Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 64 The Tholian Web
Writing these Star Trek retrospectives has a kind of fun Christmas element to them. You see I am a huge Star Trek nerd but not so huge that I have all the episode numbers memorized. I have a general idea which episode was in which season (or at least a 1 in 3 chance of guessing right) but whenever I start one of these I begin by typing “Star Trek Retrospective: Episode XX…” and then look up on Wikipedia I’m supposed to be doing. This is where the Xmas present part come in. Will this one be that massive Lego set I have been begging my parents for all year (Balance of Terror, Amok Time, Charlie X) or will it be a coupon for a free firehose colonoscopy (Spock Brain, And the Children Shall Lead, Assignment Earth) that my doctor is giving me to celebrate my Irritable Bowel Syndrome? (The image I got from our Star Trek T-shirt collection. Apparently there is a whole list of t shirts with episodes on them. Who knew?)
The point is even though firmly ensconced in Season 3 this episode is definitely on the Lego side of the Christmas spectrum. Not the Millennium Falcon set but maybe one of the better Harry Potter ones (I know, I know. Mixed genres. Shoot me). The whole concept of the Tholian Web is super cool, plus the whole cross dimensional concept rules. Also if you have ever wondered what Shattner would look like doing Mime in an astronauts outfit (and really, which of us hasn’t laid awake at night wondering that?) this episode will let you rest easy.
In spite of the fact that he managed to spend most of the episode as a ghost Kirk still managed to ham it up with a prerecorded message to Spock and McCoy and that is one of the reasons all true Trek fans love him. Sorry, there is nothing wrong with Picard. He is easily the second best captain in Star Trek history (as long as you manage to avoid watching Generations).
Dave
Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 65 Plato’s Stepchildren
“This shield will come in handy when my phaser is fully charged in public, if you know what I mean.”
This one made number 6 on my list of 10 worst TOS episodes and for good reason. Sure, it had the very first televised interracial kiss but except for that the story was kind of crap. Also the kiss was Kirk and as much a fan as I am of him I can’t help but think that was just grabbing the low hanging fruit. If they really wanted to blow some minds they should have had him kiss Spock.
Here’s the biggest thing that bugs me about that story. McCoy figures out that kironide gave the Platonians their telekinetic powers and Kirk has himself and Spock injected with it. They are able to defeat Parmen and the others and then…forget about the kironide deal? No mention of it was made in the next episode. Wouldn’t that be a discovery worthy of a little more research? Or perhaps strip mine the planet down to the core to collect every gram of kironide and create a legion of super TK guys to give the enemies of the Federation what for? Did the kironide wear off by the time Kirk got sped up in A Wink of an Eye or did he and Spock just think it not sportsmanlike to use? Sorry but it really bugged me.
Also while it is amusing and funny to hear Shatner sing/speak Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds there is no way Spock should ever comprimise his dignity by singing. Most of the things that bug me in Star Trek start when they make Spock act completely out of his established (and very cool) character. Yes I’m looking at you, JJ Abrams.
The image, by the way, comes from the many TOS Star Trek T-shirts in our collection. Did Kirk, McCoy, and Spock keep their gifts?
Dave
Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 71 The Mark of Gideon
You know as I get into each episode in depth I’m coming to realize how much misogyny was flowing off the screen. I can saw that TNG forward Star Trek was a major contributor to gender equality and women’s liberation, but in TOS it seems every non crewman female is a liar or has some secret agenda.
When you think about it the villains in Star Trek can be broken into two types. The first is the overtly evil and powerful ones. 
These are inevitably male and include Khan, Apollo, Gary Mitchell, Bele, Colonel Green, Parmen, Proconsul Claudius Marcus, and Commander Kor (Bele image courtesy of the Star Trek T Shirt category). The second is the sneak, subversive villain and those almost all are female. Janice Lester, Mira, Deela, Dr. Miranda Jones, Kara, and Leila Kalomi are good examples of this. They are also the villains most likely to change allegiance once faced with the sexual magnetism of Kirk.
The only exceptions I can think of are Mudd, who is a sneaky, conniving man (and also the only male Trek character to wear an earring) and Elaan of Troyius. In both cases the antagonist seems to have exhibited the strength or deviousness normally reserved for the opposite gender (of course Elaan was essentially sold into marriage in what today might be seen as human trafficking).
I don’t know what point I am really making. This episode bugged me. The population of the planet lives for centuries and suffers from massive overpopulation. Have they never heard of condoms? How about if they can build a replica of the Enterprise can’t they use that ship to find other worlds to colonize? This is one of those situations where you have a hard time imagining a technologically advanced society not being able to come up with a solution. I know there were religious and medical considerations mentioned, but if you are packed ass to elbow with billions of other people I think in time that might erode your belief that birth control is a bad thing.
Not a top show and fairly typical of the half assed writing that season 3 seemed to suffer from. Still better than some but not one that I would seek out and specifically watch unless I were watching the whole series sequencially.
Dave
Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 72 That Which Survives
Lessons can be learned from this episode about not trusting beautiful women who want to touch you for no apparent reason. Of course, I think I would be willing to risk death if a beautiful woman wanted to touch me for any reason up to and including felonious assault so I don’t know if that lesson sank home. However, if you were of a misogynistic nature you would be right at home with this episode and would probably have been a red shirt who survived, unlike poor Wyatt, D’Amato, and Watkins.
