Star Trek Generations (1994)

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

cool to think that, thanks to this movie, near the end of 1994 there was a month or so when TOS, TNG, DS9 and VOY were all putting out new live-action stories. I wonder if Trekkie discourse reached a fever pitch around that time.

Also interesting that this movie's release feels perhaps a little bittersweet, as it serves as a reminder that the show had recently wrapped after seven seasons of generally quickening returns, whereas TMP came a decade after a slightly ropey third season and felt more like a surprising and triumphant revival.

I like the tribute to the TOS movies with the blue font on starfield background, with the little twist of the (clearly CG) champagne bottle.

Old-school uniforms! Old-school composited models and matte paintings! Aaaah, this is glorious!

Wow, great bunch of character actors on the Enterprise-B bridge - Alan Ruck, Glenn Morshower, Jeanette Goldstein and Tim Russ.

I really like the unspoken interplay with Ruck and Shatner when that distress call comes in.

This all makes me wish they'd not killed Kirk then found a way to de-age Bones and bring Chekov, Uhura and Sulu (and, what the hell, Rand as well) to the 24th Century and kept on making movies with the TOS crew. (edited) 

Guinan reveal! That must have been such a cool moment for any Trekkie who had somehow managed to avoid spoilers.

This whole opening section is fantastic, whatever happens with the rest of the movie.

The transition to the TNG scene was a little rushed, bit of a shame. They could have taken at least an extra minute or so over going from that lovely shot of the damaged Enterprise to the stars to the water to the olde time boat to the TNG crew to medium shots to the first dialogue. And probably dropped the '78 years later' chyron as well, let the slow transition do its work and the audience figure it out. (edited) 

Yeahhhh, Tracee Lee Cocco up on the big screen!

I'm being silly there, but one benefit of this coming so soon after the show finishing and the show going on for so long is that you get a really nice sense of continuity from the same extras you've got to recognise over seven years also milling around in the background (and foreground) of the movies, even if they still don't get to say anything.

Good choice to have Picard snap at Riker there and then Riker bark at Worf, make sure the tone doesn't get too cosy. I like the use of handheld camera and a whole load of differently coloured lighting in the away team sequence, too, gives it lots of energy.

I assume this is Data's quarters due to the presence of Spot? They feel a lot more expansive and atmospheric all of a sudden! In contrast to my comments on the away team bit, I feel like the DoP could have maybe chilled out here a bit and made it feel more like the show!

Gahhh, feels so weird to have everything in this strong yellow light and feeling so much bigger! I guess the lighting is justified by them being right next to a sun or whatever, which is pretty smart, and I get why they wouldn't want their movie to look exactly like the show but they don't have that whole TMP thing of 'this is essentially a brand new ship' to really smooth over that gap.

Oh my god, this yellow is killing me. Too fast, too yellow, is my review. Need some TMP vibes up in here.

Okay, the star just blew up and the lighting returned to normal, I take it back, that worked nicely.

Also, it's a good example of the difference between tv and movies that I don't think the show could have achieved a tenth of the effect by simply holding on a close-up of a guest actor's face like they just did with McDowell.

The Picard/Troi scene was really beautifully written and acted but it also feels like the most egregious contravention of 'show don't tell' ever. Like, clearly there to establish a character trait of Picard's for the audience and for no other reason. I'll see how things play out, but from my memory of this movie they probably could have covered all this with a line of dialogue and the audience's general understanding that people love their families.

There's something for me to like or dislike every ten seconds with this movie! Amazing shot of the Klingon bird of prey wheeling round in space, slightly weird shot of a crewmember slapping away at a control panel, return of those Klingon sisters is very cool, but then the scene with them and Soren feels too cramped and rushed. But then we get Guinan with her hair down! What a rollercoaster!

Good scene with Picard and Data in the astrology dept. Mainly due to the writing and acting, but I also like the clever use of locations we've heard about but not seen before to give the ship some extra production budget oomph.

Confused about Guinan - seems like Soran is also her species, but is it her species that gives her timey-wimey powers, or her experience with the Nexus or what? Will have to look into that later!

Yeahhhh Ogawa in a barely noticeable non-speaking appearance!

Pretty funny that they chose to set so many of the pivotal scenes on some scaffolding at what isn't but very much looks like the Vasquez Rocks. Like, nice call back to TOS, I guess, but it feels sooo cheap! This is a big part of the problem with Kirk's death, iirc. Also a big part of why Insurrection (and Beyond, actually) feels like an extended tv episode: you can't have large swathes of your grand sci-fi movie clearly filmed an hour away from the studio lot. (edited) 

Data's jolliness really undercuts the tension of the Klingon fight, they should have made him tense and amped up. Really good final moments in that sequence, though, and Data's fist pump is perfect.

Come on, put a big moon in the sky or something! Bond and Star Wars movies have been doing stuff like that for fifteen years already!

