Oblivion

I'm still feeling pretty whiny about Star Trek, so I'm going to chat for a bit about a movie I DID like, even though I saw it a few weeks ago (on my birthday, actually!).

I had moderate expectations for Oblivion - I think Tom Cruise is a talented and capable actor, even if he is pretty crazypants in real life, and generally I enjoy movies he's in (Minority Report is one of my favorites, in fact).  And the general attitude about Oblivion seemed to be "That was better than I expected!", so it seemed like a safe bet.

Guys, this movie is great.  The story is solid (it's an adaptation of a graphic novel written by Joseph Kosinski, who also directed Tron: Legacy. ~The more you know~) and had a few twists I wasn't expecting, and the filmmakers do some really interesting and risky things that COULD have tanked it - but they didn't.

The biggest risk it takes, in my opinion, is in pacing - Oblivion is never in a hurry to impress you.  It has a lot of the window dressing of a big summer blockbuster, but the first hour or so is pretty much Tom Cruise wandering around a vacant Planet Earth reminiscing about a life he's never lived (pre-alien war, we're told.  Cruise and his partner Vicka, played by Andrea Riseborough, fix the drones that take care of giant water processing machines.  They have just two weeks left before they get to abandon ship and join what's left of humanity on colony Titan).  It moves incredibly leisurely, treading just this side away from boring.  It's captivating, though, because Cruise and the writers hit on just the right combination of nostalgia and weirdness to keep it interesting.

Ultimately, that pace is used to establish the world the movie is in, right before the rug gets yanked out from under you.  When the story starts shifting gears, though, the first chunk makes more sense.  Plot twists get dropped like breadcrumbs, the action spirals up slowly, and when the big reveals start happening it's almost breathtaking the way the filmmakers have played you.

Nothing comes out of nowhere - that whole opening sequence is seeded with clues that don't become clues until you know what the context is.  Going in, I thought I had a pretty good grasp on what the twist would be and what Morgan Freeman's role in all of this was; turns out what I thought I knew was correct, but only partially, and not in the way that really matters.

Oblivion also has an emotional resonance that surprised me, because I'm not used to genre or summer films being this willing to sacrifice explosions for the sake of emotional connection.  For all its scale (and there's a lot of scale - sweeping, barren landscapes, shiny futuristic planes and living platforms, lots of white and metals and a pretty cool suspension pool), the story feels small and intimate - it's the story of Morgan Freeman and his rebels, or course, but it's really the story of Cruise's Jack.  The big reveal and climax at the end feel earned, because you've spent so much perceived time with Jack, which means that Oblivion retains the emotional core that so much genre film misses (I was reminded of Avatar, actually, in that both are big, shiny science fiction tales, but Oblivion is actually resonant and, you know, good.)

Oblivion looks very much like a giant sci-fi summer blockbuster - with Cruise in the main actor seat and big, impressive visuals, superficially the film looks much bigger than what it ends up being: one man's struggle with identity and purpose.  

Star Trek Into Darkness, this time with SPOILERS

Let's get into it.

I will admit that I have never seen Wrath of Khan.  I've never been a Star Trek fan, so I never bothered, and thus may be missing something in Abrams' remake.  However, one of the things I loved so much about his first reboot was that it was so accessible - you didn't have to be a Trek fan to know what was going on, and you didn't have to be familiar with the characters to fall in love with them.  So I'm not willing to cut Abrams any slack on this front.

That said, here are my specific complaints about Star Trek: Into Darkness.

- As I said in my first review, I thought Abrams was telling us with his first Trek that he was off the leash, not to be constrained by the previously established Trek canon (however you may feel about that decision).  But what do we get as a follow up? A film that tries to shoe horn as much reference and remake that it possibly can into a story that would have been better served without it.  John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) was more interesting before the "reveal" that we're actually just doing Khan again.  The story of Kirk's disgrace with the Academy, and him getting called to task for his shitty captaining by his mentor Admiral Pike, was way more fascinating than the revenge drama we got.  All of this was washed away in the first twenty minutes of the movie.

- Let's talk about those first twenty minutes.  I was SO excited to see Pike's dressing down of Kirk, because it's a big character moment for him - yes, he's been insanely lucky so far, but the way he runs his ship and his attitude are dangerous and will probably kill someone someday.  To have another character, one that Kirk respects so much, actually call him out for that could have been a great story to follow - except that we forget about that the instant Pike dies.  The Federation takes the Enterprise away from Kirk...and then gives it back to him almost instantly.  His abilities as a captain are never in question for the rest of the film.  Even his bad decisions are mostly the product of him taking pretty solid advice from his crew.  It doesn't end up meaning anything.

- Which brings me to character motive, or lack thereof. As a Federation terrorist, Harrison was on the way to having some kind of motive - perhaps he was wronged by the Federation.  It doesn't matter, it didn't have to be complicated.  But by turning around and making him Khan, he has a tenuous motive for revenge against one specific member of the Federation (Admiral Marcus, who, um, what?  How can I give a shit about a conflict with someone I've never met before, and who's characterization wasn't explored enough to matter) and NOTHING to justify that last scene where he crashed the ship into San Francisco. Khan is only ever angry at one person: Marcus, Kirk, Spock.  But somehow, we're supposed to buy that he's this huge danger to the universe?

