Star Trek Into Darkness

It's Ongoing Mission:
To Explore Strange New Worlds, 
To Seek Out New Life and New Civilizations, 
And to Shamelessly Retread Where the Old Series Has Already Gone Before.
(Oh, and Lens Flares.  Lots of Lens Flares)

I'm disappointed.

The first Star Trek (Beta Two) did a great job of re-imagining the '60's sci-fi mythos of a 23rd century, and dragging it, shouting and flaring and shaking the camera, into the 21st Century.  It shook the faithful, too, reinforced what was great about the series (the characters, frankly) and what wasn't (a little too Hornblower and "Wagon Train to the Stars," too-vintage TV concepts, and the Enterprise corridors always seemed like a circular Ramada Inn). 

The 2009 Star Trek of J.J. Abrams was a game-changer.  It completely exploded (and sometimes imploded) the Star Trek Universe that was starting to harden (the way it did with the Star Wars Universe) with continuity.  That's the way it goes with science fiction series: everything that seemed fresh in the first go-'round, becomes rote and repeatable and formulaic, given a timeline and a structure, and the creativity becomes more about stretching the budget as opposed to stretching the possibilities, or the minds of the audience.  It was ever thus, with "Star Trek."  After its first season and a half, that saw scripts by some of science-fiction's best and brightest, "Star Trek" (the original series) was becoming rote, concentrating on relationships (there was a rotating "crewman-in-love" every week with the exceptions, significantly, of Sulu and Lt. Uhura) and planets that had remarkable resemblances to Earth.  When the movies came along, all of them (including the "Next Generation" movies, which had strictly prohibited the habit in its TV run) settled into the "Khan" pattern of having a central antagonist, rather than dealing with a cosmic crisis or ethical problem dictated by a planet's sociological peculiarities.*

But the Star Trek retro-fit changed the rules.  By altering the Trek timeline, the series could literally "go" anywhere to the "strange new worlds"—or old ones—of the mission statement from the "series bible."  So, for me, it's something of a lost opportunity that the first adventure out of the space-dock is a re-visit, tinkering with a too-obvious choice of what to "fix" and particularly re-writing one of the films to mixed results.

Not that Star Trek Into Darkness isn't fun—let's say that upfront—and never short of entertaining, taking full advantage of the shifted relationships of the Enterprise's new-old complement, but never straying from them that much to incorporate anyone new.  

This crew is more squabbly than the one from the Shatner-Nimoy-Kelley days. Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and Mr. Spock (Zachary Quinto) have an uneasy truce, still getting to know each other, and wondering why they should take a mutual mentor's advice that their alliance is mutually beneficial.  Kirk and Scotty (Simon Pegg, still delightful) are at odds over Kirk's motivations for a trip into Klingon territory and Mr. Scott takes a leave of absence from the crew, briefly, to be replaced by Mr. Chekhov (Anton Yelchin, who is underutilized, and frankly needed the job) as Chief Engineer.  And the unlikely romance between Lt. Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Spock is going through some warp-turbulence**—seems she thinks Spock is a little too aggressive in doing his duty and passive in accepting death, a nice little argument against the events of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which is further touched on throughout the movie.

Oh, that mission across the Klingon Neutral Zone mentioned earlier is to take out a terrorist, John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch, quite brilliant in this), who seems to be on a personal revenge campaign against Star Fleet, blowing up a London facility, and seeking asylum among the newly imagined bumpy-headed warriors on Kronos.  Kirk is charged by the hawkish Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) to find Harrison and fire some specially designed photon torpedoes at him with extreme prejudice.  To say anything more in the way of plot would be to spoil all sorts of little surprises and one big surprise in the film, which would be some sort of violation of the Movie Prime Directive.  I say that with some irony as once things start being revealed, the movie doesn't go off the rails, but rather travels a little too closely on them.  Oh, it has its own spin, and one that makes a shade more sense than ... Damn.  I can't even say that.  Let's merely say that for an alternate universe, this one sure provokes a sense of deja vu.***  For me, it seems a bit like the franchise is playing it very, very safe, which is particularly sad after its terrific (and risky) relaunch.  Not a good sign, especially as Abrams is moving on (to helm the first Disney "Star Wars" film).  

