STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS

For the first time in the history of this blog, my review of STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS take the form of a spoiler filled podcast hosted by Vikram of the Vassals of Kingsgrave podcast. Listen to us have a semi-serious discussion of the merits of the film before comprehensively trawling over the plot holes and hair product lapses in a movie that entertained us, but also set back the cause of feminism thirty years. Share and enjoy!

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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.

AVATAR - you can have too much of a good thing

AVATAR is the much hyped new film from writer-director and special effects obsessive James Cameron - the man who brought us TITANIC, ALIENS and TERMINATOR. Let us say that James Cameron has consistently pushed forward the technology of film, and has produced consistently thoughtful sci-flicks. Indeed, I would argue that he deserves more kudos than Spielberg - creating fewer but more consistently entertaining and polished blockbusters. But let us also admit that Cameron is the master of hyping himself, and has saddled us both with Celine Dion and with a 130 minute movie of arse-numbing proportions.

First, the praise. AVATAR is a technical marvel. Not because it does anything new - rather, it pulls together all of the advances of the last five years and pushes them further and does them better than anyone else. The 3-D is immersive rather than trying to shock us. The CGI is photo realistic. The characters and animals have weight and heft. The natural science detailing on the plants and animals is breathtaking. Fantastic creatures seem real. It is easy to mock a director who goes to the lengths of actually inventing a new language for his fictional race, the Na'vi. But it works. Much like LORD OF THE RINGS, AVATAR works because it makes us believe in an alternate world, and through believing, we care about its future.

AVATAR is also tightly structured and directed so well that it maintains momentum throughout its runtime (which is not to say it couldn't have done with being a good forty minutes shorter). Cameron may be a master of CGI but he never forgets that story comes before technical wizardry. The movie plays a three-act drama. We are in a dystopian future where humans live on a dieing world, and have colonised a planet called Pandora, in order to mine a precious metal, whose main deposits lie underneath the "hometree" of the indigenous Na'vi people. In Act One, the audience invests its sympathy with the hero and heroine. A disabled jarhead pilots an avatar Na'vi body in order to infiltrate the tribe and negotiate a relocation by any means necessary. Problem is, he becomes fascinated by their respect for nature and falls for a Na'vi chick. In Act Two, the stakes are established. The army, impatient for profits, decimates the hometree, scattering the Na'vi people, and destroying their trust in the Jarhead. The science team establish that the whole ecosystem of the planet is connected and a powerful source of energy. In Act Three, we have the dramatic climax and resolution. The Na'vi regroup and with their human allies take on the colonials.

The strength of the AVATAR story is that James Cameron knows who to weave successful aspects of genre fiction into his more modern allegory of environmental degradation and ruthless military exploitation. We have a good old-fashioned romance between the jarhead and the Na'vi chick. We have a coming of age story, as the jarhead learns the rules of the new world. We have a buddy movie as the jarhead bonds with the science officer. And finally, we have a spiritual story of redemption. I love the fact that Cameron is willing to tackle both issues of science, politics and religion in the same film - to that end, it reminded me a lot of the better aspects of Ronald D Moore's BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.

Given all these positives, it isn't a surprise that I had a good time watching this flick, even though it did seem just too long to spend in a cinema for what should just be a bit of entertainment, albeit intelligent entertainment.

But there are negatives. AVATAR features some of the most hokey dialogue and two-dimensional characterisation seen on film since STAR WARS. And maybe that's no coincidence. Maybe when a writer-director is having to balance different genres, a large cast, action, technology and romance, it's just too much to ask to have good dialogue and nuanced characterisation too? But then again, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA did, by and large, pull that off. One of the strengths of that series was its ability to present conflicted characters who changed, evolved, and felt three-dimensional. By contrast, in AVATAR, you're either a righteous hippie earth-child or a cigar-chomping, profiteering rat-bastard. And characters say the stupidest things. Towit, jarhead to Na'vi chick: "why didn't you kill me?" Na'vi chick to jarhead: "Because you have a big heart." I mean, no-one, not enough imaginary aliens, speaks like this! There's also something slightly hypocritical in a movie that thinks nasty evil people who blow shit up are bad, but nevertheless wants us to be excited by a final act which is basically about people blowing shit up in more and more noisy ways.

Ultimately, AVATAR is such a feat of imagination that, like STAR WARS IV: A NEW HOPE, it survives the hammy dialogue and weak characterisation. It's nice to spend time in this world. It would've been even nicer to have been all done in two hours.

AVATAR is on global release.