I feel like this is where it would have been helpful to have seen Wrath of Khan, because the scene with Old Spock gives some intimations of how dangerous Khan is - but the point is, we never see that in this version. He's some kind of superhuman, and I totally get why he hates Marcus, but the explosive destruction aimed at the Federation is never earned.

- Seriously, the Klingons were in the movie for two minutes and were more interesting than everything else.  Can the next movie be about them?

- The dialogue was brutal. Seriously, I love Karl Urban, he's a great actor, and we've seen that he's great at being Bones - so why why WHY would you reduce him to a series of stereotypical metaphors and one-liners?  All of the characters were distilled down to their TOS stereotypes (except, interestingly, Spock, who continually talks about being unable to feel and then being REALLY BAD at not feeling).

Speaking of, can we talk about how unfair Uhura's part in this whole thing was?  I alluded to it in my other review, but seriously: she's supposed to be capable and professional.  I do not believe at all that she would choose to fight about her relationship with Spock on the shuttle on the way to an extremely dangerous mission.  It was poorly placed, distracting, and damaging to all characters involved.

- For all that the stakes keep being raised, and the probability of death looms ever closer, I never felt like there was any tension.  With the sole exception of Khan and Kirk's flight through space (which would have been even more effective if it had been edited a little tighter), I never once was afraid for these characters.  Hell, Kirk died and I didn't take it seriously, because I knew what story we were in (which is another reason the Khan bait-and-switch doesn't work - yes, it's Spock that dies in the original, but that doesn't stick, either).  There is a way to create tension when your audience knows the ending of the story, this movie just never knows how.

- And at the end...nothing is different.  Khan is back in a cryo tube (which, how? How do you fight an super being back into a freezing tube?) Kirk has the Enterprise back. All the relationships are where they were in the beginning, because nothing was ever a serious threat to them.  The whole film felt like a wasted opportunity.

I'll probably go see more Trek films, if Abrams keeps making them.  But I won't feel the same kind of unreserved excitement I had before STID.  Which makes me really, really sad.

Star Trek: My first summer disappointment

I'm coming out of hibernation because I saw the new Star Trek film last night, and I have a lot of feelings about it. Specifically, I have a lot of BAD feelings about it, which have left me disappointed to the point of anger - which, on the one hand, is kind of ridiculous, because at the end of the day, movies aren't worth getting mad about...but on the other hand, I was SO EXCITED about this one. JJ Abrams' first Star Trek is one of my favorite m movies. I had it on my top ten list for 2009. I thought it was Best Picture material.

Into Darkness is...not. It manages to feel both bloated and hollow, drilling the same parallels into you over and over again with all the subtlety of an anvil, taking what were some of the best things about the 2009 film and tossing them merrily out the airlock.

I'm going to do this review in two parts, a spoiler free one and one where I can more fully enumerate the crimes of Star Trek: Into Darkness, the better to fully explain how I came to leave the theater feeling like I saw a different movie than everyone else I know (believe me, I wish I'd seen the one everyone is raving about. That sounded like a GOOD movie.).

To start, it's too long by about a half hour. The first twenty minutes are great - they move along, reveal some interesting conflicts, and get the action started...which then almost immediately tapers off into endless, pointless fight sequences and way, WAY too many shots of various crew members running down the white hallways of the Enterprise (which, by the way, has anyone ever bothered to map out the ship? Because I had no idea where we were supposed to be in the ship most of the time).

In addition to feeling padded out with unnecessary running, poorly edited action sequences, and revisiting the same plot points over and over, Into Darkness seems to take pleasure in wasting some of its best resources. Karl Urban as Bones is reduced to stupid metaphors and bitter one liners (to the point where another character actually says to him, "Enough with the metaphors!"). Uhura manages to somehow be both more and less interesting, getting to accompany Kirk on a mission but choosing the worst possible moment to bitch about her relationship problems. In fact, most of the crew, such strong presences in the first film, are basically reprising that here - hardly anyone gets anything new to do, or even say.

There's some good stuff here, not enough to assuage my feelings about it as a whole, but just enough to be frustrated by the film. The first two scenes are excellent, as Kirk' s methods and attitudes are called into question by the one person who's opinion he might actually care about. There's enough of the Klingons seen that I wish they'd been the villains of the film. And Benedict Cumberbatch, our actual villain, delivers monologues both traffic and sinister in a way that might have given me chills...If the material he'd been given had had more punch. But it's all so bogged down in senseless, motive-less buckshot that I had trouble keeping the good stuff in mind.

The conflict introduced in the opening sequence is pretty instantly brushed aside for something much less interesting, so that Abrams can pull what I'm sure he thought was an epic level bait and switch...but which ends up pretty much guaranteeing that the rest of the movie has no tension, because you now know exactly how it will end. This might be my biggest criticism and biggest disappointment: I thought that, with his first Trek, Abrams was making a grand statement that we were now playing by his rules. The old timeline was scrapped, he could send the Enterprise and her crew wherever he wished, and it would all be new, and fresh, and exciting. Into Darkness is none of those things. It is a group of people patting themselves on the back for being clever and good looking, while offering nothing in the way of new experience. I know you can do better, Mr. Abrams. I sincerely hope your next effort is more with my time.