Singular-Minded

Mayhaps I am a sensitive soul but watching movies is usually a terrifically emotional experience for me. Recently I've twice-sat in on two films which I could say I've experienced more than I really watched. The first would be Fury, a war movie starring Brad Pitt and company as the crewman for an American tank in the twilight months of the Second World War. Fury isn't an especially great movie - the overall message seems... sophomoric when considering the subject matter and it ladles out heavy servings of cheese on several occasions. It isn't as well put together as, say, Saving Private Ryan which does a better job of creating both an experience and conveying a story. 

But boy-howdy is Fury ever one of those see-it-in-theaters type movies. It's hard for me to easily recommend - if you want to feel like you're huddled huddled shoulder-to-shoulder with soggy, exhausted infantrymen whose coats are heavy with damp, reek, and mud while 7.62 rounds bang off the front of the clattering, snarling Sherman tank providing you with a mobile shield as you inch your way across open ground to a hasty German defensive position, then by all means watch it. If you want to feel claustrophobic, deafened, and terrified as four American Shermans dance a slow and high-stakes ballet with a single German Panzer - feel the air suck out of your lungs as 88mm anti-tank rounds howl like banshees overhead and peel paint off the side of your turret while your gunner frantically attempts to traverse and engage and everyone is screaming because people are dying and everyone is going to fucking die if you can't get around it and get ahead of its gun and then be racked with relief and grief when it's over and all that's left is the burning of engine oil and the terrible empty silence that was moments ago filled with chaos - well, this is the movie to see.  

Why you would might want to experience that is a pretty good question, I guess. But I remember watching Lone Survivor and listening to the squeal and thunder of Chinook rotors and feel the machine heartbeat in my chest and boots as a four-man team stepped panting into the mountains under the burden of heavy rucksacks. I watch Fury and I remember laughing nervously through a screen of cigarette smoke in the back of a LAV-3 while dust tumbled down in screens from the air-sentry hatch, ears humming with the monotony of radio chatter. I remember banging my fingers off the C-SAM and hearing the muffled thump-thump-thump clang-clang-clang of our gunner laying down a Z-pattern burst and watching the kinetic backlash kick dirt up on the screen and howling with the frenzy of it. It's cathartic. 

The second movie is Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. I've seen it twice and both times I've had the wind knocked out of me. Both times I've walked out of the theater with friends or my brothers and said it's the best movie I've ever seen - subjective, biased, a heat-of-the-moment sort of thing, maybe, but I can't help but feel disconnected from the cynical critical observations I've perused through online. I guess in the end, it's an emotional issue that can't readily be rationalized - I guess I'm a very empathetic being. 

Spoilers ahead, folks.

I think the main reason Star Trek: Into Darkness left such a bad taste in my mouth was that it was ideologically bankrupt and Star Trek, if anything, is an entirely ideological concept. When Gene Roddenberry wrote

"Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It's five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

I doubt very much he intended it to be representative of a brainless game of laser-tag. Superficially Captain Kirk traveled to "strange new worlds" made of styrofoam and had sex with green women but subcutaneously the series was a kind of fictional vanguard for the pursuit of knowledge and for human exploration. Superficially, Interstellar (especially with all the awesome power of IMAX™) lets us wonder at the silent majesty of space yawning terribly around the fragile Endurance; we breathlessly watch it tumble insignificantly past Saturn's rings, fold through space into a wormhole and feel the physical stresses run through the ship's frame and instruments, gaze upon the blinding event horizon of a massive black hole, feel its tidal power move waves the size of mountains across the surface of a planet caught haplessly in its orbit, and break frozen clouds into a glittering riot across the upper atmospheres of some alien, semi-gaseous world galaxies away. 

The hard physics of this are irrelevant in face of the theme - if I can hand-on-heart talk about the conveyance of realism in Donkey Kong Country, then I can attest that Christopher Nolan achieves similar conveyance through Interstellar's depiction of space-travel. Now that the movie is also an emotional roller-coaster - to hook an audience on the layman's terms - and viscerally dramatizes temporal relativity and the traumatic effects on a small American family adds profundity to the overall experience. MacConnaughey watches helplessly as his children grow old and suffer emotionally through distant radio transmissions, stuck in dilated time, The concept of a loved one ultimately beyond your reach and that love exists beyond purely physical dimensions gnawed at my heart - but how couldn't it? We are all human and suffer the same. 

