THE BEST OF STAR TREK PART 4

STAR TREK MOVIE REVIEWS
10/10 CLASSIC TREK
9/10 EXCELLENT
8/10 VERY ENTERTAINING
7/10 VERY GOOD
6/10 VERY WATCHABLE
5/10 AVERAGE
4/10 BORING
3/10 AWFUL
2/10 DREADFUL
1/10 UNWATCHABLE

STAR TREK X NEMESIS – 1/10
I'm sitting there during "Star Trek: Nemesis," the 10th "Star Trek" movie, and I'm smiling like a good sport and trying to get with the dialogue about the isotronic Ruritronic signature from planet Kolarus III, or whatever the hell they were saying, maybe it was "positronic," and gradually it occurs to me that "Star Trek" is over for me. I've been looking at these stories for half a lifetime, and, let's face it, they're out of gas.There might have been a time when the command deck of Starship Enterprise looked exciting and futuristic, but these days it looks like a communications center for security guards. Starships rocket at light speeds halfway across the universe, but when they get into battles the effect is roughly the same as on board a World War II bomber. Fearsome death rays strike the Enterprise, and what happens? Sparks fly out from the ceiling and the crew gets bounced around in their seats like passengers on the No. 36 bus. This far in the future they wouldn't have sparks because they wouldn't have electricity, because in a world where you can beam matter--beam it, mind you--from here to there, power obviously no longer lives in the wall and travels through wires.I've also had it with the force shield that protects the Enterprise. The power on this thing is always going down. In movie after movie after movie I have to sit through sequences during which the captain is tersely informed that the front shield is down to 60 percent, or the back shield is down to 10 percent, or the side shield is leaking energy, and the captain tersely orders that power be shifted from the back to the sides or all put in the front, or whatever, and I'm thinking, life is too short to sit through 10 movies in which the power is shifted around on these shields. The shields have been losing power for decades now, and here it is the Second Generation of Star Trek, and they still haven't fixed them. Maybe they should get new batteries.I tried to focus on the actors. Patrick Stewart, as Capt. Picard, is a wonderful actor. I know because I have seen him elsewhere. It is always said of Stewart that his strength as an actor is his ability to deliver bad dialogue with utter conviction. I say it is time to stop encouraging him. Here's an idea: Instead of giving him bad dialogue, why not give him good dialogue, and see what he can do with that? Here is a man who has played Shakespeare.The plot of "Star Trek: Nemesis" involves a couple of strands, one involving a clone of Data (Brent Spiner), which somehow seems redundant, and another involving what seems to be a peace feeler from the Romulan empire. In the course of the movie the Romulan Senate is wiped out by a deadly blue powder and the sister planet of Remus stages an uprising, or something, against being made to work as slaves in the mines. Surely slavery is not an efficient economic system in a world of hyperdrives, but never mind: Turns out that Picard shares something unexpected with his rival commander, although once I tell you that you can no doubt guess what it is, since the movie doesn't work you very hard.There is a scene in the movie in which one starship rams another one. You would think this would destroy them both, and there are a lot of sparks and everybody has to hold onto their seats, but the "Star Trek" world involves physical laws which reflect only the needs of the plot. If one ship rammed another and they were both destroyed and everyone died, and the movie ended with a lot of junk floating around in space, imagine the faces of the people in the audience.I think it is time for "Star Trek" to make a mighty leap forward another 1,000 years into the future, to a time when starships do not look like rides in a 1970s amusement arcade, when aliens do not look like humans with funny foreheads, and when wonder, astonishment and literacy are permitted back into the series. Star Trek was kind of terrific once, but now it is a copy of a copy of a copy.
