Showing posts with label Science Fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science Fiction. Show all posts
Friday, January 8, 2010
25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #24 - CHILDREN OF MEN
24. Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men (2006)
Using an Eastern European long take aesthetic, a Mexican director situates a British novelist’s science fiction tale about an African refugee -- whose pregnancy is humanity’s first in almost two decades – within the contexts of U.S. anti-immigration fervor and War on Terror atrocities. That Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men is terrifically entertaining without sacrificing an inch of its political breadth is something of a miracle. In collaboration with the great director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki (who also shot Malick’s The New World), Cuaron uses a series of frenzied long takes to create a zippy cousin to Bela Tarr’s forsaken glacial drifts, but it could be said both are charting historical degradation of a sort. In Cuaron's film, a gun-phobic former radical, the droll Clive Owen, escorts the planet's lone fertile human (the race's sterility is never explained, though numerous potential culprits populate the narrative) through a looking glass of squalid immigrant detention and urban warfare in an effort to get her unborn child to The Human Project, a team of scientists hoping to repopulate the dying earth. It’s an art film and an action picture: a nightmarish chase picture set in a barren future of nearly unremitting xenophobia, war, paranoia and fascism. Cuaron should be forgiven an occasionally condescending approach to both race and radicalism and applauded for an attempt at drawing parallels between domestic (immigration law, class conflicts) and foreign policies (the war on terror, preemptive strikes). Aesthetically, Children of Men boasts the greatest, most haunting sci-fi production design and photography since Blade Runner. Despite its prognosticated bleakness, the film is anything but cynical: after a decade of apocalyptic action films in which humanity must survive its own ravages, Cuaron’s vision is the only one that elects to preserve earnestly the hope that not only will human bodies weather future cataclysm, but that a shared sense of Humanity might as well.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
VISIONARILY
Zach Galifianakis plays a Visioneer in Visioneers
People across the United States are exploding at ever alarming numbers. It could happen to anyone. It could happen to you. Dreaming and weight gain are symptoms. Best to be a good, productive employee in order to avoid stress-induced combustion. Also have lots of sex (occasionally with giant stuffed teddy bears, but mostly with your spouse) and eat lots of fried chicken. So goes society’s best advice for leading a long, happy and healthy life in Jared Drake’s Visioneers.
A laudable effort at lo-fi sci-fi, this cheapo jet black comedy is about 5/7ths hilariously morose, and 2/7th overripe, New Age mush, ultimately not a bad proportion for first time filmmakers Jared and Brandon Drake (director and writer, respectively). Granted a last-minute DVD release after the success of this summer’s The Hangover made star Zach Galifianakis nearly a household name, Visioneers sports the standard dystopian sci-fi line about a horizonless corpo-governmental bureaucracy stifling the life force of its drone employees until one man decides he’s not going to take it anymore.
Visioneers’ addition to the canon of futuristic office drone cautionary tales is the absurdist sense of humor it utilizes while installing what is among the ugliest futures yet contrived in contemporary science fiction. These United States, date undetermined, as conjured by the brothers Drake, seem to have taken two steps backward and three steps sideways. Remember how Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow purported a future as projected from the 1930’s? Visioneers offers us a vision of a dystopian future as suburban teenagers might have imagined it in 1993. This tack by no means hinders the effectiveness of the Drake’s vision, as it easily could have. Instead, the oddball humor and anachronistic non-sequiturs liven up the whole thing. George Washington Winsterhammerman (Galifianakis) drives, despite only having one child, a boxy early 90s minivan, lives in a garish McMansion, wears track suits sporting his company’s logo, employs a personal trainer/life coach in the mold of both Tony Robbins and Jake Steinfeld (Body by Jake) and his office contains no computers or electronic gizmos. This is naked, unplugged misery, and it definitely smarts worse than the whizzing and whirring malaise of technocratic masterpieces like Blade Runner and A.I. Fittingly, when the evil institution rotting the American Dream from the belly out wants to corral its citizens into less emotional behavior and increase productivity, it attaches a gaudy, pager-looking device to the jugular. There’s no virtual reality, robotic maids, retinal scans, or techno-wizardry of any kind, as if the human race grew so emotionally stunted and unimaginative that the will to create distractions from the numbing cosmos had withered altogether. Television alone persists, and there isn’t much on it but vapid self-helpers (1000 Ways to be Happy), explosion cure telethons, sadistic cop shows (Mack Luster, in which the police pry the fingernails from an uncooperative geriatric) and newscasts manufacturing fear of spontaneous combustion. If all that sounds a bit obvious, the understated execution is nearly flawless, elevating the material beyond its satirical brethren.