Ironically Sulu managed to survive his death touch indicating he might have some immunity to her powers. Given that George Takei is more or less immune to all the female blandishments I guess it makes sense (for the record I am a huge George Takei fan. You should friend him on Facebook. Also if you haven’t had the chance listen to him on the Howard Stern Show. He is awesome). For those of us into women our sex drive could literally be the death of us.
I think this episode used some cool low tech filming techniques to not only show up the three of the hotty (played by the stunning Lee Meriwether (Catwoman from the TV Batman series)) but the two dimensional line transporter was pretty cool too. They didn’t have the massive special effects resources we enjoy today but they did what they could.
By the way I just spent a lot of time looking at Losira images. Good God was she hot. I did a post about why Star Trek women were so stunning a while ago. Lee definitely was on there. Love her costume too (that’s a hint if any hot women are interested in stalking me at the next Star Trek convention in Las Vegas). Not sure if why the felt the need to cover her belly button though. Seems like an odd issue to have. I don’t have any Star Trek t-shirts with Lee on them, but this image is a perfect example of why Star Trek was such a force in the advancement of women’s liberation (It’s OK if McCoy treats these women as objects. You see they were androids and therefore technically were objects. It’s mixed messaged I grew up with like these that made me the well balanced individual you see before you now.)
Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 74 Requiem for Methuselah
Now we are getting into some quality Star Trek. Interesting story, nice twist, and a girl so unbelievably hot she will make your eyes bleed (in a good way). The girl is played by Louise Sorel. She never did an amazing single role but has had a considerable filmography, doing Broadway, soaps, and a ton of prime time appearances.
The image is one of the many episode shirts from the Star Trek T-Shirt collection.
This is another episode that had less of an impact on me as a kid. I only saw it a couple times and the story was a little more complicated. I remember being kind of confused as a kid and the names bandied about like Da Vinci and Brahms had less of an impact on me than if Flint had said he was also Buck Rodgers or B.A. Baracas. However, upon rewatching it as an adult (technically) I realize it was a pretty damned good story. The idea that one man could play so many roles over so long was intriguing, as was the concept of him having such an impact on our culture. The clues Spock picked up on that led them to understand who he was were very cool, and M4 was pretty epic, although clearly a remake of Nomad from the Changeling (also redone as V’ger from Star Trek: the Motion Picture, only with more punch). However, Season 3 was all about cannibalizing the previous seasons so I won’t hold that against it.
Speaking of recycling from earlier seasons, if you watch the original showing the image of Flints home is pretty clearly the painting they did for Rigel IV from the Cage. I guess the budget was running a little thin at that point. They were probably digging through the props warehouse looking for anything they could use on the cheap. When they remastered this one they changed the image to a much more impressive mansion. Not sure if I like that or not. I find most of the remastering changes both annoying and unnecessary. Part of the appeal is the cheapness of the effects. You wouldn’t go to a live play and bitch because there is no lens flare, would you? If you are only watching Star Trek for the special effects stop reading my blog, J.J. Abrams.
Dave
Free Birds Movie Review
A turkey indeed.
There seems to be a divide between makers of kids movies. On the one side are those who appear to love children and want to make quality entertainment for them while understanding that a lot of parents are going to have to suffer through them as well and thoughtfully throw in some concepts and jokes for the adults. These wonderful people seem to end up working for Pixar or Disney and help produce films such as the Incredibles, Toy Story, Wreck It Ralph, Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille.
On the other side of the divide is a group of people who see kids (and their parents) as untended cash cows and the idea of a cash teat not hooked up to the entertainment machine as a sin. They provide films that are not necessarily bad, but are just there like a brick in a wall. It is not really notable and odds are the wall would survive without it, but no one is going to have a real objection to it’s existence. These films include Planes, Turbo, the Lorax, and Escape from Planet Earth. (damn, I review a lot of mediocre animated films).
So Free Birds. More in the second camp than the first. Not really horrible bad, but pretty much the definition of formulaic. 
I really wanted to love this film, if only because I am a huge George Takei fan (the man who taught me how to pronounce tsunami correctly. Image courtesy of the Star Trek T Shirt category BTW). I am also a Woody Harrelson and Amy Poehler fan and like to see them succeed. However, while this film was not bad in the I-wish-I-were-drunk-off-my-ass sense, it just doesn’t truly entertain.
There is one massive trap in this film that I will warn you about. Like choosing a large pile of snow to urinate on only to find out that it was really a sleeping polar bear, taking your kids to see a film about cute animated turkeys fighting to get turkeys off the menu a few weeks before Thanksgiving will literally bite you on the ass when it comes time to carve your holiday bird. I have always found animated food creatures either fighting against or campaigning for being eaten off putting (Sorry, Charlie), and unless you really want to delve into the depths of the poultry industry and the difference between movie turkeys and food turkeys with your kids you should probably steer clear.
The story. Reggie (Owen Wilson-Cars, Midnight in Paris, Wedding Crashers) is a turkey who figures out he and his friends are due for the chopping block. He is grievously ostracized by the other turkeys due to being smarter than the rest of them (no flashbacks here) and spends his time trying to convince them of their fate. The President arrives at his farm and he manages to get the yearly turkey parole.