I am a very tonelessly unreligious man. To me, religion seems like a sort of betrayal - to believe in purely fantastical concepts for the sake of comfort and community baffle me because I guess I am a humanist. I acknowledge fundamental scientific reasoning and that unanswered questions will be answered not by some higher power but by our own ingenuity and achievement. If that is faith, then I willingly choose that faith. MacConnaughey's character plummets into Gargantua and finds himself unstuck in a tesseract of space-time desperately attempting to caress his daughter's face decades into the past and correct his mistakes. The revelation that this five-dimensional room is the construct not of some alien power, but of a future human civilization evolved beyond our contemporary comprehension raises the hair on my arms. Why believe in anything if not us? 

To know that there is a finite amount of matter in all the universe and that it cannot vanish - only change states - and to dream about somehow reaching beyond space and time to even faintly hold my youngest brother in my arms again; or that whatever made up Tommy beyond his physical vessel must exist in one form or another - could somehow try and reach through that barrier - is religion enough for me. 

How could anyone want to believe in anything else? 

Same Country, Different Province

Well it's been a few months now since the suicide of my youngest brother. You would think this heavy subject would be what I want to talk about more than anything - to open a vein and pour red, wet words across a white page. Frankly, it's the last thing I want to talk about. The impact of it makes me feel malformed with grief and it has overall been a confusing and terrible experience. The whole world is a darker, grayer place, with fewer points of light in between. The geography of every day life has shifted - some thing matter more, other things less or not at all. It's hard to trust yourself to be okay all the time anymore - some days you move through life as if nothing has changed and other days you sit down and your heart cracks open with grief and all you can do is try and hold the pieces together until you can breathe again.

We were four brothers, a Four-Temperament Ensemble. We were Ninja Turtles, Pizza Cats, Ghostbusters. Now we're staggered down to three and trying to share what's left and made haggard with the cold mathematics of tragedy.

When I think of Tommy I think of holidays, of Christmas, and of lumbering down to the rec-room and splaying out on the big leather couches with Mike and John and lording over our youngest brother as he diligently set up game-system after game-system. Four brothers, four controller-ports, all plugged in to each other. We hit each other with shells or won more stars or fought over golden guns or collaborated in a scrambling, dysfunctional sort of way (usually over each others backs) to get all the Star Coins in Mario. Now there's an empty slot, a CPU, a bot.

I think regression is the common trope of grief, and so I occasionally find myself doing nothing but watching Game Grumps' Let's Plays or SNES retrospectives or fiddle-fucking around with emulated classics and sometimes wishing my HTC One-M8 was a Gameboy. Occasionally there is some heavy, emotional significance - like orchestrated Squaresoft music- but not always. The first time I played Donkey Kong Country for the SNES was at my dentist's office in Winnipeg. The man was a genius - had installed several then-gen Sega and Nintendo gaming consoles in his office waiting room to mesmerize whiny, bored kids and keep their minds off the hooks and drills and fluoride. Sonic 2, Aladdin, oh boy!

Something struck me about Donkey Kong Country, though - which, despite being stellar platforming games and some of the best Wii titles, is missing from the Returns and Tropical Freeze sequels. For a pixelated 2-D game about monkeys jumping on crocodiles DKC managed, through sheer mechanics and decoration, to convey genuine atmosphere.

Granted, this is owed to David Wise's outstanding soundtrack - but also to aesthetic. Again, despite being a game about anthropomorphic gorillas beating up alligators to steal back floating bananas something about DKC's design aesthetic conveys realism and grit. Something about the weight and jump mechanics while platforming - about your Kong's constant vulnerability to the enemies and level design around them - something about the awesome worlds you explore. That latter bit may be a big piece of it - there is a grain of fantasy, of cartoon, planted in an otherwise realistic world of chasms and pitfalls and pastoral landscapes. Yep, cartoon animals. Gotcha, floating barrels. But there is no... cartoon vegetation... or bizarre and childishly drawn mountains. Pine trees, icy grottos, coral reefs, and oh - Kremlins, beat those guys up. The minimalism does a lot for the aesthetic - like the original Crash Bandicoot for the PSX.

I'm a firm believer that the medium should dictate the message, ultimately, and in the case of Donkey Kong Country realism is conveyed rather than directly experienced through game design. If Super Mario Bros. is an absolutely enjoyable game to play, then Donkey Kong Country is an absolutely perilous one. The first game (unlike it's successors) lacks some serious balance gameplay-wise. You can cheerfully coast through the first three worlds and hoard lives like nobody's business and then WHAM Gorilla Glacier will stonewall your progress and every level will see you test the tensile flexibility of your SNES controller a little more as you grind your teeth watching Diddy Kong get barrel-blasted right into a Zinger or miss than one last bloody jump. The difficulty is immersive - pattern recognition, obstacle memorization, timing and dexterity. You're paying attention when you play Donkey Kong, fuck the doorbell. 

