Reviews

First couple of episodes aren't bad. Interesting set-up and all. Characters not too terrible other than the ones that are cartoon characters and you'll know who they are the second they open their mouths. Then the padding kicks in, and man, there's a ton of padding. You can fast forward through most of the remaining episodes without missing a thing. Mostly it's mystical claptrap with people acting and reacting in ways no actual human being would react. By the way, the story doesn't end with the final episode, because of course it doesn't. So stay tuned for another grindy season of bad plot, bad CGI and bad green screen. That is, if series 2 even appears. Me, I couldn't care less how any of this turns out and will quickly forget The Rig ever existed.

I'm a real Marvel fan and tend to be generous in my estimations of the movies. I was even kind to "The Eternals", which, face it, was pretty...uh, not terrific. My take on the "The Marvels" is that you probably aren't going to enjoy it without being the kind of viewer who's already seen (and taken notes on) several earlier movies and streaming shows. I've seen them all and had a little trouble figuring out who was who and remembering their backstory.

The movie moves along too quickly, almost choppily. As though chunks were cut out at the last minute and the leftovers duct-taped together. I think "Marvels" would have been better served as a limited streaming series. It had the look and feel of a non-theatrical release, to be honest; just needed to be cut into 4 - 6 episodes and given the chance to flesh out the characters and their motivations. Maybe give the writers the room to craft a story that made a bit more sense.

I have to mention the kittens in space sequence. Which my wife loved, and I loved hearing her laugh and enjoy herself. I was sitting there, though, shaking my head and feeling...embarrassed? Why that background music? I mean, "Cats," I get it. But that scene completely broke my immersion and I never got it back. It was another indication that "Marvels" couldn't quite decide what it wanted to be - serious action or 'nudge-nudge, get the joke' buddy comedy.

I hate seeing Marvel movies tank (and this one isn't going to recoup the nearly 300 million dollars it cost to make) because that could negatively impact future projects that would undoubtedly be better films. That said, most people are probably going to wait for this to hit the streaming platforms. Even as a diehard fan, I probably would have done so, myself.

This is how you take the ideas of nuclear war and a trip to Mars and turn them into a boring mess. People endlessly talking and looking pensive; images and actions with no context so you have no idea what's important or what has any meaning. The science....oy, let's not go into that.

The weird narration at the beginning bothered me (who the heck is talking right now) but the rest of the writing was so bad I just chalked it up to more of the same. The narration turns out to be the required TZ plot twist at the end.

It seems the world did actually end and all that's left are the five astronauts. So this is what the aliens decide to save? Are they going to manufacture clones? Do I care?

The header says it. I still look forward to new episodes of this show and generally like the main characters. Llewelyn gets a bit too quirky at times, but his plot arc has possibilities. Please, though, find a way to get rid of Dorothy Ernst. She has more lives than Jason Voorhees and has really worn out her welcome as a character. I know it's easier to keep using established characters than to write new ones, but her cycle of appearing and kidnapping George has become a running joke. I feel the same about Ralph Fellows, btw. Can someone just kill him actually dead and let us off the hook?

On the plus side, it looks like the prolonged Bobby Brackenreid story line may finally be coming to an end. Good job, that.

Like the three main characters, like the idea of disparate types working together to understand mysterious situations sometimes earthly and sometimes not. That said, the show too often relies on 'idiot plotting,' meaning the plot only works because the protagonists act like utter idiots, ignoring factual evidence, ignoring past experience, ignoring any form of logic. Example, Kristen and her mother. How in the name of all things intelligent can Kristen not realize what's going on with her mother and Leland? With what's happening with her mother and her own children? It's as though Kristen and her mother only interact in the scenes that we see and cease to exist as interconnected characters once the camera stops rolling. This is a common problem with television, but good writers understand that a lot of what happens with characters takes place when we're not watching and find ways to weave those subtleties into the parts that we do get to see.

Many others have mentioned the annoying way the kids are portrayed. That's an easy fix; talk one at a time. Please. And use you inside voices. Please.

It's been an up and down season - with a few downs really in the abyss - but this finale is one of the best ST episodes I have seen in years. Great writing, great acting, tight pacing. Time travel stories have pretty much been done to death, but this one works like a fine Swiss watch, with just enough nods to TOS to bring on a warm feeling of blissful nostalgia. Plus we get to hear Scotty, who has always been one of my favorite characters. (Perhaps added as a regular in Season 2?) Please keep this up!

Another steal, or homage, or whatever. I really wish the writers would start writing their own stories and not continually trade on the work of others. (Come on, a chest-bursting scene?) The sad thing, this is a show with great potential to be Star Trek again after the awfulness that is Discovery. For the love of Sarek, folks, please try harder.

First off, I need to say that I have never much liked ST's 'costume drama/comedy' episodes. The gangster world in TOS, that Robin Hood episode in NG, the Neelix fairy tale in Voyager. Etc. Etc. Not that they were bad, just not my thing. That said, I really didn't like this episode. Others have pointed out the various flaws, so enough said. I did like to finally see the conclusion of the doctor/daughter arc, but wish he could have found a different way to have kept her around all this time. The transporter buffer dodge was Scotty's idea in a wonderful NG episode and seemed like a thing only he could have cobbled together. Even Geordi, who is an excellent engineer himself, was in awe of that maneuver. Yet, here we have a doctor with little or no engineering training utilizing the same trick. It really trivializes Scotty's abilities as a miracle worker. Maybe this was meant as an homage, but the writers need to come up with their own gimmicks and stop using those of others.

