Star Trek Retrospective: Episose 14 Balance of Terror
This is my number one on my list of favorite Star Trek episodes and for good reason. Even now I can watch this episode and feel the tension as Kirk hunts for the Romulan commander. Pretty much Run Silent Run Deep or the Enemy Below in space (and later redone as Das Boot) something about the silent machines hunting for each other is amazing. When I first saw this episode I think I left permanent grip marks on the arm rest of our 70’s floral print sofa.
What I especially like about this one is it not only introduced us to the Romulans and the concept of the Nuetral Zone (Suck it JJ. The zone if for the Romulans, not the Klingons) but it also showed as a bit of what life in the Federation was like in those days. It wasn’t all hippy dippy love for all races that whitewashed all of TNG. There is actual racial distrust and bigotry 
(although who could be bigoted against the Vulcans? That’s like saying you don’t like bacon. Image courtesy of the funny t shirt category). Also you get to see a wedding in space (although it does end rather tragically and was the only cheesy part of episode).
Most importantly it humanized all the characters and therefore made them much more relatable. Kirk was plagued by doubts and error. Spock screwed up. The Romulan commander had to eject his best friend into space. The bridge crew has a racist. Finally Kirk shows a very human element of mercy only to have the Romulan commander turn it down in favor of one of the coolest death scenes in sci fi history (second only to Roy Batty in Bladerunner I think. Maybe Spock in TWOK).
the Infamous Dave Inman
Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 15 the Galileo Seven
Season 1 is such a wealth of great episodes (well, except for the Alternative Factor and This Side of Paradise) and this one is is near the top of that list. I loved this episode. Of course the whole “crash landed shuttle craft” theme was then stolen by every series following even shows that really had no business exploring stuff (I’m looking at you, DS9) and even surfaced in Fallout 2.
It should be obvious to any of my four regular readers that I am a huge Spock fan and this show was all Spock. He is extra cool in this one and the fact that the human crew don’t understand his flawless logic even in doing something illogical shows how much he is at a higher level.
On the other hand this episode was kind of hard on red shirts. One thing I’ll give Next Gen and the later shows is they gave their shuttle craft more equipment than six phasers and some retro 70’s post modern furniture. 
Seems like had they had even one mounted phaser they could have used that to shoot the bigfoots or even drain the battery for more power (image courtesy of the horror movie t-shirts).
Anyway, great episode and one I enjoy a lot.
the Infamous Dave Inman
Intersteller Review part 1
A sci fi movie for people who aren’t sci fi fans.
This has been an ugly trend in Hollywood. Vampire films for people who know nothing about vampires, zombie films for future zombie chow, and comic book movies for idiots who spent their high school years having sex with girls instead of hanging out in the local comic book hole like a normal person. It’s Babies First Sci Fi Movie and like anything associated with babies is cute and fun for a while but eventually gets messy, smelly, noisy, and unnecessarily complicated.
This film is very visual and I have huge respect for physical effects over CGI. However the story is really kind of dumb and derivative of many other (better) sci fi movies and stories in the same way that a blue wall is derivative of a can of blue paint. Again, I’m sure it will seem very cool and original to anyone who can’t tell you whether or not Yoda ever said “Live long and prosper” but for anyone who has ever read Clarke, Vonnegut, L’Engle, Heinlein or any of several hundred authors (or TV shows and movies) it will all seem like a badly done parody of those ideas.
The there is the science. If science were a small child Christopher Nolan would have been arrested and listed on the Megan’s Law website toot sweet (Get out of my lab image from a real scientist, Dexter, is courtesy of the cartoon t shirt category). I see this as absolute contempt that he and Hollywood has for we the audience. This film will only work if you know absolutely nothing about physics, astrophysics, chemistry, relativity, or quantum theory. I am a nerd who loves science and enjoys it when a film at least makes passing eye contact with science at a cocktail party. However I am willing to forgive some bad science if it is in the interest of furthering a decent plot but a lot of this crap was completely unnecessary and only advanced this ponderous and convoluted morass of plot holes and threads.
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Intersteller Review part 2
Sometimes giving a director some kind of oversight is not a bad thing.
