because I'm not watching the whole thing, but I'm at season 5 and even the cherry-picked episodes are nothing special. So I ended on a high note with the excellent "Trials And Tribble-ations" (it's a shame that Tribbles didn't become more of a tradition - TOS, TAS and DS9 got them, would have been nice for TNG, Voyager and Enterprise to get them too).

I enjoyed the three remaining DS9 eps that I watched - the Klingon one ("Soldiers of the Empire"?), Far Beyond the Stars and In the Pale Moonlight.

Just watched the end of DS9. As someone who has barely been watching it, that seemed like some pretty goofy, cheesy shit! First the Republic Serial stuff with Sisko and the prophet god dude, then all those badly-put-together flashback sequences! Also, that final shot tracking away from the window seemed really off-scale. But really, as I say, it didn't mean much to me as I haven't been invested in this series.

The Fall Guy (2024)

It's so close to being great, it just needed half an hour cut out and a Shane Black rewrite. There's loads of fun stuff in there, it just regularly loses steam and focus. Whenever it gets away from 'stunt guy uses his skillset to survive peril' it starts to drag: the romantic storyline feels disconnected and distracting, and the villains' plot is too busy (they lampshade this at one point but that doesn't magically fix it) and occasionally nonsensical.

Also, for a movie about a stunt guy directed by a stunt guy, a lot of the stunts feel too fake or underwhelming. A lot of them look better in the bts footage that plays over the credits than they do in-movie. I think it may have been a combination of too much wire-removal and digital enhancement plus an overuse of close-ups to show off how much the actors are doing - it just never looks as good as the GoPro wide shots.

Anyway, I enjoyed it, laughed a fair bit, and thought some of the melee combat was great (Gosling and Blunt are excellent, and Duke gets some good stuff though not as much as I would have liked), but still came away a bit disappointed.

Rating: sporadically great but overall a bit of a waste.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

(watched as part of a broadcast-order franchise group-watch)

This movie came out in the middle of a month-long gap between TNG episodes, before the last four episodes of TNG S2. I suspect it's going to feel very weird jumping from TNG back to TOS movies!

Back to the classy opening titles. I like this arrangement of the opening theme, too.
The opening is cool. Enigmatic, and a bit of a Mad Max vibe. (edited) 

More location shooting for this rock-climbing bit, too. Good stuff.

More Mad Max and Star Wars vibes on that planet, with the Mos Eisley style bar (though SW never had three-boobed cat strippers!).
They're going back to the 'this is a new ship that hasn't had all the wrinkles ironed out' beat from TMP again, which I can't blame them for - solid narrative sense to put your heroes on the back foot again.
Straight into the broad comedy stuff with the main crew, though - this perhaps feels like a bit of an admission that the light-hearted tone of Voyage Home is the best fit for the ensemble at their current age. Don't know if they could pull off a Wrath Of Khan again, even though it's only 7 years later.

All the visual and special effects are strong so far. Good starship shots, matte paintings, compositing etc. Funny to see them save budget on the shuttle picking up Kirk et al by just shining a big light - you'd never see a more modern Trek movie doing that.

The Kirk/Spock/Bones dialogue is still great. Amazing how evergreen that chemistry is. (edited) 

The majesty of the shuttle approach and docking to the Enterprise is a bit less than it used to be, but nice that they're still taking a few moments to do it.

I see Kirk still has a female crewmember in a skirt to take his coat for him.
It's interesting to see that they're keeping the 'I hate those Klingon devils' stuff in, even though regular Trek viewers are now used to seeing Worf on the Enterprise and generally less fraught relations with the Klingons. Intentionally making the TOS crew seem a little bigoted and retrograde is a bold choice.

Spock's eyebrows look a little more drawn on than usual!

Well, it's nice that Uhura's singing finally got used in a story beat, I guess, even if she did have to strip in front of the crew.

Ha, great to see Shatner still doing some unconvincing karate chops.
And neck-pinching a horse is a fun move, even if tactically nonsensical.

Oh wow, I remember that 'Scotty hits his head' gag was in the (tv?) trailer and endlessly amusing, I don't think I'd ever realised that it's actually a very contrived way to take him off the board rather than have him actively on either side.
Oh well, at least he passed the Venkman test of not copping off with a possessed horny woman. Not sure TOS Scotty would have.

A few more ropey effects showing up as it goes on!

