Lotd2242

Wait, what? Some of the best SciFi TV ever? Are you kidding me? How do you figure? The characters are shallow, obvious, and boring. The series constantly contradicts everything that we ever knew about the Star Trek universe and its history. Not just little stupid details like "In episode 5 of Season 4 of TNG Data said planet XYZ was 65 light years from Earth and T'Pol just said it was 42 light years", but major established facts, like Vulcans having control over their emotions. And from what I've seen so far of Season 4 does not have any appreciable changes. If DS9 hadn't already made a joke about the Klingons looking like Puerto Ricans in TOS, then the arc explaining that occurrence would've been cool, especially if they had done it without tying in that dumbass KHAAAAAN arc. Instead it was just evidence of how little originality this show has.

Where do I sign up for the "Erase Enterprise from Existence" campaign? I tried to watch it when it was actually airing, and I simply could not. Now that it's on SciFi every Monday I have spent the last few months suffering through every miserable episode hoping blood won't randomly spurt out of my orifices as the spirit of Rodenberry punishes me for even watching the show that having now seen almost all of it I can officially say is that bad.

I preferred the ending to the first one. It was better resolved.

The sad thing is, as bad as many of these comic book movies have been, none of them top how bad the video game movies have been. I was watching BloodRayne on TV, and it's the first time in a while I was happy when a commercial came on.

"Adventures of Jack Sparrow" covers most of the stuff I posted of the relationship between Beckett and Jack. The stuff about Davy Jones is based on Wagners opera "The Flying Dutchman."

There's some other information that would've been nice to have too that got cut from the film. It explains Jack's relationship to Beckett and Davy Jones. Originally, Jack worked for Beckett legitimately, captaining the East India Trading Company ship Wicked Wench. At some point or another, Beckett demands Jack deliver a cargo which Jack finds out is slaves. Jack refuses, and Beckett orders the Wench burned and sunk. Beckett then brands Jack a pirate, literally. Jack, having been born the son of pirate Captain Teague, embraces the status. He goes to Davy Jones and asks that he raise the Wench and allow Jack to be her captain again. Jones demands a price of 100 years' service aboard the Flying Dutchman. Jack agrees, the wench is raised and re-christened the Black Pearl. Since she is more or less a ghost ship, the Pearl then becomes the fastest ship on the sea, faster even than the Dutchman. Another thing they fail to do in the movie is sing the whole song, Hoist the Colours. The part the kid sings references the story of Calypso and the 9 Pirate Lords, but the latter half that you don't hear is a call for help, which knowing it, makes it make more sense as to why they kept going on about the song being sung. The lyrics are: The King and his men stole the Queen from her bed and bound her in her Bones. The seas be ours and by the powers where we will we’ll roam. Yo, ho, haul together, hoist the Colors high. Heave ho, thieves and beggars, never say we die. Some men have died and some are alive and others sail on the sea – with the keys to the cage… and the Devil to pay we lay to Fiddler’s Green! The bell has been raised from it’s watery grave… Do you hear it’s sepulchral tone? We are a call to all, pay head the squall and turn your sail toward home! Yo, ho, haul together, hoist the Colors high… Heave ho, thieves and beggars, never say we die.

Because the sea is a fickle mistress.

I have probably. I thought it was more Gladiator than Last Samurai. But I enjoy it anyway! Well, apparently the original cut of the film is considerably longer, and there are a few key scenes about that whole setup, particularly the curse that goes with it, that were dropped much to the surprise of some of the authors. I said of Spidey 3 that I felt like 20 minutes of the movie was missing right in the middle. With this movie, it feels like the 20 minutes is missing from the beginning to explain how they got from Part 2's "Let's save Jack!" to Part 3's "We need Jack because he's a Pirate Lord!" I'm hoping when the DVD triology box set comes out, it'll have a full cut of the movie that might take care of it.

I rather enjoyed that actually. It was hokey, for sure, but it was kind of fun in its own way.