I do like another budget flex of having more fleeing personnel and also having more of them in alien make-up. The teddy bear moment is also a really nice touch, which I assume never gets resolved.

The whole saucer sequence from separation through crash is fantastic, and Data's "Ohhhh shit" is magnificent. But iirc, it doesn't actually have much bearing on the plot. Like, if they managed to fix the warp drive or whatever and stay in orbit beaming down as and when necessary, would that make any difference?

ALSO, really weird that we're 80 minutes into this 120 minute movie and we haven't got back to Kirk yet. Some really bone-headed decisions here, presumably because they were making it at the same time as the show and everyone had tunnel vision and was burnt out.

No score under this Picard/Soren fight! That's a cool creative choice to make if you're in a big cool location, not if you're trying to work up some drama out of two old blokes scuffling in the backyard.

And his star-destroying missile looked like a moderately impressive bottle rocket. It should have been huge! Or at least a cool-looking sci-fi thing. What were they thinking?

Ah, okay, I guess the idea of the saucer section thing is that they all got killed by the ribbon or whatever. Makes you wonder why they couldn't use their impulse boosters to fly off in another direction, did they mention anything about them being broken? The saucer should be able to function as an autonomous spaceship, and they knew the destruction was coming. Also undermines it to not have any shots of them before they die, or tie them in with the Soren/Picard location at all.

Picard almost instantly realising the Nexus isn't real and not really caring about staying really undermines the whole premise! Plus Guinan having an echo in there is a bit contrived, feels like the usual 'Guinan special powers' get out of jail free card that the show could get away with a little easier than a movie can.

Also, a very cheap transition from Guinan talking to the Kirk exterior. Way to undermine the reveal and the Picard/Kirk meet-up moment!

This whole bit feels cheap, in fact - Kirk and Picard hanging out in a kitchen. Then they try to make it feel epic with the horse ride, but the music is way overdone and it all just looks like the planet Soren was just on anyway!

Also feels a bit shitty of Picard to pull Kirk out of eternal paradise just to help him beat up one old man. And Kirk is also way too easy to convince. It's like Faramir or Tom Bombadil showing disregard for the One Ring, you can't afford to undermine your central threat/temptation like that in a movie.

Three old blokes rolling around on some rocks in a very badly directed fight sequence, then Kirk goes out as a dummy strapped to a bit of bridge that falls a bit too far, good grief.

Wait, Kirk's last words are "Oh my"? Like, the George Takei joke that started four years earlier on the Howard Stern Show?! Is that not the silliest thing to do ever? "It was fun" would have been great last words!

I get how in theory Kirk having a very small, anonymous death while saving millions of people works nicely, but when everything else also feels small and low-budget, that just doesn't work.

Bit of a weak ending as well. Sigh. The whole thing started to fall apart about halfway through, once Soren goes down to Veridian 3.

Also, bit too easy to read the message as being 'stop getting caught up in nostalgia, nerds, TOS wasn't that good'.

Well, I enjoyed lots of little bits and pieces but I also remembered why,  outside of the novelty of seeing the TNG lot on the big screen and Kirk and Picard sharing scenes together, this movie is not particularly well thought of. I'm looking forward to First Contact a lot more now, basically TNG's Wrath of Khan.

Tron: Ares (2025)

The first two TRONs have lovely design, Jeff Bridges' charm and are otherwise very boring. Ares brings nothing new to the table design-wise, replaces Bridges with charm vacuum Jared Leto, has even worse writing, plus it's frustratingly disconnected from the previous two films thanks to Disney fucking about for fifteen years until almost no one wanted to come back.
It has a few nice ideas, like going back to the 80s version of the Grid which I missed a little in Legacy, bō fighting with light cycle style jetwalls, and Grid stuff in the real world, but unfortunately these are all only interesting for about a minute each because it doesn't do anything interesting with them.
It also wastes a staggering number of character actors - Gillian Anderson, Cameron Monaghan, Katherine Isabelle, Sarah Desjardins and Hasan Minhaj are all in the movie and yet could be completely removed without making an iota of difference. Some of them don't even get any dialogue and the ones who do only get to say something like "wait what?" or "you shouldn't do that" every twenty minutes. It suggests a very troubled production process.

Rating: a degraded copy of Legacy

The Running Man (2025)

MILD SPOILERS BELOW

Just so careless and bland, I find it difficult to believe Edgar Wright made that. Nothing makes sense, there's nothing clever about it, the action is all just that over-edited, no one able to shoot in a straight line, CG shit that you might expect from something like Taken 3 or Underworld 4. So many weird bad decisions, like having one character do some Truman Show level blatant product placement and give a terrible over the top performance and then not have that all be clues that he's a plant, have it just be bad movie-making, or having the first time the baddies discover the location of the lead character be a very cogent dream/his imaginings of how they might find him, so that every subsequent time they discover him you're assuming it's going to turn out to be a dream again, or mention that the baddies watch you through your television sets and then have the lead guy watch tv constantly and yet never get tracked because of it. Honestly, there are like a hundred of these. If there were a Pitch Meeting video for this, it'd be an hour long. And the social commentary feels hopelessly dated for most of it - at best it's like watching the Fifteen Million Merits episode of Black Mirror in 2025 and thinking 'wow, the media landscape changed so much in 15 years' but really it's about as relevant as the Arnie adaptation. Such a waste of a bunch of good actors, too.

