Harry Potter Is Better Than Star Wars and Star Trek
During the Thanksgiving holiday The Wife proposed a Harry Potter movie marathon. I’ve never considered myself much of a Potter-fan. During the books’ popularity over the last 15 years I resisted reading them. And while I saw six of the eight movies during my film critic days — and appreciated them individually — the franchise as a whole never inspired devotions to the level of the pop culture cults of my childhood and teen years, Star Wars and Star Trek.
So I welcomed the chance to give the series a second look, fueled by The Wife’s enthusiasm. She read all the books and knows the arcane details backwards and forwards. The Potter books arrived for April, a few years my junior, as a receptive older child, for me as an angsty teenager looking for “mature” books.
Last Wednesday night after wrapping up the day’s editing I made a run to the library to pick up the four titles we didn’t already own (The Half-Blood Prince) or have recorded on the DVR (Prisoner of Azkaban and both Deathly Hallows). And so began our epic Thanksgiving Potterfest with The Sorcerer’s Stone that night; which we carried on at a pace of three films both Thursday and Friday before concluding on Saturday morning.
My conclusion: young geeks nowadays have much better options than previous generations. Compare the eight Harry Potter films with the six Star Wars and eleven Star Trek. By any “objective” measure — box office, percentage of positive reviews, or number of award-winning actors featured in the films – Harry Potter wins. And does any Jedi or Trekkie want to argue that by the “subjective” measure — just sitting down and watching all the films in the series — Harry fails to triumph over Luke, Han, Kirk, and Spock?
Every single Potter film stands on its own two feet. When The Wife and I acquire the Blu Ray box set linked above, we won’t skip any titles when we redo our marathon someday. Pressed to name the weak link in the chain I cannot. They’re all fun, exciting, family-oriented adventure films drawing from the collective mythologies of Western civilization.
But even during my intense adolescent days of Star Wars and Star Trek obsessive fandom I — like virtually all geeks — readily acknowledged their shortcomings. The nails-on-a-chalkboard dialogue and cardboard characters of the unwatchable prequel trilogy. The strange way only the even numbered Trek movies performed. Skip The Motion Picture, The Search for Spock, The Final Frontier, Generations, and Insurrection and you won’t miss much. And with the failure of the last Trek film, the even-numbered Nemesis in 2002, it seemed to signal the death of Gene Roddenberry’s vision on the big screen. Thankfully J.J. Abrams’ 2009 reboot Star Trek points toward a more promising future.
But it’ll still take 7 more Abrams-style Star Treks or George Lucas-free, Disney Star Wars sequels to bring the franchises back up to the level of consistent quality that Harry Potter already delivered.
It looks to me like the main competition to the Potter films’ cinematic supremacy will come from a different direction…
*****
Related at PJ Lifestyle:
BTW, this book by PJMedia contributor Ari Armstrong makes a great companion for Harry Potter fans!
http://www.valuesofharrypotter.com/
It’s probably true, though we’re talking about different kettles of fish – original screenplays, original screenplays based on a TV series, and screenplay adaptations, together with films separated by years.
The original Star Wars trilogy was a game changer. They had a tone and look about them never seen before in SF cinema. The final trio are not very good.
The Star Trek TV series was a game changer for the same reason. The film series had a trio of pretty good films: II, III and IV, Khan, Search and Voyage; it was an advantage for those three to be made within five years. That trio weren’t game changers but they were pretty good screenplays and upped the ante for SF quite a bit in some ways. The other films weren’t very compelling.
The Harry Potter series, to be fair, had one advantage: there was a commitment to make the entire series. So the HP films have a similar tone and look and consistent quality to them. Having said that, that consistency could’ve been poor, but it’s not. The HP series is an outstanding expression of film making in all its aspects. There’s not a clunker in there really.
The original series of books were not game changers of literary fantasy in an historical sense – they were just very well done. The films are not game changers in a cinematic sense, but their quality is so outstanding on so many levels, and the casual way great creative cinematic instincts are presented that some of the HP films rise to the standard of some of the greatest fantasy films ever made. I think Prisoner and Goblet are particular stand outs in an outstanding series.
