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,
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?
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.
Without further audio,
 |
| Appropriate imagery. |
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. |
