X2: X-Men United (2003)

Wolverine: You picked the wrong house, bub.


And right there in the quote I chose for this film, I represent again how well X-Men set up for this movie.  Intentional or not, to me this hearkens back to the line in X-Men where Professor X pities the poor fools who choose to attack his school.


In this case, the attacker is one Stryker, the person responsible for Wolverine's adamantium skeleton.  Stryker would like to destroy all the mutants in the world because Prof. X couldn't help Stryker's powerfully mutant son.  So in one of the most ill advised moves in cinema history, Stryker attacks Xavier's school, so he can kidnap some of the kids and test his mutant killing version of Cerebro.  Bad idea.  Yes, he does take some, but I maintain Stryker's team got the shorter end of the stick.


Speaking of mutants, we also get to see Nightcrawler.  Very cool, very well done.  And he didn't even need to tell us he's invincible.  (Bond joke there.  Look up Alan Cumming, and Goldeneye)


But wait!  In one of my favorite escape scenes, Mystique has injected a guard with iron who somehow gets past the metal detector and walks into Magneto's  plastic cell.  So, Magneto extracts the lead from the poor guard and escapes with a certain panache.  All hell begins to break loose.  Of course, Magneto wants to kill all the humans.  Magneto and Stryker meet, hugs and kisses ensue.


Um, no.  We all meet up at Alkali Lake, the location of Stryker's super secret love shack.  And just as all the mutants are about to be destroyed, Magneto shows up and starts the process on destroying all the humans!


Well, that's not really that important.  No one side gets obliterated.  What we do get is Jean Grey dieing, and setting up for what should be a pretty bad ass telling of the Dark Phoenix saga.


What we got was X-Men: The Last Stand.  Which isn't completely fair, as I think X-Men: The Last stand is pretty decent, but I won't be going into that here.

X-Men (2000)

Cyclops: Well, what would you prefer? Yellow spandex?


Going into this movie, oh, 11 or so years ago, I knew very little about X-Men other than names of the characters and their powers.  So, I went into this movie with no expectations other than to be entertained.  And I was not disappointed.  This is a great super hero movie.  One of my favorites.


Plot here is simple.  Magneto wants to take over the world, and Professor X is going to stop him.  In the process of this occurring, we are introduced to some of the bigger X-Men and villains.  Cyclops.  Wolverine.  Rouge.  Mystique.  Storm. Toad.


One of the things I forgot about this movie was how well it set up for X2.  One of the cleanest endings to any movie with a predictable sequel.  Not much to review here, just a simple super hero action movie.


I give it 8/13 X-Men

Captain America: The First Avenger FTW!!!

Star Trek: Generations (1994)

Harriman: It doesn't arrive until Tuesday.
Kirk: Who am I to argue with the captain of the Enterprise? 


Time to boldly go where so many have gone before... reviewing Star Trek movies.


To start with, I'll introduce a segment specific to the Next Generation movies... I call it, Where did Worf come from?


Where Did Worf Come From?
This is an easy one.  At this point he is still assigned to the Enterprise D, so it makes perfect sense that he is in this movie.


So, now that that part is taken care of...


We will address this as Kirk's Time, Picard's Time and Combo!


Kirk's Time
William Shatner returns to the role of Kirk with the same enthusiasm that he first brought to the role all those years ago.  You can clearly see Kirk's discomfort at being on the bridge of a ship named Enterprise, and not be in command.  This is not forced from Mr. Shatner, and lends a lot of credibility to these scenes.  Alan Ruck as Capitan Harriman was perfect.  Mr. Ruck perfectly portrays that sense of awe and nerves being in the presence of living legends. His continual looks to Kirk during the rescue mission were well played and quite believable.


And then it starts to fall apart a bit.


Really?  One of the greatest commanders that Starfleet has ever known goes down to reprogram the main deflector?  *sigh* ok, fine.  I understand this is all part of the plot but still...