STAR TREK XI – REBOOT – 10/10
Star Trek” as a concept has voyaged far beyond science fiction and into the safe waters of space opera, but that doesn’t amaze me. The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action. Like so many franchises, it’s more concerned with repeating a successful formula than going boldly where no “Star Trek” has gone before.The 2009 “Star Trek” film goes back eagerly to where “Star Trek” began, using time travel to explain a cast of mostly the same characters, only at a younger point in their lives, sailing the Starship Enterprise. As a story idea, this is sort of brilliant and saves on invention, because young Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Scotty and the rest channel their later selves. The child is father to the man, or the Vulcan, and all that.Don’t get me wrong. This is fun. And when Leonard Nimoy himself returns as the aged Spock, encountering another Spock (Zachary Quinto) as a young man, I was kind of delighted, although as is customary in many sci-fi films, nobody is as astonished as they should be. Holy moly! Time travel exists, and this may be me! It’s more like a little ambiguous dialogue is exchanged, and they’re off to battle the evil Romulan Capt. Nero (Eric Bana).Time travel as we all know, is impossible in the sense it happens here, but many things are possible in this film. Anyone with the slightest notion of what a black hole is, or how it behaves, will find the black holes in “Star Trek” hilarious. The logic is also a little puzzling when Scotty can beam people into another ship in outer space, but they have to physically parachute to land on a platform in the air from which the Romulans are drilling a hole to the Earth’s core. After they land there, they fight with two Romulan guards, using ... fists and swords? The platform is suspended from Arthur C. Clark’s “space elevator,” but instead of fullerenes, the cable is made of metallic chunks the size of refrigerators.But stop me before I get started. I mention these details only to demonstrate that the movie raises its yo-yo finger to the science, while embracing the fiction. Apart from details from the youths of the characters and the Spock reunion, it consists mostly of encounters between the Enterprise and the incomparably larger and much better armed Romulan spaceship from the future. It’s encouraging to learn that not even explosions and fires can quickly damage a starship. Also that lifeboats can save the crew, despite the vast distance from home base.That would be because of warp speed, which for present purposes consists of looking through an unnecessary window at bright lights zapping past. This method of transportation prevents any sense of wonder at the immensity of outer space and is a convenience not only for the starship but also for the screenwriters, who can push a button and zap to the next scene. The concept of using warp speed to escape the clutches of a black hole seems like a recycling of the ancient dilemma of the rock and the hard place.But there are affecting character moments. Young Spock is deliberately taunted in hopes he will, as a Vulcan, betray emotion. Because Zachary Quinto plays him as a bit of a self-righteous prig, it’s satisfying to see him lose it. Does poor young Spock realize he faces a lifetime of people trying to get a rise out of him? Nimoy, as the elderly Spock, must have benefitted, because he is the most human character in the film.Chris Pine, as James Tiberius Kirk, appears first as a hot-rodding rebel who has found a Corvette in the 23rd century and drives it into the Grand Canyon. A few years after he’s put on suspension by the Academy and smuggled on board the Enterprise by Bones McCoy (Karl Urban), he becomes the ship’s captain. There are times when the command deck looks like Bring Your Child to School Day, with the kid sitting in daddy’s chair.Uhura (Zoe Saldana) seems to have traveled through time to the pre-feminist 1960s, where she found her miniskirt and go-go boots. She seems wise and gentle and unsuited to her costume. Scotty (Simon Pegg) seems to have begun life as a character in a Scots sitcom. Eric Bana’s Nero destroys whole planets on the basis of faulty intelligence, but the character is played straight and is effective.The special effects are slam-bam. Spatial relationships between spaceships are unclear because the Romulan ship and the Enterprise have such widely unmatched scales. Battles consist primarily of jump-suited crew members running down corridors in advance of smoke, sparks and flames. Lots of verbal commands seem implausibly slow. Consider, at light warp speeds, how imprecise it would be to say “At my command ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...” Between “2” and “1,” you could jump a million galaxies.I thought about these things during “Star Trek” because I could not help myself. I understand the Star Trek science has never been intended as plausible. I understand this is not science fiction but an Ark movie using a starship. I understand that the character types are as familiar as your favorite slippers. But the franchise has become much of a muchness. The new movie essentially intends to reboot the franchise with younger characters and carry on as before. The movie deals with narrative housekeeping. Perhaps the next one will engage these characters in a more challenging and devious story, one more about testing their personalities than re-establishing them. In the meantime, you want space opera, you got it.
STAR TREK XII INTO DARKNESS – 10/10
Less a classic "Star Trek" adventure than a "Star Trek"-flavored action flick, shot in the frenzied, handheld, cut-cut-cut style that’s become Hollywood’s norm, director J.J. Abrams’ latest could have been titled "The Bourne Federation."The plot pits the Enterprise crew against an intergalactic terrorist named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch, giving his honeyed baritone a workout), who’s waging war on the Federation for mysterious personal reasons. There’s a joke, an argument, a chase, a spaceship battle, or a brutal close-quarters firefight every five minutes, but all the action is intimately tied to character. The major players, particularly Chris Pine’s James T. Kirk and Zachary Quinto’s Mr. Spock, are as finely shaded as the incarnations played by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. This new voyage of the starship Enterprise is brash, confident, and often brutally violent, and features the most lived-in production design I’ve seen in a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster since "Minority Report."