There is an interesting thematic arrangement in the world-design as the lush jungles and forests and natural environments give way to the toxic, industrialized wastelands of K. Rool's mines and factories:

Which does a lot to magnify the theme of increasing peril and difficulty. If it were up to me, I would have reversed the play-order for Kremco Inc. and Monkey Mines (to end with the factory), but whatever. The Gameboy port followed suit - moving from the jungle to an abandoned urban center. All of this is completely absent of the new Wii games (again, despite their brilliance), which feel like Mario games with alternate game mechanics. They are most definitely missing from the big, fat, galumphing collect-a-thon that was Donkey Kong 64 - with its monkey rapping, coconut bazookas, barren polygonal environments and lumbering Banjo-Kazooie soundtrack (which worked in Banjo but feels out of place after the Country series). 

Me and John finally sat down and two-playered the shit out of Diddy Kong's Quest, the rarely disputed pinnacle of the trilogy. The sequel branches off from the pure Country of the original, featuring pirate ships, bayou boardwalks, haunted forests and castle parapets - but again the mechanics still convey that gritty, realistic edge to the platforming. 

I'll say it, though - Donkey Kong Country 2 is tough as nails. 

You are given a short grace period to familiarize yourself with the mechanics but by the time you reach Kremland the gloves are off, and with still half a game left to play including the insanely difficult Lost World levels. For a second-hand sample, watch the Game Grumps fruitlessly attempt to beat it before rage-quitting in frustration. John and me don't fuck around though. We've sunk dozens of hours into the bloody thing on the Wii Classic Console - we've climbed the rigging on bog-sunk pirate ships, jumped across lava flows, wrestled with giant (motherfucking) wasps and hugged doomed rollercoasters up and down ludicrously unsafe tracks. At the present time we've stalled - having squandered most of our lives in Gloomy Gulch - with one foot in the final world slipping around submerged ice shelves at the base of K. Rool's castle. I play as Diddy, because I'm better and can use his acrobatics, and John plays as Dixie, because he's worst and needs the hair-float handicap (admit it, John). 

You wouldn't expect that to co-op a side-scrolling 2-D platformer short of New Super Mario Bros. would be much fun or immersive, but DKC's switch-over gameplay is far more palatable than the my-turn-your-turn Mario-Luigi concept. It's great. It's hard; it's mind-blowingly, give-me-another-beer-I-need-a-fucking-cigarette-fuck-this-game hard - but it's also a blast to make progress and hoot and holler like idiots when you've accomplished something together. Like I said, we're in a tight spot; with three lives at the entrance to one of the final worlds - we've exhausted all the Swanky Bonus Bonanzas and there is no Kong College in sight to save and we don't have any goddamn banana coins to pay off Funky and score more lives in another world but dammit we're not done yet. We're just going to have to stick this one through until the end.

It's all you can do, really.

The Hate Locker

Critical review submitted for my United States History class:

"You know, after my first tour I told myself I was never coming back to this fucking hole. After my second tour I was one-hundred percent sure I was never coming back to this fucking hole. And all that to say, good luck getting that fucking degree when you get back to Ottawa, buds." 

- Canadian Forces Sgt, Kandahar

The opening to Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker snaps the audience to attention. Everything feels very real - the cinematography catches the smothering combination of heat and light in the urban gingivitis of Iraq so well you can practically feel the sun squatting down on the back of your neck, or taste the dust and dried spit the Middle East tends to leave in your mouth. The American soldiers, Explosive-Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technicians all, go about their business with the effortless swagger of filthy-handed professionals  - from their frosty back-and-forth about dick-sizes to the rattling off of ballistic predictions and other jargon. When Guy Pearce zips himself into the bomb-suit and moonwalks his way over to their daily find, you can smell the gym-bag blast-blanket stink inside his helmet, feel every footstep thumping against sizzling asphalt, and every bead of sweat crawling spider-like down the back of his neck. Kathryn Bigelow can convey atmosphere. When Zero Dark Thirty hit theaters in 2012, her audiences experienced the longest ten minutes of their lives inching their way through Osama Bin Laden's compound and unempathetically removing all human obstacles across a bed of spent casings. The Hurt Locker's opening sequence promises a riveting premise - the daily lives of deployed American EOD technicians against a backdrop of adrenaline and combat addiction.

