| Star Trope, Up Ours |
[Jun. 3rd, 2009|12:04 pm] |
Events after my youngest brother's wedding have been a blur of depressurization and the whirlwind descent of the preparations for my own nuptials in The-Year-Of-Our-Lord-Two-Thousand-And-Ten. Can there be such a thing as preparations for the preparations to a wedding? It's looking more and more like this is the regular run of things when speaking of the impending merger of two people and two families. How can people have more than one of these things? It boggles the mind.
As usual, in the face of enormously important things looming over the horizon, I have chosen to break my silence by speaking of enormously unimportant things-- specifically, my opinions on movies professionals are paid to have opinions about.
Star Trek was an enjoyable movie experience, but a markedly poor Star Trek story. I can't call myself a Trekkie, but I've lived around them, and the series is firmly in the background of my makeup. What I saw in the theater was a big, transparent RESET button for the franchise, but a shiny, understandable one. I only wish that they'd offered a better tale while they were at it.
Basically, I now see that what they (by which, I mean the writers/producers/source) had set out to do was to breathe new life into the old, familiar characters of the series' inception, at which they have succeeded admirably; every name was given a new face and a new dynamic, especially effected through the contrivance of forcing the 'original' crew together in the context of just having emerged from the academy. I particularly enjoyed the new hook of Young Spock being romantically involved with Young Uhura (missed her first name, how ironic).
What I didn't appreciate was seeing old cudgels of lazy science fiction being used for the purpose; black holes, planetary destruction, time travel. I acknowledge their usefulness in evoking emotion and thought-pictures, but they are quick fixes and cop outs for the most part. I had imagined that the Star Trek franchise might start adopting a more mature approach to science fiction and thus shed some of the disdain it's accrued as 'McScience Fitcion' over the years, but I guess I'll have to wait a little longer.
Sadly, these are the least of my problems with it-- what prickles me more than the pseudoscience involved (which I am not a qualified authority on by any means) are the botched narrative opportunities littered throughout the film (which I am still not a qualified authority on by any means!). Most disappointing to me was the revelation of the nature of their primary antagonist; the captain of one of the most fearsome starships ever designed for the big screen turns out to be nothing more than an angry Romulan miner out for revenge. While I cannot reasonably hope for another favorite pulp SF villain, it almost makes one wish for the Borg again.
Finally, we get to the elephant in the room, the eye-popping moral conundrum that the writers seem to flit blasely through and about (and I'm not even talking about how easily Green-Skinned Girl was forgotten after her ship was presumably destroyed in the Federation fleet that was wiped out)-- how it can be considered, by any stretch, that the day was 'saved' when an entire planet of souls was completely and utterly annihilated. Now, I have no great love for Vulcans; to my mind, they are the Star Trek equivalent of Tolkien's elves, and you all know how I feel about that lot. No, my bigger problem is the implied attitude that as long as the planet destroyed wasn't Earth, it's perfectly okay to carry on without it.
Seriously, you guy? Seriously??
The sequential beginning of the events portrayed have an older Spock seeking to save planet Romulus and failing, subsequently earning the eternal ire of one of its survivors, with the additional complication of them both being thrown back in time to different temporal points. So far so good. And then we have the irate fellow swearing revenge on the Federation older Spock represents, starting with the ship that lay conveniently just outside the black hole he emerges from into the past, which just conveniently happens to carry James T. Kirk's father.
Somehow, despite the drastically different circumstances of James growing up with no father, not to mention the other, myriad changes to the universe presented by an extra-temporal visitor, Kirk largely grows up unchanged and the universe is still a perfect place for the crew of the original Star Trek tv show to appear together like family again for the first time. O... kay. Fine. I can accept that.
So now Irate Fellow means to destroy the Federation, starting with planet Vulcan, and following with planet Earth. He succeeds in destroying Vulcan in the first half; the rest of the movie is about saving planet Earth (which is, of course, saved in the end).
Alright, so a new alternate reality rife with future franchise possibilities is born; a Federation universe minus Vulcan, plus two Spocks, and an extremely young and plucky revivified crew of the Enterprise. All perfectly acceptable, but they didn't have to rub it in my face.
The dialogue and mood of the story were at odds with each other at very critical points, particularly when Older Spock speaks warmly to Young Kirk about 'cheating' being sometimes acceptable to solve no-win problems, 'cheating' being in reference to time travel.
... but they didn't mean to travel back in time! And the cure was worse than the disease, in any case-- Vulcan remains destroyed, Irate Fellow killed and gloated upon for all his trouble, with Romulus faring no better in the other reality. I kept expecting them to plunge into a black hole and through time again to bring Vulcan back, but then the credits started rolling, and I was all like wtf?
Seriously, you guy? Seriously??
I look forward to more jaw-droppingly beautiful rendered pew pew in the future, but damned if I'll ever forget that they murdered a planetful of people and casually told us all that it's perfectly alright.
I'm always sorry when I have more to say about things I didn't like than I do about things I did like, because I did like Star Trek (as a net gain anyway). However, I liked Pixar's Up a great deal better, and thus I will probably speak about it exponentially less.
Aside from the fact that I watched this one with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) allisino this time whilst nomming on some decadently chocolatey brownie melts, it was the first 3D film I'd ever been to, and the effects are wholeheartedly recommended (if you're not prone to siezures or bouts of vomiting in the face of overwhelming visio-sensory assault, that is). I didn't even mind sitting way up on the very first row; may have enhanced the experience, really.
And of course, it was Pixar, from which I've come to expect lackluster publicity but great filmmaking. If I hadn't seen the trailer to Up, I'd have been better off; as it was, I still had a swell time. As such, I don't really want to give too much away, but I will a couple of general impressions.
I have an extraordinary respect and admiration for Pixar's commitment to perfecting the art of expressing motion and emotion without words. They're no slouches when it comes to narration, dialogue, and banter either-- their previous films, particularly The Incredibles and, my favorite, Ratatouille, establishes that-- but I take an exquisite appreciation for the times when they put the microphone down and let the reel do the talking. As with Wall-E, my favorite sequences in Pixar's Up were all in the first few minutes of the movie-- if wishes could be granted, I would have wanted for both movies to be entirely speechless. But alas, as with Wall-E, Up is, first and foremost, a children's movie (so no smart-alec 'What's Up?' jokes anymore, hmm, k?), and they have children to please.
That's the movement I perceive in Pixar's last three feature-lengths; perhaps Ratatouille's comparatively poor reception was due to the fact that it was a more cerebral comedy, with some very nuanced, eccentric dynamics carrying the bulk of the chemistry. Both Wall-E and Up start off with subdued scenes and situations, which suddenly-- almost jarringly-- segues into a lot of rollicking action sequences and a lot of physical comedy. Happily enough, Pixar blends both to their purposes masterfully, but with marked contrast comes a marked preference-- I enjoyed the fast-paced sections well enough but I dearly loved the quiet parts.
Oh, and so daring! Pixar deftly and subtly tackles extremely sensitive issues in Up as well, and again does them justice without dwelling on them too much to be depressing. They remind us that some of these things are real, as any storyteller should. But they do not lie to us and say that it is all perfectly acceptable-- something better is always possible and within reach, and you always leave their movies with a sense of hope and a smile.
These two movies amount to my total expenditures for media-based entertainment in forever. Has it really been more than a year since I last bought a videogame for myself? The times, they are a-changin'. More on this when I return.
God bless!
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