Plaidophile

The best thing I have to say about it is that it didn't feel like it was two hours long. Probably because all the quick cuts, shaky camera work, flashing lights, and way too loud sound effects made it impossible for me to have a continuing sense of time.

It was very much like a bad fanfic, with weak characters who did nothing but call back to catch phrases, and a villain whose main goal in life would have, in any sort of conceivable reality, caused his crew to mutiny about 24 years before the main course of the movie.

It also, by the way, pulls some similar tricks to Enterprise (specifically altering the timeline so it can make its own damn canon), and apparently Enterprise is the only pre-existing canon in the context of this movie. Don't get me wrong; I'd have been fine with a total reboot and a complete reimagining of how things happened, but this movie went out of its way to justify this new chronology with respect to the original established one. It was trying to have it both ways.

The most entertaining thing was watching all [edit]hardcore fans applaud[/edit] every time a character said something that reminded them of what the original versions of the characters said.

Also, being that I saw it opening night in San Francisco (the friend who I usually see movies with is going out of town for a few weeks so this was our only chance to see it for a while), pretty much everyone in the audience was a friend of someone who worked on the effects at ILM, and so as the credits were rolling it was impossible to leave since everyone was sticking around to see their friends in the credits. Which was all at the end when the hundreds of special effects names scrolled by really fast, and there was a lot of staggered cheering throughout the audience. I can't fault them for any of that, of course; I just think that's an interesting phenomenon which is pretty much exclusive to San Francisco.

Anyway, my ears are ringing pretty badly. Seriously, movie sound designers (and theaters) need to cut back on the WOW SONIC IMPACT. A non-stop assault on the ears is just plain painful. Looking around, I noticed lots of people had their fingers in their ears for large sections of the movie.