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IL: Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009)
Having never seen Alias, I missed out on the Cult of Abrams - never seen Cloverfield, feel that Lost like 24 would be a decent ninety minute thriller but is dull as multiples of 23 episodes, Mission: Impossible III had me rooting (routing?) for Philip Seymour Hoffman and had a Simon Pegg cameo from another movie... and REgrading Henry [sic] was tosh about becoming a good husband by getting shot in the head. I had no high hopes for this franchise roboot, having given up around the time the original crew had, also I've seen First Contact for teaching purposes. Abrams is no Jonathan Frakes, it has to be said.
Avoiding the temptation of doing the whole Star Trek: The OC thing, it's never the less one of those ridiculous don't-trust-anyone-over-thirty movies where untried rookies are wiser than stuck-in-the-mud veterans. And the plot cheats too much to validate them. Romulan seeks revenge for destruction of his home world, but travels through time and ends up in period of young Spock, with an old Spock wandering around in time to advise. This coincides with the crew we know and love all about to graduate from the academy, although my memory is the Checkov was a series two addition and presumably a later vintage. It does, of course, make sense for these rookies to be all stuck on the same ship at the end of the film - or has everyone with experience been killed, even those on shore leave? The time travel shenanigans presumably allows the continuity book to be torn up and so X's (initially) subtle affair with Y might not exist in the Alpha or Beta timelines, and Checkov jumped a year and then went back to college for a year. I got enough in-jokes to make me have that glow of smugness over the plebs in the cinema, but I'm sure I missed much.
Young Kirk was fine if a little punchable (and this was I suspect tongue in cheek), I kept expecting Spock to slice open people's foreheads to steal their talents, and Scottie did a good impression of someone pretending to be Scottish. I was never quite convinced by Bones. Curiously, it all felt closer to Star Wars than Star Trek - which I've since gathered in Abrams's preferred franchise. Expect Spock to be killed and Scottie to be shipped off to Pizza the Hutt in the sequel, and muppets in the third.
All in all - too much hide the special effects shakeycam, plotholes to drive starships through, but actually, sorta, ok
The same cannot be said of
L: Freejack (Geoff Murphy, 1992)
Watched as adaptation of Immortality, Inc., which shares the plot point of a man being lifted from now to the future - in Sheckley a philosophising yacht designer able to ponder upon the Cartesian mind-body split, in the film a racing driver able to be played by Emilio Estevez. Estevez plays the role like a startled rabbit, a look of disbelief on his face throughout, though whether it's at the Blade Runner-lite future or at the dumpbin destination of his career I don't know (and I haven't seen Young Guns II another Murphy-Estevez pairing, so I don't know if he had only himself to blame). Anthony Hopkins does a phoned in performance - in fact I suspect he only had a day's filming in the same scenes as the rest of the cast, with the rest superimposed (and it rivals Australia for dodgy matte lines, albeit with more excuse). The best element is Mick Jagger, who looks bored with the whole affair, and is clearly better than this, though hadn't been in a proper movie since 1970. A whoile lot worse than I remember. Murphy went on to Second Unit Lord of the Rings, and had been director on This Quiet Earth, but this is not in the same league.
Totals: 48 - [Cinema: 15; DVD: 32; Television: 3]