Rowling, like Steven King, is a very lucky woman. Any one who’s read the books realizes the brilliant bits of creativity the film makers added to the series, for example, when the two foreign schools make their entrance in Goblet in the film as opposed to the book. Smartly written books and smartly written and presented films. I can only marvel at the creative film making brilliance in all aspects of film, all together in one place experienced by those three child actors throughout the series. The rest of their careers on set may seem like a hold up.
Overall, in terms of history, I’d say the Star Trek TV series can be rightly said to have changed everything in terms of it’s genre. Nothing was ever the same in TV SF again. The same holds true of the original Star Wars trilogy for SF film. That cannot be said for the HP books or the movies, except in a commercial and faddist sense, and that will fade. However the intrinsic artistic legacy of the HP books and films will never fade. Some stuff is great just because it’s so good.
I’m not crazy about either Star Trek or Star Wars. But I’d rather have a hangnail wired with plastique and set off by soaking it in a barrel of sulphuric acid than have to sit through one (1) Harry Potter movie.
Well said! Where’s the +1 button?
Potter better than Star trek? HA!!!!
Comes down to one thing: Did Harry Potter ever do a green chick? No. Captain James T. Kirk is the man!
Star Trek > Harry Potter. Q.E.D.
I tend to agree with Swindle’s article, but am utterly unable to refute Ragnar’s argument. We’re at an aesthetic impasse.
On average perhaps, but there isn’t a single great Harry Potter movie.
Star Trek the original TV series was a game changer (though looking at them now isn’t quite the same thing). The first Star Wars, though formulaic, was the same. However, the Star Trek movies, discounting the special effects, weren’t very good (the first was a take off of a TV episode). Khan was the best – more action. When Lucas pulled the “Luke, I am your father” crap that was kind of it (I saw the rest, but the prequels were pathetic). And don’t get me started on the latest incarnation of Star Trek – more properly titled, “Alternate Universe Star Trek”. If you are paying attention to it you will note that the time travel garbage has thrown basically all of the original ST events out of whack.
I didn’t like the HP movies because I had read the books first and felt too many liberties were taken, especially with the finale (as well as the castle change between movie two and movie three). However, all in all, HP movies were far better than the ST or SW movies (and I loved the ST series when it first came out in the 60s).
Then you weren’t paying attention. JJ Abrams did that on purpose, to avoid all the fanboy complaints when the new movies didn’t follow the now-fossilized canon. Otherwise we would just see recycled episodes from the original series.
EXACTLY.. thank you Casey!
And I’m no JJ Abrams fan.. I can’t STAND his t.v. series stuff.
Alias, Felicity (wha? WHO watched that show!?), Fringe, Lost, Revolution.. they’re mind numbingly stupid.
Harry Potter – there wasn’t one book, movie his character didn’t whine like a lil’ sniveling brat.
2ndly, there are FAR BETTER children’s books/ series than JK Rowling’s Harry Potter.
Septimus Heap, Charlie Bone, Eragon, Bartimaeus Sequence and presently reading the Chrestomanci series.
I commend Rowling for getting kids to red and applaud her for being in Paul McCartney-like tax bracket though I found her Potter series, books VERY underwhelming.
consistent is not the same as good.
the books are all so dreadfully derivative and potboilers you can’t really expect much of the movies, and they deliver.
Dobby the House Elf or Jar Jar Binks… I dunno, it’s a tough call.
Dobby is more endearing. The scene where he receives the sock in the book is one of the nicest surprises ever written into a book.
At least Dobby dies to rid us of his presence. Jar-Jar Binks just didn’t go away.
But he gave us the Empire!
Just an observation, some of the people I have talked to over the years who were not readers of the HP books but checked out the movies quit after movie 2. In my opinion it is the weakest of the series because it spent too much time on special effects and not enough on the characters. For instance, the Ginny character is at the beginning and the end only in the movie. Book 2 is in part about Ginny’s travails, but kept from being in the foreground of the plot to not tip off what has happened to her. The movie would have been better if it had spent less time on the flying car and the giant spider encounter (special effects)and more on Ginny’s schoolgirl crush on Harry and that she was having a rough first year at Hogwarts. A version of the Valentine Day singing cupid scene would have great.
The director did good on the first movie, which got me to start reading the books. He did not do as well on movie 2. I think he made the same mistakes of over relying on special effects to carry the story instead of balancing plot, character and then special effects when he did Percy Jackson:The Lightning Theif. That movie was just lame. I have read those books for the same reason I did the HP books, they are relaxing, enjoyable, fun reads and it gives me a topic to talk about some of the youngsters I work with at church.