We need to go a bit more boldly next time.

Star Trek Into Darkness is a Matinee.  Dammit, Jim!

* Even Star Trek: First Contact took the brilliant conceit of a collective-mind tribe like the Borg, and created a never-before-seen "Borg Queen" as its antagonist.

** Small trekkie annoyance: Throughout the movie, she calls him "Spock."  Aren't they intimate enough that she can use his first name?  He has one, and the joke in the series was "You couldn't pronounce it."  Okay.  But she's an alien linguist.  So, if anyone could... Oh!  And another thing—at one point Kirk accuses Spock of "throwing me under the bus."   How archaic a reference is that?  Especially considering that seemingly everything floats in this universe.  Go ahead, throw him under a bus, it's going to sail right over him!  Now, if he'd said, "throw me into the warp-core"...heh, that would have been more appropriate. 

 *** Unrelated to those thoughts, but along the same lines: Cumberbatch's villain is the latest in a recent line of what should now be considered a new movie trope—the villain who lets himself be captured, following in the heels of The Joker in The Dark Knight, Loki in The Avengers, and Silva in Skyfall.   Okay, screen-writers, "you just don't get it, do you?"

Bottle Shock

Bottle Shock (Randall Miller, 2008) Miller has been making cheap, exploitation comedies (Class Act, Houseguest, The Sixth Man) for awhile now—alternating with some TV-directing work on shows with more on their mind ("Northern Exposure," "thirtysomething,") but Bottle Shock was made with his own money and he distributed it himself. One can imagine why: it's an intelligent, slightly loopy movie about pursuing your dreams despite being told (by the entire world) that you can't achieve them. It's also about wine— A sort of Rocky of the vineyards.  But, it's also a fictionalized version of true events.

The occurrence was a tectonic shift in the wine industry, which was monopolized in terms of quality by the French vintners of the Bordeaux region.  In 1976, a wine connoisuer and merchant Steven Spurrier, conducted a blind taste test between various products wine-producing areas.  It was assumed that the French would, of course, come out on top, but when labels were revealed, the clear winner of the competition were upstarts, from, frighteningly, California.  The wine-world was shocked (aghast!) that the center of the world vineyards became the neighborhood of Gallo (now owned, by the way, by Francis Coppola).

The facts are loose, and Spurrier has gone on record saying that he is less than thrilled with his portrayal—with sly, and, dare we say, dry alacrity—by Alan Rickman (personally, I'd be honored, but then I guess my taste is questionable) and with how the film tinkers with them, but Miller managed to make an okay film about grapes, waiting, sugar-chemistry, waiting, snobbery, waiting, and...obsession.

The main subject of the film (which might have spit in Spurrier's chardonnay) is Jim Barrett (played by Bill Pullman), a financial guru who has tired of dollars and sense to concentrate on nose and bouquet.  For the youth market, there are the required diversions of the chances-taking son (played by Chris Pine), who is not sure of following in his father's grape-stomping foot-steps, but is sure of making time with the UC Davis student (Rachael Taylor) who's decided to Summer working the fields...and playing them.  While wine-inspired lust simmers in the background, Pine's restless son manages to smuggle Dad's wine into the competition, a move the father staunchly disapproves of, despite being leveraged to the cork.

It's amiable, pleasant, with no harsh after-taste (despite the squabbling that was going on in the background of the film's making among the subjects and film-makers), and will more than satisfy any film-watcher's desire to see sun-dappled vineyards in long-shot.

Grin and Barrett

Unstoppable

"The Braking of Pelham 4-5-6"
or
"So...Now What the Hell Do We Do?"

Tony Scott's last film was the very "meh" update of The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 with Denzel Washington as a harried subway supervisor on the day that crazy terrorist John Travolta decides to take a train (and its passengers) hostage.  The movie was hysterical in the "hair-on-fire" way (and not in the "ha-ha" way) where the earlier Joseph Sargent-directed version was cleverly funny, the film-makers leaching colors out of the picture and backing it with a hip-hop beat.  It was a dull and lifeless movie with all sorts of editing tricks and false drama trying to make the thing seem more like an action movie than the material had the capacity to fulfill.  So, what you got was a movie that felt like it was suffering from inappropriate  'roid-rage.