He is transported to Camp David to be the Presidents daughters pet and lives life of luxury. Eventually he is shanghaied by Jake (Woody Harrelson-Natural Born Killers, No Country for Old Men, Zombieland), a turkey revolutionary. They sneak into a military compound and steal a time machine named S.T.E.V.E. (George Takei-Star Trek, Heroes, the Green Berets). They plan to go back in time and convince the pilgrims to not eat turkeys on the first day.
They get back there and meet up with a herd (flock? What do you call a group of wild turkeys? All I know for sure is the reason crows are the coolest birds ever is a group of them is called a murder) of turkeys who have been distracting the human hunters away from their underground Rats of NIMH-like compound. Reggie meets Jenny (Amy Poehler-Blades of Glory, Parks and Rec, Mean Girls) and her brother Ranger (Jimmy Hayward, who also directed this film). The humans are more or less starving but Governor Bradford (Dan Fogler-Fanboys, Balls of Fury, Kung Fu Panda) is saving all their food as a bribe for the Native Americans at the Thanksgiving meal. He puts finding food on the head huntsman and all around bad guy Miles Standish (Colm Meaney-Con Air, DS9, Law Abiding Citizen) who for some reason thinks turkeys are the only food in the universe and seems to hate them with the same passion that I hate the new Star Trek movies.
Honestly it just rolls out with bland regularity. The humans hunt turkeys. Reggie tries to chicken (haw!) out but falls in love with Jenny. Things seem to grow grim for the turkeys but for the intervention of Steve and a huge delivery of pizza. The end.
Sorry but honestly I was getting bored recounting the story. I don’t do stars or black holes for kids movies. It seemed like the few kids in the audience were entertained, so by that standard we can call this film a technical success. As an adult I was pretty bored, which means as an actual rounded kids film (Monsters U for example) it’s kind of a meh. However, unless you are an advocate for animal rights and already feed your kids nothing but tofu and bean sprouts this film will definitely make things awkward come the holidays. I don’t really see this film as a recurring holiday film (it’s no Kiss Saves Christmas) but if you are looking to kill a few minutes and already have your tofurkey planned out go for it.
Thanks for reading. Not my most in depth review but middle of the road films like this one tend to be pretty boring to write about. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. If you have comments on this film or my review please leave them here, and if you have off topic questions or suggestions feel free to email me at [email protected]. Thanks and have a great night.
Dave
Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 77 The Savage Curtain
Yes I’m back on this. I can’t start a project and let it fail after only completing 2/79 parts. It would be much more my style to have it fail after completing 76/79 parts. Also I personally own so many Star Trek t shirts that every morning as I get dressed I feel guilty for letting this series fall by the wayside and I have enough guilt for actual bad things in my life.
So the Savage Curtain. If there were one item to epitomize what was wrong with Season 3 it would have to be Abe Lincoln in space (yes, the suicide planet, hippies in space, and telekinetic Greeks all have their place but this one is at the top. For the record Spocks Brain was at the end of Season 2). Honestly, how does having Kirk and Spock dream up good guys and bad guys and get into a fist fight with them tell the turd monsters (sorry, the Excalbians)? What if Kirk had slipped on a rock and broke his skull open, leaving the Excalbians understanding of good and evil to a minor twist of fate?
(Honestly I don’t think good and evil are that hard to understand. I have an understanding and am happy to have chosen ev…I mean good!)
For that matter, who appointed Kirk and Spock as the universal representatives of good? Wasn’t it established in The Enemy Within that Kirk is comprised of both good and evil parts? I’d say a laundry list of intergalactic booty calls and half breed alien bastard children might have a thing of two to say about him from a moral perspective. Didn’t he let a super hot innocent girl walk in front of a truck in order to save his future? What about the other future full of people that he just destroyed? And Spock would let 1,000,000 people die if it meant saving 1,000,001 people. Not a lot of morality in that equation.
Finally, the real problem with this episode is they were really running out of ideas and opted to just remake Arena without the Gorn. I’m not saying I hate this episode. Only that the signs that the series was running out of steam were pretty strong. I sometimes wish for a fourth season but really when you think about it this shows the trend. Who knows what bad ideas would have arisen in season 4? A racist cartoon rabbit that talks with a lisp? Kirk being replaced by a captain with no hair? A complete reboot where the entire universe gets more stupid and Star Wars-y with no nod towards Gene Roddenberry’s vision? No, in those halcyon days such things were decades in the future.
Dave
Elysium Movie Review
Not really District 9. More like District 3.
Once again I must apologize for not getting this done sooner, or not posting at all for like a week. I am now way behind on movies and will try to get at least three done this weekend. I was at the Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas all weekend and enjoyed it immensely. Unfortunately I was so busy selling Star Trek t-shirts I never had a chance to write it up.
That’s not entirely true. I did see this the night it opened (for the record the theater at the Palms is really nice) and probably could have ground it out one of the evenings. The fact is I was kind of disappointed by this film and just not really motivated to write this up.
This is another case of me still not learning the important lesson of never expecting movies to do anything but suck. If I had approached this film with that attitude I would have been pleased enough to give it a modest thumbs up as a relatively decent sci fi film. However the fact is I am a huge fan of District 9 and as such expected this to at least blow one of my socks off. Instead I got pretty formulaic Hollywood pap and glitz without the gritty, engaging story that made District 9 what it was.
