DVD Review - Star Trek: Into Darkness

I’ll start with a spoiler: Star Trek: Into Darkness is a remake of 1982’s The Wrath of Khan.

Comparing the two films is a case study in how computer graphics have ruined movies: they encourage the filmmaker to let cool space battles carry a film, as if that could compensate for weak plots, childish characters, and insipid dialog.

Photo source: IMDB

The plots of both movies revolve around the conflict between starship captain James T. Kirk and the genetically-enhanced, power-mad Khan Noonien Singh. In The Wrath of Khan, before the proliferation of computer-generated special effects, this conflict had depth to it. Khan had met Kirk before – in the Original Series episode “Space Seed” – and had been defeated. This pre-existing condition ensured that, to employ a tagline from another movie of that era, this time it’s personal.

By contrast, in the remake, they had never met until well into the film. For Khan, Kirk is just someone he can conveniently use and discard. As for Kirk’s feelings towards Khan, they consist of childishly lashing out, as he lashes out at everyone who disagrees with him.

We see that in the opening scenes, in which Kirk rescues Spock from a volcano on an alien world. Unfortunately, he exposes the Enterprise to the natives in the process and thereby contaminates their culture.

This violates Starfleet’s Prime Directive against interfering with the natural evolution of primitive peoples. Now when I was in the defense industry they told me there’s a difference between a crime and a mistake, but the surest way to turn a mistake into a crime is to try to cover it up. Apparently they don’t teach that at Starfleet Academy. Kirk compounds his error by lying about what happened. Alas the cover-up collapses when Spock puts the truth in a report, explaining to Kirk afterward “I incorrectly assumed that you would be truthful in your captain's log.” Kirk gets all pissy about that. He accuses Spock of “throwing him under the bus,” (Do 23rd Century people with transporter technology know what a bus is?). For good measure, he subjects Spock to an anti-Vulcan slur, “pointy”. So basically Kirk is a dick. When an admiral warns him, “You think the rules don't apply to you…you're going to get yourself and everyone under your command killed,” you can bet that by the end of the movie a valuable lesson will be learned. And sure enough, a valuable lesson is learned – by Spock. Kirk just goes on being a dick.

As in the 2009 Star Trek reboot, Starfleet is mind-numbingly stupid. After a records facility is attacked, the entire senior staff meets to batten down the hatches and plan their response. They hold this meeting in a conference room reminiscent of the war room in Dr. Strangelove, except that it’s on an upper floor of a skyscraper and has a row of picture windows. Not very secret, but convenient for anyone who has an armed shuttlecraft and the inclination to carry out a decapitating strike against Starfleet.

The dialog features an occasional good one-liner from Dr. McCoy (“Don't agree with me, Spock, it makes me very uncomfortable”), but is otherwise forgettable. 2013 Khan’s stiffly-uttered threats (“I will have no choice but to kill you and your entire crew”) pale in comparison to 1982 Khan’s impassioned space-age update of Moby Dick: “He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him! I'll chase him 'round the moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round perdition's flames before I give him up!”

But don’t worry; there are plenty of special effects to distract you from these flaws. With a $190 million budget, they’re pretty amazing. At least I think they’re amazing. Most of the action sequences were dimly lit and I couldn’t see them very well. Apparently the subtitle Into Darkness refers to the ambient lighting.

The set for the Enterprise’s warp core was particularly impressive: warp core scenes were filmed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF). Since the $4 billion of government funds spent on the nuclear fusion facility haven’t actually led to any ignition, it’s nice that the taxpayers at least got a movie out of it.

There are two saving graces. First, Alice Eve, who plays Dr. Carol Marcus has a stunningly beautiful body which we get a look at during a completely gratuitous underwear scene (the best kind). Second, in an obvious allusion to Obama’s drone-strike policy, Spock questions an order to assassinate Khan by remote control, without benefit of trial. In light of Hollywood’s usual slavish obsequiousness towards the Obama administration, the writers deserve some credit for their independence. Assuming they didn’t think it was Bush they were attacking.

In any case, if you’re going to spend a couple hours watching a Star Trek movie, I recommend you stick with the original Wrath of Khan. It’s on Netflix Streaming and there’s a reason it’s a classic.