Unfortunately, what The Hurt Locker actually delivers smells more like the inside of one.  

Critical reception of the 2008 blockbuster was almost obnoxiously positive - its won nine more Oscars than it was worth and was joyously written-off by critics as "realistic", "harrowing", "powerful", and all the other spin-words movie critics use to market their Oscar winners. The negative backlash was almost exclusively from the military community, whose actual experiences conflicted drastically with the insipid, ignorant, and occasionally fantastical scenes depicted in the film. Jeremy Renner's cavalier attitude towards endangering his own team and lack of regard for his own personal safety inflamed the sensitivities of many returned veterans. Technical details, like the particular pattern of uniform worn by soldiers or the Vietnam-era helicopters which serve as MEDEVAC, were and still are ridiculed in Company-lines. Most egregiously; for someone allegedly embedded with an actual EOD-team in Iraq, Kathryn Bigelow seems to understand little to nothing about what EOD technicians actually do and where they fit within the greater military scheme of things. 

But how important are these technical details, really? Saving Private Ryan for all of its realism is guilty of a by-the-numbers Spielbergian plot almost hackneyed in its simplicity. The concept of an officer and several enlisted men pulled out of a Rifle Company during the Invasion of Normandy to find and pull some unlucky Private out of the madness of war is absurd. Apocalypse Now makes a better acid-trip than it does a mission, and Full Metal Jacket is a Kubrickian series of complex symbology sauteed in the Vietnam War. Even Oliver Stone's Platoon, one of the most famous cinematic portrayals of Vietnam, ladles out some pretty soupy melodrama courtesy of Willem Defoe. And yet, for all their warts and boils, these films sit atop the pedestal of war cinema among critics and military minds alike.

What was the deciding factor? The message? The anti-war undertones? The satire? 

For all its failings, The Hurt Locker covers a unique angle in cinematic war narration that has gained little coverage in Hollywood. The underlying theme of combat-addiction, by contemporary nomenclature, or the notion that some actually enjoy combat and participating in wars, is rarely explored and certainly overlooked in the media. It is a brave direction to take in this day and age, where in the wake of the Vietnam War the cultural respect for martial prowess had been replaced with social mourning, and condemnation. Today, soldiers go to Afghanistan, or Iraq, and in our popular mindset they are still fighting the war in Vietnam and surrounded by the same outdated controversies. The tragedy of The Hurt Locker ultimately is its inability to string together the powerful scenes which convey this message midst the movie's narrative wreckage. 

In the ending sequence of the movie, for instance, we are jarred out of the Iraqi war-zone without warning and dropped into an average American grocery-store. Jerry Renner's character is back home. We are jarred out of the war the same way soldiers are jarred out of the war - without proper decompression, or travel-time - and instead of facing the indifferent faces of Iraqi civilians and threatened by open window-panes we are facing miles and miles of cereal boxes, brand-name product, the meaninglessness of choice, modern life, and overwhelmed by it. The structure, the simplicity, the self-validation is all gone. As John Rambo states in his final soliloquy from the 1982 First Blood, "Back there I could fly a gunship, I could drive a tank, I was in charge of million-dollar equipment. Back here I can't even hold a job parking cars!". The notion that is is not merely the trauma experienced in war-fighting environments that cause mental disorders, but the mediocrity of the modern civilian world is a refreshing one to explore. There is boundless territory here to explore the shifting cultural perspective towards war in modern society, down to the shift-worker mentality by which our soldiers are deployed overseas versus the traditional campaign. When Renner steps off the transport in the final scene to join Delta Company, he wears a smile on his face. He's home. There's a moment of multi-dimensional characterization when he honestly admits to his infant son that he doesn't feel any real love for him at all.

Unfortunately the thematic depth that could be cultivated from this is wasted on Bigelow's direction. Instead of spending time developing the cast, we are treated to a Hollywoodized portrayal of a modern warzone. Disposing of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and other Un-Exploded Ordnances (UXOs) on a routine basis does not pack enough tension for The Hurt Locker - these EOD technicians must also engage in sniper-to-sniper combat, run free through the streets of Baghdad like criminals, spend the entire movie operating independent of any parent organization like some fantasy Special-Forces team, and get drunk and punch each other in a Paleolithic example of male-bonding. What these farcical plot developments commit is twofold - foremost, it is absolutely disrespectful to anybody who has served operationally to suggest that their job isn't interesting enough on its own merit to revolve a story around, and secondly, it shows more ambition than sense. The film itself can be taken as a poetic statement of our modern dissociation with the realities of war - even The Empire Strikes Back managed to get the details of a proper military defensive position correct and that was a science-fiction/fantasy epic. 

