Picked one at random and ended up watching the
Nemesis recap.
Sounded pretty spot on to me. And not particularly over the top. I guess he's either toned down the insanity and bathroom 'humor'; or I just happened to catch the one review where there wasn't much. Guess I'll reserve judgment on that part until I watch a few more.
Confession: I was never much of a Star Trek fan. And I've never been overly impressed by the films.
Which is a problem.
Because I watch each installment I get dragged to as a
movie. I don't ever experience that ritual bonding 'thing' the
Trek diehards seem to get out if it. So having somebody eviscerate a Trek feature film for being a bad movie - and a bad
story - is a welcome relief AFAIC. Especially since most reviewers focus on everything BUT how poorly written the storylines are.
I know there is the need to willingly "suspend disbelief" in order to understand and appreciate speculative fiction. But when logical development of a plot gets thrown out the window, or when internal inconsistencies make me stop and say "What???", my paused disbelief gets re-enabled pretty quickly.
About the best thing I can say for the TNG films is that the directors finally gave the
Deanna Troi character a decent hairdo.
But maybe that's just me.
Why don't you be the judge?
---------------------------
Addendum: one of my favorite sites for cranky reviews (film/TV/books) is the improbably named
Pajiba ("Scathing Reviews, Bitchy People") website. Nice to read something that's snarky
and well written. For once.
Excerpt from their
About page follows for anyone who may be interested:
Spoiler
Who is Pajiba?
Quite simply, Pajiba is an eclectic set of critics and eloquent readers. Check out the staff page if you simply must know more.
What of Pajiba?
For reasons we’d rather not go into, we can’t actually tell you what Pajiba means but, should Pajiba catch fire and become a national phenomenon, we would like you to know that it is pronounced like a part of the female anatomy, if you have a bit of a cold, which makes it an awfully enjoyable word to say (try it, out loud, in your cubicle). Any other pronunciation makes us bristle, hack, and contort our faces in very unpleasant ways, particularly those pronunciations that involve long e’s. Please do not pronounce it Pajeeba in front of the publisher; he has a felony record.
Based ostensibly in Portland, Maine, Pajiba has offices (and by “offices,” we mean guys and gals writing reviews on kitchenette tables in their overpriced hovels or in their cubicles during office hours) around North America. If you lurk in the comments section for any length of time, you’ll also notice that we have several regular commenters (often referred to as The Eloquents) who make their own valuable contributions to the Pajiba experience. They are scattered across the country, and you can add your place among them, geographically.
Pajiba is a film, book, and television review site, though we used to feature weekly political commentary as well. Unfortunately, our political column was shut down by the Bush Administration through a little-used clause in the Patriot Act. (We still attempt to sneak a few political pieces by Homeland Security, on occasion.) For real, though; in May of 2006, we were temporarily shut down when DHS seized our hard drives.
Note: If their temporary shutdown in May of 2006 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security piques your curiosity, here's the story on that:
Spoiler
I’ll start, offering up a short explanation for one of the more common questions asked around these parts:
Department of Homeland Security: Cabinet department of the U.S. federal government with the responsibility of protecting the territory of the U.S. from terrorist attacks and responding to natural disasters. In May 2005, under the Bush administration, DHS mysteriously seized the hard drives of the server Pajiba then resided on, offering no explanation nor ever returning hard drive (several other sites also resides on the server). The site was rebuilt from Google caches, and any and all comments prior to May 2005, as well as a handful of comments and our short-lived political section, were forever lost.
Apparently they were yet another innocent bystander victim of a drive-by government cyber-shooting in the
War on Terror during the Bush/Chaney
Error Era.