Perhaps the brothers had the screenplay and art design lying around the house for a few years while gathering financing. Regardless, this vision is all the more horrifying in its post-modern chaos of life. A running joke is the widespread fear of chaos (pronounced CHAY-ohss by all character in the film), without any acknowledgment of the current maelstrom of products, pacification and ugliness that surrounds them already. There is no center to this universe, no organizing principal or isolatable point where humanity went astray. This world’s relationship to our own is entirely nonlinear. We didn’t evolve or devolve toward this destination; the Drakes present it as radial explosion of twenty years worth of junk culture and capitalistic excess.
Galifianakis is mesmerizing. Toned down tremendously from his turn in The Hangover and his standup act, he shows remarkable range as George, and the Drakes wisely linger over his expressions, which are never cheap or easy to read. The emotionless sad sack is practically mute, and the film’s most biting, hilarious and wrenching stretches occur watching Galifianakis as a single word spends minutes being visibly generated in his neck and on his face before limply slipping out. He wears the weight of a forsaken society on his broad face better than any of his deprogrammed forebears. The tension he generates after failing to speak when prompted is reason enough to take in this fantastically bizarre and admirably cheap sci-fi romp. Of particular brilliance is an extended scene where he flings himself through his property in a saccadic, pre-explosive fit, his gesticulations tight spasms punctuated by uncontrolled flailing. It’s a bit of pantomime that’s unique to Galifianakis, and it, along with his droll line readings and sly facial tics, signals a significant comedic performer emerging into his own.
Not as dramatically together as Idiocracy, but far funnier. Not as brilliant as Brazil, but far more intimate a portrait of the little man’s suffering in a futuristic wasteland. Mentioning it in league with those two films should give a clear indication of its merits, while stirring up anticipation for the future work of both Galifianakis and the Drake brothers.
Visioneers / USA / 2008 / Color / 95 min. / Directed by Jared Drake / Written by Brandon Drake / Starring: Zach Galifianakis, Judy Greer, James Le Gros, Mia Maestro and Missi Pyle
People across the United States are exploding at ever alarming numbers. It could happen to anyone. It could happen to you. Dreaming and weight gain are symptoms. Best to be a good, productive employee in order to avoid stress-induced combustion. Also have lots of sex (occasionally with giant stuffed teddy bears, but mostly with your spouse) and eat lots of fried chicken. So goes society’s best advice for leading a long, happy and healthy life in Jared Drake’s Visioneers.
A laudable effort at lo-fi sci-fi, this cheapo jet black comedy is about 5/7ths hilariously morose, and 2/7th overripe, New Age mush, ultimately not a bad proportion for first time filmmakers Jared and Brandon Drake (director and writer, respectively). Granted a last-minute DVD release after the success of this summer’s The Hangover made star Zach Galifianakis nearly a household name, Visioneers sports the standard dystopian sci-fi line about a horizonless corpo-governmental bureaucracy stifling the life force of its drone employees until one man decides he’s not going to take it anymore.
Visioneers’ addition to the canon of futuristic office drone cautionary tales is the absurdist sense of humor it utilizes while installing what is among the ugliest futures yet contrived in contemporary science fiction. These United States, date undetermined, as conjured by the brothers Drake, seem to have taken two steps backward and three steps sideways. Remember how Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow purported a future as projected from the 1930’s? Visioneers offers us a vision of a dystopian future as suburban teenagers might have imagined it in 1993. This tack by no means hinders the effectiveness of the Drake’s vision, as it easily could have. Instead, the oddball humor and anachronistic non-sequiturs liven up the whole thing. George Washington Winsterhammerman (Galifianakis) drives, despite only having one child, a boxy early 90s minivan, lives in a garish McMansion, wears track suits sporting his company’s logo, employs a personal trainer/life coach in the mold of both Tony Robbins and Jake Steinfeld (Body by Jake) and his office contains no computers or electronic gizmos. This is naked, unplugged misery, and it definitely smarts worse than the whizzing and whirring malaise of technocratic masterpieces like Blade Runner and A.I. Fittingly, when the evil institution rotting the American Dream from the belly out wants to corral its citizens into less emotional behavior and increase productivity, it attaches a gaudy, pager-looking device to the jugular. There’s no virtual reality, robotic maids, retinal scans, or techno-wizardry of any kind, as if the human race grew so emotionally stunted and unimaginative that the will to create distractions from the numbing cosmos had withered altogether. Television alone persists, and there isn’t much on it but vapid self-helpers (1000 Ways to be Happy), explosion cure telethons, sadistic cop shows (Mack Luster, in which the police pry the fingernails from an uncooperative geriatric) and newscasts manufacturing fear of spontaneous combustion. If all that sounds a bit obvious, the understated execution is nearly flawless, elevating the material beyond its satirical brethren.