What separates Apocalypse Now and Saving Private Ryan from The Hurt Locker is that the plot is true to the source material. Both films take the audience on a tour of the Vietnam War and the Invasion of Normandy respectively - and thus, the narrative is built around this. In Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard commands a lone Patrol Boat on an independent mission and acts as our Virgil into the dark heart of the Vietnam War. All the disconnected scenes of madness and chaos make narrative sense because for all intents and purposes it is supposed to be the equivalent of a roller-coaster ride. Saving Private Ryan pushes us out of the Higgins Boat into the bloody mayhem of the Omaha Beach landing and then, scene-by-scene, we are whisked up the Yellow Brick Road to Ramelle, and Ryan, and the Alamo. In both these movies the war in question is the backdrop for the narrative - either movie could have easily taken place during the Trojan War, or the Peloponnesian. These movies are not written for soldiers, they are written for audiences, and the plot is conveyed to us as if we are tourists (which we are). 

The Hurt Locker should have been made about an embedded or freelance Combat Journalist, a character who bounced unit-to-unit and whose story explored the Iraq War piece-by-piece. If you are just determined to have action sequences, make the film about Combat Engineers or Assault Pioneers. When dealing strictly with the lives and experiences of your characters, authenticity reigns - the 2008 HBO series Generation Kill reproduced the 2003 Invasion of Iraq down to the ornamentation on the Marine First Recon Humvees. It unashamedly shows off the modern Marine Corps sub-culture at war and allows us to interpret it as we see fit. Platoon is a morality tale set within a dismounted infantry platoon in Vietnam. The routine, the exhaustion, the formations, the weapons, the slang, the juxtaposition of mundanity and fear, all are so accurate that they smoothen out the narrative - characters stumble and slip in the mud, cigarettes take multiple attempts to light, and actual South Vietnamese Safe Conduct Passes are stapled to the mutilated corpses of American soldiers. When the environment your characters live in is authentic, their performances becomes authentic, and your message becomes authentic. The Hurt Locker, for all the power and good of its message, fails to authenticate that message with technical knowledge and it ends up falling flat.

The final nail in The Hurt Locker's coffin is its absence of humanity. While Jeremy Renner's Staff-Sergeant William James shows sporadic moments of depth, he still ends up being a flat character (which is a far cry above his entourage, who show about as much depth as gasoline puddles in a supermarket parking lot). During his final scene in Iraq, James claims he "[doesn't] know" why he is the way he is - why combat and war does not shake him as much as it does his team-members. The Hurt Locker does not even make inferences as to why James feels this way - this coupled with the ending sequence makes James out to be some sort of alien or sociopath incapable of "normal" human emotions. This is a disgraceful notion because there are legitimate (and aforementioned) reasons why he may enjoy his job so much. This popular idea that war is absolutely terrible and that everyone who returns from its is fundamentally changed for the worst (or that those who excel at it are somehow broken) is juvenile and insulting. Incidentally, James' flatness conveys more about the audience than it does about the characters - our cultural misunderstanding of war and war-fighting are reflected in James' smile at the end of the movie.

This lack of humanity is compounded by other supporting characters - Specialist Eldridge's fatalism becomes so melodramatic it becomes unrealistic and borders on being satirical. Eldridge himself becomes a smaller symbol of this cultural disconnect by proxy - he is less a soldier at war than someone imagining himself to be a soldier at war, and is unconvincing.  

There is no light-heartedness either, nothing about these characters that makes you smile. For the most part they merely crack wise, or moan and complain. There are no "Tracks of My Tears" moments, or "Field Fucks", or running in serpentine patterns, that truly convey the absurdity of war and mankind's ability to cope with it. In Jarhead, Swofford's ability to make us laugh made his psychological transformation under the external pressures of a combat deployment all the more shocking. At the end of the day, Bigelow is telling us how to think instead showing and letting us decide, and leaves herself and The Hurt Locker open to rejection. 

