I keep seeing the Star Trek franchise make attempts to capture a younger audience. A cartoon 4 kidz (Prodigy) and now a sexy teens show (Starfleet Academy).

It's not that I'm mocking the premise of these shows, it's just that it seems really obvious to me how Star Trek became generational in the first place and what made TNG such a big hit that the rest of the franchise is trying to recapture those heights.

Namely, TNG was family-friendly enough that kids to watch it, but still adult enough to interest adults, so you had all the old TOS fans watching it with their kids, who then became interested in the rest of the franchise. I mean, that's how I was introduced to Trek.

Once again, TNG was not a kid's show--in fact, the "look, kids, it's you!" character was, ahem, not the best--but it was appropriate for a child audience. The sexuality was matter-of-fact and nonexploitative, the violence was infrequent and usually limited to someone getting blasted by a Phaser set to stun, and the language was just Picard saying merde.

Now, you compare that to the mainline Trek entries being made today: Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds. I think SNW is pretty good on this account, but otherwise...

Jesus! Would you want to watch this with your kid? From a few reviews I've read, Starfleet Academy is supposed to have sex scenes, which I'm sure everyone loves watching with their parents. And the thing is, there's no real need for this. They're not making a show about the Holocaust or something else that cries out for graphic imagery. It's the same space adventures as ever, they're just putting a bunch of foul language and gruesome violence in there to be edgy. Which is their prerogative, sure, but don't do that and complain that kids aren't watching your shows. You're the ones making shows that no reasonable parent would want their kid to watch!

One of the big weaknesses of the MCU is that they haven't built up any bad guys the way they have the good guys and good institutions (like the Wakandans, Asgardians, wizards et al). Like who is there in the way of continuing evildoers to oppose the heroes?

Val? Bitched out by the Thunderbolts, who don't even bother to expose her wrongdoing because she threw them a party.

HYDRA? Disbanded.

Baron Zemo? For some reason hyperfocused on the Super Soldier Serum but otherwise fine with staying in jail.

AIM? Destroyed in Iron Man 3.

The Ten Rings? Turned into good guys.

The Red Room? Turned into good guys.

The Department of Damage Control/SWORD? I guess still a thing. Apparently they're going to be the bad guys in the next Spider-Man, but as an evil SHIELD, they're pretty weaksauce. In the comics, HAMMER was run by NORMAN OSBORN. In the MCU, I guess the Big Bad is Tyne Daly?

The Power Broker? Yeah, she's still around, but she's got X-Pac Heat. Does anyone really want to see the noble Sharon Carter from the comics turned into a wrongdoer? I don't wanna root for someone to punch Sharon Carter in the face!

Namor/Atlanteans? Good guys now, right?

Loki/TVA? Good guys now.

The Kree? Didn't The Marvels reveal their empire collapsed? I am asking, because like everyone else I didn't watch it.

The Skrulls? Good guys now, but can turn bad if Marvel wants to generate a million thinkpieces.

The Dark Elves? All dead, right?

The Flag Smashers? All dead, still boring.

The Serpent Society? Not all dead, but all boring. ("Watch out, Cap, he's got a balaclava!")

The Frost Giants. They're still around, I suppose, but they're pretty much pikers, right? The words "oh no, Frost Giants!" have never passed anyone's lips.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I want villains who can "nuh-uh!" every defeat--that's my problem with the Kingpin's showing in Daredevil--and HYDRA, for instance, more or less ran its course organically. But it's nice, in a fictional setting, to always have some guys who can be counted on to start shit instead of having to start from scratch with every villain. That, to me, defeats the purpose of a shared universe. How many times can the MCU go "oh, haven't you heard of this far-reaching conspiracy that controls everything and has existed for decades but will now be completely destroyed in one movie?"

Tl;dr way too many good guy organizations, way too few terrorists.

One of the reasons Stranger Things just isn't hitting anymore is because it used to be all of the cast was siloed into their own age-appropriate subplots. The kids were doing crazy shit because no one else would believe them, the teenagers had love triangles, the adults were dealing with the adult world. Yeah, the kids had some puppy love stuff and the adults had a little love thing, but basically every subgroup of characters was its own little genre and that gave the show a real variety.