Perhaps the brothers had the screenplay and art design lying around the house for a few years while gathering financing. Regardless, this vision is all the more horrifying in its post-modern chaos of life. A running joke is the widespread fear of chaos (pronounced CHAY-ohss by all character in the film), without any acknowledgment of the current maelstrom of products, pacification and ugliness that surrounds them already. There is no center to this universe, no organizing principal or isolatable point where humanity went astray. This world’s relationship to our own is entirely nonlinear. We didn’t evolve or devolve toward this destination; the Drakes present it as radial explosion of twenty years worth of junk culture and capitalistic excess.
Galifianakis is mesmerizing. Toned down tremendously from his turn in The Hangover and his standup act, he shows remarkable range as George, and the Drakes wisely linger over his expressions, which are never cheap or easy to read. The emotionless sad sack is practically mute, and the film’s most biting, hilarious and wrenching stretches occur watching Galifianakis as a single word spends minutes being visibly generated in his neck and on his face before limply slipping out. He wears the weight of a forsaken society on his broad face better than any of his deprogrammed forebears. The tension he generates after failing to speak when prompted is reason enough to take in this fantastically bizarre and admirably cheap sci-fi romp. Of particular brilliance is an extended scene where he flings himself through his property in a saccadic, pre-explosive fit, his gesticulations tight spasms punctuated by uncontrolled flailing. It’s a bit of pantomime that’s unique to Galifianakis, and it, along with his droll line readings and sly facial tics, signals a significant comedic performer emerging into his own.
Not as dramatically together as Idiocracy, but far funnier. Not as brilliant as Brazil, but far more intimate a portrait of the little man’s suffering in a futuristic wasteland. Mentioning it in league with those two films should give a clear indication of its merits, while stirring up anticipation for the future work of both Galifianakis and the Drake brothers.
Visioneers / USA / 2008 / Color / 95 min. / Directed by Jared Drake / Written by Brandon Drake / Starring: Zach Galifianakis, Judy Greer, James Le Gros, Mia Maestro and Missi Pyle
Sunday, August 30, 2009
PLASMA RIFLE ENVY
Humanity Covets Alien Firepower in Neill Blomkamp's District 9
As the faux-documentary footage near the beginning of District 9 reveals, years ago a race of large, insect-like aliens visited earth only to be quarantined -- after a failed stint a living amongst humans -- in a Johannesburg shantytown. Unable to return to their mothership, which ominously hovers over the decrepit slum, the “prawns,” as they’re known, are eventually placed under the jurisdiction of a large weapons conglomerate known as MNU. The plot details the moral reawakening of corporate wonk Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley, oddly resembling filmmaker Spike Jonze), who is nepotistically placed in charge of relocating the troublesome shantytown residents to a tent-city concentration camp further removed from human civilization.
Following this set up is a messy social allegory in which Van De Merwe is accidentally infected by a serum that slowly transforms him into a prawn. Forced thereafter to live amongst The Other, he conspires with a scientist prawn (the only intelligent member of the race that the film offers us) to steal back the confiscated serum, which also, most conveniently, is capable of powering the aliens’ mother ship back to their home planet – where that is exactly, or what it might have been like, the film doesn’t say. And gradually, after so promising a start, we arrive at the standard paradigm for the racially-charged action picture: abusive white man is forced to live among The Other, realizes his host's humanity, and through his own heroism manages to facilitate his former foil’s emancipation. It’s a tired formula, more than a little offensive, and the innovations to it that this film offers only underscore the cliché’s insensitivity and lack of historical perspective.
