We always get this when the person doing the write ups has some alternative vision for the show and obsessively documents how the actual show falls short of it. It’s just a bad way to do reviews.

“Dark” scifi is the default mode of movie and television scifi. Doing a “darker”, more “morally ambiguous” version of Trek is the lazy way to do Trek. Utopianism is the daring move nowadays. Utopianism is radical. Trek doesn’t need to be assimilated into the relentless chorus of scifi that tells us that we can’t hope…

I like the way people STILL try to come up with logical explanations for this stuff, even though you’d think they’d have been burned enough times by now that they’d realise BY FAR the most likely explanation is incompetence on the part of the film makers. She has big eyes because the character has big eyes and the…

I’m really enjoying this show. It’s essentially TNG with dick jokes, but it turns out adding dick jokes is the least worse way to ‘update’ Star Trek for a modern audience. I’ll take some crude humour over setting it in a grimdark future with a crew with secrets in their past or making it pure action or trying to make…

So her mouth DOES close.

Seems like it was more fun to make than it is to watch.

I’ve always thought Star Trek’s decline has reflected the decline in US culture, from the utopian high point of TNG, through the various attempts to make it more ‘realistic’ (i.e., the reintroduction of all the elements of our civlisation the Federation is supposed to have overcome) in the successive sequel series, to…

You can use Hollywood lazy script writing logic to figure this stuff out.

Japan and South Korea have no interests in the South China Sea.

Seriously. I loved this trailer. It wasn’t laugh out loud funny but I loved the sets, the strange creatures, etc. If it focuses more on the high concept stuff rather than throw away gags, it could be great (McFarlane’s capable of both, so we’ll see). It makes me wonder if comedy is the only context in which we can now…

If by ‘gorgeous’ you mean ‘soulless corporate rehash’, then yes, yes it does look ‘gorgeous’.

The joke is that 40 years on they still need to use a set designer for the Asian role because there aren’t any Asian cast members.

Not surprised. Nothing made me think it wasn’t just another rehash of Prometheus with bad writing, poorly thought out characters, etc. The trailers made it clear that they’d decided to make David the origin of the xenomorph, which is a typical cheap move by hack writers (“people like David, people like the…

Aurora’s about as far from a male ideal as it’s possible to get. The scenes where he’s watching her dull, pretentious videos and laughing and swooning at her were jarring for just that reason. One of the first things she does is interview him for God’s sake. That’s the most incongruous thing about the movie: she’s the…

It’s bizarre seeing people go out of their way to defend this movie. It’s not a ‘subversive’ commentary on Hollywood casting. Maybe an indie movie could do that. But this a Hollywood movie. Hollywood has a long history of white-washing - particularly of Asians - and drawing attention to its own white-washing within a…

“People liked David the android so let’s make the entire mythology revolve around him”, said the hack writer to the has-been director.

It’s veeeery obvious they’re using CGI on ScarJo’s body in this movie. See the behind the scenes footage.

Cue dozens of comments saying manga/anime don’t ‘look Asian’ because they aren’t drawn to look like anti-Japanese WW2 propaganda...

It’s weird how Hollywood feels compelled to use these cliches. They’re handed a story that’s somewhat different and they immediately try to fit it into a set of tropes that have been thoroughly explored by dozens of other movies.

The issue is Asians not being cast in Hollywood movies, so watching foreign movies isn’t going to help.