Thinking Out Loud

Tag: science fiction

Why can’t Star Trek always be as good as The Undiscovered Country?

“Please let me know if there’s another way we can screw up tonight.”

Not only is Nicholas Meyer’s The Undiscovered Country my personal favorite Star Trek movie, I may go far as to argue that it is the best. It truly ticks every box of what makes Star Trek Star Trek, and comes the closest to getting everything just right.

Watching it back-to-back with its immediate predecessor is especially informative. Director William Shatner’s The Final Frontier is not quite the unmitigated fiasco its reputation would have it, but it has many flaws, the most tragic being its deep lack of dignity. There was no escaping the increasing ages of its beloved cast, but it’s just plain preposterous to open with Kirk free-climbing a mountainside, and then end with him embarrassingly huffing and puffing up a tiny hill. And poor Uhura is treated even worse, in what must be one of the most sexist scenes in Trek’s entire history.

Classic Star Trek was in the process of being eclipsed by the Next Generation TV series, midway through its 1987-1994 run at the time, just hitting its stride in quality and popularity. It would have been heartbreaking for the low point of The Final Frontier to have been the last adventure for the classic Enterprise crew. Things could have gone so wrong. Thankfully, The Undiscovered Country reclaims everything that The Final Frontier squandered, and allows the full original cast to go out on a high note.

Cold war brinksmanship in outer space.

Far from ignoring the cast’s age, The Undiscovered Country instead embraces it. Our former space cowboy heroes have all aged into diplomatic and strategic roles in Starfleet, and their frontier mindsets chafe at the transition. We’re no longer asked to believe William Shatner is possessed of ageless physical prowess. Kirk wins a fight largely through a lucky sucker punch, and when he’s smooched by the much younger Iman, the moment is immediately undercut… twice.

The stakes are high enough to be serious, but not so low that the movie resembles a feature-length television episode, the excuse often made by fandom to apologize for the too-frequent mediocrity of the feature films. The previously thinly-drawn foes the Klingons are here reimagined as canny equals, on the opposing side of an interstellar cold war. Christopher Plummer is superb as a canny political operator — today, we would recognize his paper-thin charm and propensity for brazen assassinations as very Putin-like. The metaphor for US/Russian relations may be unsubtle but it packs a punch, particularly as Kirk struggles to overcome a lifetime of prejudice.

Meyer & Denny Martin Flinn’s screenplay is a thing of beauty, with an airtight plot, crackling dialog, and just the right balance of humor and gravitas; it’s somehow the funniest and the most serious Trek movie. The at-the-time cutting edge CGI special effects are used efficiently and for story purposes instead of mere flash and sizzle (globules of alien blood floating in zero-gravity not only looks neat, but is a significant plot detail). The entire cast is on point, and everyone gets a moment to shine.

As if to make up for The Final Frontier, Nichelle Nichols has several standout scenes (including my favorite among many classic Trek facepalms):

The Undiscovered Country begs the question: why can’t Star Trek always be this good?

December 16, 2018
Teenagers shall inherit the world in Wes Ball’s Maze Runner: The Death Cure

While definitely not in the target audience, and without expressly setting out to do so, I’ve still somehow managed to see all three Maze Runner movies. Their easy availability on streaming services is just too tempting for my chronic addiction to escapist sci-fi.

It’s interesting to see how young adult fiction contrives such scenarios where adults are absent, subservient, or villains. Like Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Hunger Games, the Maze Runner movies are constructed upon the trope of there being one single girl or boy, born with the inherent destiny of rescuing a world that the older generation has squandered. I’m sure kids are not blind to how the genre panders to them, but that doesn’t mean it’s not cathartic for them to imagine themselves bearing cataclysmic responsibilities in life-or-death, world-ending situations.

While none of the Maze Runner films are very good, I did appreciate the first’s relatively straightforward Lord of the Flies pastiche (with the caveat that the premise allowed for only one female character — inexcusable in this day and age). As the original title helpfully elucidated, the hero’s journey was to simply escape a maze, which of course came equipped with a minotaur. But the original quest is accomplished, the title becomes essentially meaningless in later installments. To be fair, their subtitles Scorch Trials and Death Cure are also silly, so I guess cool-sounding nonsense is part of the whole package.

This year’s Maze Runner field trip will be chaperoned by Aiden Gillen and Patricia Clarkson.

Wes Ball’s The Death Cure is a bloodless PG-13 zombie war movie for kids, and almost preposterously long at almost 2 1/2 hours. But it does boast some exciting action sequences, however wildly illogical and coincidence-dependent. The opening rescue of captives from a caravan is an effective emulation of Mad Max for kiddos, and the aerial ensnare of an entire bus near the end is impressive.