The film’s most obnoxious problems rest in its dramatic treatment of the alien race: the film argues that our inhumane treatment of the aliens has led to their barbarism, yet also holds that same barbarism up for laughs, as the poverty-stricken prawns are viewed with derision, save for the aforementioned scientist, more or less the archetypal noble savage. So, which came first: human atrocity or the aliens’ own coarse nature? Neglecting the history of the prawns – or, more precisely, communicating it entirely through munitions – leaves the question frustratingly stunted.
Most problematically, the filmmakers (this is Neill Blomkamp's first feature) and MNU's nefarious corporate suits have a parallel interest in the subjugated aliens, namely their superior weaponry, which, through complex biotechnology, can only be operated by prawns themselves. Thus, within the story, there are black and gray markets for prawn flesh, which criminal gangs seek to ingest and MNU hopes to synthesize with human DNA, both with the goal of facilitating the use of the alien weaponry by human hands. Similarly, the filmmakers covet the extraordinary (and extraordinarily stylish) firepower of the prawns; as Wikus’ left hand becomes entirely prawn, he’s able to gun down corporate mercenaries and warlords with extreme prejudice. The candy-colored laser guns and pulsating explosives in the prawn arsenal clearly resemble the imaginative cavalcade featured in first-person-shooter video games, which boasts increasingly sadistic means of eliminating enemies (1). Human bodies (those of the evil bad guys) are shredded, exploded and lacerated with this firepower, dwarfing the effects of the shotguns and sniper rifles sported by the human baddies. The quest for brutal alien technology would easily make for great science fiction, but the filmmakers’ helpless indulgence in fetishized weaponry deflates any higher thematic ambition, leaving the film with a blown opportunity at its core. Even Tarantino’s most recent self-professed death-trip Inglourious Bastards can’t claim but half of District 9’s body count.
Both the faux-documentary approach (persistent, yet violated as narrative convenience dictates) and the shaky, hand-held camerawork strike against the film, the former amounting to lazy exposition, the latter, ostensibly reinforcing verisimilitude, achieving a confused mis-en-scene. Still, there are occasional bits of well-choreographed, adrenaline-pumping action, but they are rare in the film and scarcely compensate for the objectionable narrative development.
Lastly, the highlight of the film must be the digital rendering of the prawns themselves, which appear as lifelike and textured as any computer-generated creature has ever looked. The seamless situation of these finely wrought beings within a grainy documentary image makes the achievement of Peter Jackson’s Weta workshop all the more impressive. But while Weta held up their end up the bargain in creating a wholly realistic (light years beyond the computer constructs populating Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series) alien race, Blomkamp has ultimately failed in injecting these creations with a commensurate humanity, not realizing that his would-be allegory depends on it.
District 9 / USA, New Zealand / 2009 / Color / 112 min. / Directed by Neill Blomkamp / Written by Mr. Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell / Starring: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope and Sylvaine Strike
Notes:
1 - It’s worth noting that there is a tracking shot late in the film which resembles the camera angle of FPS games – gun perched firmly in the bottom of the screen, as the background skirts by wildly – a shot not entirely uncommon in contemporary action pictures, a truly depressing cliché that shows no sign of fading away. Fitting, though, that it would show up in this picture considering Blomkamp was Producer Peter Jackson’s pick to helm the abandoned big screen adaptation of the uber-popular FPS Halo.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
BACK FROM THE FUTURE
J. J. Abrams' Star Trek
How’s this for time travel: As it reboots itself for a 21st century crowd nursed on the hollow pandering of multiple Star Wars and Matrix films, the once forward-thinking Star Trek series has backtracked at warp-speed from a thoughtful, if idealized, utopian future to the mindless, specious present of the tent-pole summer release calendar. One would think that in the era of audacious hope Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a united humanity traversing the cosmos could once again prove a viable pop-culture vehicle, but in the hands of television wunderkind J. J. Abrams (Felicity, Lost), Star Trek has instead devolved into yet another juvenile and ultimately banal exercise in blowing shit up. Abrams and co. have retooled and reinvented the Enterprise and her crew, emerging with a souped-up muscle car zipping about the galaxy in search of cheap thrills and even cheaper platitudes.
