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Reviews
Star Trek: Voyager: Tuvix (1996)
Perhaps the most amoral Trek episode of all-time
I am giving this a 5 out of 10 because the concept was good and the Tuvix character was very interesting with good acting.
However, Janeway and her crew decided to murder Tuvix. They were never brought to justice either. It's a very sick episode.
This is another example of a fake moral dilemma that was solved in a completely amoral way. I mean fake because there was only one possible moral solution: let Tuvix live -- don't murder him!
All of the rationalizations fail utterly. That no one seems to even see this is even more troubling.
The episode where a Q commits suicide is also a mess, but for a different reason, by the way. In that episode, there was also a solution that didn't involve Janeway deciding someone should die. The solution was for Q to selectively forget his experiences which would have solved his problem. But, I guess the Voyager writers liked to kill people needlessly.
I would also like to strenuously counter the euphemistic and absurdly inaccurate "death penalty" framing. There is no penalty for existing. Being born, however strangely, is not a crime!
We're not talking about penalties. We're talking about cold-blooded murder.
It may be inconvenient and emotionally unfortunate for Janeway and others to lose the separated Tuvok and Neelix, but that in no way can possibly justify murdering someone.
Plus, the transporter was used to duplicate Riker so the intelligent and moral thing to do would have been to try to duplicate Tuvix and then separate the duplicate. Even that is murder technically, but it is vastly less serious -- particularly if the duplicate were to be immediately rendered unconscious so no new experiences were gathered to make the duplicate a separate person.
The transporter is also a fountain of youth, but that's another Trek problem that's outside of the scope of this review.
Star Trek (2009)
Pure garbage
This film is alright if you're a little kid who doesn't want a film that's as good as something like the Dark Crystal. In fact... why not rent that instead?
Not even kids should be subjected to this dreck. It's a bad cartoon masquerading as a Star Trek film. There's nothing in it but the flimsiest of bad characters, a plot even a 4th grader could have done better with, and a flavor that makes Aspartame seem enticing.
Someone called this "ADHD addled". Addled is a great word for it. All action without conflict. To have conflict, you have to have a legitimate problem. This film's only problem is that the cameras are rolling.
People have compared this with the very disappointing Episode 1, and the comparison is pretty apt. Both films dumbed down to a target kiddie audience. But, Episode 1 is the better film, marginal as it was. At least it had better visuals and a few minimally interesting moments. Trying not to laugh when a teenage girl in a goofy faux-Asian getup pretends to be "oh-so-serious" in a monotone is one of them. Seeing children lead the adults -- a walking commercial for products, is also amusing. There is none of this even marginal aesthetic appeal here. It's a TV movie compressed into a bad commercial. It's bad because you can't even identify the product.
The saddest thing of all is the utter butchery of Spock's character. These people couldn't rest until they destroyed the most interesting person in the original series. It's a good thing Gene and Majel didn't have to see this.
I'm asking myself why I devoted to many words to this "film". As with watching it, there's no way to get that time back. A better review would just be one sentence: "don't bother".
Growing Pains (1985)
A middle of the road bland "family friendly" show
As with other "family friendly" shows, the underlying theme is how propaganda is good for society. Good people are crafted by presenting a manufactured saccharine reality, rather than actual reality. I can't recall the show doing a good job of demonstrating the pitfalls of hypocrisy and other truly educational matters, unlike Family Ties.
It's been a long time since I saw this, but it was similar to Full House, another show that I found unwatchable because of the bland characters and smarminess. At least Michael J. Fox brought energy as well as some reality to his show. Cameron, by contrast, is more interested in knocking cast members away and apparently lobbying against producers to prevent reality from peeking through.
The show isn't awful, but when I made a short list of the weakest examples of corporate television, this show was part of it, along with Full House.
Voor een verloren soldaat (1992)
A bland but picturesque film with a very beautiful actor (the soldier)
Parts of this film are weak (the dance studio scenes in particular), and it failed to have much of an impact overall. Despite this, it is worth watching, not only because of the beauty of the soldier, but because of the picturesqueness of the landscape and family life in the protagonist's memory.
One strength of the film is the avoidance of stridency. Hollywood films tend to exaggerate everything for dramatic effect, and it's a refreshing change here to be free from that. I particularly liked the stepfather's attitude toward their relationshipthat's life. That theme pervades the film, and while it makes it a bit milquetoast, it also avoids the soap opera plus cartoon style Hollywood film-making tone.
Someone here wrote:
"And yet, the fact that the boy never got over the love of that man suggests the inherent imbalance in that type of relationship. Do you think the soldier went through the rest of his life trying to find the boy?"
I'd never get over a guy that beautiful myself, no matter how old I was when I was with him! Actually, when I was about twenty-three, I spent a weekend with a graduate student and he was so gorgeous that I have never completely gotten over him. If had been really young and had been with someone like him, the desire would have probably been even more intense, though. When I was that age of the protagonist in the film, I definitely wished for a relationship and wouldn't have turned down a guy like that solider.