The stench of the opus pet project spills off this film like rancid roadkill. It’s clear that the operative word here was BIGGER. The numerous plot threads fly back and forth across the screen like a ball of yarn with an M-80 stuck in it. T
here are more ideas and concepts here than a shark has teeth and they all seem to be hell bent on taking a bite out of the audiences patience. (Image from the Jaws t shirts collection)
The net result of the legion of concepts is you are left with two questions; what the point of it all is and why did they feel the need to pack so much into one movie? Is Christopher Nolan retiring and this is his last film ever? Does he have so many ideas bursting from every seam that a film with only 20 seems impoverished to him? Most movie directors like to take an idea or thread and cultivate it into a well presented film but this one stuffed itself on every sci fi meme ever and then vomited it all over the canvas like a crappy performance artist, trying to see which ideas stick and form pleasing shapes. I left the theater with not a dook of an idea of what message was actually being presented.
The other net result of all the gyrations the story goes through is this film is insufferably long. There was a scene that wanted us to believe a planet could orbit a black hole close enough to have the time dilation be one hour on the planet equal seven years on Earth and honestly I was kind of feeling that dilation in the theater. Two hours and 49 minutes felt like 15 years. Also remember all that bad science I talked about? I how did that planet get heat and/or light? Or be close enough to a black hole to dilate its time that much without being ripped apart by the gravitational pull? A black hole is not like a big planet or sun. It will destroy every object in a solar system in short order.
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Intersteller Review part 3
Bad science is the least of this films problems.
I could go on about all the other bad science for the rest of this review but I don’t really need to when I have such campy mediocre dialog and gaping plot holes to party with. Even assuming Christopher Nolan didn’t hire a top scientist to consult with him (which he did incidentally) and learned all he ever need to know about science and astrophysics by watching old Space 1999 reruns I have to believe he knows how to make a decent film and not have the story stumble upon dopey plot holes and story pacing from hell. The dialog was very campy which would have worked brilliantly in a camp film but this film was supposed to be taken seriously (also I know this is my own personal bias but every time I heard Matthew McConaughey speak all I could see was him shirtless in Magic Mike saying “But I think I see a lotta lawbreakers up in this house tonight…”). Of course since this is a Nolan joint the soundtrack has to so overpower the dialog that you miss most of it. Good thing there weren’t about 3 billion different ideas he was trying to transmit with his dialog (oh wait there was…).
For all that if you dropped acid in a theater while watching the “My God! It’s full of stars!” scene from 2001 you will probably enjoy the hell out of the visuals (Image courtesy of the movie t shirt category). If you are not a fan of sci fi but want to be able to at least sound like you know a thing about it when talking to the tech geeks at work (you know, become a poser) this film will probably work very well for you. Like many of Christopher Nolan less than great films you can’t just hate this one completely. He is too talented to make absolute crap and I applaud a film that fails for trying to do too much rather than one that fails for trying to do too little. I can totally see why half the reviews are lauding this movie and the other half are lamenting it (including Jae, there girl who writes on our other blog. She thought it was great).
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Intersteller review part 4
Story recap (spoilers incoming. Skip to part 5 if you want to miss them):
I’m going to do this blitz style with extra sarcasm and want to run a counter on all the sub plots that surface like a whale breaching but then never appear again like this (0). Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a farmer and ex NASA test pilot who is haunted by a crash for like the first 15 minutes of the film but then fortunately forgets it in time to progress the plot (1) (everyone knows the greatest test pilot is Hal Jordan. Ferris Aircraft image courtesy of the Green Lantern t shirt category). His son is smart but in spite of Coops desire has been rejected by college and is basically forced to become a farmer (2). They live in the near future where a crop blight (or something) has caused most of the population to die off and everyone is a farmer (3)(note-in spite of this being in the future they all pretty much run around in early 21st century cars and technology except when the prop guy decides he wants to create a super advanced Lego robots). His daughter Murph gets into trouble at school for bringing in evidence that man landed on the moon when the new “edited” history says it was all faked (4). Apparently NASA is illegal or something because everyone hates science and anything that doesn’t just grow more food (5). There is a ghost in Murphs bedroom that keeps knocking books down and one day writes some map coordinates in the dust. These lead Coop and Murph to the nearby NASA headquarters where they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars while the world starves without anyone noticing (5).
So Coop gets captured by the Lego robots and finds out that NASA is trying to fly though a wormhole (if you have ever read A Wrinkle in Time this will feel awfully familiar) to find a new planet for humans to live on and have already sent through 12 ships (build on which budget exactly?). They are going to send through one more ship and Coop is THE ONLY HUMAN WHO CAN FLY THE SHIP EVER! He leaves his kids who come to hate him (6) and goes into suspended animation along with Anne Hathaway and a couple of red shirts.