For some of the older teens and 20-somethings I get to talk Stargate SG-1/Atlantis, very good times.
I liked #2, myself. To my mind it was the 3rd where the series went to pot, with far too much emphasis on special effects, and a severe shift away from showing the humor and somewhat Dickensian characters. (Rowling cannot draw a real adult character, but the grotesques are good, so long as they don’t “grow”.)
After that, they never got much better. The two things I most objected to were,
1. Completely underusing Maggie Smith, who is a natural for the character, and a longtime favorite of mine.
2. Almost totally leaving out the comic side of Luna.
IMO, Rowling can do exactly 3 things: She is good at plotting, she does do good characters of a certain kind (see above), and she can be funny. The movies spent way too much time on the other features of the books. (But at least there was less teen angst than in the originals.)
Very true, both star wars and star trek suffer very inconsistent writing leading to movies and episodes that range from brilliant to unwatchable drek.
J.K Rowling is no Tolkien however…
Agreed, with some caveats. Star Wars did inspire some folks to become fighter pilots in real life (as did Top Gun). And, what the heck: it was a perfect backdrop of the US vis-a-vis the real Evil Empire of that time, the Soviet Union.
Star Trek? Well, I was less of a fan of the overall concept, but I did like the overall “space pioneer” concept (far more so than Deep Space Nine, which I just couldn’t take).
However, Tolkien’s books – and the movies made by Peter Jackson – are the best. They just are. Epic heroism against implacable evil. Sauron is the devil himself, and all of the forces of light are against him. Beats a school boy versus a wannabe dark wizard.
I think the idea here is not the content but the presentation of that content.
I don’t think LOTR can count as a series since it’s basically one giant movie and was made as such as much as it could be by the same guy. If it does count then LOTR deserves as high a marks as any fantasy series.
I had 2 problems with the LOTR movies.
1. The oversized Nazgul mounts (and elephants). Really, it was implausible that a girl and a hobbit would kill the king. This distracted me throughout those scenes. It seems a a temptation fantasy/scifi movie makers cannot resist, e.g. the worms in Dune.
2. Much worse–something which really killed the movie for me–was the omission of the scene where Frodo makes Gollum swear on the ring, that he will make no more attempts to steal it, and that if he breaks his oath, the ring will destroy him. By leaving this out, the entire ending seems to “just happen”, rather than being a fulfilling of the oath. I cannot forgive that.
I couldn’t STAND the LOTR movies.
I love young Peter Jackson. ‘Bad Taste’ is an amazingly funny cult movie. A notch below Evil Dead for me.
Though the LOTR movies.. all they did was WALK. And walk. And..
Frodo whining, unsure of himself, the gullibility throughout the 9, 10 hours.. oy!
Make it stop!!!
Star Wars I-III completely sucked except the last ~15 minutes of Star Wars III.
Harry Potter.. he whined as much as Frodo. Ugh!
You are aware that Eowyn (with Merry’s help) did kill the witch king in the book, are you not? Or are you saying that, because Jackson made the mount so big, it was improbable that Eowyn could take off it’s head with one swipe, thus bringing about the killing of the Witch King?
Wait . . .
You have to put “objective” in quotation marks, yet you claim that the Harry Potter movies are still “objectively” better and not merely subjectively better?
Do you actually understand what those two terms mean?
Do you actually realize that however “objective” something like box office is, it is still subjective to use it as a measure of actual quality?
Do you not realize that positive reviews themselves are still essentially subjective, making percentage of them a logical fallacy rather than an objective measure, and number of award winning actors barely rises above being a non-sequiter to qualify as merely subjective?
A fine round of Geek Trolling is one thing, but you need to do better in mucking up the difference between those two for a really good time of it.
As for which series is really better objectively, they are all riddled with so many flaws from the piddling to the egregious that it is not really worthwhile to bother arguing it on such grounds. Certainly they have been wildly successful, and inspired legions of adoring fans, but when it comes to serious objective standards they are all B movies that would never even get to support a truly blockbuster A in the first place.
pweh…… now we’ve got Sword Art Online………
http://kat.ph/sword-art-online-light-novels-1-9-side-stories-pdfs-t6644914.html
Rifle308:
“For some of the older teens and 20-somethings I get to talk Stargate SG-1/Atlantis, very good times.”
