Blame Lundon: Star Trek Into Ha Ha Just Kidding.

TL:DR Suffers greatly from to much talent not enough direction. Everything except the story works perfectly. Lens flares were far less annoying except for one scene they overpowered character development. The film hits all the required moments a movie needs to be a movie but the reasons it hits those notes are completely lacking. See it for the visuals and actors doing their best, lower your expectations by a few steps at least as far as the story.

I give it 6 out of 10 warp core breaches.

THUS BEGINS THE FULL REVIEW:

Dear Bad Robot,

lens flares are cool, they look great, they are not cooler than the following things,

character development
coherent plot
emotional investment that rewards the audience.

if this is what you feel to be a worthy companion piece to Wrath of Khan then I will thank you to please focus the entirety of your energy on Star Wars because, god help you, you're going to need it. Empire Strikes Back is infinitely more nuanced than Wrath of Khan, and you have proven that lighting effects and bullshit random ass special effects mean more than character or story.

Sincerely
The Fat One, Blame Lundon

OOOOOOO kay, first raise your hand if you like the first Bad Robot Star Trek. Those of you who didn't raise your hands can leave. This isn't about bashing the cool kids who don't know what it means to REALLY like ST. I pretty much loved BRST 1 and think that they got the damn thing done right, which is rough because then they needed to do a sequel and there is A LOT of story and content they could draw from and I know they must have had a hard time trying to decide whether they go right into Khan or ignore him completely or do some other story or what.  This question was on the mind of every nerd at least once a week don't lie. So if you're Bad Robot what do you do? Skip Khan and tell your own story? it has the virtue of striking out on your own path and making Star Trek fresh and new for reasons other than the publishing date of the copy of After Effects that they used.

Or you could just do Khan, begrudgingly, because well 'everyone' (THE MONEY GUYS) want you do Khan cause nerds obsess over that shit and by obsess the money guys mean spend money for thirty years never letting the past go. So you suck it up and start cranking out a Khan story line, which is awesome cause it's got a main character death and theres a villain who's presence forever echo's through out the TOS history because he scarred Kirk to his emotional core. So you and your writing guys pretty much figure everyone will assume you're doing Khan so you spend months and half the movie money advertising that you're not doing Khan, Khans a classic legend we would never do that no, nope, uh uh, the villain is Donald Mcbumbleveryoneknowsitskhanstopthestupidfakeoutbullshit. So you announce Benedict Cumberbach is playing Donald MCkahn, and on three continents panties drop simultaneously which is impressive because, damn, you have done something right. You've added british sexiness to an already overly talented cast of overly talented people being overly talented. Now all you have to do is figure out what kind of story you're going to tell about not Khan. Well obviously there needs to be Klingons, Klingons were an integral part of the storyline after Khan and Spock died so we'll throw an action scene in there to introduce klingons cause….klingons. And make some references to other shit from TOS. Nerds love references to stuff they know. So you have klingons and a terrorist plot, and star fleet being attacked by a terrorist and Jim kirk getting busted just like it was back in the old days when Fatty Mc…..pause played the captain, the nerds are going to love it! buildings are shiny, there's price scanners all over the bridge, and everyones got witty banter about torpedos, cause torpedos are a big part of the plot now? and Blondy science officer immediately makes Spock jealous/curious/suspicious. But she's a good guy cause she gets pretty much naked and HOJOLY SHIT KIRKS GONNA BONERCISE WITH HER AND THE TORPEDOS ARE GENESIS!!!!!! AND THIS FUCKING MOVIE IS….what do you mean the torpedoes are actually secretly stasis tubes? Why would Khan put his people in super torpedoes? What? Where is the superman logic in that? Put the people in and take the torpedo parts out maybe yes, then The Enterprise brings the super torpedoes over to Kronos and fires them and Khan lands them by remote on his uninhabited island and his people take their hijacked klingon ship and whoop the shit out of the enterprise and i'm totally cool with Kirk dying because it would have BEEN THE BEST REAL TWIST EVER. But no, Notkhan surrenders after saving the cast in the shuttle instead of shooting them, taking the shuttle back to enterprise and taking that shit over and going to kill the general. Did i forget to mention there is an evil general? yeah, ok so evil general apparently unfrozed JUST khan because with 73 stasis pods to choose from he caught a tiger by its toe, and forced Khan to make weapons for him cause…weapons and tactics made by super notkhan. YUP. So Khan is in Hollywood brand Clear glass prison (so hot right now) and Kirk and Khan team up cause Khan is SURPISE the victim and is just trying to get his family away from the evil general (who interestingly is played by robocop, The immortal Peter Weller. I don't say immortal out of respect i say immortal because he looks like a fucking ghoul, seriously dude eat a sandwich or get reverse liposuction, you look like the understudy for the fucking Emperor…shit they are gong to cast peter welled as the emperor in Star Wars 7.) So Roboempevilgeneral takes the super ship designed by khan out to kill the enterprise cause see the evil general wants a war between klingon and the federation because….he likes space battles, space battles are cool now. But apparently this secret plot to start war between klingon and The federation is a for really real secret and that means the enterprise needs to die so the emperor general fires on the enterprise at warp which is fucking awesome and they fall out of warp cause its sort of like the Eastern Austrialan Current from Finding Nemo, but with no giant space turtles, I COULD HAVE MADE THIS MOVIE SO MUCH COOLER FOR STONERS!!!! So the enterprise is beat to shit they can't really move, or fire but Kirk and Khan go space luging through space debris while scotty talks to a steroid guard on emperorgenerals ship and they start killing the very tiny crew on the VERY LARGE ship, (HOW THE FUCK DID KHAN KNOW 300 YEARS AGO HOW TO MAKE A SHIP THAT MAKES ENTERPRISE LOOK LIKE A MINI COOPER BUT IS FUNCTIONAL WITH A CREW OF TEN? THE ENTERPRISE NEEDS A CREW OF 10 TO TURN THE GOD DAMN BLINKER SIGNAL ON!!!!????