I now believe the weight of working with major Hollywood stars and operating under the thumb of an actual Hollywood studio crushed Neill Blomkamp’s creativity and caused him to push out this very pretty and expensive by-the-numbers BM (either that or given three and a half times the budget of his first film he suddenly pulled a Lucas and thought that cool CGI makes up for lame story. God I hope not). While this film had it’s moments and were it of a lesser pedigree I might give it a pass it really didn’t feel like it was made by the same person.
I think the best way to explain my issues is to talk about what made District 9 great and how this one failed to live up to that legacy. In his first film Blomkamp took a total nobody protagonist and a sidekick that looked like a seven foot tall bipedal potato bug and managed to make us not only like but care about them both. The social issues addressed made sense and seemed like a potentially realistic approach when dealing with a mass immigration of blue color alien bugs. The villains were motivated to do what they thought was best for their society rather the just plain evil, and the denouement, while opening the door to the potential of conflict resolution, managed to avoid the Disneyfied “all must be right in the world by the end of Act III” rule that is the Black Plague of Hollywood scripts. The CGI and science fiction were tools to tell a great story and engage the audience with cool characters.
In this film the main character is the very human Matt Damon, who is motivated by the simplest and most inane of reasons to do bad, explosive things. His character develops only in the most tertiary of manners, and all of the supporting characters looked like they were created by a supercomputer designed to create the greatest stereotypes of all time. The villains seemed to be in a contest to see which of them could be the most evil for evils sake: the brutal, exploitive capitalist who treats his workers like expendable slaves (to the point that he kicks Damon out of the infirmary in order to save the cost of replacing the hospital bedding), the bitchy, callous, power hungry security director who wants to be the Hitler of space or something, and the psychopathic South African mercenary who apparently gets his rocks off killing and raping everything he comes across. It was like they all went to the Dr. Evil School of Super Villainy and graduated with comical honors. The story lacked any kind of real drama or arc (anyone else remember the slow and methodical way that Wikus Ven De Merwe changed his attitude towards the aliens even as his body changed?) and naturally since this is a big budget Hollywood film we have to pull out the inevitable MacGuffin that will save the world. Throw in a ton of unnecessary action to appease the unwashed masses and I guess we have a film.
Sigh. I will give this film props for some of the action being both believable and cool, and also for not feeling the need to explain how the science of a ring world works. I guess Blomkamp assumed we had all read Ringworld or played Halo once or twice in our lives. I guess it was pretty and the CGI flawless. If you ever wanted to see every villain from Snidely Wiplash to Khan Noonien Singh distilled into a potent evil serum and injected into three otherwise talented actors than I guess this would work for you. As a movie it’s not awful, just mundane. It’s just that I expected so much more.
SPOILER ALERT. Skip ahead a few paragraphs if this puts you off. The story starts off two hundred years in the future. The Earth is pretty much permanently screwed thanks to our pollution and overpopulation. Like all problems money is the answer, so the rich of this future have all moved to a ring world called Elysium that closely resembles a less crowded Newport Beach in orbit around the earth . Max (Matt Damon-Good Will Hunting, The Bourne Identity, Inside Job) is an ex-con trying to go straight at a dead end job manufacturing the very robot drones that are used to keep him and the rest of the population under suppression (um, could I get an extra helping of irony with my movie please?). Meanwhile, dragon lady Elysium defense director Delecourt (Jodie Foster-the Silence of the Lambs, Contact, Panic Room) has the job of shooting down ships filled with families trying to escape Earth to Elysium, a job she appears to approach with the same relish that a dingo would working as a guard dog at a pre school.
In the future they have medical tanning beds that will cure all diseases in like three seconds, but of course the super rich being intrinsically evil and selfish keep them for themselves and leave the rest of us to pound sand. Max gets his arm broken by the very robots he is building (ironic!) and while at the hospital runs into childhood friend turned hot nurse Frey (Alice Braga-I am Legend, Repo Men (no, not Repo Man. Repo Men), City of God). She has a child dying of leukemia (Emma Tremblay-no other film credits).
Max gets back to work where he is forced to enter a chamber to fix something and receives a lethal dose of radiation (OSHA apparently ended in the mid 21st century). The owner of the company John Carlyle (William Fichtner-Black Hawk Down, the Dark Knight, Contact) is a billionaire Elysium resident and all around dick. He kicks Max out of the infirmary in order to save on the laundry bill (he has nothing better to do with his time?).
Meanwhile on Elysium Delecourt is in trouble for her shoot-first-ask-no-questions approach to security. She is called to the carpet by the president (Faran Tahir-Star Trek (2009), Charlie Wilson’s War, Iron Man) and then decides the only thing she can do is stage a coup and take over entirely. She recruits Carlyle who writes a program to basically rewrite everything in the Elysium system.
Max now needs to get to Elysium in order to get cured. The only way he can do that is to do a job with local crime kingpin Spider (Wagner Moura-Elite Squad, VIPs, Romance). Spider wants to kidnap some Elysium resident and steal data from his brain, and naturally Max chooses Carlyle. In order for Max to operate in spite of the fact that he is dying they graft a powerful exoskeleton to him (the exoskeleton was pretty cool, and probably my favorite part of the movie). They get Carlyle and the data turns out to be the very program needed to completely fix the world.
At that point all hell breaks loose. Delecourt unleashes psychotic mercenary Kruger (Sharlto Copley-believe it or not this is the guy who played Wikus in District 9. I’m still not sure I believe it. Also the A Team, Europa Report) who uses some fairly cool high tech tracking techniques to hunt down Max. Stuff gets blown up, people get killed, and there are like five double crosses in the last ten minutes of the film.