George Lucas envisioned Star Wars as the quintessential panhuman cultural document filtered through a kinetic “pure cinema”; a semiotic code bereft of specificity, relying exclusively on speed and volume, epitomized in the only scrap of directorial guidance the visionary offered his performers: “Faster, with More Intensity!” We can now imagine Abrams echoing this command to his writers, editors and thespians. One winces to think that it may also be the rallying cry of today’s audiences. After famously mining Joseph Campbell’s pioneering work on centuries of human mythology, Lucas reconstructed a phantom past that was gleefully decentralized: his landscape was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, belonging to no one and everyone, as technologically advanced as it was morally simplistic. Unsurprisingly, this construct was adopted by the aimless post-boomer generation as its own center of cultural gravity. Gazing backward with a bushy-tailed sweetness and casting his net widely, Lucas sidestepped an engagement with his calamitous present while unveiling the future: the massive, meaningless film spectacle populated almost entirely by machines, with a plot cobbled from military tactics and good ole’ fashioned derring-do. Almost immediately, Star Wars became mile marker zero.
Ten years earlier, Star Trek had captured the collective imagination of a much smaller group of earnest science fiction obsessives during it’s abbreviated three year run in prime time. Riding the emotional high of the Apollo program, the series reveled in allegorical allusions to the social ills and moral quandaries of the Cold War era. With an array of alien life forms rendering human discrepancies meaningless (and the concomitant belief that the future would see a human nature expanded and evolved beyond petty grievances), the crew of the Enterprise set about on a series of ventures whose closest television equivalent may have been The Twilight Zone. Along with the six feature Trek films that followed in the wake of Star Wars, the original series was comprised, unabashedly, of Shakespeare- and Milton-quoting chamber dramas set in outer space.
Almost a half century and several worthy spinoffs later, the series has finally succumbed to those middling standards set forth in 1977 by Star Wars and happily maintained each subsequent year by new installments of James Bond, The Terminator and a slew of superhero comic book adaptations. Rather than plumb the depths of racial antagonism, political legitimacy and the moral boundaries of science, Abrams’ newfangled Trek is yet another mouth-breathing, juvenile fantasy awaiting a full line of increasingly bloated sequels and candy-colored merchandise.
To provide himself with enough wiggle room to reinvigorate the series, Abrams and his screenwriters Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman fashion a parallel universe storyline in which a Romulan ship (resembling a bunch of mechanical bananas) breeches an artificially created wormhole in order to travel back in time and destroy the federation-aligned planets one by one. The ship’s pilot, Nero (Eric Bana) is seeking revenge for the destruction of Romulus, which Starfleet (the peace-keeping arm of the United Federation of Planets) will fail to prevent 250 years in the future. Nero’s first target is the ship USS Kelvin, the command of which falls to a young George Kirk after his Captain is taken prisoner by the Romulans. Kirk the Elder subsequently sacrifices his life in order to ensure the safe evacuation of his crew, including his unborn son, James T. We then flash forward 12 years to the rambunctious, fatherless Kirk’s pre-adolescent escapades, before flashing forward again to his teenage years and his joining Starfleet, and flashing forward yet again to his third year in Starfleet, as he has matured to a meritorious, if no less unruly, student of intergalactic diplomacy. Devotees of Abrams’ Lost series should have no problem being constantly shot ahead in these narratively convenient chunks of time, but newcomers might feel as though trapped in a stuttering elevator. Eventually, Nero resurfaces through his wormhole to battle a second Kirk, and the film makes a beeline for it’s predictable outcome, scarcely worth spoiling. It will suffice to say that by the end we’ve all learned that revenge poisons the soul and a bit of unvarnished gumption gets the job done over rationality and compromise every time.