Now ALL the characters are pretty much adults, so there's really no contrast. Jonathan and Nancy have relationship drama the same way Hopper and Joyce do which is the same way Mike and Eleven do. It used to be the literal childlike whimsy of Mike and the gang would be grounded by how Hopper and Joyce KNEW how serious things really were, but now it's like...

They WANT that same lightness, but they can't organically bring it in by Dustin or someone acting silly, because they're too old for that. They should be in college! So everything's in action-comedy mode instead of the adults taking things seriously and the kids being lighthearted.

I'm not saying Stranger Things needs to be killing off main characters every season, but maybe the cast would be more manageable if a few people thought to just move away from the town that's continually attacked by monsters.

Take Robin, for instance. Great character. Fine actress. Do I believe she thinks that she has so much to contribute to the saving-the-world effort that she wouldn't just hop in a car and drive anywhere there isn't a Hellmouth? Not particularly. And if you repeated this train of thought for at least ten characters, you might have something there.

Obviously you have to keep the kids, Hopper and Joyce aren't going to leave since some of those kids are theirs, but if Jonathan and Nancy were off at college, would you miss them? Would you?

Actors on the way to film Will Byers' coming out scene

For the record, I find it crazy that the last season of Stranger Things ended on the clear implication that the Upside Down had merged with the real world--spores were falling and there was red lightning and Vecna had completed the ritual that everyone said would merge the Upside Down with the real world--and now the big threat in this season is that

the Upside Down will merge with the real world for serious this time.

Obviously, fuck me for caring about Stranger Things in this, the year of Our Lord 2025 (and pretty much 2026, really), but it really does feel like they should've wrapped everything up last season, when they almost killed Vecna.

This season feels like... you know the end of T2, when Sarah Connor is blasting the T-1000 with her shotgun and it keeps knocking him back and he's about to go into the vat of molten lead when she runs out of ammo? And then Arnold shows up and finishes off the T-1000 for good?

This season of Stranger Things is like if instead, the Connors just ran away with Arnold and the T-1000 went after them and the movie just kept going for another two hours before he finally got dunked in the molten lead. YEAH, it'd be nice to see more Arnold and Robert Patrick and everyone, but also... time to wrap it up, my guy. We get it. You can stop now.

I've ended up feeling about Survivor Lara Croft a lot the same way I feel about Daniel Craig Bond.

It was good to try something new as a change of pace and get out of the rut of just doing the formula again and again.

However, this 'more realistic' traumacore portrayal is necessarily limited in what they can do as a character and I feel like I've seen all they have to show me. Neither ProtoLara or ProtoBond really pulled off evolving into their classic characterization. Survivor Lara has gone from traumatized kitten to tortured savior with a vendetta, while Craig Bond became a stoic workaholic who seemed as likely to self-harm as seduce... a far cry from Brosnan or Moore's gentleman adventurer with a glinting eye for self-indulgence.

Just as Survivor Lara has never really become a swaggering thrillseeker with a predilection for using two pistols at once.

The thing is, while Craig's run was necessarily limited by him becoming too old to continue the role (and I'd argue he overstayed his welcome by a movie or two), Survivor Lara is still harping on despite the novelty having worn very thin indeed. We've had three games, comics, a movie, a cartoon, and an upcoming live-action show all dedicated to this iteration of the character. Is this vision really such a slam-dunk or is it just a milquetoast offering riding on the residual goodwill of the character's salad days?

If "Survivor Lara" was an original character... Tomb Respecter, perhaps... instead of a once-iconic character that's been 'fixed,' would we really see so many attempts to push her into the mainstream? It's obvious there's a hunger among some to say that this new Lara is bigger and more popular than ever, despite all evidence to the contrary...

But I see it as hypocritical that the adherents who lambaste Classic Lara holdouts for not being willing to move on and try something new are themselves so unwilling to move on from a take that is now over a decade-old and has been thoroughly explored. We've seen Survivor Lara. We know all her tics. We're aware of what bestest of buds she is with Jonah and how almost lesbiany she is with her other bestest buds. Her character development has made her more generic, not less.