Perhaps they should have skipped Pelham and gone straight to Unstoppable (called that because, presumably, Andrey Konchalovskiy already made Runaway Train in 1985!).  Based on the "Crazy 8's" incident in 2001, where an engineer-less train—train 777, making it apparently that much closer to "the Choo-Choo of the Beast"—carrying dangerous chemicals (the "molten phenol" used in the film), moved unimpeded and under power at speeds up to 48 mph, it has, like Pelham, been ginned up with drama and death and daring-do, and the inevitable "countdown to disaster" that could end Scranton, Pennsylvania as we know it.

Everything that can go wrong can and does.  The train is under power due to an operator error—he was under pressure from co-workers to move a heavily laden train quickly, and left the cab to try and move a track-switcher—with its brakes disconnected, is on a collision course with another filled with school-kids on a "train-safety" field-trip (Oooooh, the irony!), but there seem to be enough Pennsylvanians on the track that you suspect it was "Go Stand on a Railroad Track Day" in the state (at least, the film-makers kept it free of nuns, widows, orphans and puppies—although one shot of a raccoon crossing the track with the train hurtling at us in the background provoked an inappropriate fit of the giggles).  It's carrying the afore-mentioned molten phynol "used in the manufacture of glue"—and in case we don't get it (a problem with this movie) it is reiterated that it is "very toxic, highly volatile" and the place the train will most likely derail is in the middle of Scranton on a curve that overlooks (conveniently) a large collection of fuel oil storage tanks.  Now, ladies and gentlemen, that is bad city planning. 

On top of that, the corporate heads irresponsibly want to stop it in the least expensive way possible, meaning that it probably won't work, and the two engineers also on a collision course with "a missile the size of the Chrysler Building" consist of a bitter company vet and a kid on his first day on the job with a court appearance that he has to make.

This is one over-loaded train.  Scott pulls out all the stops—he doesn't have any brakes, either—skip-and ramp-editing the train footage to move it faster, swooping around the trains to give everything more momentum, constantly changing perspective to keep one ill at ease (until the two Mutt and Jeff engineers—Denzel Washington and Chris Pine—share a laugh—and a frame—half-way through the film, their conversations consist of separate shots of each speaking their lines from opposite perspectives of the engine compartment), it is a busy, busy movie.  Credit to Scott, he keeps you informed what's going on so you never get lost in the spinning images.  If anything, there is too much information—needlessly identifying various locations at the beginning when they're all 200 miles of each other, and not trusting any piece of information to not be re-iterated (after a terse conversation with the corporate HQ, do we need to have the gal in charge (Rosario Dawson) call her callous supervisor, played "an asshole?").  The entire plot is summed up a couple times during the movie ("So, what you're telling me is....") to the point where you're feeling slightly talked down to.  Still, it is a bit of a fun ride for all the lapses in passenger-service.

One funny aspect of the film is its constant thrusting of Fox News coverage of the event (the film is a 20th Century Fox release and both entities are holdings of News Corp.).  But it may be a bit of a miscalculation: the circling news helicopters buzzing the train seem to not only distract, but also interfere with the rescue efforts, to the point where they're actually one of the things hampering the struggles of the people to resolve the situation.   Fox runs the risk of making one of their own divisions look poor in their attempt to cross-promote, derailing their own efforts throughout the film.

Unstoppable is a Rental.   

Star Trek (2009)

"See If You Can Do Better"

I got a call from the Captain about 5 o'clock (that'd be 2000 hours for him)on Friday, and when I saw who it was, I called him back and said "I know what this is about."

The Captain is a life-long Trekker. He knows the arcana of "Star Trek" in its canon, that being the television series—both broadcast and syndicated—and film. Plus, he's a little "inside," having drinks with the late Majel Barrett Roddenberry, introducing Patrick Stewart to "Buzz" Aldrin, and calling up Jonathan Frakes the day show creator Gene Roddenberry died to talk about "what it all meant."

