When I saw the movie on opening night, I loved it. It was fun. It was fast. The opening scene was gripping and intense. The visuals were flashy. It had plenty of humor. And Karl Urban as Leonard McCoy ROCKED!

Over time, though, my nitpicky cynicism started to kick in, and started to seem more and more like a Hollywood bastardization. It started with the observation (on opening night) that the crew of the Kelvin had the Enterprise "delta shield" flight patches on their tunics, instead of the ship-specific flight patches that were in use during the original series and before.

Really, who are these people?

Eventually, I started to be bothered by the insistence that all the characters have to turn out exactly like their original series counterparts, despite having their origins and life histories significantly changed. Apparently, in the J.J. Abrams' Star Trek universe, a person's "destiny" is a complete matter of "nature" rather than "nurture".

Read an article today at TG Daily saying that Lucasfilm will start production on 3-D Star Wars with The Phantom Menace.

The plan is to re-release all six Star Wars movies in 3-D in "episode" order: starting with The Phantom Menace and ending with Return of the Jedi.

However, if The Phantom Menace does not perform well enough, the studio may scrap the remaining five 3-D adaptations.

Comic book fans have had a lot to be excited about these last ten years or so. After decades of mediocre-at-best comic book movies, and the one exceptional Tim Burton Batman movie, the onslaught of surprisingly good comic book movies in the early 2000’s has been a pleasant surprise. Excellent films such as Spider-Man 2, X-2: X-Men United, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Watchmen, and the underrated Edward Norton Incredible Hulk have been undercut by a relative minority of abysmal films such as X-Men 3, Spider-Man 3, and the crappy Eric Bana Hulk movie. But the turbulent up-and-down nature of comic book films makes it very hard to know what to expect when you buy that $10 movie ticket. Are you going to get Batman Begins? Or Superman 4? Iron Man 2? Or X-Men Origins: Wolverine?

Going into this summer, we have a handful of comic movies to look forward to with anticipation and anxiety. Thor, X-Men: First Class, The Green Lantern, and Captain America all debut this summer. So far, Marvel has done an outstanding job with the movies made by its relatively new in-house studio. Thor already turned out to be a good-but-not-great movie (in my opinion), and so I expect a lot with X-Men and Captain America.

Last Friday night, the Colbert Report aired the following Threat Down segment:

It's definitely not the first time that Colbert has has let out his inner geek. He's been known to talk about The Lord of the Rings, make Star Wars references, and show clips from video games. But this segment was probably his geekiest yet!

Comic books, video games, and Glee all in one Threat Down? He might as well have made "geekiness" be the one and only Threat in this particular ... um ... Down.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of participating in a podcast called Geek Fights, and the topic was "Worst episode of Star Trek". During that debate, I railed pretty heavily against a particular episode of Star Trek Voyager called "Dark Frontier", and alleged that that episode (and Voyager in general) ruined the Borg - one of Star Trek's most compelling villains. Although, I don't think I was as hard on "Dark Frontier" as Allen was on Republicans...

But, due to time constraints, I tried to restrain myself, and I mentioned that I would go into more detail on my blog.

Well, Geek Fights fans, the podcast was recently released, and so here is that blog!

First of all, the podcast itself is included in the embedded player below, or you can listen to it from its original source at Geek Fights.

The story arc from "Dark Frontier" is a representation of the 2 things that I most hate about the last few seasons of Voyager. The first being that they were too heavily focused on Seven of Nine and the Doctor. Yeah, she looked great in that skin-tight unitard. Yeah, sure, she and the Doctor are probably the best and most interesting characters in the entire series. And I will defend Jeri Ryan's acting performance to the last -- she totally nailed the part! And yeah the Doctor is Voyager's equivalent of TNG's Data (arguably that show's most popular character). And Robert Picardo probably provides the second-best acting performance on the series. But there are like 7 other major characters on the show, make an episode about one of them for a change...

The other problem I had with Voyager was the Borg. The Borg were probably the best, most perfect villain for Roddenberry's Star Trek because Star Trek was supposed to be a "human voyage". The Borg were antithetical to everything that the show was about: the human spirit, the spirit of discovery, self-betterment, compassion, friendship, loyalty, and so on.

The Borg had none of that. They were mindless, infallible automatons with a collective will, who single-mindedly sought out technology and mercilessly destroyed anything and anyone that got in their way. They were a representation of technology gone amok.

They had NO humanity.

But that's not even the worst of it!