An utterly spoilerific review of Star Trek Into Darkness

I love Star Trek. As a committed geek, I spent my teenage years watching the films and every episode of the first four TV series, collecting tie-in novels, magazines, figures and of course getting mocked by various classmates. Then Enterprise came along during my university years, and, well, the less said about that, the better. After four seasons of that, it felt like Star Trek needed a rest, and indeed, for a while, it went away.

Then the reins of the franchise were handed over to JJ Abrams, and in 2009 we got a bright, flashy reboot, replete with action, in-jokes and excessive lens flares. It wasn’t quite Star Trek, it erased the timeline I knew and loved, and the more you analysed it, the more flawed it became – but overall, it was pretty enjoyable nonetheless. Would Star Trek Into Darkness offer more of the same?

Cat-based Video Games

I love cats. I love every kind of cat. I just want to hug all of them, but I can’t. Can’t hug every cat. What I can do, though, is play games about cats. Thus, in this completely uncalled-for article inspired by a random IM conversation, I will list some of the cat-based games I have encountered so that other cat lovers may benefit from my feline gaming wisdom.

Looper

Joe Simmons is a ‘looper’, a hired assassin with a very special list of targets – they’re all from thirty years in the future. In that time period, the mafia have control of time travel, and the best way they know of to make their enemies ‘disappear’ is to send them into the past to be killed. But every looper’s final mission is to ‘close their loop’ by killing themselves, and when Joe fails to do so, he finds himself on the run in an ever-shifting timeline.

Time travel is inherently paradoxical, and with that in mind, I’m often quite lenient on time travel movies when they do things that either induce a headache or just don’t make sense. Sometimes, though, a movie comes along that is simply so terrible that I simply cannot stay my hand any longer, and Looper is one of them.

Total Recall 2012

Yes, it’s that time again – having watched some bad sci-fi movies, I desperately feel the need to rant and share the pain. The frankly terrible Looper was going to be next on the list, but on request, instead I’m pushing the 2012 remake of Total Recall to the top of the list.

Total Recall takes place in a future where much of Earth has been rendered uninhabitable, forcing humanity to take refuge in one of two places – the Colony (Australia) and The United Federation of Britain (UFB) – linked to each other by a tunnel bored through the very planet itself (trust me, we’ll come back to this). Douglas Quaid is a factory worker who spends his days commuting from the Colony to the UFB to help build robot soldiers. He has a stable job and a loving wife, but his nights are plagued with recurring dreams about a fraught escape from the authorities with a mysterious woman.

Snow White and the Huntsman, or a detailed description of why you shouldn’t waste two hours of your life

Over the past few years, live action adaptations of fairy tales seem to have come back into fashion, and so it was that 2012 saw yet another adaptation of the classic tale of Snow White. With Kristen “Bella Swan” Stewart in the starring role, my hopes weren’t high for much in the way of quality, but Snow White and the Huntsman fails to even be amusingly bad, settling instead for a tedious mediocrity.

Spiral (Engrenages)

Thanks to BBC4′s Saturday night European drama slot, over the last year I’ve discovered a great love for the best of Nordic television – I loved The Killing, greatly enjoyed The Bridge and Borgen just might my favourite TV series. So it seemed like no great gamble to let them choose what I watched next – French crime drama Spiral (aka Engrenages, meaning cogs or wheels). Unfortunately, I soon discovered that this series was a far inferior beast.

In Time

In the future, no one ages once they hit 25 – but of course, there’s a catch. Time is now a commodity to be traded and worked for, and if you run out, that’s it. In such a world, a radical imbalance between the vastly rich and those who are only ever a few hours away from the ultimate end has sprung up. But when a mysterious benefactor gives Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) over a hundred years of life, what will he do with it?