There's a line in the movie one reviewer quoted to sum up the plot, "Do you think he planned that or does he just make it up as he goes along?" That's about as accurate as it gets. The story is a jumbled, incohesive mess. It seems like between 2 and 3 a whole bunch of stuff happened that we should have been made aware of so that we can understand why everybody's acting the way they are. And everyone constantly is backstabbing everyone else, so you really have no idea what they're trying to accomplish. In the first movie, even though Jack does that constantly, you know ultimately he's trying to get the Pearl back and ultimately Barbossa and the Commodore are his enemies, so he's more or less on Turner/Elizabeth's side despite all that. In this movie, you really have no friggin' idea who wants what outcome. However, that being said, this is the definition of a big screen spectacle, and even with the incoherence, it's still the kind of movie you go to the theater for. The climax is large, long, and mostly satisfying. I think the camera man(woman/people) seriously deserve credit for how they shot this. Unlike Spidey, which relies on speed to keep you from actually seeing enough to notice glaring CGI and to get your mind filling in the blanks, you actually see everything in At World's End and it looks good. I will say, of the ending, the door for Pirates 4 is certainly wide open, not that I really think they could have anything nearly as climactic as this one. Though, Bruckheimer said the trilogy was done as far as he was concerned, so I guess that depends on how much Disney wants it and who signs up for it. Spoilers: What the hell happened to the two fleets while the Dutchman and the Pearl go one on one? Were they just sitting around watching? Also, is it fair to assume that it's "Will Turner's Locker" now? Thats kind of...sad. And lastly, how in the hell did Disney approve this one. You have a kid hanged, a woman shot in the forehead hole and all, a very explicit sexual reference...it's pretty graphic for what started out as a series for a young audience. Hell, that scene where Davy Jones kills the second in command guy is enough to give them nightmares forever. About the ending, and before I had this outside the spoiler but then I put it in here instead, while that whole ending is rather dissatisfying, you have to give them credit for not following the established formula.

If I were going to structure the post Spidey 2 films, I would've done it thusly. Spider-Man 3 would more or less have been the current first hour and a half minus the black suit. Instead we'd learn about the Sandman, a sympathetic villain just trying to help his kid, therefore presenting Spidey with a moral condundrum. He understands Sandman's motives, but knows robbery is no way to go about it, and further knows "with great power..." I would've emphasized the dynamic between the two, with the Sandman growing quickly more difficult to handle as he figures out his powers. You can toss in some filler with Harry and MJ where appropriate, but mostly, it's Parker trying to figure out what to do about an extremely powerful villain with whom he sympathizes. Spider-Man 4 would feature the arrival of the suit, and the conclusion of the New Goblin arc. With that addition would come the Lizard. In this way, Parker is faced with two villains he doesn't want to hurt, but the overwhelming power of the suit and his frustration with Harry, Eddie Brock, and all the other characters is driving him to be more and more violent. Toss in the issues one faces in having a fiancee, and maybe a competing lower maintenance love interest like Felicia Harding. It would center around Parker's struggle to combat the suit and his own dark desires as much as anything else. And we'd get to see a little of Parker's genius side while Doc Connor is out being the Lizard, requiring Parker to figure out the suit on his own and a way to cure his mentor. Of course, at the end of Spidey 4 Brock would've gotten the suit. So Spidey 5 would showcase Venom, a seemingly upstoppable villain who hell bent on attacking Parker at every turn. Maybe he's forced to team up with some old nemesis to find a way to stop him. And then, to round it all off, we have Spidey 6, the Carnage film. Parker and MJ are finally married and trying to deal with the perils of married life when yet another menace comes to town. Spidey is forced to team up with the reformed Venom to stop Carnage. Parker has to come to grips with the fact that this villain can't be captured or negotiated with, and that he'll have no choice but to find a way to kill him, if he can, something he couldn't even do to Venom. I think that way each movie could build on one another, and the last one goes out with a bang.

