Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

Being well aware that this is going to be just one of kazillions of reviews and commentaries this reaction to just seeing Star Trek Into Darkness (note Abram's lack of punctuation in that title: there's a declaration of intent for you) is going to be below average in the details. I'm a fanboy, but couldn't hope to compare with Den of Geek and their ilk. And I'm equally aware that lots of you will see this film so I've kept the spoilers to a bare minimum, limiting them to facts that already out there on sites such as IMDb.

JJ Abrams' latest addition to the franchise is almost cynically successful at building on his first (ingenious) reinvention of Captain James Tiberius Kirk and his trusty cohorts on board old NCC-1701 (see? I can be a nerd too). The action is, from the first second, ramped up, CGI vertiginous and shot through with that post-Transformers NOISE. But at least you don't get to see Shia LaBeouf, and the film's pace - while never really letting up - becomes decidedly more coherent after the first ten breathless minutes.

This time Abrams managed to include a worthy bad guy. For such a factory-line genre so few action movies seem to realise that the bad guy has to be at least as charismatic as the good guys for the film feel balanced and well-rounded. The last movie used its convoluted temporal paradox story mainly in the service of setting up the originals all over again. But the downside of such cleverness was that it lacked a really compelling adversary. Eric Bana did little but brood and blow up Spock's homeworld, apparently because he was sad about his wife and child.

But look out here comes SHERLOCK HOLMES! Well, actually Benedict Cumberbatch plays a kind of anti-Holmes here, mentally AND physically superior, but as mean as you can get. He's a Starfleet guy with an agenda that involves blowing up, shooting and generally being nasty to everyone. He's Cumberbastard. And he uses his best basso profundo to serve up all of his most chilling pronouncements. You know, the ones that link up all the bits where stuff blows up. Of course he's not what he seems at first (cf that spoilers remark). I think he nailed it.

The aforementioned first ten minutes set up a plot whereby Captain Jim can be stripped of the Enterprise, then get it back in about two minutes along with a strong thirst for vengeance. We're reunited with all the usual faces with the addition of a rather useless Alice Eve as new crew member/gratuitous alternative eye candy to Zoe Saldana, Dr Carol Marcus (there's a big clue in that name BTW). Cue a romp across the neutral zone into trouble.

It's worth mentioning here that, as before, the production team have to strive to achieve a balance between retro and futuristic because they're effectively re-imagining a modern version of an old vision of the future to make a third meta-futurism. It's a cool trick but also means that women seem to occupy a woefully retrogressive place in the future. Just like the old future. Yes, we expect old serial space shagger Kirk to leer, but it also means that the female uniforms remain woefully aimed at teenage boys. Thighs in space! And Uhura's role as Spock's sensitive touchstone undermines her more hard-headed skills as multi-linguist and comms person just as Marcus, as second science officer (specialising in weapons, natch), is undermined by her getting down to her space undies pretty smartly.

This is unapologetically a boy's movie, filled with daddy issues, bromance and mobile phone spats. But there's enough here for all of the family, really. There's a lot of love on this ship - cross-gender, cross-ethnicity, even cross-species - and who knows what they could get up to on a five year mission? It's just as Gene Rodenberry saw his original vision for ST:

“Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms."

But the upgraded Enterprise 2.0 also takes into account modern politics. Just as the '60s series represented the face of liberal American imperialism, ST 2013 seems to want to make atonement for rushing into conflicts or forcing them upon us, replacing revenge with justice and saying something about the use of drones, terrorism, George Bush and WMD. Maybe. It's never that clear and it blurs the real reason that people will go and see this film. Contained in Rodenberry's vision was the idea of a disparate bunch of characters who you could genuinely love. Why else did we watch the cardboard rocks and latex silliness? And Abrams makes sure that we care just enough for these gloriously 2D characters for two hours.

Of the usual crew, Karl Urban (above) gets singled out by me, if only because his DeForest Kelly as Dr 'Bones' McCoy impersonation gets better every time. And he was Dredd (did I mention that I loved Dredd?). However Zachary Quinto also seems to have become more like Leonard Nimoy than Leonard Nimoy ever did. Even Simon Pegg manages to be aceptable as Scotty this time around.

The script's snappy, witty and (thankfully) always manages to shove the technobabble bits into segments where characters walk or run fast, thus making comprehension no longer a requisite. Machine-gunned sentences about warp cores being mis-aligned etc. only need to convey the very simple premises of fixing something within an allotted time before something very bad happens. That's how knowing this script is. Even when it throws a 'disarming a ticking bomb' cliche into the mix only to make you smile to yourself for recognising that it's a blatant use of a cliche. Make no mistake STID is put together like a well-oiled adventure ride. It also manages to slip in nods to other sci fi greats: a USS Bradbury is mentioned, while Cumberbastard's character is called John Harrison. A coincidence? Also Peter Weller's in it. You get the picture...

So STID is stuffed with enough meta references to keep the faithful happy (a TRIBBLE!) even down to at least one of the denouements. I say 'one of' because if STID really has a noticeable fault it's that it's too willing to give fans what they want. I think I counted at least five big climactic moments before I started to wonder how much more edge of seat stuff my brain could process. Abrams doesn't yet seem to have learned that you should always leave us wanting more. But in this case STID was more than enough. I loved every second.