They arrive in a system with three planets orbiting a black hole (???) and apparently have no way of evaluating the planets from space or even talking to any of the humans who have already landed there. The closest one has the one hour to seven years time dilation (???) so they try to do it quickly but instead lose like 20 years when they discover the planet is covered with knee deep water and tidal waves (kind of what you might be able to see from space normally). They then only have enough fuel to hit one more planet and have to chose between one or the other. Turns out that Anne Hathaway was in love with the guy on the further planet (7) and believes that love is as powerful a force as gravity but is outvoted so they can go to the closer one.
Meanwhile, back on Earth Coops son has been driving the same pickup truck for 20 years and has a wife, a sick kid, and a burning hatred for Coop (8). Murph (Jessica Chastain) was adopted by the scientist in charge of the whole project and now is a super scientist herself. She is trying to figure out how to get the super ship off the ground using gravity while the head scientist and father of Anne’s character (Michael Caine) has been lying to everyone about the theory. She hates Coop too (9) but wants to figure out the problem.
Meanwhile back in space the crew land on the closer planet to find the Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) still alive and waiting for them to come down and set up a new colony. He claims that while the frozen clouds that they are all on (???) have lots of chlorine down on the surface it is habitable but is lying for some reason (also wouldn’t any amount of chlorine be bad? Ever heard of mustard gas?). He wanted to be rescued so sucked them all in. He attacks Coop but then blows himself up trying to get aboard the main ship after killing off the other red shirt. Coop and Brand (Anne) get aboard the ship and are pretty much out of fuel.
They figure out a way to get to the last planet by using the thrusters on the two remaining shuttles and by having them drop off (I don’t want to go back on science but the simply having something fall off your space ship will not make it go faster). Meanwhile Brand thinks if they can get data from inside the black hole they might be able to solve the gravity problem Murph is working on. They fly off and first send one of the Lego robots into the black hole and they Coop himself for some reason. Good thing the tidal gravity alone wouldn’t be enough to tear him apart, or the heat in the accretion disk or for that matter tiny bits of matter traveling at massive speeds.
I hope you are all wearing eye protection because you are going to have a lot of loose plot threads flying together all at once. Coop successfully enters the black hole but instead of being rendered down to his base elements find himself inside an Escher cave that allows him to see any time he wants to as long as it is inside Murphs bedroom. Here is the massive twist: it turns out he was the ghost inside Murphs room the whole time and can push books off the shelf but can’t otherwise communicate with her. He figures out how to tell her about NASA and eventually gives her the clues she needs to solve the gravity problem after Murph burns down her brothers crop (10).
He eventually falls out of the black hole (that can happen, right?) and is picked up just outside of Saturn in the future. Humanity now lives in giant space stations (wait a minute! If they could create self contained environments in space for humans why didn’t they just dig a hole and do the same thing on Earth?) and Murph is an old lady. He steals a ship to go looking for Brand, who ends the film by herself raising a colony of test tube babies on a desolate world while feeding them rocks and boogers.
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Intersteller review Part 5
In conclusion…
Very disappointing, honestly. I had real hope for this film and have seen about 200 trailers for it. In the past I would have said I was a fan of Christopher Nolan but in light of this film and the most recent Batman fiasco (Batman hoodie image from our massive Batman collection) I think I am going to have to amend that to say that I am a fan of Inception. If you are not a fan of sci fi but want to dip your toe in the water to see what all the fuss is about you will probably enjoy it (unless movies dragging on forever with a myriad of plot threads makes you mad) but don’t think that makes you qualified to discuss what makes a good sci fi film with me.
2.5 of 5 Meh.
I had a choice between seeing this film or Big Hero 6 and now I wish I had watched the cartoon (or any film with a coherent plot). 2.5 of 5 phasers.
Speaking of Big Hero 6, the reason I didn’t see it is I am going to watch it with some friends and then film a video review with them. Very exciting and I will be mentioning it a lot in future blogs and via Twitter and Facebook. You don’t like us on FB or follow on Twitter? Get on it! There is some good stuff on there (and my blog posts).
the Infamous Dave Inman
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A question about replicators from Star Trek
So I have been watching Star Trek DS9 lately and enjoying it in spite of it being a Rick Berman project but something keeps bothering me about it. Like any society that has effectively unlimited resources the Federation doesn’t really use currency. If you ever read any of the Culture books by Iain Banks this will make total sense to you. The use of replicators by the Federation means that anyone can effectively have any food or item they want.