I think it's far past time to call it a day on this version of the character and once again reimagine her, not continue to force talented actresses to continue selling a characterization that simply will not catch on with the general public.

There are two principles of storytelling that should co-exist

2. Reading and writing stories is a form of play, like sports. And, like sports, storytelling is often done by rules depending on the story being told. In the story of Star Trek, Vulcans can do mind-melds and Klingons cannot. If you want to write a story about Klingons doing mind-melds, you CAN argue that it's a fictional story and you can do anything you want... but it's like a football player saying hey, we're all playing this game for fun, right? Well, it's fun for me to get on an ATV and drive the football into the endzone.

Which isn't to say a game where people drive ATVs around while carrying footballs couldn't be fun--maybe a bit risky--but people who want to watch football probably wouldn't appreciate this "rule change" the same way people who watch Star Trek wouldn't appreciate Klingons doing mind-melds, or the Enterprise being able to change into a giant robot, or anything else that breaks the lore. Because "this story is set in the same universe as these other stories and the same lore is in effect for all of them" is one of the rules of Star Trek and if you don't play by that rule, you're ruining everyone's fun.

Yes, even though these fictional characters and there's no real Captain Kirk or USS Enterprise. Pretending that there is is what makes it fun for a lot of people. Sorry, but that's your audience. If you wanted a different audience, you should've kept walking until you found the writer's room for the Golden Girls reboot.

Here's the thing about the Starfleet Academy pitch that keeps coming back like a roach that won't be stomped:

We already got a Starfleet Academy story. It came out in 2009 and was titled Star Trek. It focused on young versions of the TOS characters going to Starfleet Academy in the first act, then a crisis arose and they had to go on a real mission with actual stakes. At the end of the movie, they graduated to go on real missions all the time.

This is the best you can do with the Starfleet Academy premise.

No one wants a Star Trek show about a bunch of teenagers who stay on Earth cramming for tests. You can't send them on missions because then they wouldn't be trainees, they'd be actual Starfleeters. You can't have them "uh-oh! whoopsie!" getting thrown into real emergencies every week, so you do it once for a movie.

So, yeah, J.J. Abrams has better storytelling instincts than the current Star Trek guys.

You know, it's silly, but I can buy that you can be transported into a computer and it's a fantasy realm of glowing people who do all the things that computer programs do. Like the stopwatch app on your phone is really a little person counting inside a computer chip. That's cute. That's charming.

I don't buy that you can transport stuff from this metaphorical computer wonderland into the real world and it will not only exist, it will hold together. It's like if the Matrix characters could defy gravity in the real world, only an order of magnitude worse.

You're telling me that this thing is aerodynamic? That this thing could exist in the real world without any means of propulsion or power generation... no, no, no way. You'd need, like, arc reactor technology and anti-grav technology... and if people in the Tron universe have that tech, why are they bothering with turning computer programs real? Just build hover cars and make a trillion dollars that way.

Like where does it end? Could I make a program that's a sixty-foot-tall blue Angie Harmon (for reasons) and then just laser her into the real world, square-cube law be damned?

I know Tron: Legacy kinda implied this would be possible, by having the villain planning to invade the real world (and Olivia Wilde actually doing it, but she's an Iso, so that's at least a rare drop in-universe), but that's a case where you should back off on that instead of doubling down and saying yes, you can jam Tron stuff into the real world and they'll be able to do all the same stuff they did on the Grid, even though that stuff is physically impossible and only works because it's happening in a computer simulation.

I mean, it's pretty much magic now, isn't it? Like the ticket in Last Action Hero. I don't like to be a nag and say a screenplay can't have two impossible things--fuck it, Spider-Man and Green Goblin get superpowers entirely separately in the same movie, do you see a cop around?--but this is an impossible thing too many.

I might've even gone for hard-light projections and drones and holograms, or just having the Tron characters talk to Users by projecting themselves as holograms... but this...

Like, you think that could really exist? No! It's an abstraction of bits and bytes moving around in cyberspace. It doesn't have mass! It doesn't have velocity! That's why the lightcycles can literally turn 90 degrees on a dime, because they don't really exist, they're computer programs that the laws of physics don't apply to. If you tried to bring one into the real world, it would fall apart, because it suddenly has friction and gravity and inertia acting on it.

