Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 46

I won’t say much about the plot, because it’s better without spoilers, but…I hated the first hour of the movie. Just couldn’t stand it. The two leads were just acting so stupid and self-destructive that I couldn’t sympathize with anyone except the police inspector, and even that was probably in part because he was effectively narrating the story.

If it had been a two-part TV miniseries, I wouldn’t have bothered with part two.

But I stuck through with it, and the tone changed significantly in the second half…and then the ending was so good that it completely made up for everything that had bothered me about the beginning.

Yeah, I was watching Star Trek during the earthquake. Right at the point that they open a huge, loud, grinding door to a remote outpost. Fortunately it was small, the movie kept playing, and we all kept watching.

Judging by audience reaction (to the movie, not the quake), there were definitely lots of people seeing it for the first time today, so I’ll keep this non-spoilery as much as possible.

What I Liked

• The film manages to recapture the Kirk, Spock and McCoy dynamic that gave the original show its heart.
• Each character gets at least something to do, even if it does focus heavily on Kirk and Spock.
• The actors really manage to convey the same characters, rather than new characters with the same names. Especially McCoy and Spock. Karl Urban in particular seems to be channeling DeForest Kelley the way Ewan MacGregor channeled Alec Guinness in the Star Wars prequels. (And yes, Kirk is different, but there’s a reason for it, and that reason is critical to the story and his character’s journey.)
• The plot moves and holds together (mostly).
• The effects of course are incredible.
• They remembered that Trek can have humor – something that ST: TNG and later shows seemed to avoid as if it would somehow taint their artistic value (except when Q was around).
• The nods to established elements of the series, from character quirks to design elements to music cues, that are there if you know what to look for, but don’t bog down the story if you don’t.

What I Didn’t

I had no problems with the obvious canon changes, and thought that the huge event 1/3 of the way in was probably the best way they could recapture dramatic suspense and establish the idea that anything can happen.

In fact, the things that bothered me have very little to do with other versions of Star Trek. Again, trying to be as non-spoilery as I can for the people who haven’t seen it.

• Supernovas are not that dangerous unless you’re in the same solar system. For planet X to be destroyed, it would have to have been that planet’s sun that went supernova.
• Another planet, to provide the view that it offered of a significant event, would have to have been a moon of the planet on which that event took place.
• Engineering doesn’t look like a spaceship. It looks like a brewery.
• It relies heavily on the same dead-relative-as-motivation trope that’s bothering me so much in Flash: Rebirth. But I can see what they were going for and why they did it.
• A piece of miracle technology is invented which would revolutionize space travel to the point that it would make any further voyages irrelevant, and will most likely be ignored because of this. (Of course, the TV series did the same thing all the time.)

Music

Also, while I liked Michael Giacchino’s music in context, it’s very repetitive. The theater was playing the score while we waited for the film to start, and an awful lot of it is the same theme, over and over, in different arrangements.

My favorite Star Trek music is a toss-up between James Horner’s scores for The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock, and Cliff Eidelman’s score for The Undiscovered Country. We were talking about the music before the movie, and neither of us could think of anything else Eidelman had done, so I looked him up on IMDB. It turns out that he’s written music for about 20 films since Star Trek VI, and I recognized almost all of them…I just hadn’t actually seen any of them.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but the stage version is very good. Oddly enough, while it’s narrated by one of the journalists working with Frost, and is largely told from David Frost’s point of view, it’s really Richard Nixon who ends up being the main character. Frost himself is mainly in it for the ratings (if it does well, it’ll jump-start his career), but Nixon is really in it to rehabilitate his reputation – which, of course, doesn’t end up happening. (“Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”)

The larger-than-life presence of TV is a huge factor as well, with a bank of TV screens frequently upstaging or highlighting the interactions on stage. (For the interview sequences, they actually bring out a pair of TV cameras as if they were filming, and put that picture live onto the screen above the stage.) I’m especially curious to see how well that aspect translates to the film version.

Quite nice, although the rooms are extremely small by modern standards – small enough that instead of an actual desk, there’s a fold-out desk on the armchair. There’s also a flatscreen TV with both pay-per-view and video game rentals, and an AT&T wireless hotspot accessible from the room. The staff is nice, and the location was perfect. A decent area of town, near restaurants, 5 minutes from the Moscone Convention Center one way, 5 minutes from a BART, MUNI and cable car station the other way, and right across the street from the official (WonderCon) convention hotel.

We watched an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from Netflix this evening, called “Paradise.” Sisko and O’Brien investigate signs of human life on a planet with no charted settlements, and find a village of people who have been marooned for ten years in an area where no modern technology works. “Fortunately” they had someone who was an expert in low-tech living, and so they’ve built a small community there.

And they keep coming back to that word, “community,” even though by “community” they basically mean “what Alixus wants us to do.” It becomes clear that they follow her with cult-like devotion, such that if she merely suggests something — say, that one of the villagers seduce Sisko to make him feel more welcome — they’ll do it. Eventually it turns out that she not only caused their emergency landing, but created and still maintains the field that keeps anything technological shut down.

In the end, O’Brien shuts down the field and exposes the fact that their “community” only exists because Alixus wanted to prove a philosophical point. The Starfleet officers take her into custody to answer for the fact that she let people die because she blocked access to modern medicine. By this time it’s amply clear that she doesn’t actually care about the people in the community, just that it follows a form that proves her right.

But aside from one person saying “You lied to us!” no one objects. And they all stay, because this is their home, and they’ve formed a community, and because, Alixus claims, they’ve discovered their “true identities” instead of being stuck in a high-tech society’s pre-defined roles.

Of course, it would have been more effective if they’d shown some of this self-discovery, rather than that they’d simply exchanged a technological pigeonhole for an agrarian one. Or that the villagers were actually connected to one another, rather than simply that they all were willing to follow their leader.

If the episode was trying to make the point that even though their society was established under false pretenses, they actually gained something from the experience, it failed utterly. It doesn’t show a tight-knit, thriving community, but a bunch of followers who have just lost their leader. “Fortunately” they seem to have gained a new one.