The stars.
Most of the hard core sci fi was pretty cool. The robot police, the actual ring, the medical beds, and a lot of the technology was in the very cool category. One star. I have to give a bonus for the grafted exoskeleton. I really want one. One star. Each of the actors played their fairly one dimensional characters as well as could be expected. Someone told Sharlto to play a crazed psychopath and he ran with it. One star. Action was pretty good, and nothing in this movie strained my sense of disbelief too far. One star. CGI was flawless and used in the right proportion to actual sets and actors. One star. Total: five stars.
The black holes.
Unfortunately a lot of these are going to stem from comparisons to District 9, but I can’t stop myself. The story was extremely linear, with character motivations being delivered with all the subtlety and depth of a mackerel slapped across your face over and over again. One black hole. In spite of the fact that all the characters were human I couldn’t generate 1/4 the caring that I did for any of the Prawns. None of them drew me in and the film gave me no reason to care about them in the least. One black hole. The villains were evil for no apparent reason and by the end of the film were more comical than serious. One black hole. In spite of the coolness of the ending in D9 Blomkamp obviously caved in to the studio and came up with yet another Save the World MacGuffin for this one. One black hole. Total: four black holes.
So one star. I suppose I could have been kinder, but I have seen and been excited by the trailer for this film for months and to be this disappointed just feels crappy. If you have never seen D9 I suppose you will enjoy it, as long as you just want sci fi action. If you have a decent sized TV it’s worth seeing on DvD or NetFlix. Date movie? Meh. No reason not to bring her along but it won’t impress her. Bathroom break? Honestly nothing springs to mind. Maybe any of the scenes with Frey and her daughter. Not a lot going on there.
Thanks for reading. I will try to get some more going on soon. Now that my show season is more or less over I can concentrate on doing more of these. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. If you have a comment on this review or the movie feel free to post them here. Off topic questions or suggestions can be emailed to [email protected]. Have a great day.
Dave
Goodbye Iain M. Banks
I in all ways qualify as a fan boy. I am really into and obsess about certain nerd sub cultures and will fight tooth and nail to defend my position against the ignorant savages who want have deluded themselves into believing that the Star Trek reboots were decent films, or that Superman is as good a comic book character as Batman, or that the Alliance is better than the Horde because the characters are prettier (2009 Star Trek image courtesy of the Star Trek T Shirt category). If you ever get me into a discussion of the relative merits of the new Star Wars verses the original three prepare to be either bored or enthralled (depending on your own fan boy status) for several hours as I discuss exactly how Lucas failed and betrayed us all in excruciating detail.
The thing is I am for the most part I am a fan boy of characters and concepts far more than people. I am a huge fan of Han Solo but given the opportunity to meet Harrison Ford I could take it or leave it. My love of Han never got me to become a big fan of Indiana Jones. The point is that one of the few actual real life humans I am a fan of is the late, great Iain M. Banks.
I wrote something about his developing cancer a couple months ago so I am not going to gush on about how great his books are or how much they always meant to me. If you are that interested you can check out the blog I did back then here. Sufficed to say he was one of the few people in the world I would have gone to great lengths to meet and discuss his work with, and with his passing yesterday the world feels like a more bleak place for me. Anyone who knows anything about Science Fiction (or just dark, gothic fiction) knows what he was to our beloved genre, and I hope you all take a minute out of your day to reflect and appreciate what a rare gem he was; a truly creative and humorous soul in a literary world cluttered with sparkly vampires, dragons burning sky worms, and every other rampantly prolific author of pulp designed to regurgitate every trite sci fi idiom as a bland paste.
Iain M. Banks, I for one will miss you.
Dave
P.S. Mr. Banks managed to finish his last novel three weeks before his death. Not at all surprisingly it is about a man with cancer. It is called The Quarry, and I recommend we all buy and read a copy as a tribute to a great author. I am looking forward to it.
D.
Star Trek Into Darkness Review
ABRAAAAAAAAMS!!!!!
I am in every sense of the term a nerd. I love science and (to a lesser extent) math. I would rather read a book than watch or participate in a sporting match. Solving problems logically is a joy. I am socially awkward, especially with women and dating. I used to have 20/400 vision and wore thick Coke bottle glasses but had laser eye surgery (and as further proof of my nerdishness went into the operation with the secret hope that a freak lab accident would give me the ability to shoot lasers out of my eyes). In college I wore only the worst possible clothing (ever wonder what tie dye shirts and camouflage pants looks like together? I don’t have to) and had the personal hygiene habits of pig/monkey hybrid (ponkey?) with dysentery. My nerd interests are legion, including science fiction, comic books, cartoons (anime), video games, role playing games, and miniature war games.
However first and for most I am above all things a Star Trek nerd. Star Trek was my introduction to the nerd world, opening the door to the wonders of science fiction and datelessness, enticing me through with soft music and the delicate scent of flowers and bacon. Kirk and Spock were the friends I wished I had when my so called peers were kicking the crap out of me in grade school and my actual friends looked on. Most of my childhood was spent wishing for the chance to beam the hell out of my life and then call in an orbital phaser strike on Palisades Elementary School.
