STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS

Zachary Quinto as Spock, Benedict Cumberbatch as John Harrison, and Chris Pine as Kirk.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed J J Abrams' STAR TREK reboot, never having watched any of the various iterations of the TV shows. It had real youthful energy, genuine camaraderie, and a cast that definitely outperformed expectations (Chris Pine, I'm looking at you!)  Add to that one of the few time travel/parallel universe storylines that actually makes logical sense, and I was totally sold.

J J Abrams' sequel unites the original crew in front of and behind the camera, with the exception of adding writer Damon Lindelof, who managed to piss off most TV sci-fi fans with LOST and really messed up the reboot of ALIEN.  The good news is that his hand is not notable in this movie - the story is logical, involving, asks profound questions, and yet has a wonderful light comic touch.  I particularly love the fact that even small characters that we forget about - like Chekhov (Anton Yelchin) - end up playing a critical and plausible role. The additions in front of the lens - Benedict Cumberbatch as the new villain John Harrison, and Alice Eve as a new crewmember - both work out really well too. Add to that the same sleek visuals, intelligent script and beautiful score, and I'm struggling to work out why, while I had a good time watching this flick, I left the cinema feeling somewhat underwhelmed. 

Anyways, back to the plot.  The movie opens with Spock on Mordor sacrificing himself for the greater good of the planet and his crew, resulting in Kirk doing the human gut instinct thing and rescuing him, exposing a comically pre-civ planet to awesome tech, and getting kicked off Enterprise by an irate Starfleet as a result.  This then brings us to the setup of the movie proper, in which a nasty evil vengeful terrorist (Cumberbatch) manipulates a desperate father (Noel Clarke) into launching an attack on Starfleet. What I love about that scene is that it plays almost entirely without dialogue - and while Clarke has a small cameo role, the acting that he does without words is exceptionally strong.  

All these machinations lead to the Enterprise being sent to the Klingon home planet to assassinate Harrison, armed with deadly secret Starfleet weaponry, that raises all sorts of moral questions about assassination without trial, and the use of deadly weapons in a pre-emptive strike. Whether you think the writers were heavy-handed in tackling these is a matter of taste: I rather liked it, but even I felt it was quite jarringly clear that they were basically making out Harrison to be Al Qaeda/Black Spiderman, the Klingons as the Taliban, Kronos as Afghanistan, Admiral Marcus as a kind of Donald Rumsfeld/Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, and Captain Kirk as the patsy sent to do his dirty work.  And even for me, with only a cursory knowledge of Trek lore, it was obvious who Harrison really was, and also the role that Alice Eve's scientists and Scotty were going to play.

I guess that's kind of my problem with the whole film. I loved the emotional stakes - and the contrast between Spock and Kirk/Uhura in how they deal with emotional stress.  But the actual plot, while not entirely predictable in its details, was basically obvious once you figured out who Harrison was.  And knowing the antecedents of his character meant that you knew basically how the final scenes were going to play out, and how everyone was going to live happily ever after to leave this film at, pretty much, the start of the old TV series - on a five year mission to go exploring.  One other quibble - there's a wholly unnecessary and rather juvenile plot device that allows us to see Alice Eve in her underwear. That was unworthy of this film.

STAR TREK: INTO THE DARKNESS is rated PG-13 in the USA and has a running time of 132 minutes.

STAR TREK: INTO THE DARKNESS is on release in the UK, Australia, Austria, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Taiwan and Thailand. It opens next weekend in Egypt, Bosnia, Chile, Croatia, Hungary, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, the Ukraine, the UAE, Canada, Colombia, Cyprus, Estonia, Iceland, Indonesia, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Panama, Romania, the USA and Vietnam. It opens on May 23rd in Cambodia and Macedonia; on May 30th in South Korea; on May 31st in Poland; on June 5th in Belgium and Finland; on June 6th in Denmark, the Netherlands and Portugal; on June 7th in Turkey; on June 12th in France, the Czech Republic, Israel and Italy; on June 14th in Brazil and South Africa; on July 5th in Spain; on July 11th in Greece; on July 19th in Venezuela; on August 22nd in Argentina and on August 23rd in Japan.

STAR TREK - deus ex singularity

I am not a sci-fi fan. I've never seen an episode of Star Trek in any of its guises. I only watched the new Battlestar Galactica because Melvin and Sam convinced me that it wasn't, in fact, sci-fi but a consideration of US politics post 9-11. In fairness, I did get pretty addicted to BSG up until season 4 when it transpired that, not only Ronald D Moore NOT have a plan, he also had NO respect for his viewers. So my brief dalliance with sci-fi was over.