So they take over the ship and Buckaroo Banzai gets knocked out and his daughter is all blond and helpless, and now that Khan has a ship he and Spock have a little verbal chess match and its awesome cause I FUCKING SAID SO. And the torpedo people get sent over and Khan who can design super ships and do all kinds of fucking awesome gun katas doesn't think to scan the torpedoes for life signs and is somehow shocked that they blow up cause well we're running out of time, then the enterprise almost crashes into earth for like three months and then some tiny rockets save everyone because  yay tiny rockets, then we find out that Kirk was the reason for the tiny rockets and we get a GREAT flippsy daisy scene from Wrath of Khan with Kirk dying instead of Spock and for a split second your mind screams WUUUUUUUUT DAAAAAA FUCKBUBBLES!!! but then you remember that this is hollywood and he'll probably be saved by a tribble or some god damned thing. And then khans ship which i swear to fucking god blew to pieces not three minutes earlier is now re-intact and crashes into San Francisco, which, random point of trivia, Khan never apparently listened to Scott Mckenzie, because I saw no flowers in his hair. So Khans miracle self assembling ship crashes into A HUGE portion of the city and destroys like seven sky scrapers and tons of the town and then two blocks later not only does no one care, but they don't even SEEM TO NOTICE because life goes on as per normal even though a HUGE FUCK OFF SPACESHIP has just taken out a substantial part of a coastal city…no biggie I guess. Spock and Khan leap from flying car to flying car like 'roided out billy goats and beat on each other cause action scenes are cool. Bones gets the idea to save Kirks life with…A FUCKING TRIBBLE FUCK YOU BAD ROBOT, FUCK YOU. So Uhura beams down to keep Spock from beating Khan to death Rocky style and they use his blood to bring back Kirk. Then thirty seconds later, with the slightest of fades, it's a year later and the coast city of San Francisco is fine as frogs fur and Captain Kirk is giving a tribute speech about dead extras and responsibility and now the Enterprise is going on it's five year mission.

1: everything and I do mean EVERYTHING in this movie wraps up TOO NEATLY, even character deaths are either erased or made insignificant. Everything that seems to be a negative consequence always turns around to be a positive thing through very little to no action from the main characters.