I start this review thusly in order to establish where I am coming from. I am sure any marginal or non fan will have no problem with this film and enjoy it immensely (although any fan of movies without gargantuan plot holes will be bitterly disappointed). However, as a fan of both Star Trek and well written movies I find myself once again frustrated and insulted by the lazy pap thrown up on the screen.
I tried. Honestly I did. I have had a few years to get over how butt hurt I was at the whole remaking of the entire Star Trek universe into the developmentally challenged image that J.J. seems to feel is appropriate. I have been watching episodes of Fringe in an attempt to acclimatize myself to his particular story telling style (of course in a recent interview on the Howard Stern Show he said he was not really involved a whole lot in Fringe and has not even seen all the episodes) and showed up at the theater wearing a Star Trek t shirt and a heart full of hope.
132 very long minutes later I walked out and the only thing I could think of was “It’s going to be really hard to remember all the plot holes and canon screw ups when I write my review tomorrow”. After about an hour the part of my brain that feels pain every time they butchered another piece of my childhood was nothing but a burned out mass of scar tissue and all that was left was the occasional flare of ire at the laziness of the script and honestly a certain amount of boredom.
So, Star Trek Into Darkness, or as it should have been called Star Wars Into Dark Side. I have always said J.J. Abrams always wanted to be making Star Wars not Star Trek and never has it been more clear. It started when I realized the new formal uniforms that Star Fleet now wears look like a slightly more Nazi version of the uniforms of the Death Star officers. There was a scene where a suspiciously coin shaped ship squeezed through a narrow passage in an almost exact reproduction of the Millennium Falcon’s assault on the Death Star in Return of the Jedi. Instead of the trademark long sweeping maneuvers from TNG we get either Episode IV style dog fights or Episode III style long slow battles. Even the aliens looked a lot like the aliens from Star Wars, including one that looked suspiciously like a scaly Ewok in size, facial features, intellect, and demeanor.
I’m about to lay down some pretty heavy spoilers as I don’t think I can pass all my bile out without doing so. If you feel like this will ruin the experience for you and/or don’t want to be bummed out by my banging on about Star Trek canon why don’t you got back and read the review I did for Oblivion? That review is far more upbeat than this one. Come back after you see the this movie and finish reading this review. Be sure to let me know here if you agree with me or are a poser half assed fan who didn’t vomit all over his or her popcorn when you watched Generations. I promise I won’t ignore you to death.
SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT! This movie claims to be a remake of my most beloved Star Trek movies The Wrath of Khan, and for sure is uses a character with the same name and sort of the same back story but other than that it is such a miss I’m not sure they were even in the same ballpark. I think in a week or so I will do a detailed list of all the plot holes, stupidity, and canon rapes this movie has but for now I think it would be amusing to keep a counter going like this (0).
So the film starts off with Kirk and Spock violating the prime directive by saving an indigenous people from an exploding volcano. All Star Trek fans know that the Prime Directive is more of a guideline and nothing at all to be taken seriously (1). For some reason they have to hide the Enterprise under the sea because they can’t launch the shuttle craft from orbit (2). I’m OK with the transporter not working as that is a pretty standard Star Trek thing. In an effort to maintain a low profile and not interfere with the primitive alien culture Kirk and McCoy sneak into the alien temple for no apparent reason whatsoever (3) and Kirk opts to shoplift some kind of holy drawing of a Christmas tree (4). They run away and jump off a cliff in order to swim back to the Enterprise using some kind of underwater jet boots (no number there. I actually thought those were kind of cool).
Meanwhile Spock is wearing some kind of armor and is going to be lowered on a rope into the volcano in order to detonate a cold bomb and freeze it (no one ever heard of a winch or parachute? For that matter if you are going to lower some kind of explosive device into a lower level from an aircraft wouldn’t it be nice if there were some kind of way of “dropping” the “bomb” without risking someone’s life? Too bad something like that wasn’t invent during WWI. 5, BTW). Apparently if the volcano erupts the whole planet will die (6). Anyway, for some reason they can’t do this at night and only a shuttle craft can sneak into the smoke. Also something was said about the heat damaging the Enterprise (??? Don’t they have shields? Aren’t they capable of withstanding massive energy based damage? For the record heat=energy. 6). Of course the heat managed to wreck the shuttle craft yet somehow Spock is OK in his EVA suit. Why don’t they just wrap the shuttle craft in the same material? (7).
Kirk further violates the pesky Prime Directive by lifting the Enterprise out of the ocean directly in front of the aliens (why did he park it within sight of their village? Also I’m pretty sure the Enterprise was constructed in space and was never intended to land anywhere. I think they expanded the in atmosphere capabilities in TNG but for sure even being slightly in atmo was bad. 8 and 9). Naturally he rescues Spock and goes back to Earth for a nice relaxing three way with some alien chicks. He heads back to headquarters where the look of the season is SS uniforms.
He gets demoted back to first officer under Pike again. Meanwhile the only character that really was worth anything shows up in the form of a traitor named Hamilton (Benedict Cumberbatch). He subplots a guy with a terminally ill daughter and cures the daughter in order to get the guy to blow up something. He then attacks the meeting of all the officers with a gun ship (why would he try to kill them all with effectively a machine gun? Why not just kill them with explosives? 10). Pike gets killed, and Kirk manages to blow up the gunship with a firehose (no joke. 11).