What’s interesting about the story’s trajectory is the translation of Kirk – the fulcrum of Roddenberry’s original universe and the standard by which all subsequent starship captains are judged – into the idiom of Star Wars: Shatner’s Kirk was red-blooded and cocksure, but also introspective and pensive, as apt at quoting classical literature as he was in a scuffle. This new Kirk (played by the relatively unknown Chris Pine) is an amalgamation of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, equal parts rapscallion and starry-eyed farm boy, prime for reckless adventure but simple at his core. Even as the United States elects its first avowedly intellectual president in decades, we still demand of our heroes a temperament closer to the recently departed George W. Bush, a pistol-packing, uncompromising anti-hero with complete disregard for both consensus and the law alike. Kirk is balanced by Zachary Quinto’s Spock (the third point of the triangle, Bones McCoy, is far less involved in this incarnation, and it doesn’t help that Karl Urban’s performance is an occasionally embarrassing imitation of DeForest Kelley) is a touch more Obama-like, but here rendered largely impotent with humility, shame and inadequacy, much as the political right wishes Obama would be. It is doubtful this portrait of our current political discourse is intentional, as the film was set in production before the current international climate solidified into this dynamic, yet even without intent it is nearly impossible to shake the parallels between this dynamic and the world that we’ve recently built for ourselves. It’s worth considering the implications of the disparity. As we experiment with a cool customer at our highest office, why is it that our most lucrative chunk of culture (already the highest grossing Trek of all time) during his first year in office showcases as its exemplar of heroic maleness a man remarkably similar to his loathed predecessor (let alone Kirk’s similarity to Obama’s foe in last year’s election)? Twenty years ago a Star Trek film may have questioned the viability of such a leader, but this film is far too busy looking for things to eviscerate.
Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has described our contemporary cinema as one of concentrated efficacy, and it is in this instance that this new Star Trek logs its most glaring acquiescence to Lucas’ hegemony. The perfunctory manner in which entire planets are destroyed, or evil is vanquished, or a young hotshot assumes command of a starship, removes all sources of tension, leaving the viewer (or at least those with any resistance left to the perennial blockbuster onslaught) feeling throttled rather than engrossed. This efficacy largely began in the 1970s with Star Wars and Jaws, and more thrills at ever-increasing rates have been offered up summer after summer on thousands of theaters simultaneously ever since. For the past quarter century, the Star Trek films also utilized bigger budgets and prime Cineplex release dates in the search of boffo box office, but The Series as a whole always felt out of step with the narrative trends of the day, admirably preserving its tendencies of earnest pontification. As Hollywood guns blazed, average shot lengths plummeted, and “Summer Movies” became a genre, the Stark Trek franchise stubbornly maintained a slow, inquisitive burn as it probed more than popped. At the center of these films were deep, timeless questions. Sadly, this new film has only answers in the form of payoffs to which the setups hardly have time to register. That’s progress for you.
Depending on whose account you trust, Gene Roddenberry either thought the idea of a Star Trek: The Young Years a worthy extension of his vision or a laughable indulgence. But even if we accept an attempt at an origins story (practically a compulsory move for any franchise these days) what has resulted is at odds with the tone that Roddenberry cemented firmly for his brainchild. One thing that Wars and Trek have always had in common was their existence as the work of a sole mastermind; Lucas and Roddenberry each maintained an equal mastery over their creations, employing talented, if pliable, stewards to tend their gardens. It’s clear that this Enterprise has room on the bridge for only one captain, so Abrams’ blockbuster ambitions (informed by his fervent adherence to the gospel of Lucas) have elbowed Roddenberry out of the chair. Abrams as an auteur is less the yeoman that Lucas found in Irvin Kirshner and Richard Marquand, so this Star Trek is his baby entirely. (2)
But is it necessary to discuss this film entirely within the context of another, altogether separate series? Has this become something of a false dichotomy? It’s now fair to conflate the destinies of Star Wars and Star Trek, as the latter has prostrated itself to the mandates of the former. Abrams has said in a recent interview that he has always preferred Lucas’ series, and sought to implement its lessons of aesthetic and narrative vigor in Roddenberry’s lumbering universe (3). However, if one evaluated each on its own terms as revenue-generating Hollywood product (the barometer most suited to the task, considering how thoroughly all ideological divergences have been purged) it could easily be said that Abrams’ film is vastly superior in both sentimental and aesthetic acumen. That Star Trek is so utterly superior to the past three Star Wars films is faint, if significant, praise. Abrams has a natural photographic eye whereas Lucas compositions have always been leaden, the most obvious evidence of which is the universal preference among fans for The Empire Strikes Back, which was not directed by General Lucas himself. The protégé also commands the ability to elicit identifiably human emotions from his actors, which his predecessor famously lacked. Abrams’ affinity for his human characters provides the film with a merciful absence of humanoid robots. Instead, Abrams has the decency to populate his films with biological creatures, and this touch of warmth keeps the film from feeling like an auto show or toy convention, giving it a leg up on most recent science fiction.
