Category: Film

I was asked on my Tumblr thing what I thought about it, because I didn’t like the trailer at all (I said something like “I just saw this trailer for a generic sci-fi action movie, but everyone was wearing a Starfleet uniform.”)

Before I get into Beyond, some context: I’m the guy who worked on TNG, but was a massive TOS fan growing up (and still is). When I watch Star Trek movies, I don’t watch them as someone who actually went to Starfleet Academy (class of 2389 REPRESENT!) but as someone who loves Star Trek and cosplayed as Spock before he knew what cosplay was. So, that said, to recap: I loved the first rebooted Trek movie. It had its flaws, but none of them were big enough to upset me, so I give it 4 out of 5 jars of Red Matter. I really enjoyed Into Darkness when I was in the theater, but the more I thought about it after, the more it fell apart until I now have to give it 2 out of 5 tribbles-on-a-stick.

Star Trek movies are always going to have a hard time with fans of the series, because when we think about Star Trek, we think about 79 episodes of the original series, or our favorite 30 episodes of TNG, or the last season of DS9. We take something that’s been spread out over days of on-screen time, spread out across years of releases, and then compare all that character development and nuance and series of individual moments with something that has to be a fully-told and completely self-contained story in 90 or 120 minutes, and it has to be accessible (as defined by risk-averse studio goons) to as wide an audience as possible. So I think it’s unfair and unreasonable to directly compare the film installments of a long-running TV series to that series. I won’t do that with Star Trek Beyond. I’ll just compare it to the two previous installments in this series.

Without holding Beyond next to the hundreds of episodes of Star Trek we can watch on TV, and just looking at it as part of this current film trilogy: I was really disappointed by it. Unlike Into Darkness, which was a lot of fun for me in the theater but fell apart upon reflection, Beyond just fell apart while I was watching it. You can read more if you’d like to know some of my reasons. There are spoilers.

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I posted a thing on my dumb Tumblr thing about how awful the Stallone Judge Dredd movie was, and a lot of people asked me if I’d seen the 2012 Dredd with Karl Urban. I hadn’t, and didn’t intend to, for reasons that will become clear shortly. So many people recommended it to me, though, and it had such a great group of creative people behind it, I gave it a chance … and I loved it. Here’s what I wrote about it this morning:

I hate reboot culture. I hate that studios remake movies that were perfectly fine the first time around, simply because they’re too afraid to take a chance on something new, different and unproven.

That said, in an instance like Dredd, where the original film adaptation was a catastrophic failure of flaming shit, I should be willing to make exceptions.

I should be, but I’m usually not, because I’m stubborn. So when I posted about how I didn’t want to watch the 2012 version of the film, about two dozen people urged me to reconsider. I decided to take a chance (you know, like studios won’t), and watched it last night. I am so glad that I did, because I loved everything about it. A lot of fans fixate on Dredd never taking off the helmet, which I understand, but I don’t think that’s its strongest selling point. What I loved about it was how it felt like a proper motion picture adaptation of the 2000 A.D comics I read in the 80s, and the Games Workshop games I played from that universe. The city blocks felt massive. The Judges felt powerful. The relationship between Dredd and Anderson felt real. She didn’t need him to save her, even when he was trying to. The design of the entire picture, from the costumes to the sets to the little details like graffiti was pitch-perfect. And the photography was sensational.

I felt like it started to wobble a little bit in the third act, but like I originally wrote yesterday, I was on board by that point so I was willing to go along with it and let it be. I’m guessing that there won’t be any sequels, or we would have heard about it by now. If that’s the case, it’s a bummer, because I’d like to see these characters and this universe again … but maybe it’s for the best that this film can simply exist as its own thing, without being tainted by a sequel that lets us down (OH HAI THE MATRIX). Or maybe it’s a tragedy that Dredd won’t get its Aliens or T2. I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.

So now I’m thinking about other movies that missed the point of their source material (Running Man and The Shining come to mind, though they stand on their own in their own glorious ways), and trying to figure out what other pictures I’d remake, if I could pass a universal law that requires two new movies be made for every remake, because I am a powerful, tyrannical king.

Following these rules, what would you remake, and why? Show your work.