For some reason (I keep using that phrase over and over again but this film is pretty miserly on explanations of pretty much anything) Scotty is part of the forensics team looking into the wreckage of the gun ship (12) and is allowed to wander off with a massive chunk of evidence. It is some kind of long range transporters that indicates the traitor has gone to Qo’noS (that’s Kronos to the posers out there) the Klingon homeworld (I should ding them for the long range transporter but really that was established in the last bad movie). Admiral Marcos (Peter Weller) gives Kirk some experimental photon torpedoes and orders him to park outside of the Neutral Zone (for the record the Neutral Zone always marked the border of the Romulan Empire, not the Klingon. 13) and shell him from a distance but to do so quietly so as to not start a war with the Klingons (14).
A new crew member shows up for no apparent reason and with incomplete or forged orders (apparently if you want to go for a ride on the Enterprise all you have to do is flirt with Kirk for a couple seconds and make up some bogus story. 14) in the form of hot blond science officer who later turns out to by coincidence be Admiral Marcus’s daughter (15). Scotty resigns off the ship in a snit because no one will let him look inside the the new photon torpedoes (for the most part Scotty was a good officer and knew how to obey his orders. Anyone else remember him letting a big computer run the Enterprise in Episode 53 the Ultimate Computer? 16). Kirk remembers his standard orders of peace and law when he gets to the neutral zone and sneaks onto Kronos with no apparent problem (the Klingon Empire has little interest in detecting enemies coming to their home world. 17). He heads to the planet in a shuttle craft they confiscated (apparently the shuttle bay on the Enterprise now has room for a fleet of smaller craft. I guess the ship is a carrier? 18) that looks suspiciously like another space ship that shall go unnamed but sounds like Aluminum Malcolm. He uses that ship to turn sideways and escape between a narrow metal passage while being pursued by tiny little Klingon ships. They are stopped by the Klingons and rescued by the very traitor they were after, who manages to kill like 20 of the galaxies greatest warriors.
The guy surrenders when he finds out how many of the experimental torpedoes they have and reveals that he is Khan as in Space Seed and the Wrath of Khan (wait a minute. Wasn’t Khan Noonien Singh supposed to be Indian? This guy is whiter than Casper and has an English accent. 19). He is taken back to the ship where McCoy examines him and tells Kirk he is 300 years old (note-at the start of the movie they reveal that the year is 2259 which means Khan was born in…1959? He could be watching this movie as we speak at the ripe old age of 54. That’s lazy beyond the pale. It’s one form of lazy to not do any research into any element of your actual source material but this is so lazy you can’t pull out a calculator and figure out the age of your villain is stupid. 20). Also McCoy says Khan’s blood has healing properties and injects it into a dead Tribble (didn’t they encounter Tribbles as part of their voyages? Here it seems like they are as common as guinea pigs. 21)
The ship has a warp core malfunction and is stuck in the Neutral Zone (Klingons still not really great about checking for enemies. Typical. They are generally a peaceful and docile race). Khan convinces Kirk to open up one of the torpedoes. In order to do this he opts to use his new super hot science bimbo (who also happens to be an expert in experimental weapons. 22). She needs help and recruits McCoy because he had steady hands (??? Are there no technicians or engineers on the ship who know how to use a screwdriver? I thought that was what Red Shirts were all about. On this ship there is exactly one medical doctor and about 400 basic bullet stoppers. 23). Naturally he bones it up (haw!) so we can have an “exciting” 30 second countdown to death averted at the last second by just ripping out the computer core or something (24). Inside the torpedo we find a frozen human?
Yes, it’s the rest of Khan’s jolly crew from the Botany Bay. Don’t worry none of them wake up to make this film actually interesting. Somehow Khan or Marcus got the crew stuffed into the torpedo tubes (25) and Marcus was going to fire Khans old mates at him instead of just dropping them into the nearest sun (26). At that point Marcus shows up with a super dreadnaught that has everything a warship could possibly need except for locks on the outer doors (27). Much is said about how this is the first Federation warship and how the Enterprise was just an explorer with guns (sorry, but I have to take issue with this. The Enterprise in TOS was always a considered a warship that was used for exploration. 28). Marcus does the typical evil monolog and plans to kill Khan and the rest of the crew. His daughter comes up to stop him and he just transports her onto his ship (what was her plan exactly? How did she not see that coming? 29). They do a space battle but Marcus’s ship is disabled when it is revealed that Scotty was on board the other ship and shut down the warp core (I might buy his ability to hide on board the ship and shut it down, but how did he know what was going on? For all he knew Marcus was fighting an alien horde. Also remember when communicators were for short range communication? Apparently Abrams does not as hand held communicators can now reach from Kronos to Earth. 30. By the way, when they show Kronos it is with the moon blown up. For those of you who aren’t in the know, that moon got blown up in Star Trek 6, 30+ years after the date of this film and IN AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT TIMELINE THAT JJ ABRAMS DESTROYED WHEN HE REBOOTED THE FRANCHISE! For god’s sake if you are going to do something stick with it. Lazy, lazy, lazy. 31).
