This is one of those movies where it’s easier to talk about what went right. There’s a lot, actually.

1. Garrett Hedlund and Jeff Bridges give performances as realistic and convincing as the material allows. There’s one scene where they get to talk as father and son about real-world events, and it actually kind of works.
2. Michael Sheen has three things in common with Jeremy Irons: he’s a fine actor, he gives me the creeps, and he knows when to ham it up in a bad fantasy movie. I hate to say it but his fey bleached-out Ziggy Stardust act is as much fun as this movie gets.
3. Bruce Boxleitner doesn’t get much to do, but it’s always nice to see his face.
4. Olivia Wilde is pretty. So are the other women in the movie. So is Garrett Hedlund, but then I’ve known that since Troy.
5. Though the movie can’t seem to decide whether de-rezzing now means breaking into tiny hailstones like sugar glass or splattering translucently all over the floor, both effects are very nice to look at.
6. After the initial nonsense about how the new Encom OS should be released for free, the movie is rarely actively embarrassing, and insofar as it is logical at all, it’s a reasonably logical extension of the original.

Unfortunately these pieces don’t add up to anything worthwhile, or more importantly, enjoyable.

I won’t waste a lot of your time discussing the meaning of the film, though I should because it really asks for it. Kevin Flynn has become a sort of Zen hermit at the top of a mountain, playing Go with his apprentice and teaching her Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nietzche, and Verne. She’s apparently a spontaneously generated artificial life form and the future of humanity, a charming enough idea that’s only stated and never explored. She has less personality than many of the programs that users wrote, so that can’t be what’s special about her. Meanwhile Flynn’s software clone and former proxy, Clu, has become a dictator with a nebulous agenda of achieving “the perfect system,” which apparently means forcing programs to play games until they die, wiping out the a-life, and making bombastic speeches to a bunch of other programs before taking them into the real world. Flynn tells Clu he can’t achieve perfection because he doesn’t really understand what it is (because Flynn didn’t either at the time he wrote Clu — another interesting idea that doesn’t go anywhere else), and the problem is that neither do we; it just looks like any other cartoon dictatorship we’ve seen in a thousand movies, including this one’s superior antecedent.

The original Tron delivered solid entertainment. It had appealing characters with accessible personalities (both inside and outside the computer, often with the same faces in what I’m only realizing at this moment was totally a Wizard of Oz homage), a fabulous and memorable score, gorgeous luminescent visuals, a sense of humor (sorely lacking in the sequel save for a precious few moments), a sense of honor and decency and principle (remember when Flynn refuses to kill his opponent? Notice how his son never hesitates?), and a simple but effective plot. You didn’t have to look for meaning in the “throw the Christians to the lions” allegory to have fun.

With this one, I was hoping for fun, but would have settled for deep. Unfortunately I got neither. Hell, I would have settled for beautiful, but the soundtrack was largely dull (but then I think Daft Punk are overrated — they’re no Wendy Carlos, clearly) and so were the visuals. At one point Sam is supposed to marvel at what his dad’s created, but what’s worth marveling at? The programs with personalities were there the very first time Kevin Flynn entered this world, and as far as I can tell all he’s done is redecorate — exchanging bright for dim, imperial Rome for (maybe?) China & Tibet, and a pleasant well-designed adventure story for a gloomy poorly-told philosophical squib, as faceless as its interchangeable CGI adversaries.

Jim Broadbent acts the SHIT out of this movie and is the unsung backbone of the whole thing. Dan Radcliffe’s come a long way, too, and in the sequence where he’s high on Felix he’s actually FUN for a while instead of being a dour little messiah. Sorry to say Emma Watson’s still a weak link; better, but never quite properly cast to my mind.