Star Trek Into Darkness is released in cinemas on May 9th

Remake, Remodel

Over the weekend (whatever happened to my regular 'Weekend Views' slots? Answer: I got a life), I saw Casino Royale - Daniel Craig's first foray as our favourite vodka martini drinker - for the very first time. Only three years too late, I know. But it set the grey cells a-whirling on the subject of meta-movies. I'd be interested to know if many others have posted on this. But essentially what we're talking about is a film belonging to a long-established franchise that assumes such a level of knowledge from the audience that they can effectively 're-invent' the whole series and start again for a new market.
Casino Royale may not have been the first movie to do this but it certainly was the most notable (and I'm not counting the Star Wars franchise here, as Lucas just went back and filled in details rather than re-starting the whole thing). Here we're quickly introduced to a black and white Bond and his first two pre-'00 status' kills (the requisite number to complete before you become designated as such). From this point the directors can play fast and loose. There's M (Dame Judy) as always, but as we progress through the (frankly quite believable compared to other Bond movies) plot we discern a darker edge. The hero is borderline psychotic. He's vulnerable. He doesn't crack wise at every opportunity, making it twice as incongruous when he does ('That last hand nearly killed me'). He passes on the easy shag for WORK (following a terrorist to Miami) and he doesn't CARE if his martini's shaken or stirred. It thrills because it flouts convention for those millions who think they know what to expect from the film while still making reference to what's missing. And thankfully they've removed the first quarter irritation of Q and his gadgets. We see them when they're being USED only.
But on another level it's a fantastically visceral action movie that stands on its own for anyone either born on another planet or two young to remember what a Bond movie is 'supposed' to do. Voila: meta movie. So post modern that it spits at its own conventions while pumping new life into something that was existing by rote.
JJ Abrams, of course, also did this in 2009 with Star Trek. Using some dodgy time travel guff and a cast that were all excellent impersonators of the originals, Abrams reset the clock at zero and reinvented the franchise for the new millenium.
Any more examples out there?

Hello Damon!

(Firstly, an apology: I promised myself I wasn't going to write another word on the shark-jumping spectacular we call Lusht here at Garuda-towers. But bear with me. Normal service will be resumed etc. etc.) Yes folks this is it. I've finally turned into another of those chuckleheaded idiots who get so involved in their drama that they start to think that the TV IS TALKING DIRECTLY TO THEM. In other words, I watched this week's partial return-to-form episode of Lusht (The Man From Talahasee) and suddenly realised that Damon Lindelof had left me the biggest possible clue as to who 'The Great Man' aka 'Jacob' aka the leader of the Hostiles etc may be. It's ME! Good grief, I know this show was kinda interactive but come on...I never saw that one coming etc. etc.
Re-watching the mind-bending sequence where evil Ben and born-again Locke chatted about the Island and its powers (and let's not even talk about the weird hamster-related clue) I suddenly noticed what Ben had on his dining table. Yes, it's a GARUDA (see pic!!!). Call me paranoid. But are those crazy guys at ABC going inside my head? What next? Let's hope they look at my Last.fm page too. Then we'll get King Crimson instead of all that Mamas and Papas and Three Dog Night nonsense ;-)
So Lindelof, you can write to me here when you want my character to appear on the programme. But I don't get out of Streatham for less than 20 quid, y'hear?

Plotspoiler quarterly (Lusht jumps the shark)

Got that? I'M GIVING STUFF AWAY HERE! Ok, for all you Sky-watching freaks, stop now.
However, it's my sworn duty to report on what appears to be a severe crisis at Lusht production central. Now into its two-month 'hiatus' (ie: christ, let's really go back to the drawing board before we get cancelled, guys) until February. The first 6 episodes of series 3 of the national tourist board of Hawaii's premier TV show (Check the utterly Lushtous pic below) is floundering badly. The trouble is, I still enjoy it.

The initial trick (as mentioned earlier) of making Jack quite a sympathetic character has been dulled by the endless dragging out of the whole Henry gale/Ben plotline about his bloody spinal tumour. Maybe it's the fact that the 'Others' are turning out to be as unpleasant, bitchy and disorganised as those island inhabitants who stupidly flew Oceanic, but the 'mysteries' behind everything seem to be mere placeholders to keep an increasingly flimsy series of illogical events in place. Not even the reappearance of the 'monster' in the latest episode could bring back the old magic. And why take a character like Eko to whole new bad-ass levels (the murderation in Yemi's church was ace), only to squish him against a tree? Eko's opposite number, John Locke, is looking increasingly less like the keeper of deeper knowledge and more like a middle-aged fuck up floundering through portents and visions (but at least we now know that he knows how to grow weed, hehe).
There HAVE been some great little moments. Ben/Henry telling Kate how unpleasant the next two weeks were going to be; Desmond's strange psychic/future vison stuff, and who is the man with the eyepatch???
But boy, the whole Others stuff at the Hydra station is really beginning to feel like the producers have NO idea to go until they get their big screeen version in the pipeline. At first it seemed that the mind games were all very cool, but now it just seeems as though we're gonna have to go with Kate, Sawyer and Jack's 'Escape from Stalag Lost' and just put up with EVERYBODY'S inability to answer a question in a straightforward manner. Meanwhile the beach dwellers continue to flail pointlessly until someone decides to give Desmond a bigger role, stop Sayid being so fucking serious (ok, I know he's been through a lot) , throw Charlie in a hole and give us more about the Hanso stuff. Hey ABC, I'm still here, but it's looking more and more likely that, like Twin Peaks, a cutting-edge piece of psycho-drama is turning into a bloody expensive soap.