Ralph Fellows puts together this scenario to kidnap Dr. Ogdon, then stages his own death, which is what he had planned all along. But why? To have Murdoch find him and then think he was dead? For what purpose? Was he even on Murdoch's radar after being in the wind for ages? What was the point other than to fill an hour of television time?

If you've been waiting for a truly decent adaptation of a classic Heinlein novel, you'll have to wait a bit longer. Netflix's newly-released take on "The Door Into Summer" is another sad botch job, taking what was a thoughtful and interesting (though incestuous) novel and turning it into a goofy romantic/comedic/high-schoolish mess.

A few problems with this film:

1) Actors who look to actually be in high school and whose talent shows it.

2) Changes to the plot (probably to keep the production costs to a minimum) that end up ruining the story. Rather than being set in 1970 and 2000, it's set in 1995 and 2025. The problem here is that the protagonist is a roboticist who's created household robots that don't yet exist and is put into commercial cryosleep, a process that also doesn't exist. These plot devices worked for a novel written in 1957, where 1970 and 2000 were both in the future, but not a movie made in 2021. I suspect this was all done, again, to keep costs down, but it makes the story nonsensical.

3) The addition of the character Android Pete. Done, I would guess, because the original novel is largely a one-person show, but the addition of Pete changes the protagonist from a solitary, independent thinker/actor into a wide-eyed goofy doofus. They also blew most of the special effects budget on Pete's 'open the chest and see the cool glowing battery' scene.

4) The dialogue straight out of anime. At times it literally caused me pain.

5) The rest you can find for yourself. You'll probably be hitting the forward 10 seconds button quite a bit because the movie is leaden-paced.

Someday, someone may create a film adaptation of Heinlein that's worth watching. He certainly wrote enough novels that would make excellent movies. Any of his juveniles, for instance. Or a version of "Starship Troopers" that actually follows the novel and doesn't turn it into a ridiculous farce. Probably not "Stranger in a Strange Land", for obvious reasons. Maybe there's a parallel universe where "Tunnel in the Sky" or "Have Spacesuit Will Travel" exist as film classics. I like to think so, because Heinlen's works deserve better than they've seen in this universe.

At least they didn't make this one into a series...

Again with the running around from place to place to place. And questions. Do we end up with questions. How many of these people wind up in 1988 and why is nobody concerned about screwing up the timeline? Is bad cop lady actually dead? Do we care? How about cave boy/Dad? Does he ever accomplish anything or will he continue just kvetching and wringing his hands? Then there's kidnapped older quasi-sister, whatever her name is. Will she figure out that by using a stick she can pry open that trap? And the biggie; how many people in 10000 BC are related to one another or, in reality, different versions of themselves? Tune in next season when NBC may or may not pick this up for another 10 episodes. (And I have to wonder; with a 10-episode season, was this series originally pitched to Netflix? Did they pass on it and, yikes, what does that mean?)

Another week of people behaving like nobody in this universe would behave. Let's walk over here. No, let's walk over here. Let's fly around for a while. Let's blow up the plane. Let's talk about things that don't matter. Ok, let's do that some more. Are the crazy villagers still around? Who knows, so let's just forget about them. Oh, and what happened to the predators? They don't seem to care about all the free lunch meat wandering around, so let's take midnight jaunts in the woods, it's all good...

We get a rare glimpse at how the IMF would work in the real world; torture and straight-out murder to accomplish a goal. The team would be right at home in Guantanamo. Not surprisingly, an episode like this was relatively rare. In the 60's television reality we were typically portrayed as the good guys...

I still enjoy this soap/emergency show, but this has got to be the fourth or fifth series to use the 'mistaken identity of victims" routine, down to the staging and pretty much even the dialogue.

Among the various (and numerous) ridiculous plot tidbits this week, the doctor, whose name I forget along with the names of every other character in this show, falls what looks like hundreds of feet to land on his back - on rocks - and not only avoids becoming soup, but also gets up and walks with a little help from his friends. Must have some fantastic healing powers; can't wait for him to pop the claws...

Well, August is usually when studios haul out the trash, and this movie certainly qualifies as such. Cheap-looking effects (possibly generated on a Pentium 1 computer) bad script, bad acting. Tim Allen shows all the warmth and charm of an ex-con making his weekly visit to the parole office. Nobody is enjoying themselves here; even Chevy Chase seems embarrassed. Consider that. How rotten does a movie have to be for Chevy Chase to be wondering: Is this worth a paycheck?

Maybe everyone was upset by the glaring continuity problems. The rubber band baseball sequence, for instance, seems out of place and makes very little sense. Then there's Allen, who appears hostile to the kids in one scene, their best friend in another, then hostile again. Apparently he can't make up his mind. Near the end of the movie, he leaves the four kids safely hidden from the evil military men, yet in the next scene the kids are back in captivity without explanation. Did he turn them in? Does anyone really care?

This is a very white movie. Very very white. I think Tim Allen even makes this comment at one point. There are no characters of color to be seen other then the wannabe heroes at the beginning who hit the reject pile. Personally, I think the kid with the giant snot balls would have been at least as useful as the one the military ultimately chooses (his special ability is the inflation of body parts) but what can you do.

If your children, six or under, have absolutely nothing else more entertaining to do this week, like getting booster shots, you might want to take them to Zoom and kill half an afternoon. Or not. It's hard to decide how much would be too much to pay in order to see this movie. Maybe if you found one of those dollar bargain theaters. Or maybe not.

One can only hope there isn't a Zoom 2 in the works.