A lot was still glossed over from the book, but here the movie hung together instead of seeming like a hasty montage. One scene sticks out like a sore thumb and I hear it was added; bad move. The climax of the most harrowing scene also proves once again that CGI zombies don’t cut it.

music
You’ve probably heard that the music in this film is distracting. It is. Sometimes (“All Along the Watchtower,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’”) the song works: it’s appropriate in mood and lyrics, and if it’s a little too obvious and straightforward, that’s forgivable. Other times (“The Sound of Silence,” “99 Luftballons” — even though the latter IS an 80s song about Cold War tensions leading to nuclear war) it stands out too starkly, and at best serves to remind us that we’re watching a film that’s about the planet we live on, alternate history or no. And then there’s the use of “Hallelujah” (the Leonard Cohen original, not the more-famous-these-days Jeff Buckley cover) to soundtrack the Nite Owl/Silk Spectre softcore sequence, which is a bad choice on pretty much every level. Probably the best musical quoting is the Philip Glass music used in the Dr. Manhattan section of the movie; yes, it was written for its own movie, but it’s also the least recognizable piece for most of us, and it’s incredibly lovely.

acting
What you’ve heard is true: Malin Akerman, though better than I thought she’d be, still flatlines on several important scenes, though some of them are opposite Carla Gugino trying and failing to play her older self and it’s hard to decide who’s worse. But the guy playing Ozymandias, whose name I don’t even care to remember, is easily the weakest of the key players, barely convincing us that he’s awake, let alone the smartest man in the world using every resource at his disposal to try and save it from nuclear war. More on this in a moment.

Patrick Wilson (Nite Owl) is better than some of the reviews are saying. I don’t agree that Philip Seymour Hoffman would have been better; in a different version of this movie, maybe, but even in the comic Dan Dreiberg isn’t really the schlub that Hoffman would have been asked to make him. Wilson is dorky and awkward but still convinces you that he could have fought crime effectively within the decade; Hoffman, as impressive an actor as he is, would just have seemed comical. So Wilson’s fine.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan (the Comedian) is fine, too, though not quite as good as they’re saying. There are a lot of lines he just reads but isn’t really feeling. It’s a challenging role, for sure — the guy’s an asshole, but he’s also roundly human and complex, so even though you never really like him, you have to understand him and the shaded feelings others have about him. Morgan gets close enough, but he could have gotten closer.

I don’t like Billy Crudup much, but he does a mesmerizing job posing for and voicing Dr. Manhattan. It’s easy to see why this is the character that fascinated Roger Ebert enough to earn the movie four stars. And then there’s Jackie Earle Haley, whose raspy delivery in the trailers worried me but turns out to be perfect if only in a meta- way: Rorschach is, after all, a perfect lovechild of Bale’s Batman and Ledger’s Joker, and a damn good sendup of both. But he’s more than that, and my worst fears are probably going to be confirmed — though the guy is obviously unglamorous and psychotic (like Ledger’s Joker), he’s going to strike a chord (like Ledger’s Joker) with a certain kind of fan who thinks he’s an admirable badass. Haley gets the guy inside and out, though, and though I don’t quite agree with the way he delivers his last lines, I otherwise have zero complaints.

look & feel
Generally awesome. I like that some of the newer costumes have more body armor, and that the old ones are just flimsy spandex. I love the vivid colors, though Ozymandias should have had a lot more gold in his costumes and scenes and a lot less black. Yes, it’s stylized, but mostly avoids the tableau style of 300. A little more realism would have been truer to the book, but it doesn’t kill the film. And the Dr. Manhattan sequence is gorgeous.

There are a few odd squibs, though. The old age makeup is pathetic, and “Nixon’s” nose is just silly. Bubastis looks like an afterthought, just barely more convincing than the lions in I Am Legend (and they SUCKED).

Much has been made of the supposed shot-for-panel faithfulness from book to movie, but it’s exaggerated. Will you recognize key images from the book in the film? Yes. Is that all there is to the movie? Definitely not.

story
Turns out it’s filmable. Not in its entirety, obviously, but the flip side of a story constructed (to paraphrase Alan Moore himself) like a jewel with many facets that reflect and enhance one another is that you don’t need all the facets to tell the story. It doesn’t sparkle as much, but it’s still a jewel.

Of course, I’ve read the book at least three times (and I’m starting on the fourth), so it’s hard for me to tell how this stuff feels to someone who hasn’t read it at all. I recognized minor characters like Hollis Mason and Moloch as soon as they appeared, but will the audiences pick up who Mason is based on a slow trackback from stacks of his memoir Under the Hood? Will they get that Moloch was once a sinister villain if they can’t quite decipher Matt Frewer’s increasingly eccentric line readings?