A Star Trek Into Darkness

So for those of you wondering, I unashamedly and blatantly lied four months ago when I implied I would be posting with more frequency. I could attribute blame to a heavy course load dealing almost exclusively in third-year History classes, but I will more honestly attribute blame to my lazy, lazy ass. Now, I've been meaning to coherently and in an organized fashion record my indignation after watching the new Star Trek movie for some time - this period of rumination has been broken up by heated, fiery oral rants to my friends about how fucking feckless and insipid the movie was for all its extraordinary production value. I would normally err on the side of caution and be somewhat diplomatic about the whole thing; but since nobody reads this and Simon Pegg is such a clown I think I'll slip off the kid gloves.

Without further audio,

Appropriate imagery.

Cinema is a very specific medium. It allows a visionary to do many wonderful things as long as that visionary adheres to the constraints indigenous to that medium - notably the run time of a feature film, clocking in at anywhere between 90 minutes to three hours, in my mind. I'd say one of the biggest mistakes both fans and producers make when attempting to translate source material from another medium to the big screen, say literature or television or comic books, is expecting that this material will be conveyed or attempting to convey it in its original form. Star Trek Into Darkness (sounds pulpy and adventurous, without the semi-colon) crams so much shit from both the numerous television series and the movie franchise into a single picture it immediately undermines any hope at having a coherent or engaging plot. And the plot is shambles - I could barely follow what was going on, between the farcical "moral dilemma" of saving an aboriginal people from natural events to the rogue Federation commander to the escaped terrorist/Khan Noonien Singh returning (from... the franchise, and nothing else) to Federation-Klingon Cold War. If this film did anything it was prove that you'd be better off taking all these great actors and money and ideas and use the first Star Trek film as a means by which to launch a series reboot on television. Gone are the days where TV is a technologically bankrupt wasteland rife with styrofoam scenery and soap-opera matte sets. HBO, AMC, all the networks have steadily been pumping out quality programming not only rife with excellent storytelling but exploding with production value unprecedented outside of the big screen.

So why are we taking a television series with such a colossal, mind-boggling wealth of material, and limiting its narrative scope to what we can achieve in a 90-180 minute time frame? What's the point? The time between one project and the next undermines the creative liberty the first Star Trek movie granted the writers by re-booting the timeline. It also sort of forces the writers to break away from that principle theme of discovery and exploration to typical Hollywood drama which is starting to hit a formulaic keyboard of genius-villain, genius-heroes, genius-betrayals, conspiracy, blah blah. Into Drivel's exposition is infuriating because it so casually brushes off story material that has fueled the series for decades - the moral conundrum of interfering in the affairs of an under-developed world contrary to the Prime Directive versus allowing such a culture to be wiped out by the natural ebb and tide of history. We are force-fed ten minutes of a potentially great narrative arc, choke it down eyes watering, merely to move past into a whole field's worth of potentially great narrative arcs only to barely taste any of them for the sake of gorging them all. We are also robbed of our chance to see Kirk properly at the helm of his own ship, for the first time, vulnerable to all the pitfalls and problems and drama of his own inexperience. Kirk, the voyage, the exploration... The whole film could have trashed the tawdry "revenge" theme and opted for Kirk's character growth amidst a dark and overwhelming plot. In all fairness, this was partially remedied near the curtain call - but we'll touch on that later.

Oh, spoilers. Shaddap.

We are also granted lazily written action to justify action, which has been lampooned elsewhere on the intarwebs so I feel I shouldn't repeat them and eat up space (eg. How the Federation has the Technology to Freeze-bomb (?) a volcano into dormancy and yet somehow doesn't have the ballistic capability to deliver the bomb from the Enterprise gaaah my brain).

Moving back to my primary argument here - that of the plot itself - Into Drek's garbage-barge of a story seems to be par with contemporary big-budget narration, where ambition supersedes good editing and story-telling. Ambition, or greed, as probably the case of The Hobbit trilogy. I'm actually boggled by the creative reasoning behind making this movie a Wrath of Khan reboot and not just making it its own movie. What was so instrumental in making that particular reboot the second movie? The original Wrath of Kahn made narrative sense - the antagonist had been introduced to the cast and the audience previously in the television series, and returned on the big screen to chew the scenery a little. In Into Darkness, the audience - for the most part - knows who Kahn is because we know Star Trek, but none of the cast does except "Old Spock", obliterating the tension and drama of a returning villain and hobbling the stakes of such an event. It would make narrative sense, then, in this cinematic medium, to introduce Kahn as a side-character as part of a larger more operatic story and then bring him back for the now anticipated Wrath-of-Kahn-is-coming Third Film! It doesn't even make sense from a marketing perspective that Kahn would be the main villain in this series because J. J. Abrams did everything he possibly could to deny Cucumber-patch was actually Kahn in disguise. And how fucking absurd and contrived is it, even just thinking about it again, that super-terrorist JOHN HARRISON is actually Khan Noonien Singh in disguise. If that isn't the purest example of soap-opera logic.