2: Kirk gets demoted, then promoted again not three minutes later because why would we not want Captain Kirk? the demotion did fuck all of NOTHING FOR ANY REASON.

3: Spock uses the death of Pike to make up with his girlfriend. As far as classic Star Trek death major characters have died for much much less so i can't slight them here but as the only persistent consequence in the whole film I felt completely and utterly cheated. For all of three seconds i felt invested in the death scene between Spock and kirk but that investment was betrayed almost immediately because they didn't have the balls to follow through on it.

4: Khan needed to be a main character, the general was a complete and total waste of time. Pick a plot, a villain and stick with them, classic movies are classic because they took the time that was required to let emotional investment from the audience PAY OFF. he's a terrorist, no! he's a freedom fighter!, No he's a Super genius psycho mad man bent on killing  guy he just met ten minutes ago and has actually been WORKING WITH most of that time, NO HE'S REALLY A SUICIDAL IDIOT WHO CAN'T THINK OF ANYTHING BETTER TO DO WITH HIS SHIP!. This is not development this is jumping from lilly pad, to lilly pad hoping one of them has enough strength to float your bullshit.

5: The selective gravity of the Enterprise during the crashing to Earth scene REALLY annoyed me. To have a scene where the ship is fully flipped on its side and people are falling to their deaths and three main characters work together to not die, immediately followed by a scene where they run through another huge open area of the ship and a shit load of extras are standing at their posts somehow successfully having not fallen to their deaths when the ship went completely ass over tea kettle not thirty seconds previous is SLOPPY. If reminded me of this: http://www.hark.com/clips/xbrnwmfngm-tilted

6: Any time the main cast was conversing with each other i loved what i heard, these guys know their characters and hit home runs again and again, but the plot was god awful and a complete waste of a classic character, several great actors, seriously you needed Peter Weller AND benedict Cumberbatch to chew scenery in your shitty dollar store space based rip off bastard child of Cocoon and Under Siege? What the FUCK is wrong with you?

7: I would love to have some actual Trekking in the next Star Trek please.

Iron Man 3: Supply and Demand

No breakdown cause the movie is new. Go see it. In theaters, wif yer friends. (READ BELOW AFTER YOU SEE THE MOVIE. I AM TALKING FRANKLY ABOUT THE PLOT. DON'T BE AN IDIOT AND RUIN THE STORY IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY SEEN IT.)

TL;DR Not a bad story, fun to watch but ultimately fails to build on the marvel world or Tony Stark's character. I gave it three thumbs up.

Your movie was bad and you should feel bad (1)
The loneliest star (2)
arbitrary numerical assignment identifying an average performance (3)
* three thumbs up(4)
ALL THE STARS!!!!(5)

Things I think IM3 succeeded in doing:
Setting up Tony's mental state post Avengers, and this was largely done in the trailers, but still it was done well, the guy is a mess and he doesn't trust himself to be the awesome bad ass he used to think he was. Setting up the evil charismatic sinisterness of "the mandarin" again this began with the trailers but the first half of the film the whole presentation of the mandarin is cool and mysterious and charismatic. Pepper's time in the suits, 'bout damn time she got to play with Tony's toys. The (stealing from a friend) "Tony Stark P.I". feel of the story, I think that ultimately the pacing and flow worked really really well, even if the focus on characters in the plot was misguided. Misguided you say?