The new ending is the biggest problem. It’s not that they changed it, it’s that what they changed it to is really difficult to follow, and doesn’t really make any more sense than the original ending. Even so, it might have been fine if the character responsible for the secret plot had seemed benevolent or at least beyond suspicion at first (as opposed to seeming like a Vulcan Nazi from the get-go), and if that character genuinely seemed triumphant and happy at the end. Instead we get basically a moustache-twirler, and in general the character’s story is handled so poorly and stupidly that it’s hard to believe anyone really understood it. As a result the ending has no emotional heft and feels way too long.

Luckily, a ridiculous amount of what leads up to it is pretty wonderful. The story is remarkably fluid considering that it basically follows the comics in focusing first on one character, then on another, and honestly, flipping through the book afterward, I couldn’t find a lot that they missed (apart from the Black Freighter, which I think could never really work intercut with the main story the way it was on the page, and which of course is to be released separately). The Comedian, Dr. Manhattan, and Rorschach each get their spotlight sequences, and each totally works.

Oh: what Rorschach does to the child killer he corners is changed from the book, as you might have heard. Like the change to the ending of the film, this change was made for good reasons but doesn’t quite work. This time it’s too abrupt and simple, rather than being too drawn out and complex. Instead of being Mad Max or Saw, it’s Dirty Harry, though that’s arguably even more appropriate for Rorschach’s story.

violence
Yes, the martial arts are over the top, though I’d argue that with no superpowers you’d have to be pretty effective at hand-to-hand combat to be a decent (still living!) costumed vigilante.

Yes, the blood and gore are WAY over the top and totally unnecessary. They’re distracting, too “look at me! I’m freaking gross!”, too obviously bones thrown at those looking for 300-style carnage (perhaps including Snyder himself).

sex
Yes, the sex is over the top, but only in that one scene, and I’ll take a fake orgasm in a movie any day over a fake hand amputation.

but is it good?
It’s way better than it should have been. It might even be better in some respects than V for Vendetta, since it rarely tries to make the story contemporary in theme, doesn’t add any love stories that weren’t in the source, and mostly remembers that its heroes aren’t really that heroic. But which of the two Alan Moore comics I prefer depends on what day you ask, and I suspect that’s how I’ll continue to feel about their two flawed but still remarkably respectable film cover versions.

You want to hear more? Okay.

Well, like the first film, we have a perfectly cast Ron Perlman, we have a reasonably charming Doug Jones, and an irritating Selma Blair who suffers from the same problem Leo DiCaprio has, which is that funny generimerican accent that leaves me unable to forget for one second that she’s just an actor reciting a script. We have Guillermo del Toro directing and scripting, which means that all of the visuals are almost unbearably rich and beautiful, and almost all of the dialogue is directed with a tin ear. And we have the tired “we’re heroes, but we look like freaks, so people are scared and ungrateful” trope that has been trod into the dirt by countless superhero stories and movies in the past 50 years or so.

Unlike the first film, we have an almost insultingly stale plot about an elf prince who needs to recover three pieces of a magic crown that will let him control a robot army to destroy the human world. There’s no telling why he’s waited at least 100 years or so to do this, or why his father thinks his obsessively martial son will take no for an answer. (Or why his twin sister, who apparently shares every injury with him, doesn’t try to keep her brother from getting so many fights, considering he could easily get her killed.) Unlike the first film, the attempts at humor and character development are almost insultingly weak.

I probably would have liked both films a lot better if I hadn’t read creator Mike Mignola’s comics. The comics aren’t literary masterpieces, but they are artistic ones: sumptuous black backgrounds from which phantasmagoria loom, punctuated by hilariously incongruous tough-guy talk from Hellboy. The moods and creatures are Lovecraftian, Gothic, or older still, folk tales from earliest Europe.

I don’t ask that the movies faithfully reproduce this mood; I get that it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. The first film came pretty close, though, and when I saw the del Toro Creature Studio vibe in the trailer I knew this one would be ranging farther afield. To this film’s credit, it doesn’t spend much more time than necessary on the dull plot, but replacing this with Hellboy’s romantic and professional drama isn’t much of an improvement.