I’m much older than that but can still appreciate the Stargate series’s quality–despite inevitable flaws. (Where else does one character accuse another of imitating a 1967-vintage Captain Kirk?)
Well, for any Star Wars movie with Han Solo, no; Jar-Jar Binks and later, heck yeah.
I am completely torn on this question. I’m a Trekkie from way back, a Potter fan from day one, and a Star Wars fan by default (because of my brothers and sons).
So, I asked myself which movie marathon would I most want to watch?
Potter first, Star Trek second and then Star Wars. I think for me the books make all the difference because there is so much more character and plot development.
Spock is still my hero, though.
The Terminator movies could be included in the discussion too.
I’d like to see Disney treat the Star Wars prequels the same way the Terminator franchise treated Terminator 3 – simply pretend they never happened.
Terminator 3 was lousy, so Terminator 4 simply ignored it and started with T2 left off.
There’s no debate that the Star Wars prequels were terrible. Disney should pretend those “stories” never happened and do a new set of prequels.
God, how I hate Harry Potter. It would be the most overrated thing in the world of print if Twilight hadn’t reared it’s empty head.
Star Wars? Meh. It’s generally consistent. Consistently bad. The first movie I liked, but it’s been face-lifted so much that I don’t get a nostalgia rush off of it anymore. They wrecked it by fixing it. Should’ve been left alone. Phantom Menace was utterly unforgiveable! I quit after that. I doubt they’ll ever get me to relinquish a hard-earned 10 bucks again.
Trek? I’m a fan. I get disappointed now and then (Kirk’s death? He falls? That’s it?) but overall I get entertained more than disappointed.
I’d rather gouge my own eyeballs out than watch all the Harry Potter movies one after another. Maybe I could have gotten into them when I was 7 or 8 years old, but I’m an adult, for crying out loud.
I’m always up for a Star Trek marathon, though.
Star Trek and the Prequil trilogy of Star Wars were written by Hollywood Writers. (Lucas was an outsider with the original Star Wars trilogy, and it shows)
Harry Potter was written by J.K. Rowling and she maintained some control regarding the content of the movies. (similar to Jean Aul and Clan of the Cave Bear – when she told the producer “You’re not putting my title on your movie.”)
The LOTR and now Hobbit are being done by Peter Jackson now and he’s been faithful to the Tolkein Stories. (how many attempts to do Hobbit or LOTR have been duds because Hollywood had to make it better?)
I’m simply agreeing with you here, Dave, I’m just pointing out why.
Good to see PJM tackling the really meaty cultural issues.
The original Star Trek TV,forgiving the now low-tech framework, is still so far beyond Harry Potter it’s not even comparable.
Harry Potter better than Star Wars? Blasphemy!
Oh, you’re including the prequels. Yeah, we don’t say that word in this house. Nope, just three Star Wars films. That was it. Yep. Three.
*Sigh*
The author is comparing apples, oranges, and grapefruit. Harry Potter is a set of children’s movies about fantasy and magic. Star Trek (and to a lesser extent Star Wars) is science fiction.
As for Star Trek, forget the movies. The TV series (original and TNG)was far better. As with any almost TV series there were some clunkers. But the best Star Trek episodes were entertaining and thought-provoking on a level that Harry Potter doesn’t even begin to match.
Consider the climactic scene in “City on the Edge of Forever”, where Captain Kirk abandons his love to die and Dr. McCoy says “My God Jim, do you know what you just did??”. Then Mr. Spock, with his usual gift for understatement replies, “He knows doctor. He knows.”. The one scene alone beats all the scenes in all the Harry Potter movies combined.
As for Star Wars, only the first one was really good. (The first one filmed, not the first in the series). It beats all the Harry Potters.
Harry Potter isn’t even as good as Bed knobs and Broomsticks. Let’s look at it thirty years removed from its current visual advantage. When you’re making epic movies with state of the art CGI and then comparing it cinematically against movies that are 30 plus years old, and a TV show that is 45 years old, the modern movie will be at a distinct advantage.
The movie Logan’s Run is brilliant in concept, and pretty good in dialog, but suffered badly from low budge effects, which now are incredibly dated. I know people who claim to love Science Fiction, but can’t sit through it because they are too accustomed to the modern movie visual magic.