Still, I approached J J Abrams re-boot of STAR TREK with curiosity and an open-mind. He did a good job injecting the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE franchise with some emotional heft, and allowed us all to vicariously get off on Philip Seymour Hoffman beating the crap out of Tom Cruise. Moreover, much of the team from MI-3 were reunited on STAR TREK - not least writing duo Kurzman/Orci and cinematographer Daniel Mindel.

Imagine then, my horror, when a few minutes into this new flick, I'm greeted with a rip-off of one of the worst scenes from the new Star Wars trilogy - James T Kirk's mother screaming through childbirth as her heroic (read: unemotive, square-jawed, blonde) husband suicide bombs into the nasty Romulan ship so that his crew can escape. I had traumatic flashbacks to the Natalie Portman birth scene.

Fast forward through Kirk and Spock's childhood (Kirk an enfant terrible a la Dubya; Spock a half-human, half-Vulcan misfit) and we end up with Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quino), Sulu (John Cho), Uhura (Zoe Soldana) and Bones (Karl Urban) aboard the brand new Enterprise and on their way to aid Vulcan. Kirk doesn't inspire me with much confidence. He runs round the ship like a five-year old who's eaten too many E-numbers. And seriously? Would Starfleet really staff up a ship with 17 year olds? Maybe I'm just taking this too seriously, but it's these sort of crazy details that pulled me out of the film.

Now the one thing I had always liked about the concept of STAR TREK was its liberal, pioneering political message and racial inclusiveness. So I was particularly keen to see how the new movie pushed forward the envelope. Would they have an Indian officer? More woman? An openly gay crew member? Nope, they stayed true to the original. Indeed, I was particularly dismayed to see the only female crewmember strip down to her bra and knickers within the first half hour of the flick - a crass and unnecessary move only partly mitigated by the fact that she ends up with the brainy Vulcan rather than the brawny Kirk.

Next up, the Enterprise realises that Vulcan is actually being attacked by aforementioned Romulans; there's some fighting that hints at light-sabers; Kirk is ejected off the ship onto a planet that looks suspiciously like Hoth; and the movie totally jumps the shark. As soon as it became clear that time-travel was going to play a major part in the flick, I was lost. It has always struck me that the ramifications of time-travel are too mind-bendingly complex and insane to grapple with in a movie, and that screen-writers tend to use it (as with religion in BSG) as a lazy, unsatisfying deus-ex-machina, or rather deus-ex-singularity.

The plot unwinds with lots of technically superb action shots; a good comedy turn from Simon Pegg as Scotty (despite an unnecessary Willy Wonka rip-off); and the only really engaging and convincing performance from Zachary Quino as Spock.

Overall, I just didn't see what all the fuss was about. The movie was well-made but unconvincing. It's hard to get too excited about fight scenes when you know that all the main characters are going to survive. And I was utterly unconvinced by Chris Pine's Kirk as the hero of a new movie franchise. Still, it's taken shed-loads of phat cash, and the fanboys seem happy, so I guess these actors are made for life.

STAR TREK is on global release.

OUT OF THE BLUE - neutered by its understandable sensitivity to the subject

OUT OF THE BLUE is a respectfully straightforward retelling of the worst massacre in New Zealand's history. A schizophrenic man shot 13 people at random before being shot dead by police after a 22 hour seige. Karl Urban of LOTR fame stars as the local copper first on the scene. The strength of the film is its evident respect for, and patience in depicting the lives of the victims. The weakness of the film is its understandable unwillingness to think creatively about such a sensitive subject. The only truly memorable sequence is near the end. Without more of this, you can't help feeling that this is a well-made TV true life drama.

OUT OF THE BLUE played Toronto 2006 and was released in New Zealand that year. It was released in the USA in 2007 and in the UK in March 2008. It is now available on DVD.

DOOM - Why outsource the blowing up of shit?

DOOM is a decent first person shooter video game that has been, for reasons unclear to much of the Western hemisphere, transformed at great expense into one of the most pointless movies ever made. Pointless because seeing The Rock blow shit up is clearly less satisfying than blowing shit up yourself, especially given the fact that the graphics in most video games are better than the CGI effects we get here. Admittedly, if the screenwriters had actually bothered to give the movie a plot or decent characters, it could have been a more satisfying entertainment experience than playing the game itself. But they haven't so it isn't. 

There are four very slight redeeming features to this movie. 1. Guys get to see the blonde Bond girl from "Die Another Day" run around a lot. 2. Girls get to see Eomer from Lord of the Rings open a can of whoopass. 3. We also have the nostalgia trip of seeing that cheeky Yank from kids TV show The Press Gang playing a character called Pinky. 4. Oh yes, and let me not understate the unintentional comedy value of seeing The Rock lovingly handle his "big gun." 

DOOM went on general release in the US in October where it failed to make even half of its budget before dropping down the charts. Since then it has failed to earn money in Germany and France. It opened in the UK yesterday and I trust that the Great British Public will also consign it to the trashcan of shame.