What’s most dispiriting about this film is that for a younger generation unfamiliar with the franchise’s venerable history, this new entry (and its future sequels) exists cozily alongside every bombastic franchise that soaks up summer dollars before returning to the trough at Christmastime with Unrated and Collector’s Edition DVDs. Rather than spark a renewed interest in the series’ previous installments and their progressive optimism, Star Trek is more likely to inspire anticipation for its own sequels – along with graphic novels and video games. Sequels which will continue to pay lip service to the window dressing of Star Trek lore while pulling further away from the original premise of Roddenberry's endeavor. Abrams’ film has eradicated, along with the hapless planet Vulcan, its own past, consequently destroying a better future. Through a wormhole, indeed.
Yet again, we’ve imagined a future nestled within an imaginary past. This film envisions a destiny rooted in the mythologies of violence and misanthropy that have plagued our popular culture for most of the postwar era. Roddenberry’s vision of a better way of conducting our affairs no longer has a place at the table (or, to be accurate, market). J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek has dreamed for us a colossally stupid and banal future, which should position it well within a culture hungry for squeeze and release arcs tucked within insipid master narratives. A pity the collective imagination has developed such a ravenous appetite accompanied by such a limited capacity.
Star Trek / USA / 2009 / Color / 127 min. / Directed by J.J. Abrams / Written by Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci, based on the television series created by Gene Roddenberry / Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg, Bruce Greenwood, Leonard Nimoy, Karl Urban, Eric Bana, Zoe Saldana and John Cho / Presented by Paramount Pictures
NOTES:
2 - For a humorous and detailed account of Lucas’ obsession with brand maintenance, see “The Empire Wins,” collected in John Seabrook’s Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing – the Marketing of Culture.
3 - Paradoxically, Abrams expresses admiration for the “optimism” of Star Trek as “positing a future that is incredibly inspiring,” while claiming that his film is necessarily in “the shadow of George Lucas,” and thus must be made to beat Lucas at his own game, rather than opt for any sort of alternative. The interview can be accessed at http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2009/01/star-trek-dir-1.html
Either due to the unavailability of footnotes and superscript on Blogspot or my inability to figure out how to use them, I’ve resorted to a simplified, MLA-inspired method of annotating this and future essays. While aesthetically unappealing, these notes still serve the same purpose as traditional footnotes. With any luck, Blogspot will soon allow for footnotes, or I will figure out how to use them. Suggestions are welcome.
How’s this for time travel: As it reboots itself for a 21st century crowd nursed on the hollow pandering of multiple Star Wars and Matrix films, the once forward-thinking Star Trek series has backtracked at warp-speed from a thoughtful, if idealized, utopian future to the mindless, specious present of the tent-pole summer release calendar. One would think that in the era of audacious hope Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a united humanity traversing the cosmos could once again prove a viable pop-culture vehicle, but in the hands of television wunderkind J. J. Abrams (Felicity, Lost), Star Trek has instead devolved into yet another juvenile and ultimately banal exercise in blowing shit up. Abrams and co. have retooled and reinvented the Enterprise and her crew, emerging with a souped-up muscle car zipping about the galaxy in search of cheap thrills and even cheaper platitudes.
George Lucas envisioned Star Wars as the quintessential panhuman cultural document filtered through a kinetic “pure cinema”; a semiotic code bereft of specificity, relying exclusively on speed and volume, epitomized in the only scrap of directorial guidance the visionary offered his performers: “Faster, with More Intensity!” We can now imagine Abrams echoing this command to his writers, editors and thespians. One winces to think that it may also be the rallying cry of today’s audiences. After famously mining Joseph Campbell’s pioneering work on centuries of human mythology, Lucas reconstructed a phantom past that was gleefully decentralized: his landscape was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, belonging to no one and everyone, as technologically advanced as it was morally simplistic. Unsurprisingly, this construct was adopted by the aimless post-boomer generation as its own center of cultural gravity. Gazing backward with a bushy-tailed sweetness and casting his net widely, Lucas sidestepped an engagement with his calamitous present while unveiling the future: the massive, meaningless film spectacle populated almost entirely by machines, with a plot cobbled from military tactics and good ole’ fashioned derring-do. Almost immediately, Star Wars became mile marker zero.