Harry Potter isn’t bad, and it might possibly the Star Wars of the decade, but whether or not it is ‘better’ is highly subjective.
Sorry, HP is a pure ripoff of LOTR. Lets keep thing in the right order.
I think the author’s entire premise is flawed.
The Harry Potter films are direclty drawn from a carefully plotted serioes of novels, driven by a singular vision. But there is no real underlying philosophy or social commentary other than Good suffers, but ultimatelt triunphs over evil.
Don’t get me wrong: I love the novels – they are well written, engrossing, and enjoyable. The movies are good interpretations of the novels.
The Star Wars films, as previous comments have stated were a game change for the industry and are thematically as detailed as the Harry Potter movies (not the novels).
The comparison to Star Trek is entirely offbase. The movies were not thematically conencted through one long story arc ala the Harry Potter franchise. The movies are a bit disjint, but I think Start Trek II, II, and IV show a good arc and together are much more thrilling than any of the Harry Potter movies.
The true comparison should be the Harry Poter movies to the Start Trek series – The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. If you compare the Harry Potter universe to that entire Star Trek universe, Harry Potter loses because it goes up against some of the finest science fiction writers of all time. Because it goes up against a visionary set of work that spans hundres of years into a speculative future and not one that stands entirely upon ideas and mythology that was created hundres to tousand of years ago.
Good points about control & direction; note also that the Potter movies enjoyed pretty much continuous direction from a common pool of production talent, which allowed greater coherence and consistency.
The only other series which enjoyed such control is Star Wars, and considered as a whole the Potter movies are a better series. I would consider the original three Star Wars movies better, but Lucas’ lousy scriptwriting handicaps two of them.
There was very little continuity in the teams which produced the Star Trek movies, and they naturally got worse when Berman & Braga got involved.
To say that Harry Potter is more consistently good than the other franchises is completely subjective. Star Wars in my mind is ten times better than Harry Potter if you only talk about the originals. The pre-quals are actually closer to Harry Potter than it is Star Wars, with Anikan acting as the reverse Harry. Star Trek is and always will be in a universe of its own; built from several blocks of various sizes and shapes. If half the original episodes were made using today’s technology (and they did try to at least improve some of that with computer graphics) then they would become more timeless than they already are.
Going back to Harry Potter, it has some stinkers to this casual fan of the franchise. The first one is magical, but childish. The second one was good the first time, but grew tedious with other viewings because the mystery that held your attention no longer existed. The third one is a masterpiece thanks to great performances, good pacing, and wonderful dialogue. The fourth one has its moments, but is choppy and feels slapped together with ill fitting sub-plots on top of cliche tournaments. The fifth one is almost as good as the third installment with real tension mixed with dark humor and a feel the characters have finally come to their own sense of purpose. The Sixth one seemed to squander the premise built up in the previous that a new generation of freedom fighters was on the march; throwing the whole thing on the three main character’s shoulders again as if no progress had been made. It also dragged on far longer than was necessary even if some plot points required the length. A good edit would have helped that. The second to the last was painful in a bad way. Never want to watch that one again as for the first time there is hope the good guys lose because they are so stupid. The final installment was awesome, I will give it that. I don’t think any better than taking on the death star, but close in excitement and awe. All the movies had very good effort, but hardly better or worse than the other franchises.
Swindle, it’s nice that you have an opinion. To determine whether this is in the realm of cultural observation is different.
So… go to a con event — comic-con, sci fi con, anime con. Look around. You can measure the relative cultural influence (geek Q factor) by seeing the number of geeks doing characters and/or referencing beloved dialog.
Harry Potter geekdom? Weak. Highlander (“there can be only one”) and Dr Who are far more referenced by the same crowd that ought to otherwise be HP freaks. At any given event there’s a lot more trek and star wars referencing. Potter barely registers other than some cosplays. Dialogue influence? NONE.
Geek Q for HP for real geeks at geek cons? Virtually nonexistant.
Good point about fanbase. HP isn’t “beloved” by most geeks – geeks being the kind of people who could get in an hour-long argument over which cut of Highlander 2 is more insulting. Geeks like it, on the whole, but almost all have other things that capture their interest more.
I’m not sure what that says about the culture at large, though. My personal feeling is that HP has been one of those pop culture things that, like the Ninja Turtles, will be irrationally loved by the generation weaned on it, but utterly forgotten by everyone else.