This God thing comes out of left-field. I think that's the big issue with this movie: it's full of good stuff (that scene where he's attempting to 'turn' McCoy, Spock and Kirk was very effective) and it's fairly pacey but the structure is pretty flimsy. There's no strong throughline because you don't know what Sybok wants, you're not sure for a long time what the nature of his hold over people is, the Klingons are just hanging about on the edges to show up for a bit of jeopardy when needed...

Funny moment when Eden turns out to look like Southern California and Sybok is awed while Kirk just has a 'I've seen this at least thirty times before' look on his face.

A really messy ending. Suddenly they're looking for God, and they get through this impassable barrier with no issues or unique approach, but then he turns out to be a Wizard Of Oz with laser eyes (and it's unclear how Sybok knew to come to this planet, or if it's a coincidence that there's a godlike alien on the one they happened upon, or it's read their minds somehow and played into what they were looking for), and then they try to do an action movie ending which is far too low-budget and goofy to work, and then there's an empty gesture towards some sort of character arc between the lead trio, a butt joke and then that's the end.
I like a lot about it, including the deeper thematic stuff even though it's under-served, but it has a lot of issues with structure, pacing and scale. I think I would have preferred a return to the TMP tone for this one.

DooM (2016)

Finally got round to starting DooM '16 on my new PC and it handles it marvellously! It's running fine in 4K (as far as I can tell, unless even though I've set it to that it's outputting at 1080p regardless because of some setting or other and I'm sitting there like a dope going "wowwww 4K much difference"!), I might whack some more settings up, see how it does. It looks really nice although honestly I don't think I can really see much difference in game graphics over the past ten years. Maybe I need to get a 2024 game and see if it blows me away.
Anyway, I had to knock it down to easy mode to get anywhere with it (maybe the game is tough, maybe I'm rubbish, or maybe it's because I'm not at a proper set-up with a desk and stuff, I'm just on the sofa with my kb/m and a tray, but I didn't feel like I was able to do all the strafing and swivelling and what have you as gracefully as I should be), but now it's really fun. I'm enjoying ripping through demons but still getting freaked out when they decide to charge at me. The enemy AI and physics and stuff all come together really nicely. The mood's great as well, everything's designed to feel really oppressive and heavy metal.

Have got back into DooM 2016 (with a proper desk set up now but still on easy mode!) and am now about halfway through. While I'm enjoying it, I am feeling a little worn on it already. I'm not sure if it's because I put it down to Easy, but there doesn't feel like much balancing in this game - none of the enemies or weapons feel that different from each other, I'm not constantly making tactical decisions like I was with classic DooM™. The hellknight is the main one I worry about because it constantly charges and does its jump attack thing, but otherwise it feels a bit more like a Serious Sam game a lot of the time. The enemy AI and navigation continues to be very impressive, though. But I'm climbing this tower to chase down cyborg Tilda Swinton, and it's just big fight in a circle then lots of platforming then big fight in a circle...
Also, I want some pinkies and flying tomatoes and stuff! I'm starting to get cooler enemies now but it's still mostly zombie variants, and all humanoids.

Okay, Doom almost immediately picked back up again by sending me to Hell and introducing a bunch of new enemies. I've now got Cacos, Lost Souls and Barons, plus I've got the gauss gun! The atmosphere is great here as well, especially the sound design.

I'm just about to get the BFG, and I'd ideally like to meet a cyberdemon and robospider, but I'll have to see if I get bored of it before they show up! The arena fights are definitely more blood-pumping now all the bigger, more diverse enemies are in. They probably should have cut an hour or two out of the first half of the game.
It's also weird how the beginning of the game is all 'look at us, we hate boring story, the Doomslayer is just going to smash up any vidscreens trying to do exposition and give him missions' and then there's loads of boring story throughout the whole thing.

Well, I got to the cyberdemon, and fuck that noise. An incredibly irritating, long and boring boss battle in a small round arena with a bunch of shitty wave attacks, and they start you off in a really annoying position as well. Plus, it kept crashing every fifteen or so attempts. Fuck that. I was still enjoying the game but it also didn't really feel like it was giving me much variety, so I'm not too disappointed to give up at this point - I think I got everything out of it I was going to, although it's a shame I didn't get to see more of Hell.
Generally, though, very cool game, especially once it steps up at the halfway point, with lots of atmosphere and great enemy AI.