I don't age, but I get it.  It is definitely a weird side effect of the insistence that "photo realism" is always desirable.

The Spider-Man villains don't.  doc Ock almost does but then does the opposite instead.

So when the aliens in War of the Worlds attack and the movie is obviously evoking 9/11, that makes the aliens terrorists?

I think they should keep the Star Trek movies off earth in general, but the ship crashing into a city just seemed, to me, like a build off that time the ship crashed into grassland in Generations, and that time the ship crashed in Search For Spock.  But it is definitely weird that they would have a scene like that after evoking 9/11 conspiracy theories so much in the first half, definitely a strange dissonance there.

Also, let us not forget that this is Star Trek, where people who know that a ship is crashing into San Francisco can beam immediately to Los Angeles, or the moon, or whatever.  So it may not be that the casualties didn't matter, there should not have been a significant number.

I don't see that as a terrorist act, I see that as "If I'm going to crash, I'm going to do as much damage as possible because I'm angry because Spock just killed my crew in a movie which somehow left me just alive enough to guide my ship and my ship just intact enough to do damage."

The terrorist act is at the beginning, and arguably even that is not a terrorist act in the sense that his motivation is not terrorism (like 'Die Hard').

I didn't realize Kurtzman & Orci were writing this.  Oh well.

I like the new Brando stuff, but I think that a lot of the Donner cut gets by because it is so scrapped together that it gives you some room to fill it in with your own imagination.  Like, "imagine if we had gotten to shoot this scene when Reeve looked like Superman" or "just think of a cool ending that isn't exactly the same as the first movie, that is what we would have shot."

But, the same is kind of true about the old cut once you know it.  You can't unsee that Hackman wasn't on set or even dubbing his own voice.

Does anybody prefer anybody to Christopher Reeve?  Is there even a close second?

That was waaaaaay better than I expected.

I love that, and I also love that the guy immediately recognizes/remembers him, which creates a lot of strange implications if you really want to follow that path.

Yeah, even if he does kill them in Superman 2, it i pretty de-emphasized.  Plus Superman 2 has Superman bitterly going back and beating up the bully you stole his seat, so it isn't the definitive Superman or anything...

Cameron would have done it, and then by now we wouldbe sick of that style.

I enjoy reading him and think he makes his points well, but our tastes our wildly divergent.  I find him a little too dismissive towards movies that are entertaining, which is something I value even/especially in my art films.

I think you are kind of willing yourself to ignore that this movie repeated 95% of the things you claim are wrong with Wrath of Khan because you enjoy disliking that movie so much.  But, actually, even then i kind of don't get it, because the movie is so unapologetic in how slavishly it loves Wrath of Khan.  It was basically the movie equivalent of "dear Wrath of Khan, hi!  how are you?  Do you like me? (Check one) - Orci and Kurtzmann"

It was great in that last ep, though.

I think this is actually one of those retro-canon things where they ignore the times on the old show when it wasn't the case and say that in the pre-TNG days, phasers were either stun or kill, in all Star Trek.  [They came up with a lot of these rules in the '80's and then made them explicit in 'Enterprise'; it's actually a little surprising how many of them the new 'Star Trek' is sticking with.]