What makes it even more aggravating is that the setting of Into Cinematic Dark Age is brilliant. Yup, I said it. I probably should have proclaimed in some disclaimer how absolutely marvelous the whole film looks, and shmoop, but honestly production value is a given in this kind of movie and when production value starts taking plot for granted we have some problems. In any case, we have a tenuous political situation between the Federation and the Klingons, a kind of galactic Cold War. That a small, covert team of Federation agents actually crosses into Klingon space in order to hunt and track a terrorist at the risk of launching both nations into open conflict alone had me white-knuckled. The heights at which good writers could have taken this - the allegory that could be made with US Foreign Policy in Afghanistan and its self-interested activities in Pakistan, the notion of inter-national (inter-galactic?) jurisdiction. Star Trek has ever been science fiction - not science fantasy. And frankly, these two concepts do not necessarily obliterate one another. All the most off-the-wall set-pieces of plot-devices in the world would not put a dent into a great story, maybe to a few die-hard fans but who really cares about fans anyway. Why not use entertainment to ask big, blaring, serious questions about our own society? So here's an idea - Khan remains the terrorist (and remains Khan, without the need of a pseudonym), and after the ensuing conflict resultant of Federation action into Klingon-controlled space evades pursuit but remains marooned somewhere in hostile Klingon space, setting up his return in the next film. Or, Khan, to ensure that the tradition of the good-guys-gone-bad-make-the-best-bad-guys is milked dry, is one of the agents on this covert Federation team sent to eliminate this terrorist and is abandoned by the Federation under political pretext, suitably motivating him to seek revenge (and filling in the super-soldier requirement all in one). Hell some time, relativity, plotnium field could even speed up Khan-time so he'd have a whole settlement of revenge-seeking people to come back at the Federation in a future installment. The main players of Into Dankness could remain the rogue, militant Federation commander or even a Klingon political figure. We have enough latent drama here to light up Babylon 5 for an entire season. I'd honestly like to know who green-lit the plot to this movie and what could have possibly been discarded in exchange. "Brevity is the soul of wit.", is it not? You tell 'em, Shakesman.

To probe this even further - would this plot make the movie less interesting to the mouth-breathing, oxygen-gorging caricature of modern movie audiences? The answer is who cares - the plot is only engaging in how it's presented. That's why Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy shat the bed in the box-office. Casino Royale made a shit-gazillion dollars and yet that a bunch of obese oxygen-pirates probably didn't clue in to the fact that Le Chiffre was financing acts of terrorism to benefit from their after-effects on the stock-market didn't matter, did it?

"From Hell's heart I stab at thee!"

It amuses me to no end that Benedict Cumberbatch was chosen to play Khan Noonien Singh. This isn't a criticism of Cabbage-patch by any means - the man has chops as an actor, pork-chops even. He makes such a good Smaug I almost liked The Hobbit for sake of his screen time. But the ultimately sackless Hollywood decision not to cast a Sikh, Middle-Eastern, Latin, or African, or ethnic actor in the role of the famous antagonist says quite about the nonsensical sensibilities of the age we live in. How is being so fearful of casting a minority actor in the role of a villain (to quote co-producer and co-screenwriter Bob Orci:  "it became uncomfortable for me to support demonizing anyone of color, particularly any one of Middle Eastern descent or anyone evoking that.") any less prejudiced than casting a minority actor in the role of a villain? Audiences love villains - villains make a story; antagonism is usually the engine which drives a plot forward. This movie is practically more Euro-centric than the First World War in its drama. It actually undermines (and this has been said a million times) Roddenberry's multi-racial future and raises some eyebrows as to the composition of the federation - the roles would be occupied from people of all backgrounds (more so because the original actor was our good buddy Ricardo Montaban). And if we're going to talk about potential discrimination, I'd be more concerned that the only leading cast member of colour is completely fucking useless.

Call the Human Rights Association! We have a great villain of colour!

Uhura (sp?) is actually an interesting piece of this movie. That she was inconsequential in Star Trek didn't matter - not many characters were consequential in Star Trek, it was the first film of a new franchise and had more pressing issues like establishing its canon. She is interesting in Into Drabness because she against all odds manages to remain completely inconsequential despite momentous opportunities for the writers to steer her into an empowering role.