Anyway, Kirk dies when the Nexus bitch slaps the Enterprise-B.  Kudos to James Doohan at this moment.  His reaction was well done, and still sends a shiver down my spine to this day.


Picard's Time
To start with, we get Worf's promotion to Lt. Commander.  Its about time! An amusing scene here sets up one of the subplots for the rest of the movie which is Data's decision to install his fucking emotion chip.  This becomes probably the most annoying part of this movie.


Speaking of annoying...


Would it have killed the lighting department to turn on a few lights?  The majority of the Picard's time scenes were barely lit, and was very distracting.


We see Picard get all emotional as he deals with the death of his brother and nephew.  Nice scenes, but pretty much dropped after this episode.... er movie.


Combo!
So, needless to say, Kirk and Picard meet in the Nexus to take down Soren who apparently couldn't handle being rescued by the Enterprise-B as well as Guinan did.  Cause Guianan and Soren were total pals and on the same ship that the Enterprise-B saved.  Oh right, we STILL don't quite know how Guinana and Picard know each other, but we get to see her quarters...


So, theres some exposition, fighting and Kirk dies.  Yup, they kill off Kirk.  Which, I dunno.  It was good as a passing of the torch kinda moment.  I think though that they could have done a Next Gen movie without Kirk.  But worry not!  William Shatner brings Kirk back to life in the non-canon books.


I wanted one scene with an Admiral reaming out Picard for not keeping Kirk alive...but that's just me.


Final notes:
Lursa and B'etor make an appearance as Soren's lackeys.  One of the better random parts of this movie.  I liked it.  Plus they are responsible for the destruction of the Enterprise-D.  But they die and can't get all the Klingon cred they want.


Uniforms:  Pick one and stay with it.  I understand you wanted to use the DS9 uniforms, but it got distracting seeing two different styles of uniform.


Its all ok though.  First Contact is coming.


I give this 4.3/7 Tuesday deliveries.

The Starter by Scott Sigler

The Starter is the second book in the Galactic Football League Trilogy, written by Scott Sigler.  What is the Galactic Football League you ask?  Well, its a football league that encompasses the galaxy.  Clearly, we are not talking your basic football story here.  Set some 600 years in the future, The Starter follows the Ionath Krakens as they play to stay in Tier One of the Galactic Football Leauge.  We saw their ascent to Tier One at the end of 'The Rookie', which is the first book of a planned seven.

The starter in question is one Quentin Barnes, a young 19 year old quarterback for the Krakens.  He is from a world where he has been taught that all other races are inferior to humans.  Talk about culture shock when he joins the Krakens!  There are humanoids with blue skin, Heavy G humans, Ki, Sklorno, Creterakians, and a variety of other races thrown in the mix.  While most of Quentin's culture shock is portrayed in The Rookie, there are still situations in this book that bring out the indoctrination of his early years.

But beyond that this book is about football.  Its also about gangsters, which means its also about money.  Believe it or not, once football spread through the galaxy, it got pretty corrupt!  Players also die on a regular basis.  Even with high tech football armor, the sizes of the players involved still cause massive injuries as they crash together on the field of battle.  Quentin, standing at nearly 7 feet, is about an average hight for the players.

Using his deep knowledge of football, Mr. Sigler perfectly breaks down the action, so even this football illiterate reader can understand and follow the plays on the field.  You feel like you are there with the Krakens as they win, lose and travel the galaxy.

I don't want to go into too much more detail, but needless to say, I can't wait for the third book, The All-Pro.  This is a blend of football, mafia stories and sci-fi.  There is a little bit of everything for everybody in this book.

I give it 4/5 touchdowns.

BLOGGER's NOTE:  This post was edited on 17 MAR 11 to reflect the corrections made by the author of this series himself, Mr. Scott Sigler.  My poor research (or bad memory) caused me to incorrectly list the title of the next book, and also to think this was a trilogy.  In fact, it will consist of a planned seven books.  My apologies to Mr. Sigler.