The young cast is… fine, if a little bland except for an impassioned Thomas Brodie-Sangster (doomed to be known as him from Love Actually). Like Kate Winslet in Divergence, Ashley Judd in The Hunger Games, and every grownup in Harry Potter, a handful of respected respected veteran indie actors take up the slack: Patricia Clarkson and Aiden Gillen as baddies-with-actually-rather-complex-motivations, and the Giancarlo Esposito Drinking Game (take a swig every time he says “hermano”, and you’ll be on the floor long before the end).

October 27, 2018
Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone is bad and bonkers, but never boring

Lamont Johnson’s Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone is definitely a bad movie, but also definitely not a boring movie. Possessed of a slightly bonkers energy, the plot races from one crazy incident to the next. I’m not sure if today’s action movies have this many — or this varied — set pieces: a wild steampunk train raid, an escape from subterranean amazons & their pet sea-snake, a nude zombie attack, a torturous obstacle race, and on and on.

It comes across as shamelessly derivative, until I realized that most of what I thought it was ripping off had not even come out yet: Dune‘s desolate landscapes, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome‘s vehicle design, and Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s borg (note Michael Ironside’s costume). Most notably, it manages to prefigure the basic plot of Mad Max: Fury Road: reluctant male hero helps woman rescue female captives of a pervy, despotic cyborg.

Were it not for the flat staging, witless dialogue, and atrocious acting all around, this might be better remembered as some kind of mad cult classic. Sorry, Molly Ringwald! You were miscast. Love you forever.

September 29, 2018
Battle Beyond the Stars is Star Wars gone wrong

Battle Beyond the Stars is the rare bad movie worth experiencing. How can you not be at least a little curious about a Roger Corman-produced Star Wars pastiche, starring John-Boy from The Waltons, Hannibal from The A-Team, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., with a screenplay by John Sayles and special effects by James Cameron?

Like Starcrash a few years earlier, Jimmy T. Murakami’s Battle Beyond the Stars crassly copies a number of superficial elements from Star Wars: sassy robots, radial wipes, exploding planets, severed arms, and heavy borrowing from Akira Kurosawa and John Sturges (Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven in this case).

But it betrays a total cluelessness regarding the real feat that George Lucas pulled off: iconic characters, mythic underpinnings, and a tantalizing sense of a larger world worth exploring. Its spaceships, lasers, and robots are all in service of the story, not the other way around — otherwise you wind up with Battle Beyond the Stars, essentially a special effects reel with cursory linking material. Everything Star Wars gets right, Battle Beyond the Stars gets wrong.

They really know how to party, beyond the stars.

As for those aforementioned James Cameron special effects, there sure are a lot of them. The ratio of effects shots to live-action studio footage must be near-equal. There’s a tremendous discrepancy between the level of effort expended on the models and matte paintings, vs the dialogue, characterization, and story.

The performances certainly don’t commend it. Robert Vaughn sleepwalks through it, and George Peppard hambones as an Earth cowboy. Richard Thomas doesn’t seem to have a handle on his character, which I suspect is due to a lack of clarity in the writing & direction. Like Luke Skywalker, he’s an everyman farmboy with aspirations to be a pilot. What appears to make him unique among his people is his ability to pilot a A.I.-powered spaceship, but he later claims to not know anything about computers. He’s also an embittered jerk who seems resentful for the ragtag army that sacrifices everything for his world.

And it would be a waste of time to outline the ways in which it is ridiculously sexist. It’s only 3 years younger than Star Wars, but decades more retrograde.

August 30, 2018
Foolproof and Incapable of Error: Christopher Nolan’s 70mm Unrestoration of 2001: A Space Odyssey

If any excuse were necessary to rewatch Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a new print projected in a proper theater would certainly be it.

To mark the film’s 50th anniversary, Warner Bros. commissioned filmmaker and Kubrick aficionado Christopher Nolan to create a set of new 70mm prints. Nolan’s team located an intact 70mm preservation print, and strove to reproduce its inherent color and picture quality without digital effects. In theory, this new version of the film would be closer to what original audiences saw in 1968, intrinsically more authentic than any subsequent prints, broadcasts, or home entertainment releases — all of which were multiple generations removed (more details in this interesting Ars Technica piece).

Perhaps wary of historical revisionism, Nolan has described the result as “unrestored”. Why coin a marketing buzzword, for surely, if a new print struck from the best available elements is not a restoration, then what is? A colleague of mine suggested a better way of describing it: “not remastered”.

The “Dawn of Man” looked markedly more colorful and saturated than I remembered.