Neither ship has weapons capabililty (nothing more exciting than a space battle involving two ships aimless drifting at each other) so Kirk recruits Khan to personally assault Marcus’s ship before they are all killed (the Enterprise has a crew of over 400 people. Doesn’t he have anyone who knows which end of a phaser the pew pew comes out of? 32). They capture the ship and of course Khan betrays them. He extorts his crew out of Spock and starts blowing the hell out of the Enterprise. Naturally Spock send over armed torpedoes and blows his ship up (by the way, much is said to establish that Vulcans cannot lie in order to make this deception a big deal, but that was never a part of any Star Trek until this movie. Spock could lie when it suited his needs, and his wife T’Pring lied her ass off at him).
Now we get to the part that made me want to weep. The core is knocked out of alignment and in a sort of homage to TWOK with a super “fun” twist it is now Kirk who has to go into the radiation room and fix the warp core with precision kicks (literally. Everyone knows you can fix high tech equipment with blunt force, like Fonzie and the jukebox. 33). They do the whole Spock death scene exactly as they did in the good film only without the emotional gravitas or weight. Anyway, Spock now has an emotional freak out (34) and screams Khaaaaan to no one in particular (35). Khan has crashed his ship in San Francisco (did I not mention that the whole fight took place 200K kilometers from Earth? Good thing Earth doesn’t have any kind of detectors or ships around that might have done something. 36) and Spock goes after him (again, no one else on board who can shoot?). They do a foot race that looks a lot like the final fight scene from Revenge of the Sith (with less lava, of course) and he captures him. JJ then pulls a happy ending from the deepest recess of his sweatiest ass and has Khan’s blood return Kirk from the dead (37), effectively removing any possible emotional connection with this film and draining the last of my interest.
I’d like to comment a bit on fake death scene and why it was such a miserable failure. I have often said that that scene in TWOK made me cry like a little girl and to this day tears me up. It was the death of a legendary icon, my childhood idol and best friend, and the effective end of the franchise (sure they kept it going but really the Star Trek I grew up with died there). In this film we get a cheesy reimagining with characters we don’t really give a damn about and an event we all know the studio will never let stand, especially when McCoy was already working on blood with regenerative abilities. It has all the weight of a wet fart and was about as annoying and insulting. Also, when Kirk scream Khaaaaan in the good movie Khan had just left them to die on a rock and Kirk was in communication with him, not bellowing at an empty bulkhead. This scene was forced into the movie with all the subtlety of a gardenhose colonoscopy and was about as painful. The only thing I felt when Kirk died was a weird kind of relief that that scene was over and a slight wonder as to when they would do the blood thing.
Oh, by the way why the need to capture Khan alive? Does Kirk need a full body transfusion? A tiny syringe of blood was enough to revive the Tribble. Couldn’t they mop up Khans blood off the pavement, or drain it from whatever body parts are still lying around after Spock gets done with him? Also aren’t replicators pretty well established in Star Trek and couldn’t they just whip up a batch of it on their own? How about the fact that they have like 72 other frozen super humans with the same blood, including the one guy they pulled out in order to freeze Kirk in the first place? For that matter what motivated to McCoy to inject Khan’s blood into a dead tribble in the first place? Is this some kind of standard Starfleet Medical procedure? “Well, you tested negative for all STD’s and your Dead Tribble Revival rating is through the roof!”? Am I the only one seeing these things? 38, 39, and 40.
The stars.
Special effects are great, but if you are going to a Star Trek film for special effects you are missing the point. One star. Some of the stuff I liked included the underwater jet boots and the look of the Federation Dreadnaught. One star. Uhura and the new girl are very easy on the eyes in a family friendly PG-13 way. One star. For all my bile, it is still a Star Trek movie. One star. Total: four stars.
The black holes.
So 40 plot holes, canon mistakes, or just stupid plot devices and that’s after a tertiary examination. I think that’s worth at least three black holes. Using Star Trek to warm up for his Star Wars movie. One black hole. Chris Pine is still not Kirk. One black hole. The crowbaring in of the death scene and the Khaaan moment in a worthless and painful manner. One black hole. Essentially a very lazy script that only picked the low hanging fruit, while leaving all the good stuff that required a step ladder to rot. Two black holes. Extra character who added nothing. One black hole. It’s weird to say this, but this movie had a strange pacing. Normally 135 minutes of sci fi is easy for me even if it’s not Star Trek, but this one felt like a grind. One black hole. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; there is a limit to how many near death escapes a character can survive before you stop giving a damn, and this one hit the limit in the first 20 minutes. Every scene was yet another shockingly (yet not really shocking. More like licking a 9 volt battery than getting hit with a tazer) close call. It’s like being given a delicious chocolate sunday and as soon as you are done being fed 23 more in two hours. Eventually you are going to vomit and go into a sugar coma. One black hole.
A grand total of seven black holes. An incredibly disappointing score for me for a Star Trek movie. However, understand that as I love Star Trek so much I hold anything related to it to a higher standard. If you are not a rabid fan and/or just want to be entertained go for it. I think you might get a little bored by the end but no worries. You will feel like you got your monies worth. Date movie? It annoys the crap out of me that I have to say yes as being a Star Trek nerd has for years been a huge deal breaker for me and women, but I think it would work. Bathroom break? Honestly the death scene is the perfect time, and since no one actually dies it has zero weight or merit. Go for it.
Thanks for reading. This is another one I hate myself for doing, but I am in almost all things honest, especially when it comes to things I love being abused by people. For the record this is the longest review I have ever written. Follow me on Twitter NerdKungFu. Feel free to post comments here on my review or this movie. Off topic comments, suggestions, or death threats can be emailed to [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