Except that's not how the suit works. The suit makes you powerful and then being evil, it influences you to abuse that power to take what you want and to hell with anyone else because they're weaker. He never wanted to be a ladies' man anyway, not even in the movies. He was always focused on getting MJ. Plus, the only person that's even impressed by his antics for even an instant is Gwen, so it didn't even achieve that goal, making him and the suit incompetent buffoons instead of an evil menace. Spoilers If they had stayed true to the suit, then rather taking Gwen for a spin around the dance floor to spite MJ's breaking up with him, he would've spent the movie stalking her and more or less wrecking any guy who looked at her the wrong way. Or, if you want to go with the ladies' man angle however contrived and overused it may be, he should've been walking down the street with bimbos on either arm and "accidentally" bumped into her. The part where he's beating down the bouncers was much more on theme. Moreover, it's silly to go and more or less poke fun at the whole idea of Parker being evil, particularly when it's supposed to be the central theme of the movie. They spent all that time advertising "the greatest battle lies within." What battle? He tried to hit on some women and took a spin around the dance floor looing like a jackass. He wasn't trying to fight his ever growing abuses of power. He didn't even have an ever growing abuse of power. If they had done it right, it would've been more like Doc Ock in Spidey 2 with the tentacles influencing him to be evil in order to meet his own needs. The stupidest thing about the whole episode is that the majority of his behavior could be attributed to a regular old tantrum as a result of the events of the movie, not the evil doings of a symbiotic organism from outer space. But hey, it must be the suit since they spent all that fifteen seconds talking about how it increases aggression. And now, naturally, it won't come off when he could stick it in a closet before. It was just poorly executed on every level, which is a shame because the symbiote is a fabulous plot device. Take your hero, whose whole creed is to use power responsibly, then jack up his power level with an alien entity that constantly whispers in his ear that he's invincible and can do whatever he wants. What did we get instead? Cirque du Soleil's new Emo show.

It was never meant for him to be cool, but he didn't turn into a retarded dork either. For one, the suit never came off like in the movie, and typically morphed into whatever clothes he was wearing, so he had it on constantly over a considerable time period. It didn't make him a dancing fool or lower his IQ by 150 points. It made him progessively more aggressive and arrogant as time wore on. It worked to emphasize the "with great power, comes great responsibility" theme of the whole comic. He started to abuse his powers. Granted, you have to speed things up for a movie, but the only scene in which Peter acts like he should with the suit on is the fight with Harry, where the normally reserved Parker has decided he isn't going to put up with Harry's crap. He's even taunting him and using excessive force. That's Peter on the suit. Not John Travolta walking the city streets.

True. He acted like a drunken frat boy instead of someone who's become progressively more aggressive and arrogant to the point of becoming like Batman.

I was hoping that the creative team that made the masterpieces of 1 and 2 would be able to at least hammer out a cohesive movie. I was expecting them to fuck it up, but I never thought I'd have to endure Emo-Peter.

It's called studio pressure. They caved to it. The studio saw the hit of Spidey 1 and then watched it get followed up by Spidey 2. So the studio went "we need to top Spidey 2!", which of course to an executive in Hollywood means "more more more!" Just watching this movie makes it ridiculously obvious that they had one idea for a movie and then they got sidetracked an hour and a half in. It's pretty blatant that they had a story which was going to be the Sandman for a villain with Harry being a constant pain in the ass to coincide with Spidey 2's ending, but then tried to figure out how to stuff in Venom. The studio clearly wanted more than a B-grade villain like Sandman, and clearly wanted Venom for his popularity. Everything about Venom feels inserted, and everything about Sandman feels like it was cut for the insertion of Venom, like, "we were going to use this scene to explain Sandman's growing control over his powers or his struggle to save his daughter through less than moral means, but instead we needed a scene that shows how a black suit can make Peter Parker Emo." The only character that has solid development from beginning to end is Harry, and that's only because his subplot worked for both a Sandman movie and a Venom movie equally well. *Spoilers* By the end of the movie, I was actually wondering who the star and hero was supposed to be. Emo-Parker is annoying rather than scary, and he doesn't even realize or attempt to fight himself turning. He only even gets the suit off by luck, when normally Parker's intelligence allows him to figure this shit out. And then he doesn't get enough screen time to do the thing that Spidey does best: feel guilty. Not once does he even return to the age old moniker of "With great power comes great responsibility." I guess that's because the suit doesn't appear to make him much more powerful, and because they had to rewrite the whole Uncle Ben history to give Sandman a place in a Venom movie. Harry on the other hand has had his power for all of 15 minutes and he's already easily kicking Peter's ass the whole film over. Even in the final fight, he's clearly the superior force of the two. Moreover, unlike Peter, he actually manages to turn himself around (yes, the Butler thing was stupid, but it was just another thing contrived due to lack of available screen time to show a transition) and then join the fight to stop the villains. Since he wasn't a hero to begin with, it makes him look all the more heroic since he took up the task, made a difference, and then sacrificed himself to save his friend. Peter didn't even realize he was a dick, got trounced the whole movie over, and then couldn't even take on the main villains without help. Ultimately, as it always is, desire for profit crushed what could've been a perfectly excellent movie.

