OMG! The new Star Trek movie is down to 93% at Rottentomatoes.com! Who DARES diss the new Trek?

The boys wanted to see it, so I took them.

Meh.

Dreamworks does this a lot with their animation.  They take an idea with a lot of cool visuals in it and they barf it up on the screen without remembering that story and character actually make a good movie.

MvA starts when Susan gets smacked by a glowing meteor on her wedding day and grows to fifty feet tall.  The government whisks her away to a special prison for other mutated monsters, including cockroach-y mad scientist, a blob without a brain, the missing link between fish and humans, and a godzilla-sized fuzzy bug which also doesn't have a brain.  The trouble is, none of them have heart, either.  A squiddy alien invades the earth, so the army offers the monsters their freedom if they repel the invasion.

The performances are decent, especially Reese Witherspoon as Susan, but the script is so poor, the movie dies.  The plot wanders all over the place and never has a chance to build.  There's absolutely, positively no suspense.  I mean NONE.  The bad guy is a buffoon villain, and not once is there a moment when it seems possible he might win.

Each character is supposed to have a talent and a flaw.  I think.  Blob dissolves everything but is really stupid.  Missing link can swim really good but he scares people.  Dr. Cockroach can build machines out of nothing but is insane.  Insectosaurus is huge and strong but has no brain (oops, we did that one) and he's attracted to bright lights.  I think each one is supposed to overcome his flaw throughout the course of the movie and use his talent, but it doesn't quite work out that way.  They never really overcome their flaws and never fully use their talents.  And oh yes--the "surprise" ending with Insectosaurus ain't a surprise.  Not only did I see it coming, a little kid in the audience shouted it out long, long before it happened.

The dialogue is never very funny.  Once in a great while it earns a chuckle.  Usually it's just okay.  Often it's embarrassingly bad.  You could tell they were trying to be funny and failing.

Give this one a miss, folks.  Especially since they charge extra for the 3D glasses.

Headed out for another viewing of WATCHMEN this evening.  It was very long.  :)  I still liked it, but I needed a snack break partway through. And you have to be in the right mood for the relentless cynicism.

Okay, I knew it was going to be bad, but I had to go see JUMPER.

Yeah, I'm going to compare it to the book.  I know you have to take movies on their own terms because they're a different medium, but this time it's germaine.
 
We all had high hopes for this movie.  See, JUMPER wasn't written by Michael Crichton or Stephen King or one of those other seven-figure, NEW YORK TIMES best-selling authors whose books get made into movies as a matter of course. JUMPER is firmly part of the science fiction ghetto.  It was sold only in the SF section.  No one outside the SF community had heard of Steven Gould, the author.  It was really great having a book written by One Of Us getting done as a big-budget movie.  "Look!" we could shout.  "There's more to SF than Michael Crichton!"
 
When hopes climb high, the disappointment smashes us equally low.

As you know, Bob, the film's been getting wretched reviews, and deservedly so.  The problem is in all the crap they added to it.  It was stupid to add a plot with a group of people (who inexplicably call themselves Paladins) who hunt down people who can teleport, and was obviously thrown in to have an excuse for battle scenes.  And to make room for this stuff, they removed everything from the book that made the story good.

In the movie, Davy is an asshole.  Sorry, but there's no other to put it. He starts off with a voice-over narrating his mid-teen years in which he says, "I started out as a chump like you."  Great way to get the audience on your side, guys!  There's a brief moment when Davy is bullied in high school and he becomes sympathetic, but the moment his powers surface, that goes away.  We pop ahead eight years, and we see Davy-the-asshole again.  He jumps around the world, stealing what he wants, using his power to pick up women, deliberately ignoring people in danger who need his help, and generally living the life of a sybarite.  This could still be done sympathetically, but Hayden Christensen keeps a smirk on his face and a sneer his voice the entire time.  He (literally, in one case) looks down on everyone else in the world, and you want to slap him.  When Roland the Paladin shows up and beats the tar out of Davy, I was ready to cheer.  It was like watching a brat get a much-deserved spanking.

Then we have Millie the Girlfriend.  In the movie, Millie is a nothing.  She is pure damsel in distress.  She does untie Davy once when he's trapped and can't teleport, but that's it.  She adds nothing to the film, and the makeup and clothing designers made her look like trailer trash, for some reason. her and Davy's relationship is thoroughly unbelievable, completely lacking in chemistry, and it's clear she's only there so Davy can save her.

Davy's father is the main villain in the book (for the first half of it, anyway), and he is nasty and horrible and scary.  In the movie, he's a dud. You can't even tell whether Davy runs away from him in a fit of teenage pique or because Dad is abusive.  The character is murky and unclear and poorly done, unlike the novel.

And boy, do we have plot holes.  In the movie, Davy teleports in and out of crowded places AND NO ONE SEEMS TO NOTICE OR CARE.  It's the stupidest thing.  He teleports from one end of a crowded pub to another, but no one sees. He pops in and out of airport security lines, and no one bats an eye. He teleports someone to an emergency room, and his arrival creates a big dent in the floor and sends hospital equipment flying, but there's no follow-up to this (and you never find out what happens to the character--does he live or die?).  Griffin, another jumper, teleports cars, vans, and buses around, but no one seems to notice this, either.  (Exactly what happened to the driver of the London bus Griffin teleports to the Egyptian desert?)

The stupidest, most asinine bit of all was the change in Davy's mother.  In both the novel and the movie, Davy's mother abandons her husband and son when Davy is five.  In the book, we learn she flees her husband's alcoholism and abuse, but she isn't emotionally strong enough to take Davy with her. Eventually, Davy tracks her down and tries to reconcile with her, but an unexpected tragedy interferes.  It's a major part of the book's plot.  In the movie, Davy's mother is only briefly mentioned and we learn at the very end (in order to set up a sequel) that she's a Paladin who will now be hunting Davy down.  If the moviemakers were waiting for gasps of shock, they were disappointed--it wasn't shocking, it was stupid, and the audience sat in silence during the scene.

The screenwriters took everything out of the book that gave the story heart. Davy was one of the most sympathetic characters I've ever read in my life. That disappeared.  His developing relationship with Millie was well-drawn and sweet and realistic.  That disappeared.  His feelings of abandonment and attempts to reconcile with his mother made for fascinating character development.  That disappeared.  Davy's fights with the FBI agents who were trying to capture him and force him to work for them were suspensful and action-filled.  Those disappeared.  What we got instead was a new plot full of holes driven by unsympathetic characters.

It was sad and horrifying to watch such butchery.  Judged alone or against the book, this movie loses.

Yesterday we took the boys to see THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES, a film all three had been agitating to see.  It was a fun movie, an interesting mix of traditional fairy lore with some new stuff thrown in.  It wasn't without its flaws--it was difficult to sort out who the protagonist was going to be, said protagonist was an unlikeable brat for the first half hour of the movie, and the startling twist at the end was easy to see coming--but it was still great fun.  I liked the fact that the first kid who saw the fair folk didn't try to keep it a secret; he got his siblings involved right away. The fairy characters were interesting and well-drawn.  Mackie got a little nervous during the big fight at the end.

A fun afternoon.