It feels like the whole thing was some studio note, like "Let's not break the bank by setting this whole thing on the Grid. Make it so all the characters get teleported to the real world, we'll film it all in Vancouver, keep the budget down." I don't think they even saved that much money, but that seems like the ethos they went in with, and it's too much. Sorry. It's too much.

ETA: There's one other memorable thing about Tron: Ares, and it's that all of the evil computer programs at Dillinger's Grid are really sexless and androgynous, with Jared Leto having longer hair than any of the female characters.

And you kinda gotta ask if this is meant to be a sign of how inhumane the evil Dillinger megacorporation is... or is it just a sign of how inhumane the evil Disney megacorporation is?

Why are all these people butch lesbians? What's the ssssymbolism there?

Well, that's a nice blurb, probably oversells it a bit but... JACK PALANCE!?!?!?

And the book he's blurbing is...

You're telling me Jack Palance... from TANGO & CASH... read a Harlequin romance novel? And blurbed it?

I'm freaking out, man. I think I found a glitch in the Matrix. They must be coming for me...

Watched The Dark Tower movie

Was the book basically Percy Jackson with guns? Because the movie ended up being Percy Jackson with guns.

In The Running Man, Glen Powell plays an angry white working-class man who conveniently is not angry at any of the things angry white working-class men are really angry about

There's this one scene in The Running Man (2025) where Glen Powell's serious leading man is in a scene with Michael Cera's goofy sidekick. The cops know where they are and are coming for them. Powell, playing Richards, is saying, you know, we've gotta get out of here, we've gotta leave, I'm in a gritty dystopian movie and violence is scary and I'd rather avoid a fight than get traumatized and brutalized and forced to take precious human life.

And Michael Cera just goes okay, but I'm in a fun action movie and I want to have a silly fight scene set to a pop song where I kill a bunch of bad guys in clever ways!

And so we just put the gritty dystopian movie on pause to have a silly action movie where Michael Cera does that for a while.

And that about sums it up for me. It's a movie that's serving, not just two masters, but maybe half a dozen.

It's an Edgar Wright joint.

It's a true-to-the-source-material Stephen King adaptation.

It's a remake of the Schwarzenegger movie.

It's a commentary on modern politics and entertainment (the Kardashians are vapid? Topical!)

It's a commentary on politics and entertainment from the Eighties.

And, I don't know, it just never really congeals. At various points in the narrative, Ben Richards is deep-faked by AI into saying hateful things to turn the audience against him... but also the audience is rooting for him, but only the poor audience... but then the rich audience is rioting in support of him at the end even though we've been shown by example that they don't even think the show is real... and also everyone thinks that the contestants on the Running Man show are degenerates and criminals being punished, but also everyone knows that you can sign up for the show like it's Jeopardy?

And also, aren't modern reality shows about 'heartrending' sob stories, not punishing evildoers? Is there really an example of game shows or reality television where you're rooting for the contestant to fail because they're an asshole? I know there are villains on The Bachelor, but they're contrasted with contestants the audience is supposed to root for. Is The Running Man audience supposed to root for McKone and his hunters? The show doesn't seem to spend any time on them personally (contrast with, idk, Dog The Bounty Hunter) with McKone explicitly being a cipher (to cover up something spoilery about him).

So they're doing this commentary and it doesn't really make sense because it's this big jumble of the book, the old movie, the current political climate, and just Edgar Wright being silly.

They also have it so Richards is helped by noble inner-city blacks and bedeviled by evil white rednecks, which is exactly the kind of class warfare and divisive stereotyping that the movie is supposed to be criticizing, so good job, folks!

The big sore spot is that they have a killer book ending that they can't use for spoilery reasons. But they also don't do it in spirit or find a clever workaround, so basically it's King's novel, already kinda mishandled by Wright doing it as a fun action movie but not AS fun as the Schwarzenegger movie so why does this movie even exist? and also without the punchline of the ending. I'll go into some spoilers.