I will say one thing about this film, and that is has some very good scenes. Some of which are almost great. This is one of the latter. Spoilers.

So Kirk, Bones, Spock, and Oohoora are all aboard a stealthy Federation vessel venturing illegally into Klingon space and risking an intergalactic incident and, sure enough, are caught by Klingons. For the first time in the movie, there is real tension here - we know as the audience that Klingons are the warrior race and that these meek Federation humans stand no chance of engaging them in combat. The Birds of Prey will cut them down and a male Klingon could probably pull a human's head off his/her spine, right? The cast is equally perturbed, and for the first time in the franchise's history Bagheera decides that she will be a useful member of the cast by approaching this situation with some outside-the box thinking - diplomacy. Being a xenolinguist, she can speak Klingon and attempts to reason with the aliens - not only that, but she appeals to their sense of honour and culture to escape from harm and accomplish their mission (perhaps even enlist their aid?). This is some serious shit. All of the sudden all the blasters and dual-pistols and slow-motion in the world are worthless because the characters find themselves in a situation where they are completely out-gunned, and conversation is the only thing that can save them. I think Roger Ebert once said that in Munich tension is strung to breaking in a single scene involving an old man running across the street from a telephone booth to his comrade to stop a bombing. It's the context, not the action which empowers a scene. Argo didn't succeed as a film because it had gun fights and explosions. And yet instead of using this jewel, the writers elect to have Khan show up and go all Shaq-Fu with super-powers and the Federation cast become suddenly able to kill the shit out of every Klingon on Qu'onoS (no, I am not a Star Trek fan, and yet I am still able to research the spelling of the planet's name and not changing it so some simian knuckle-dragger can better relate to the movie - make alien look alien).

Not only does this grossly demean our conception of the Klingons as a threatening foil to the Federation (and the whole Cold War plot device), but tension is at once effortlessly dispelled in a light show designed to amuse chimps. To compound all of this, any sense of an empowering role for a female lead is made a mockery of (and the other female lead is both vacuous, pointless, and utilized strictly for eye-candy). You know, I took a 4-year old to see The Hobbit and watching his reaction to the movie was like living metaphor for the problem with the cinematic method in big-budget blockbusters. Would it shock you to know that he couldn't care less 5 minutes into the drawn-out fight between the dwarves and the goblins in their cave, but was both glued to his seat and riveted to the screen during the entire "Riddles in the Dark" sequence?

Now I don't want to sound like a curmudgeony old cynic here. I didn't actively despite Into Dimness wholly. One thing that Abrams managed to convey with strength was the characterization of Spock and Kirk. More specifically, the ending (that great scene I was talking about) - where Kirk, forcing himself to think like Spock, sacrifices himself. It's a cyclical process - Kirk's emotionally-driven attitude towards his crew and his mission is incompatible with the Kobayashi Maru scenario presented at the film's climax. Only Spock's emotional distance is capable of resolving the issue with the least damage. Kirk is fundamentally acknowledging his inability to captain without Spock, his personal failings, by resolving the issue as Spock would/had. And it's a powerful inversion of roles, glass-to-glass, Kirk not going out with the dignity that Spock exuded in his final moments, unable to separate himself from his fear of death. My only change (nitpicking) would be that Spock should only barely whisper "...Khan." as opposed to yelling it to more symbolically represent this inversion of roles.

And then they go and ruin the scene by bringing him back to life. What is this, Dragon Ball Z? This is the same sort of diet-drama that Downton Abbey spoon-feeds its leprous fan-base on a weekly basis. Where actions are constantly bereft of any real consequences and no one is ever forced to change or evolve. I don't even get this from a basic marketing perspective - again - why not kill off Kirk to make way for The Search for Kirk? Why not set-up the next movie and get audiences ready to see it before it comes out? Why the fuck would I want to pay to see the next Star Trek movie - what stake could I have in a fictional universe where no one can die? I am aghast at the sloppiness of this movie, for all the sleek-looking visuals and the minutiae of brilliance.

Well, that felt good. Like punching an html pillow. It also somewhat fills the review-void I'd been hoping for Red Letter Media's Mr. Plinkett to fill on this movie. I expect I'm going to have to gnash my teeth at this whole Hobbit thing, before long. I read the book again, and watched the first two movies, and the first two movies can suck my balls.

Pew, pew. 'Murica.