Michael Isenberg is the author of Full Asylum, a novel about espionage and hospital gowns. Available at Amazon.com

Movie Review: Atlas Shrugged Part II

Photo source: atlasshruggedmovie.com

I almost didn’t write this. For the first 80 minutes of Atlas Shrugged Part II, I didn’t think I could write a good review and I didn’t want to write a bad one. Ayn Rand’s dystopian epic about a collapsing economy and Americans giving up in despair has long been one of my favorite books. I had written a great review of Part I, but the first two-thirds of this new movie were disappointing. The problem was directing. Although he had an experienced and talented cast, director John Putch just couldn't seem to get good performances out of them.

Samantha Mathis, as railroad executive Dagny Taggart, couldn’t deliver a line naturally to save her life. Mostly she moped around like a wet washcloth. Jason Beghe as steel magnate Hank Rearden sounded like he escaped from the cast of The Godfather, and Esai Morales made for a rather subdued Francisco d’Anconia. The speeches were flat and disconnected from the scenes around them.

Then came Directive 10-289. The government sought to prevent the economic emergency from getting worse by outlawing change. Businesses were prohibited from raising or lowering their output. Employees were prohibited from leaving their jobs. In other words, they were slaves. New Yorkers halted in the street to watch identical images of the president announce the new law, Big Brother-like, from every giant screen in Times Square. Suddenly, Atlas Shrugged Part II had become drama.

The rest of the movie was exciting and fast-paced. Rex Linn gave the best performance of the film as Kip Chalmers, a politician on his way to a fundraiser. He seemed to channel Fred Thompson as he bullied Dagny’s brother James to provide a new locomotive when the one pulling his train broke down. An older, and possibly unsafe coal-burner was found and in a gripping scene, the train got stuck inside a smoke-filled tunnel—with an army munitions train hurtling towards it in the other direction.

And then we even got to see Dagny become forceful. I wanted to cheer when she finally stood up to smarmy bureaucrat Wesley Mouch.

I didn’t completely hate the early parts. There were touches here and there that I enjoyed, many of them provided by the minor characters. Diedrich Bader was very likable as Quentin Daniels, as was, surprisingly, Bug Hall as the Wet Nurse. Star Trek Voyager’s Robert Picardo played Dr. Stadler the way I always imagined him. The production values were better than in Part I: views through the windows made the offices of New York City seem less like movie sets and more like, well, the offices of New York City. There was a great discussion about Rearden Steel on a news show, with Sean Hannity and Juan Williams as panelists. Mr Hannity defended Rearden, of course. And we got to hear the music of Richard Halley. Although his Fourth Concerto had, in the movie, become a rhapsody, the piece was true to the description in the book: “The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising, and they were the rising itself….[Dagny] listened to the symphony, thinking: This is why the wheels have to be kept going.” These bright spots kept me going until the movie got to the good stuff—which really was worth seeing.

Michael Isenberg is the author of Full Asylum, a dystopian comedy about a collapsing economy and Americans fighting back. Check it out on Amazon.com.

Movie Review: The Avengers

As a fan of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer I always wondered what would happened if he ever got some funding (to steal a line from the series). In his new movie, The Avengers, he had $220 million dollars worth, but the opening sequence wasn’t promising. It was typical of today’s action flicks: lots of shooting and computer-generated special effects as a substitute for anything interesting or clever. I wondered if I was in for two hours and twenty-two minutes of boredom.

Fortunately, the opening was not typical of the movie.

Photo source: Wikipedia

Just as with last year’s Thor, what made this movie intriguing was the interaction among the characters. The theme of Thor was family relationships; the theme of The Avengers was team building. The plot actually followed the stages of Ohio State University psychologist Bruce Tuckman’s group development model: forming, storming, norming, and performing (Dr. Tuckman’s full name, BTW, was Bruce Wayne Tuckman so I suppose his model is appropriate for a movie based on a comic strip). The storming phase was the most entertaining, with personality clashes between Iron Man and Captain America, and the entire team suspicious of leader Nick Fury’s ultimate agenda.

A couple aspects of the movie appealed to my right-wing political sensibilities. The villain, Loki, reminded me of Obama when he said in the opening scene that he had come to set mankind free from the burden of freedom (Ok, so there was one thing in the opening scene that I liked). It was also refreshing to see Hollywood portray a chronically straight-laced character like Captain America as a hero. He reminded me of many of the real soldiers I met during my career in the defense industry. In another nod to conservatives, he even adhered to Christian theology. When told that Loki was a god, he replied, “There’s only one God and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.”

That response was typical of the many great lines in the movie. My personal favorite came from another exchange about Loki – this one between Thor and the Black Widow:

Thor: He's my brother
Black Widow: He killed 80 people in 2 days
Thor: He's adopted

Exchanges like this made The Avengers lots of fun; they definitely compensated for the opening.