At least there are a few nice touches. Johann Krauss is a great addition to the team, basically an ectoplasmic ghost in a suit whose inconsistent character is balanced by some great lines and equally great voice work by Seth McFarlane. That thing you’ve seen in the trailer, with no eyes on its crested head but dozens of them on its wings, is also terrific, though maybe I just like it whenever someone calls Hellboy “Anung un Rama.” And there’s a scene about halfway through where a city street is covered in moss and falling flowers that’s intensely beautiful, articulating the movie’s ostensible theme much better than any of the dialogue. If only it had all been that sublime.

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
Loved it. It’s a slight drag that the quest in this one is for two (specific) girls instead of a shitload of little hamburgers, but it allows for some cute scenes and the whole thing is pretty funny. And yes, the giant bag of weed returns.

Running with Scissors (the book)
Creepy, depressing, bizarre. It’s hard to read it without the ever-lurking suspicion that this guy did, as he repeatedly suspects, inherit some crazy from his batshit mom. I can understand why his foster family wanted to take him to court, though if half the book is true they’re still a buncha fruitcakes. I can’t imagine how they turned it into a movie, but I know how I can find out.

Death Note (the live action movie)
Fucking awesome. It felt a little goofy at first, especially since they showed it with an English dub, but it got really good. The actor playing L is perfect and his voice is just as good, provided in the English dub by none other than Alessandro “Gaeta” Juliani. Can’t wait to see part 2!

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
It’s just okay. Ford is 65 now and looks it. The action is more cartoonish than ever, to the point of being so silly it’s hard to enjoy. The plot is slight and never really explained, relationships are established and wasted, and once again insects and aboriginal peoples are made out to be far more villainous than they ought to be. Still, it’s reasonably entertaining, and rarely embarrassing. Cate Blanchett’s not nearly as much fun as she ought to be; her Russian is kind of a robot, though she strikes some dashing poses. Shia LaBoeuf’s already scant charisma has completely worn off for me; I find him agreeable but not spectacular here, and the prospect of him donning the hat and taking up the whip for future installments is even more depressing than the idea of a fifth movie where Indy hurtles off a cliff in a wheelchair with a blanket over his lap, surviving unscathed. Luckily I’ve never been this franchise’s biggest fan, so I could be pleased without needing to be impressed.

But of course it was cancelled, and Whedon had to rush his ending with this movie. We find out some things we basically already knew — that River had been extensively altered by the government to be a psychic living weapon — and some things we didn’t know, like where the Reavers came from, and why the government is so keen to get River back. Those last couple secrets are unfortunately a bit anticlimactic and only one of them is even faintly plausible. Perhaps the problem is that we know so little about the Alliance government — except that it must be bad because it does mean experiments on people and because Our Hero Mal fought against it on the yee-haw side of the Civil Star Wars. It’s never been clear what kind of regime this is — dictatorship? oligarchy? plutocracy? or just a corrupt republic like we have in the US of A? — so it’s hard to guess what’s at stake for this government if its secrets get out. People buy fewer Oaty Bars? There’s another Civil Star War in which the Rebels lose again? A “candidate for change” gets some votes?

And doesn’t it seem a little out of character for Mal to stake so much on this? It does, which is why in every other scene someone is talking about strength of belief, why the enigmatic Shepherd Book (whose past may now remain a secret forever, unless the series is revived, and maybe even then) has to pound into Mal’s skull the idea of “believing in River” — because Mal now has to do something stupid, profitless, incredibly dangerous, and completely against his nature, not to mention sort of pointless. Even today the media has a lot less power than we imagine; one conspiracy theory from a disreputable source is just a drop of oil in the ocean.

What happens is SO out of character, in fact, that Mal has to threaten his crew to get them to go along with it. This is incredibly clumsy writing for a show that prided itself on being about people and relationships. The latter don’t get their due either; I don’t want to spoil anything, but there are deaths in this movie and none of them are visibly mourned. Yes, we see their graves, but that’s not mourning. It just rings hollow.

I had some other minor complaints, like how Mal could hold his own for more than a minute in unarmed combat against a master assassin, or why the master assassin AND the scary bounty hunter from “Objects in Space” are both black and both ultimately diffident in bizarrely inconsistent characterizations. But what it comes down to is that the pacing and — I’ll admit it — pretty solid writing of the TV series didn’t quite work in this film. It’s too bad, because in a lot of ways this is better TV (and it’s HELLA better sci-fi) than the new Doctor Who, and even if you don’t like a person, you can’t always enjoy seeing them give themselves a wedgie. It’s sad.