In DS9 we have Quark and his bar. The entire Ferengi race is obsessed with earning gold pressed latinum. I have learned from Memory Alpha that latinum cannot be replicated…because you know, science but Quark uses replicators to create drinks all the time. Yet he is often bemoaning his low margins when he effectively pays nothing for his merchandise. Why would anyone pay Quark to get drunk when they could just replicate 800 gallons of Thunderbird in their room? At one point Quark was very much into the weapons trade and selling them by the thousands but why would anyone buy a thousand phaser rifles when you could just buy one and then replicate them by the gross? For that matter let’s say the Cardassians were about to invade Bajor. In the last hour before they landed couldn’t the Bajorian government send out a message of “Um, everyone on the planet go replicate a rifle and 200 kilos of high explosive. We are sending you the schematics right now.” Often times a Runabout is stranded for lack of a part but has a replicator. Doesn’t that imply some kind of solution?
For that matter what could Quark buy with latinum that he couldn’t just replicate? Sure there is probably some kind of status associated with wealth in Ferengi society but even so shouldn’t you just have a free beer tap pretty much anywhere? The economy of the Star Trek universe bugs me. Actually so do the Ferengi. Any Ferengi heavy episode sucks. Beer image courtesy of the funny t shirt category.
Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 16 Shore Leave
I admit I loved this episode as a kid but as an adult (with body hair and everything) I now kind of think of it as fairly juveniles. When I did my list of favorite Trek episodes it didn’t even make the top 20. To be honest I have always been more inclined towards the serious and depressing episodes. They just always felt like they have more gravitas.
As an adult I also have some questions about the Omicron Delta planet. If they have to technology to take McCoy’s ripped out heart and bleeding corpse and revive him wouldn’t that make the planet the destination of every cadaver in the Federation? In fact as a doctor wouldn’t Bones have an interest in some of those techniques? Seems like a season later McCoy almost had Sarek die on the operating table. Some of the Omicronian technology might have come in handy.
For that matter how about the whole mind reading thing? Seems like this planet is a treasure trove of tech for the Federation and I probably would have strip mined it to it’s molten core. Either that or just lived there and populated the entire planet with clones of Zoe, Inara, and Kaylee from Firefly. Sorry you can’t visit. (very appropriate image courtesy of the Firefly tshirt category)
the Infamous Dave Inman
Nightcrawler Review Part 1
Something weird happened while I was watching this film. I became a Jake Gyllenhaal fan.
Not that I ever had anything against him. I have always been a big Donnie Darko fan and enjoyed him a great deal in End of Watch. Even when he does mediocre crap like Source Code I generally like his performance and of course I have had a thing for his hot sister Maggie ever since Stranger than Fiction.
However last night while watching this excellent movie I suddenly came to realize that he is a great actor and have put him on the list of with performers like Denzel Washington and Brad Pitt whom I will seek to see in any film regardless of subject matter just for their performances. If those three did a remake of Fried Green Tomatoes in drag I would check it out.
So I guess I have already given away how I feel about this film and that is that it rocked. Great story, excellent camera work, tight editing, good dialog, and above all Jake Gyllenhaal my new man crush. What was great about him? He is super, duper, uber, smuber, foober creepy and engaging in a way that only true sociopaths can be. 
His fast paced and concise monolog engaged me in a way that I can only compare to Tyler Durden delivering his destruction of modern values speeches in Fight Club or Emperor Palpatine explaining to Luke how much he failed to understand the Force in Return of the Jedi that I love so much. (retro Fett image courtesy of the my collection of Star Wars t-shirts) Plus I don’t know if it was makeup, camera work, lighting, his own face, or just emoting so great it translated into his look but Jake definitely had the insane crazy eyes going that will have you squirming in your seat.
If you look at this film as a character study of a true nut job I think you will get the most bang for your buck. He is truly out there and each scene just shows you how much out of touch with actual humanity he is. Jake has always done crazy well (i.e. Donnie Darko) but it now all previous films seem like prep work for this movie. Sorry to gush on about his performance so much but the man truly nailed this film.
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