Why, then, is the film ultimately disappointing? I suspect it’s the pop culture echo chamber effect: Abrams and his screenwriters (Robert Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof) are so obsessed with acknowledging and then futzing around with what we already know about Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Scotty and company that the movie doesn’t breathe. "Star Trek Into Darkness" is peppered with nods to past films and episodes: Kirk’s impetuous decision-making and horndog sexual proclivities; Spock’s denial of his half-humanness; Dr. McCoy’s cranky witticisms; Scotty’s protestations of what he and the ship “canna” do; references to tribbles and neutral zones and the Harry Mudd incident. The central plotline refers to one of Trek’s most celebrated storylines — a callback that alternately seems to honor the original, then turn it on its head, then honor it again. The final act includes an homage to one of the most famous scenes in the entire Trek canon — but this, too, is an inversion, or appears to be, until the script springs another whiplash reversal.I’d like to be more specific in my complaints, and feel as though I have a right to be. After all, the “surprises” Abrams would prefer I keep secret aren’t surprises if you’re passingly familiar with the Trek universe. (All you really need to know is that the film is plotted like a Bourne film or a season of 24, and that Harrison is not as he seems, or as he represents himself; his layers have layers.) But I’ll save a detailed gripe list for a blog post this weekend, and say here that "Star Trek Into Darkness" is one of the most aggressively self-conscious summer blockbusters ever made.The story starts with a "Raiders of the Lost Ark"-like action sequence: Kirk, Spock and the gang are embroiled in a secret mission on a red jungle planet filled with superstitious tribespeople whose lives are threatened by a volcanic eruption. The correct thing to do is leave Mr. Spock behind, because going back to rescue him would violate the Federation’s Prime Directive against messing with the natural development of primitive cultures. It’s in this opening sequence, for better or worse, that the movie establishes a vexing narrative pattern: The characters have urgently necessary arguments about the morally, ethically, and procedurally correct thing to do in a crisis, then one character (usually Kirk) makes a unilateral, straight-from-the-gut decision that worsens everything; and yet somehow at the end he’s rewarded, or at least not seriously punished. We’re given to understand that it’s always a good thing to prize personal friendship and loyalty above the concerns of one’s crew, ship, federation or species. Sometimes the reward is quite deliberate — as in the end scene, which finds Kirk being celebrated as a hero after making what looked to me like a series of catastrophic rookie mistakes that ended dozens of lives. Other times it’s as if the cosmos itself is rewarding or at least protecting Kirk, as when he loses command of the Enterprise for his behavior on the primitive planet, then gets it back thanks to another sudden plot twist. A good alternate title for this movie would be the name of one of Steven Soderbergh’s great books about filmmaking: "Getting Away With It: Or, the Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw." The Federation itself seems to have plenty in common with Kirk: Both the opening mission and a subsequent intergalactic act of aggression are presented as having grave consequences if they fail, then the film just sort of writes them off with a shrug, as if to say, “Well, that’s all in the past, and as long as it doesn’t happen again, no harm, no foul.” (Has anyone in the Federation actually honored the Prime Directive?)Yes, the film’s stumblebum plotting comes from a desire to give audience what it wants: Kirk in command, flying by the seat of his tight pants; Spock learning that it’s OK to acknowledge his emotions and then act on them, and that there’s more to life than following rules all the time; etc. But surely there were more elegant ways to get us there! Abrams makes the 23rd century look like a place of actions and consequences, in which humans and other creatures might actually live, think and feel, in a world in which a fall of more than ten feet could break a leg, lava can melt flesh, and people who are dead stay dead. But he also tells stories in which rules — Starfleet tactical procedures, the Prime Directive, gravity — have no narrative weight. Too much of "Star Trek Into Darkness" has what I call a “playground storytelling” sensibility: “Lie down, you’re dead. Never mind, you’re alive again — now fight!” This narrative flailing-about isn’t merely amateurish, it’s at odds with the gritty production design and pseudo-documentary camerawork and references to 9/11 and the War on Terror. It takes a great artist to be both serious and silly, and Abrams, for all his enthusiasm, just ain’t it. For all its sloppiness and blind spots and fanboy pirouettes, though, "Star Trek Into Darkness" is still an involving film with more heart than most summer blockbusters. Abrams’ roots in TV (Felicity, Alias, Lost) seem to have made him attentive to the dynamics of groups, and to the repeated phrases and gestures that bond viewers to characters. Pine’s beefy frat-boy Kirk is appealing, especially when he’s being called on the carpet; Pine has several strong scenes opposite Cumberbatch’s Harrison and Bruce Greenwood’s mentor-father figure, Capt. Pike, in which Pine is overmatched as both character and actor but uses the imbalance to enhance the scene. Sometimes you see terror in Kirk’s eyes as he blusters; his vulnerability makes you root for him even though his “I gotta be me!” philosophy destroys careers and ends lives. Quinto’s Spock is equal to, but different than, Leonard Nimoy’s incarnation, and it’s a relief to see that Abrams has made the destruction of Vulcan in the first film a key component of the character’s psychology. As Spock explains to communications officer Uhura (Zoe Saldana), his main squeeze, it’s not that he can’t feel any emotion, it’s that he’s decided he’s better off not feeling it: this Spock is a Holocaust survivor who has adopted numbness as a survival strategy. Uhura, Simon Pegg’s Scotty, John Cho’s Sulu, Anton Yelchin’s Chekov, and Karl Urban’s “Bones” McCoy all have their moments, too; they behave like plausibly real people even when the script is asking them to do and say things that common sense tells us is horse manure, and their presences lend the film a dignity that its careless storytelling doesn’t earn.