I really enjoyed Deathly Hallows Part I but… I can’t say I got much enjoyment out of any of the other HP films. There was a lot of important stuff cut out from the books which could make people who only watched the movies feel confused by some plot points, the films felt like they dragged, it was just not that interesting.
Specific points of dislike for the movies – the werewolves looked like aneorexic monkeys, in Half-Blood Prince how Snape looks directly at Potter and then walks away (in the book Harry was concealed by the cloak). Now how could Harry continue to think Snape was on the side of darkness when he had a clear chance to kill the kid right then and there? Makes no sense.
I’m not a big fan of either the Star Wars or Star Trek films but as another comment mentions – the timing and risks are important considerations to take into account.
Well, any franchise that’s built around a tightly unified concept, and that stays largely under the control of a single halfway-able creator, will get the qualitative edge over franchises that aren’t. The Potter universe hasn’t been farmed out to a thousand different creators to be morphed into a baggy, inevitably uneven “expanded universe,” as have Roddenberry’s and Lucas’s creations. And unlike Lucas, Rowling seems to understand which aspects of her creation make it at all appealing, and aren’t to be monkeyed with.
But that’s true of most competent creators, so Swindle’s really setting the bar a tad low. For a more apples-to-apples comparison, I’d match Rowling up creatively against universe-creators like Tolkien, Conan Doyle, or Edgar Rice Burroughs. Not sure she comes off quite as well in those cases.
The books were interesting and entertaining, but I did not particularly like Harry Potter.
The message seems to be “you must be born special.” Magicians don’t get their power by long, hard study, secret knowledge, and/or painful and terrifying ordeals, but by being born with the right genes (or whatever) so that a few words of gibberish and a wave of a wand get results.
You can’t really compare them. Harry Potter is based off a coherently written set of novels that had a tightly planned and plotted arc from the get-go. Star Trek never had a story arc vision. Each movie is designed to more or less stand alone like its own giant TV episode although there are some that loosely connect. Star Wars was planned as a trilogy, but Lucas didn’t know for sure with each installment is they would get the green light to go on, so each had to also be more or less self-contained.
“Harry Potter Is Better Than Star Wars and Star Trek”
In Harry Potter’s world the Adults are craven cowards almost to the last. Murderers (death eaters) are allowed to walk freely among the law abiding. Punishment for crimes does not occur, based entirely on apologies, “I’ll never do it again”? And false imprisonment is common.
No. Harry Potter’s world is a moral desert compared to the Federation, or the Empire.
This.
I always found the series morally bleak, to be honest. Like, exceedingly so. I remember reading that ending of the fifth book where Harry was screaming at Dumbledore (or whatever, it was eighth grade) and wanting the adult in the situation to backhand him. Stopped reading after that. Found the movies a plodding mess. These books were written to appeal to children, though, and I’ve always felt that they were sucessful because they did just that – appeal to those childish impulses/behaviors/fantasies that we’re supposed to grow out of, but don’t want to, at that age.
Sure and a belly ache is better than a kick in the groin or a broken nose but still …
Haven’t seen Potter. No interest. Not my sort of thing. Inclined to suspect author’s opinions about HP series having no real duds may be true. But “high standard of standardness” isn’t everything. Real highs tend to go missing along with real lows. As others point out, Star Trek TOS had City on the Edge of Forever. But also Spock’s Brain and A Piece of the Action. Star Trek TNG had Borg war episodes, Conspiracy and Yesterday’s Enterprise, but also those tedious and annoying Q episodes. Star Wars had first two films, then it had last four.
But am amazed neither Swindle nor any commenter save Ragnar addressed what makes Star Trek the real long-term standout – the babes! The later Potters have jailbait-y Emma Watson. Star Wars has Carrie Fisher and Natalie Portman. Star Trek beats combined HP & SW babe count just with babes who are green! The late Susan Oliver in TOS, Cyia Batten, Crystal Allen and Menina Fortunato in Enterprise and Rachel Nichols in Star Trek the Reboot. From there, one can drone on, seemingly for days, naming avatars of galaxy-class babealiciousness who have graced Federation spaceways. Leslie Parrish! Sabrina Scharf! Beth Toussaint! Chase Masterson! Jeri Ryan! Jolene Blalock! Even the parts of the Star Trek oeuvre where quality is disputed or just indisputably awful don’t disappoint in this respect. ST: Insurrection, alleged sufferer of “odd-numbered curse” that IMHO gets bad rap in this respect, indisputably also a celebration of the ageless charms of the preposterously yummy Donna Murphy. Babes, people! Star Trek wins in a walk!
