After nearly ten years of putting persons like myself through acute movie-watching hell, the dynamite writing-and-producing team of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are splitting up as far as big-screen projects are concerned. A little more than a year ago I wrote the following in a piece called “Gain World, Lose Soul”: “One of the reasons for the ongoing demise of narrative movies, I believe, is that way, way too many big-studio scripts have been written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who are probably the most successful super-hacks around or are certainly among the most successful in this realm.

“But successfully churning out one highly efficient, mind-numbing screenplay after another (which is not easy…seriously, not everyone can do it), this malignant duo has probably ushered more despair into the hearts of not only rival screenwriters but untold millions of moviegoers…more than you or I could possibly calculate. It’s not that Kurtzman and Orci are bad guys in and of themselves, but they serve soul-less corporate mainstream packagers who pander solely and entirely to Joe Popcorn and Joe Download, and are therefore incurring mountains of ill will and bad karma.

“Over the last half-dozen or so years these guys have written or co-written The Island, The Legend of Zorro, Mission: Impossible III, Transformers, Star Trek, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Cowboys & Aliens, People Like Us (an uncharacteristic stab at modest, human-scale drama that didn’t work), Star Trek Into Darkness, All You Need is Kill, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, etc.

“When these guys hit their 50s they’re going to start looking in the bathroom mirror as they’re shaving and go ‘My God…what have I done?’ I mean, I live well in a beautiful house and I’m paying for my children’s ivy league educations but my God!!”