Slashdot | Star Trek XI In Two To Three Years

You know, I’ve been a fan of Star Trek for many years now - both TNG and ToS - but I just wish they’d let it die. Or at least lay fallow for several years before trying to spin off something new. ToS was fun, not real substantial, but fun. TNG added a lot more substance, and at times sacrificed the fun, but in the end it was a good show. DS9, once it got going, was a terrific show. Voyager and Enterprise were both crap that I couldn’t stand to watch. And the last few movies really haven’t been that great either…

Not only are they talking about a new Star Trek movie, but Berman has suggested that it’ll feature an entirely new crew & ship, and possibly be set as a prequel of some sort… While I suppose this could make for some interesting plot elements (none of the crew necessarily have to survive, you can kill them all off) I have a very hard time seeing completely alien characters do well in a Star Trek movie. The movies have always basically offered stories that were simply too big for the television screen, but were still the show you loved to watch week after week. And a prequel? Didn’t Enterprise do badly enough?

What’s with prequels right now anyway? It seems like everyone is making prequels… Why not simply tell a new story? Or something from a different point of view? How about we go back and revisit the ToS story arc, but from a Klingon or Romulan perspective? I’m sure that could be very interesting, and there’s plenty of historic events in the Star Trek timeline that could be told from a non-Federation point of view…

After what Lucas has done to Star Wars with all his edits, prequels, spin offs, and re-releases… I’m just sad to see Star Trek headed down that same path. It used to be good, enjoyable entertainment. Now it looks like they’re trying to turn it into nothing more than a money mill.

A Gamers’ Manifesto

Slashdot | Home Made Star Wars Movie Injury

Alright, so these people got seriously injured and that’s absolutely horrible. I feel for them. It’s an awful thing.

But… Come on folks, how dumb do you need to be to think that filling a glass tube with fuel and then lighting it sounds like a good idea? It never occured to them that they might be injured by waving around a glass tube filled with burning liquid?

We went to see Episode III on Saturday, and I can’t say I’m terribly happy with the result. I didn’t really expect much, after how terribly the other two were, but everyone kept telling me how good they were. Not just the usual professional movie reviews either, which I often disagree with. The folks on Slashdot were indicating that it was actually a decent movie, and they’ve been very critical of the prequels. Folks in my guild were all raving about how good it was too. People were claiming that this one movie redeemed the entire prequel trilogy. So, despite my skepticism, it sounded like it might actually be decent. Unfortunately, they were all wrong.

Episode III sucked. Sure, there was lots of action in it, and the special effects were good. There were lots of lightsaber fights, which were quite fun to watch… But pretty much everything else sucked.

I’m still of the opinion that George Lucas focused on entirely the wrong topics for these prequels. Episode I should never have featured such a young Anakin. It thoroughly messed up the plot and pacing for the rest of the trilogy. We should have first met Anakin when he was roughly the same age as Luke, which would have made him a much more interesting character and set up some of the similarities that Obi-Wan and Yoda then talk about in Episode IV.

Then we’ve got a gap of 10 years or so during which Anakin is presumably learning to be a Jedi, but we don’t get to see any of it. We pick up in Episode II with a much older Anakin who in no way resembles the little kid we were introduced to originally. We then spend most of the movie watching Anakin and Padme fall in love. Not only is their pairing absurd, but we waste far too much screentime just watching them hold hands and stare into eachother’s eyes. It was readily apparent in the original trilogy that Han and Leia were falling in love, and we never had to watch them stroll through a field.

And now we have Episode III… Which again picks up after a significant lapse of time. Once more a huge period of time has passed, important things happened, and we didn’t get to see any of it at all.

Aside from my many complaints about the focus and pacing of the trilogy as a whole, this movie was just plain bad. The acting was horrible. Portman simply cannot act. In previous movies she’s made a good piece of eye candy…but this time around not even that was working. Not that I have anyting against pregnant women, really, but they shouldn’t be running around in ultra-short skirts and leather harnesses. It just doesn’t do anything for their figure. And the creation of Darth Vader, something that should have been one of the most momentous events in the movie, was just plain silly. I kept waiting for the lightning bolts and screams of “It’s alive! Alive!”

Slashdot | Human Blood For Electrical Power