Things I feel failed, were wasted, or didn't execute in IM3

The Marvel Movie Universe is a universe of gods, monsters, and mutants. And in the middle of it all, we have Tony Stark. A super smart human being. The heart warming tale of a boy and his sentient computer system. Tony Stark's mutant power isn't his intellect, its his charisma, the fact that everyone (including himself) loves him unconditionally. Each of the Iron Man films centers around people who stop loving him. His business partner betrays him for money, The rival business man betrays him for money, and the Mandarin betrays him for...shit we've hit our first speed bump. In Iron Man 3 No one gives a shit about Tony, Tony is narrating as if this is his story but ultimately there is no inexplicable failure of his charisma. The mandarin's scheme centers around getting the vice president into office so they can for ever run the war on terror and use super soldiers to fight it. Yes the villains were slighted by Tony Stark thirteen years ago but the ONLY reason Tony Stark gets involved with the actual plot of the movie is because his friend gets hurt. And it is here that we have to ask ourselves what kind of story is this? It's NOT a super hero adventure film, it's Shane Black telling another P.I. story that happens to involve Iron Man. It's a decent story but ultimately we see no real progression of Tony's mental state or self actualization, he narrates that he changes but ultimately the ONLY thing that is shown is him building the Home Depot suit and a one liner about how special Pepper is. Tony's panic attacks only ever effect him when its useful for comedy or when we need him to bond with the kid. In fact we get a clearer understanding of Tony's instability through the consistent failure of MK42, first it can't fly, then it can't shoot then it can't fly again, then it spends half the movie inert (recharging) after which it can take a fucking beating over and over and over again. In lieu of actual character development the MK 42 barely works at the best of times and gets the shit kicked out of it repeatedly and in the end sacrifices itself to kill the villain (which ultimately fails). What we see happen to the MK42 we NEEDED to see happen to Tony, but every time you think he's about to get hurt or should have gotten hurt he wasn't actually in the suit. 

If it wasn't any clearer by the end action sequence IM3 is one long shell game of false build ups and reveals, that end action sequence in which 20 suits fight guys we only see as random henchmen. And literally Tony uses the suits as a sort of flying shell game. Even the villain gets his bait and switch reveal which almost ruined the movie for me but we were rescued by the actual mandarin being genuinely a creepy cool bad guy and the fake mandarin being played by a legendarily good actor.

All of this I was ok with, until the shot of the burning iron man mask. Movies can be silly and fun and shallow and random and just mindless action, I don't require every movie be deep or well thought out, or logical. The shot after the MK42 explodes and 'kills' Mandarin when tony see's the head piece and fire comes up from the eye and it's sinking in that they might have had the balls to REALLY kill pepper pots and that last line he said about her already having been perfect gets to him and he realizes that while he has no iron man suits left to fight with, she was his heart and he has no heart to fight with any more, he has nothing left, and the burning face is staring back at him and you get this tremendous sense of foreboding of everything Tony Stark touches turning to ash, his whole life nothing more than one long cleansing fire of hubris and fear. We are seeing the moment Tony officially begins down the path of super villain, he is now as hollow as his suits, his charisma used to bend the earth to his twisted will to NEVER be vulnerable again, to wipe the earth clean of anything that could ever even contemplate doing him harm, and anyone who would ever even dare to reach him emotionally, this man would scour the planet clean of danger and feels. BUT NO the Mandarin is still alive and Pepper pots is too and she uses her itchyburn heals and some IM suit pieces to finally kill the Mandarin once and for all and rob us of something that could have been a CLASSIC movie moment, the moment that Tony Stark became the villain for Avengers 2.

Instead we get pepper with itchyburn heal which gets narrated away, along with Tony's chest piece, the vice president, and any questions about what the hell happened to his PTSD/Panic attacks and why any of this shit helped him get over what happened to him in NY, why it mattered at all that the villains knew him in 1999 (Seriously the movie would have worked just as well without the 1999 connection, it MEANT NOTHING).

I hear a lot of people really didn't like IM2 and I kind of feel like while IM3 wasn't a bad movie I like it the least of the trilogy, it wasted some great set ups on the same old shit we saw in the first two movies ( real villains hiding behind other fake villains) and ultimately wasn't really the movie I was hoping for from the trailers, In a world of Gods and Monsters there is nothing wrong with telling a human story about a human guy who has human fears and deals with them humanly. I feel like having all the suits be able to kick ass without him in them meant that when he says "I am Iron Man" at the end of the movie all I wanted to do was sort of roll my eyes and respond "yeeeah ok Tony, what ever helps you sleep at night." Which kills me because Bruce Banners reaction to the story was EXACTLY the way I felt about the whole mess.