Recently, a fellow under the screenname of RedLetterMedia had been making quite a splash with his 70 minute YouTube critique of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in which he quite hilariously slices the movie into very thin pieces:
He did similar videos for all of the Star Trek movies that came after Star Trek VI, which I found similarly insightful and amusing. He didn’t give the same treatment to the latest JJ Abrams’ Star Trek however, a movie which I found particularly flawed. The “review” for that one was a rather distasteful short about a woman getting raped and finding out that it wasn’t as bad as she thought it was going to be.
But the point all of it drove home for me was just how creatively bankrupt big-name science fiction has become. Now, when dealing with series that have large and established followings, writers will start with a few elements they want in a film then twist, beat, and break the plot around them. It doesn’t matter how nonsensical the story becomes, just as long as it has certain characters, dazzling action sequences and special effects. One of the things that disturbed me most about the latest Star Trek was the positive reception it got even among a lot of hardcore fans, despite its glaring flaws.
YouTube user typeNtardis very nicely summed up the state of Star Trek in particular with this posting:
Hiroki Matsuuchi
January 7, 2010 at 12:49 am
I watched the first video about the Star Wars prequels. Pretty funny. Keep the good stuff coming.
Hiroki Matsuuchi
January 8, 2010 at 11:21 pm
I just got around to watching the second video. Although it was entertaining, his initial argument doesn’t really make sense. The rest was pretty funny though.