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?"

Super 8

"Heavin' Steven"
or
"Asshole! Can You Stop Blowing Things Up for Two Seconds and Move the Camera?"

J.J. Abrams already had told you what this film would be with his first teaser—trailer and before anyone knew he was working on it.*  That first teaser had all the candy-smudged fingerprints of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (by way of Jaws) through it...with a noticeable twist—the utility vehicle that looks so much like Roy Neary's from that film drives onto some railroad tracks and crashes into a train causing a massive derailment, and the freeing of...something.  Something that goes crash-bang-boom in the night.  And won't take the time to let you complete five notes of Zoltán Kodály's musical hand-signs.

Super 8 is very clearly a Spielberg homage: the kid-centric cast of fresh faces; the swooping crane shots making parabolas before reaching for the high vantage point; the big faces turning toward the camera; the empty sky shots that are just waiting for something to fill them; the overlapping dialog; the hiring of local yokels for "color"; the slow reveals—things that make a lot of damage before we really see anything; the dysfunctional families; the ostracized pint-sizers and geeks; the showman's brio of opening the curtain just a little...then closing it...again and again and again.**

Abrams is doing an homage to Spielberg (even got him to produce it), but it's still his movie, more so than, say, Tobe Hooper imprinted Poltergeist.  If anything, this one is a little more polished (than MI:III and Star Trek [2009]) because it's trying to ape Spielberg—there's more technique and less hitting the camera for jitters' sake, like the movie was on a perpetual coffee-jag—even if the film purposefully, deliberately simulates 1970's film-grain and anamorphic lens-flares (that actually get irritating after awhile)  But, the tone is more Abrams.  If I can use a culinary metaphor, Spielberg's early run was like a sweet-and-sour dish at a family-friendly Asian restaurant; Abrams gooses everything up a a couple stars flipping the ratio between action and characterization (there's more of the latter than the former)—the action a bit grittier, the emotions a might more painful and the pangs a bit more heart-felt.

For one thing, Abrams likes girls.  And by that I mean that he knows how to write for them.  For all the time that he spent contemplating the heavens, the boy-filmmaker Spielberg did not understand that men and women come from different planets.*** Spielberg's women (in his early films) were tom-boys with girl-clothes, or icons that the men-folk didn't/couldn't fathom.  Here, the women are people (when they're allowed to be more than caricatures—the older sister, played by AJ Michalka, doesn't much rise above "petulant teen" mode).  Elle Fanning's Alice Dainard feels like a real-life human being, her emotions raw and just under the surface.  It's no wonder Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), the hero of the piece, is obsessed with her, beyond the fact that they're both motherless children with absent fathers (Ron Eldard, as a guilt-ridden alcoholic, and the great Kyle Chandler as Joe's Deputy Dad).  Of course, they gravitate to each other—they're both dependable people in undependable worlds.

They meet—well, they already know each other by reputation from school—because baby-Orson Welles Charlie Kaznyk (Riley Griffiths) is making a Super-8 zombie movie for a an amateur film competition.  Joe's half the crew, and Charlie has cast Alice as the dutiful "wife" of a zombie investigator (wonder where they train for that).  During a night-time shoot at a far-flung railway station, the kids are witness to, and almost victims of, the spectacular train-crash—of the teaser—caused by a truck travelling the tracks to deliberately de-rail it.  The sequence goes on a bit too long, but it is a "Holy Crap!" inducing spectacular where, despite the CGI that was certainly involved you worry for the young actors dodging the fireballs and sizable debris hurtling through the frame.  Abrams is a bit more visceral that Spielberg was, and has a cruel way of making sure you glimpse everything while not letting up the pace.  He also keeps the reveal of the "thing" as delayed as possible, exposing only bits and pieces, various debris-fields and the governmental cover-up feint that insures we go through the bulk of the film's progress without knowing exactly what in Ohio is going on.****

All for the better.  With all the manic mayhem Abrams dishes out, the focus is more on the people caught in the web of circumstance than in the BEM behind it all—in that, Abrams has more in common with M. Night Shyamalan (specifically Signs, where it seemed apparent the writer-director didn't give a Sixth Sense about what the aliens were like, so much as what the humans were going through).  This leads to a rushed finale where through some E.T. like-symbiosis the kids and the "creature" (oh, let's call him a "Horta," shall we?) come to a meeting of minds and a mutual focusing of priorities.  Both must find "home," and both get there a might too hurriedly and conveniently.

Still, Abrams, despite truncating any deeply emotional pay-off in his ending, does manage to stay focused on what's important—the holding-on and the letting-go.  If Super 8 isn't as moving in its consummation as its inspirations were, at least it reminds us—as the whole exercise set out to do—of how rich they were and how their power should not be overlooked or taken for granted.

Super 8 is a cheap Matinee.

*

**  He missed one thing, though: the opening shot along a fence of some kind.

*** The funny thing is (if I can be gossipy for a moment) is that Spielberg didn't fully grasp women until he'd worked with his present wife Kate Capshaw, who gives one of the most irritating performances of any woman in his films in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

**** At one point, I thought it was going to turn into a "giant spider" movie.

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?"