If Nolan’s goal was to recreate the authentic analog celluloid experience, warts and all, then I suppose it would have to be judged a success. The particular print I saw (at New York City’s Village East Cinema in May 2018) had likely already been screened numerous times. It was rife with dust and scratches throughout, with a distracting jitter during most of the Dawn of Man sequence, and inexcusable vertical scratches throughout the entire Beyond the Infinite chapter. This print certainly had greater contrast and depth of color than any version I’ve ever seen, but I wouldn’t complain if digital technology were employed to ameliorate some of this distracting damage.

Film Comment states the Nolan version was “struck from the original camera negative of the earliest screening version of a film that later underwent panicky last-minute edits”. It’s true enough that the film was not initially well-received upon its 1968 premiere, and Kubrick made judicious cuts of up to 19 minutes of footage. But Film Comment seems to imply that the Nolan version includes cut material. I’ve seen this movie at least 10 times (including the 2011 blu-ray), and there wasn’t a single moment that I didn’t know well.

Thanks to articles like Film Comment‘s, and the “unrestoration” marketing, I experienced a double disappointment. I even briefly wondered if the Village East Cinema had screened an existing print of the film. But I should have known not to expect a mythical longer cut, or blu-ray-like visual perfection. But the brilliant film itself transcends all this.

Foolproof and incapable of error. A masterpiece.

August 18, 2018
Gorging on Nostalgia: Solo: A Star Wars Story

Like a big bowl of candy, Solo: A Star Wars Story certainly went down easy. But also like a big bowl of candy, generations raised on too much Star Wars are going to gorge themselves sick on nostalgia. Who filled that bowl, and why? When Disney acquired the Star Wars rights, and promised a new movie every year, I don’t think I was alone in imagining there would be more than enough room for original stories. But so far Disney has spent more time facing backwards than forwards.

To recap: The Force Awakens was in many ways a phantom remake of the original Star Wars, rationalized as rebooting the franchise with a new foundation for future stories. Rogue One and Solo are essentially neu-prequels, plastering in the gaps deliberately left in the original foundation. Solo is especially focussed on continuity and nostalgic callbacks, and teasing future nostalgic callbacks yet to come. It isn’t about anything other than itself. Four films in, The Last Jedi stands alone in striking out for new territory. It’s the first to really surprise.

Maybe I’m being overly cynical, but what is the point of the neu-prequels, if not mere fan service? Aren’t the missions to steal the Death Star plans and the Kessel Run better left to the imagination? Did anyone really wonder how Chewbacca came by his diminutive nickname? Do we feel we understand Han more now that we know where he got his surname? The one major new detail we learn about him — that he is an Empire deserter — loses its impact when even this idea is recycled: q.v. Finn in the mothership films.

The most egregious fan service in the film is of course the confounding cameo by Darth Maul — confounding, that is, only for those evidently undedicated Star Wars fans like myself that haven’t seen the spinoff animated series. My reaction was not “wow, Darth Maul survived being sliced in half!”, but rather “All this took place before The Phantom Menace? How old is Han Solo? Does Darth Maul always fire up his lightsaber before hanging up the phone?”

Alden Ehrenreich has caught some flak for his performance here, but he was given an impossible job: impersonate Harrison Ford and get criticized, or don’t impersonate Harrison Ford and get criticized. He either chose the latter or was not able to pull off the former. Whichever explanation, he looks bad opposite Donald Glover, who successfully channelled Billy Dee Williams while still doing his own thing.

By the standard set by the original trilogy and prequels, Solo‘s three prominent female characters should count as progress. Or, it would have, had the film not quickly killed two of them off. The original Star Wars infamously included only one woman among its cast, but Carrie Fisher’s force of personality made her instantly iconic, and that’s lacking here.

Also, Paul Bettany was fine but Michael K. Williams got robbed.

August 16, 2018
The Future is a Tasteful Monochrome: Anon

Andrea Niccol’s Netflix exclusive Anon is a rather quaint throwback to the techno-paranoia cyberpunk genre, once common in the late nineties — remember Virtuosity, Johnny Mnemonic, and Paycheck? The ultimate modern incarnation of is of course the BBC series Black Mirror, which out-Philip-K.-Dicked Philip K. Dick., and set a newly high bar for cynical, pessimistic takes on the future.

But reality has outpaced all of these cautionary tales, as we’ve since come to understand that of course governments surveil our movements and communications, while unchecked corporations build detailed consumer profiles on all of us. Logging off is little protection.

If Anon‘s future America without the Constitutional right to privacy were to come true, society’d have bigger problems than a sexy serial killer (Amanda Seyfried), exploiting the system to murder those who exploit the system. Ultra-grim detective Sal Frieland (Clive Owen) must fight the ambiguities of his digital record to entrap her. After, of course, bedding the much younger woman under false pretenses (for there are sleazy erotic thriller tropes and a female nudity quota to fulfill). Privacy is the foundation for many civil rights we enjoy today, a topic Anon only glancingly acknowledges.