Oh come on! Raul Julia's last and best movie! "What's the matter? You came here expecting to find a madman, and instead, you found a God?" "For I beheld Satan, and he fell from heaven, like LIGHTNING!!!" "But why? Why do they still call me a warlord? And mad? All I want to do is to create the perfect genetic soldier. Not for power, not for evil, but for good. Carlos Blanka will be the first of thousands. They will march out of my laboratory and crush every adversary, every creed, every nation! Until the world is in the loving grip of the Pax Bisonica. And peace will reign and all humanity will bow to me in humble gratitude." C'mon, you just can't beat that...

After seeing that I have to ask, who was the star of that movie again? Peter/Spidey or Harry/Gobby?

No, in the future Hiro and Ando arrive in, the cheerleader was saved, and Sylar did not have the healing power. It was future-Hiro that didn't know because he had not witnessed those events in the past and apparently didn't know he succeeded with his trip to the past. Any number of explanations work for that, such as they arrived just as future Hiro came back from the trip or future Hiro never got a chance to find out. Sylar didn't "regain" the healing power until he finds Claire again in that episode. As he said to her at the time, he was looking for her for a long time because her power more or less makes him immortal.

Two words: Tanooki suit.

I don't know if my standards are lower from having watched Hollywood wreck virtually every franchise they've touched from comic books to video games over the past decade or so, but I thought it was fantastic, both as a film and as part of a franchise. The only glaring issues I had with it were that it was too short, and April O'Neal has been totally overhauled with no explanation despite the fact it attempts to be in complete continuity with the other films. It's barely an hour and a half long, and while it doesn't feel rushed, I think about another 10-15 minutes spread out would've helped. As for April...I guess it's because she's April the Vampire Slayer (if you don't get it, check the VA) she's now almost as badass as her turtle companions. But yeah, good film. Watch for the subtle homages too. I don't know if anyone else caught it, but at one point they show the full moon with the wispy cloud in front of it, just like how the cartoon/video game used to open up.

There are only two possible ways that would happen. Either they put him in as he is, and he becomes more or less invincible as he Omnislashes his way around the screen/makes the game take forever thanks to subsequent mimics of Knights of the Round, or they'd have to nerf him so badly it wouldn't even be worth it. Plus even if they nerfed him, the Buster Sword would take up half the screen. And then Aerith, well between being able to completely heal herself, she's got that wonderful Great Gospel which not only heals everyone but makes them impervious to damage for a while.

Thanks

Patience is quite contrary to the nature of Sonic the Hedgehog and his games.

It's just about timing. It's a total bitch with Knuckles because if you're off at all, you either won't hit him or you'll hit the spikey hands things and die. Sonic and Tails have more leeway. And if memory serves, you can't climb the wall and glide into him. 'Course, the most fun way to do it is to put the game in that debug mode, create an assload of ring boxes, pop them all, and turn into Super Sonic...