Good call. Just saw Chase M. at a show a few weeks back. Still teh hotness.
#34 Denver
Well, as far as which one reflects the modern American world, I think HP is one hell of a good analog.
Babe count granted for the Star Trek franchise as a whole [Jolene Blalock being the hottest Vulcan on record], the movies not only have the downside of wild inconsistency [and I am a Trekker whose heart pounded when the lights came on the Enterprise in the space dock]; but the destruction of Vulcan in the last incarnation was a step too far. Not going to bother seeing the new one coming out, because the new alternate universe does not interest me.
I will grant the extreme localised negative ambient pressure involved in Star Wars I-III, and I look at the prospect of a Disney final trilogy with as much enthusiasm as a colonoscopy. But the middle trilogy had the basis for an extremely detailed and diverse world to explore.
Given the choices of the three genres, I have to come down on the side of HP; because despite the changes from the books [which I read after the movie series started] it was one good story arc consistently told. Yes, there were differences from the books, but that will always happen when you translate from print to film.
Even with the masterful job Jackson did with the Lord of the Rings, there were changes. Arwen did not have a prominent a role in the novels, but it was worth it because Liv Tyler in elf ears is eminently worthy of a script re-write. The “Scouring of the Shire” was written out of the movie, and I regret that. Overall, compelling and consistently good.
I dread the Hobbit though. Stretching a short novel into 3 long movies will not work, and the reviews by Tolkien fans who have seen the early releases show that the book has been discarded for the movie.
Subotai Bahadur
Agree wiping out Vulcan in The Reboot was a major bad move. Considering all the time-travel story lines in other ST’s, though, I wouldn’t count on this event necessarily sticking.
And scrumptious as she be, Jolene B. is only tied for hottest Vulcan on record with TOS’s spectacular Arlene Martel (T’Pring – Amok Time).
Gawd what a bore. Dave, grow up and stop playing hobbit.
On the whole, I’d agree. Star Wars has a two in six ratio of decent movies where the best lines were ad-libs. Lucas is great at creating worlds and horrible at creating love interest. Star Trek had an odd sort of issue with some really good scrips and some really bad ones. “Save the Whales” and “the Laughing Vulcan” are great examples of the later. Somehow, the Harry Potter series managed to do seven movies without sucking once. I suspect it had something to do with J.K. Rowling’s insistence on creative control.
What??
iN 10 years everyone will have forgotten the insipid and magical infantilism of Harry Potter.
Star Wars and Star Trek are classics in the truest sense of the term.
They are not even in the same league. Harry Potter is irritating like sh**.
Star Wars and Star Trek are epic films. Harry Potter is nothing more than bedtime stories transposed to the big screen.
We should not forget space odyssey either.
I didn’t read the post, but let me just say this. I’ve seen all the movies of all three series. I never read the Harry Potter books (and don’t want to). But suffice it to say, I can barely, if at all tell you the difference between any of the HP movies. None of them were overly impressive, now maybe they weren’t trying to be great stories, more broad brushed (like Star Wars).
I admit that it’s somewhat the same with Star Trek, though much less so. With just a clue or two I would quickly remember what the movie is about. It would take several minutes to clue me in which HP your talking about (distinguishing the titles is another few minutes).
HP movies were blockbusters because the books were blockbuster . . . and there is nothing wrong with that.
I’m lucky, I guess.
I have all the Star Trek episodes (TOS), all the Trek movies (also TOS), all the Star Wars movies, and all the Harry Potter movies…and I love ‘em all.
Star Wars was on the path of greatness but was marred by Lucas’ greed. Both “A new hope” and “The Empitere striakes back”. Some people siad there was a third movie called “The Return of the Jedi”. I saw no movie, what I saw was 90 minute commercial for Lucas’s brand of teddy bears and bizarro plastic figurines.
After seeing the trailers I was unable to summon the courage to see the second trilogy except for the final episode where I needed far too much to my taste to go into suspended disbelief.