And if we ever start installing apps into our eyeballs, I somehow doubt the GUI will be a tastefully-designed monochrome. Everyone who’s ever touched a computer or smartphone knows we’ll be blinded by punch-the-monkey banner ads, free-to-play gem-matching games, and tweets from President Kid Rock.

August 15, 2018
Petrochemicals, munitions, and Aqua-Cola: Mad Max: Fury Road

A dystopia ruled by three corporate fiefdoms: petrochemicals, munitions, and Aqua-Cola. A diseased and starving population terrorized by a religious army motivated by martyrdom. A decadent ruling class reliant upon the subjugation of women. Environmental collapse. Car culture run amok.

It must be escapist summer blockbuster season!

In case I sound too snarky, let me be clear: I checked my pacifism at the door and loved every second of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road. More visionary lunatic filmmakers should get multimillion dollar budgets.

I was going to add it should have been called Furiosa, but I see that’s the title of the forthcoming sequel. Fitting, because Charlize Theron owned a film in which the Tom Hardy’s title character played second fiddle to a largely female cast.

May 15, 2015
Riddick makes the most haphazard of movie franchises

When even the humblest movies are planned to allow for multiple sequels if at all financially feasible, the Riddick trilogy (and counting?) must be one of the most haphazard of movie franchises.

I doubt many would have expected any kind of sequel at all to 2000’s Pitch Black, and yet The Chronicles of Riddick appeared four years later to reinvent its surviving character as the hero of a grand sword & sandal epic in outer space. It’s not unlike the later John Carter of Mars, but less wasteful in terms of money spent, and with 100% more hovering Judi Dench.

Even more improbable still, with David Twohy’s Riddick, Vin Diesel is now officially the headliner of a trilogy. Having achieved the holy number of installments, now three movies can be packaged together in budget multi-dvd box sets in time for Black Friday shopping. Or should that be that Pitch Black Friday? Oh, please yourself.

Riddick has more in common with Pitch Black than Chronicles, but one thing they all share is surprisingly good art direction and set design. Chronicles, especially, went far above and beyond the call of duty. I’d argue that it draws more from Dune‘s visual imagination than the typically plundered art direction of Alien or Star Wars. Even Riddick has more believable alien landscapes than the volcano top conclusion to After Earth, which looked like it had been shot on the tiniest soundstage M. Night Shyamalan could book.

Katie Sackoff and Dave Bautista in Riddick

Riddick‘s plot is admirably simple (man trapped alone on a hostile planet, struggles to simply survive, then gain a foothold to escape), and the first 30 minutes or so are crackerjack. But then additional characters show up and so there has to be… shudder… dialog.

Sadly, everything falls apart at this point — and I mean everything, from the visuals to the script. What started out as an intriguing shipwreck story turned into something conventional and cheap. The bulk of what follows is set inside a single room, and not in a good way (like a good submarine movie, for instance), but in a bad way (like, they ran out of money and ideas).

Riddick is also unfortunately sexist. Battlestar Galactica fan favorite Katee Sackoff gets the coveted only-girl-in-the-movie role, and she dutifully works what her momma gave her. She’s sadly stuck with a retrograde character who exists mostly to concede to Riddick’s brutish flirtations. It’s unclear if her character is actually gay or simply allows her male colleagues to assume she is, but either way, it’s stomach turning when she acquiesces to Riddick’s crude propositions. Her utility exhausted, she simply vanishes from the film.

September 6, 2013
The Matrix Reloaded is the best Matrix movie

Conventional wisdom will tell you there is only one good Matrix movie, and it’s called The Matrix. Conventional wisdom is wrong.

The Wachowski‘s The Matrix Reloaded does everything movie lovers claim they want from sequels, and complain that Hollywood so rarely gives them: it expands the cast of characters while still taking care to enrich the returning players, it delves deeper into the themes of the first film while widening the scope to include even more, it explores the fictional universe in ways that illuminate the character’s motivations, it ups the ante on cutting-edge special effects, and expertly raises the stakes for a grand climax in a promised subsequent film.

Stop! It’s bullet time.

The Matrix Reloaded is smarter, has more exceptional action set pieces, and employs a more consistent sense of morality than the original The Matrix. It always bothered me that Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) casually sacrifice innocent humans by the dozens in the first film. I am sure it was a deliberate creative choice that in Reloaded, the heroes battle only virtual “programs”.

So why the popular opinion that both Matrix sequels suck? Here’s my theory: the concluding film in the trilogy (The Matrix Revolutions) fails to live up to everything set up by Reloaded. The mediocre third film makes all three look bad in retrospect. With time, I maintain people will look back and reappraise the entire trilogy and recognize The Matrix Reloaded as the best of the three.

July 24, 2013