When I heard Battlestar Galactica was going to wrap up this season, I was scared that it would end up like this: a rush job that didn’t and couldn’t do justice to the measured development you get with a solid TV series. It still might, but BSG has the luxury of 900-odd minutes to wrap up, and Firefly had only about 115. Serenity didn’t totally suck, but it sure didn’t blow me away.

There’s a little too much story and not quite enough jokes, and at least half of the jokes are weak serves, and probably a quarter of those involve star Dan Fogler getting kicked in the nuts or having expensive electronics shoved up his butt or otherwise abused and grimacing in pain. He doesn’t bring a lot to the movie aside from tastefully underplaying a lot of the comedy and being at least 60% less annoying than Jack Black. I’d bet money that if they weren’t hoping to land the man himself they were at least telling the casting director to get “a Jack Black type,” and frankly I’m glad they got this guy instead. But watching him get hurt still isn’t funny.

Fortunately, watching Christopher Walken do Christopher Walken is enough to keep a slow Sunday night moving along, and there are a few other funny moments with the rest of the cast. Having Walken’s harem of courtesans be all-male is one of those weak serves, but it’s returned more vigorously at the end of the film when Fogler has to go back into danger to rescue them from their cell. This subgenre of competition-movie parody is all but played out (Dodgeball, Blades of Glory, even Zoolander) but roping in clichés from other formulas helps this one stay afloat just a little longer.

Still, I wouldn’t give it your undivided attention. Maybe put it on in the background while you’re doing your taxes.

But when you put it that way, those are the same needs we all have. Drug stories just strip them down to their barest forms, cut away all the subtleties. But they conceal as much as they reveal, they tell you that if you’ve never stuck a needle in your arm it can’t happen to you. That’s why the Sara Goldfarb plot is there, why this movie works; she’s just an aging woman with nothing to look forward to, and she gets hooked on speed prescribed to her as diet pills.

Even so, it’s not the story, but the way it’s told. I still haven’t seen Pi, so this was my introduction to Aronofsky’s style. When I describe it in words — quick cuts, split screens, repeated images, second-long shots — it sounds disorienting, frenetic, what cantankerous critics still refer to as “MTV style.” In fact it’s the opposite, unbelievably expressive and lucid, perfectly comprehensible, intuitive and yet explicable. He makes so many other directors look pathetically dependent on script and clumsy with their imagery.

The tradeoff is that he’s not quite as adroit with the more traditionally dramatic moments. A key scene between Ellen Burstyn and Jared Leto comes off as an after-school special, and it’s partly a misstep in the script, spelling out the obvious in phony language, but it’s also Leto’s awkwardness as Burstyn’s son. He’s much more in his element with his best friend and his girlfriend, and so the moment doesn’t really work and the plots don’t quite connect. Fortunately the movie doesn’t turn on that connection and we can get by without it.

I don’t think I’ll ever watch this again; it’s a downer among downers. But I’m glad I saw it once. And maybe it’s just because of smack and the Jami Gertz expression she wears throughout the movie, but I think Jennifer Connelly belongs in the next Bret Easton Ellis film adaptation.

However, she’s John Barrymore next to the teensy blonde playing Cora, the Britney/Madonna amalgam. All the reviews I skimmed loved her, but I just saw a massively blown opportunity — she read her lines as though she were a makeup girl they grabbed at the last minute and faced toward a teleprompter. So what could have been a trenchant, hilarious send-up of singing nymphets wasn’t. Britney might be nuts but she’d need a lobotomy to sound this stupid and tranquilized. It’s hard to believe they couldn’t have found a girl able to sing, dance nearly naked, AND read a line with marginal feeling.

Oh well. It was a pleasant enough background while I learned how to check the fuses in my car and futilely tried to find cheap flights across the country.

It also contains the scariest scene from any Hitchcock film: Cary Grant in a towel! Okay, the man was 55, so the skinny arms, droopy pecs, curved spine, and overall tawny man-glow just came with the territory, but yikes. And then that cleft chin on top — it looks like some tabloid Photoshop job. I’ll never understand how that was considered irresistible.