Rating: inexplicably awful.

The Naked Gun (2025)

Pretty rough. All the actors are solid, Neeson and Anderson particularly good and Huston knows how to play an NG baddy. But 9 out of every 10 jokes are either poorly executed to the point where you can instantly imagine how the originals would have done it properly, more Hot Shots level humour than Naked Gun, or just straight up ripped off from a Mike Myers movie or Dodgeball some other spoof. To be fair, this means that 1 in 10 jokes are legitimately excellent and so I was doing a proper laugh every few minutes, but overall the laughs were buried under groans and sighs.

Rating: very low hit ratio

28 Years Later (2025)

The first half tries to emulate the energy of the first movie but instead of using the same low-budget grime it instead employs a bunch of wanky techniques like intercutting archive footage and overlaying poem recitals, and it just makes it all feel like a film school project. Gave it weird The Beach/Lock Stock vibes. The first movie still stands up, but this was just really slow and unengaging. The second half picks up a bit with the lead character trekking through the wilderness to find a doctor and encountering all the weird evolved elements of the UK after 28 years of rage virus - suddenly it feels like its own film, with a reason for existing and a different tone, and the switch to nicely shot 4K feels more logical and appropriate. Unfortunately, though, it's all still fairly derivative - we've seen all this stuff in I Am Legend, TLOU, Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes etc. And then it ends with a really odd turn into Fury Road rip-off territory that might have worked if it had been integrated into the movie at all, but here just adds to the overall sense of a creative team throwing a bunch of ideas at the wall and hoping it all somehow coalesces into a story.

Rating: some interesting stuff but a bit of a mess and nothing ground-breaking

Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)

For most of it, I was enjoying it a lot and my review was basically going to be 'if you like spending time in this world, and you don't mind it feeling like a chapter rather than a standalone story, it's good'. It has loads of cool stuff going on, it looks incredible, it uses stuff from 2 in ways that makes everything feel a bit more cohesive, it examines some central premises, it's got some great fist-pumping action and Oona Chaplin's character finally achieved 'sexy cat person' for me. But then the movie really lost me in the last 45 minutes, in a very similar way to how the second one did. The big climactic battle has way too much back and forth, it's unclear where everything or why one side is winning at any given moment, and this one is really similar to the one in 2. I don't know why (it's tempting to blame Jaffa & Silver, his co-writers on the sequels), but Cameron seems to have lost the knack for tight, escalating climactic sequences. Even the first Avatar had it nailed - the goodies finally fight back against the baddies, their low-tech ingenuity makes a big dent, but the baddies' superior numbers turn the tide and it looks like all is lost, then there's a last minute assist and the goodies win, all that's left to do is a tense hand-to-hand fight between the lead goody and lead baddy and we're done. But here, we again have too many moving parts, too much hostage-taking, too many breaks in the action.

Hopefully 4 and 5 will really knock it out of the park and wrap everything up, so 2 and 3 will feel like slightly uneven but still enjoyable chapters in a really strong overall saga!

Rating: lots of cool stuff going on but stumbles towards the end (again)

The Accountant 2 (2025)

SPOILERS BELOW

The first Accountant was okay, a weird mix of genres where it seemed to want to be a Tom McCarthy film more than a Jason Statham-esque 'hyper-competent greyhat works his way up a baddy chain' movie, and the portrayal of the lead character's autism, as far as I could tell, was nothing too egregious.
The sequel is terrible. All the dialogue is so much worse, and the quiet character drama stuff has been replaced with a knock-off version of Rain Man by way of Dumb And Dumber, where Bernthal's efficient terse mercenary is now a motormouth with so many wacky bits that he comes across as autistic as well and Affleck's character learns to line dance, and there's a load of really goofy stuff around the edges like the care home of autistic child super-hackers (led by Affleck's friend from the first one who has been recast and retooled to be prettier, less severely autistic and wearing standard hacker fingerless gloves) and the rival assassin who also is a savant, except she got it from head trauma and is a savant in survival which means a) she's suddenly amazing at all combat ever and b) she has amnesia because her brain decided you don't need memories for survival.
The action is well-directed but also nothing new or interesting, mostly just big dudes in body armour shooting automatic weapons at each other in the desert. Though kudos for giving JK Simmons an almost-convincing hand-to-hand combat scene.

Rating: clunky and cartoonish