The Captain knows from "Trek." So I was particularly interested in his take on "The New Version" of J.J. Abrams, or "Star Trek Begins" (a version of which producer Harve Bennett had proposed away back in the time-space continuum before "Star Trek V"—you know, the Shatner-directed one best forgotten). I'd watched the trailers warily, noting the emphasis on disrobing cadets and slam-bang action (not mutually exclusive), but noting a certain underlying devotion, not entirely slavish, to the original. They weren't trying to re-invent the warp-drive, which was a good thing.

"So..." I said, "what'd ya think?"

"This is the way they should have always done it.." he began.

Yeah. It is.

"Star Trek" is a rollicking world-and-expectations-shattering version of the Gene Roddenberry original, and most niftily, done in a way that fits within its science-fiction-y concepts. The whole movie is its plot-point and one watches in wonder how the deconstruction happens before one's eyes, while simultaneously nodding acquaintance with the tropes, concepts, and characterizations of the original. One gets the feeling of happy ebullience watching a favorite building imploded with the added delight of seeing it rise simultaneously from its own ashes to be sleeker, shinier and un-compromising

Part of it is due to budget. Abrams was given a fat check to re-launch Paramount's key franchise (which it nickeled and dimed into the ground), so the limitations the creators always had to contend with aren't so apparent. The Enterprise corridors no longer look like motel hallways, Engineering isn't a big space with a back-lit perspective painting behind it, and the aliens restricted to stereo-eyed bipeds with varying head-ridges. No, there's a lot of imagineering going on here in the Enterprise's brave new world of industrial-strength space-faring (at one point the new Captain Kirk sprints—of which he does...a lot—through what I swear was a brewery standing in for some section of the Enterprise's inner workings). The creatures have evolved differently* with nonhuman proportions, sometimes tossing out the human baggage entirely. It's a messy universe, but a full one with good ideas and concepts tossed amid the dialogue. It's a "Star Trek" Universe so full of potential, that there's no chance of coming across a creatively bankrupt parallel Earth, although the film manages to do exactly that in its own clever way.

That's the big picture. The question is the actors; the franchise will live or die on how "the New Kids" can portray the old characters. Fortunately, it's where "Star Trek" shines. Everyone will have their favorites—mine are Karl Urban's note-perfect blustering McCoy and Simon Pegg's hyper-driven Scotty—but Chris Pine is a genuine find for Captain James Tiberius Kirk, employing none of the Shatnerisms (well, there's one deliberate vocal steal that made me laugh), but supplying the one thing that Shatner always brought to the table—energy. John Cho's Sulu is terrific and it's a hoot to see Russian actor Anton Yelchin employing the wretched "wessels" accent of the original Chekov. Zoe Saldana is given much more to do as Lt. Uhura, and given that he had Leonard Nimoy on-set for inspiration, Zachary Quinto might have taken the easy way out with a direct imitation, but his Mr. Spock is far less serene, more volatile and haughty, betraying that human half far more subtly than Nimoy did—and I believe saying that might be a court-martial offense in my house.

Where the other "Trek" movies have fallen down have been the secondary characters, but here they're just as important—Ben Cross and Winona Ryder play the star-crossed parents of Spock, while Bruce Greenwood is a superb Captain Christopher Pike. And Eric Bana, who can be on or off depending on the movie, is terrific as the long-suffering, revenge-driven Romulan Nero.

There will be a lot of sniping from the "Trekkies" who want things their way, or no way—that's to be expected with any "Trek" movie. But in the words of the former Captain Kirk: "Get a life."

Star Trek" certainly got a new one.

"Star Trek" is a Full-Price Ticket.

* There is a wickedly funny bar scene where Kirk tries to pick up the comely Lt. Uhura, while between them sits an alien seemingly modeled on the "Spitting Image" version of Leonard Nimoy, when it suddenly dawned on me what it was doing there: "Why the long face?"