Ten years earlier, Star Trek had captured the collective imagination of a much smaller group of earnest science fiction obsessives during it’s abbreviated three year run in prime time. Riding the emotional high of the Apollo program, the series reveled in allegorical allusions to the social ills and moral quandaries of the Cold War era. With an array of alien life forms rendering human discrepancies meaningless (and the concomitant belief that the future would see a human nature expanded and evolved beyond petty grievances), the crew of the Enterprise set about on a series of ventures whose closest television equivalent may have been The Twilight Zone. Along with the six feature Trek films that followed in the wake of Star Wars, the original series was comprised, unabashedly, of Shakespeare- and Milton-quoting chamber dramas set in outer space.
Almost a half century and several worthy spinoffs later, the series has finally succumbed to those middling standards set forth in 1977 by Star Wars and happily maintained each subsequent year by new installments of James Bond, The Terminator and a slew of superhero comic book adaptations. Rather than plumb the depths of racial antagonism, political legitimacy and the moral boundaries of science, Abrams’ newfangled Trek is yet another mouth-breathing, juvenile fantasy awaiting a full line of increasingly bloated sequels and candy-colored merchandise.
To provide himself with enough wiggle room to reinvigorate the series, Abrams and his screenwriters Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman fashion a parallel universe storyline in which a Romulan ship (resembling a bunch of mechanical bananas) breeches an artificially created wormhole in order to travel back in time and destroy the federation-aligned planets one by one. The ship’s pilot, Nero (Eric Bana) is seeking revenge for the destruction of Romulus, which Starfleet (the peace-keeping arm of the United Federation of Planets) will fail to prevent 250 years in the future. Nero’s first target is the ship USS Kelvin, the command of which falls to a young George Kirk after his Captain is taken prisoner by the Romulans. Kirk the Elder subsequently sacrifices his life in order to ensure the safe evacuation of his crew, including his unborn son, James T. We then flash forward 12 years to the rambunctious, fatherless Kirk’s pre-adolescent escapades, before flashing forward again to his teenage years and his joining Starfleet, and flashing forward yet again to his third year in Starfleet, as he has matured to a meritorious, if no less unruly, student of intergalactic diplomacy. Devotees of Abrams’ Lost series should have no problem being constantly shot ahead in these narratively convenient chunks of time, but newcomers might feel as though trapped in a stuttering elevator. Eventually, Nero resurfaces through his wormhole to battle a second Kirk, and the film makes a beeline for it’s predictable outcome, scarcely worth spoiling. It will suffice to say that by the end we’ve all learned that revenge poisons the soul and a bit of unvarnished gumption gets the job done over rationality and compromise every time.
What’s interesting about the story’s trajectory is the translation of Kirk – the fulcrum of Roddenberry’s original universe and the standard by which all subsequent starship captains are judged – into the idiom of Star Wars: Shatner’s Kirk was red-blooded and cocksure, but also introspective and pensive, as apt at quoting classical literature as he was in a scuffle. This new Kirk (played by the relatively unknown Chris Pine) is an amalgamation of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, equal parts rapscallion and starry-eyed farm boy, prime for reckless adventure but simple at his core. Even as the United States elects its first avowedly intellectual president in decades, we still demand of our heroes a temperament closer to the recently departed George W. Bush, a pistol-packing, uncompromising anti-hero with complete disregard for both consensus and the law alike. Kirk is balanced by Zachary Quinto’s Spock (the third point of the triangle, Bones McCoy, is far less involved in this incarnation, and it doesn’t help that Karl Urban’s performance is an occasionally embarrassing imitation of DeForest Kelley) is a touch more Obama-like, but here rendered largely impotent with humility, shame and inadequacy, much as the political right wishes Obama would be. It is doubtful this portrait of our current political discourse is intentional, as the film was set in production before the current international climate solidified into this dynamic, yet even without intent it is nearly impossible to shake the parallels between this dynamic and the world that we’ve recently built for ourselves. It’s worth considering the implications of the disparity. As we experiment with a cool customer at our highest office, why is it that our most lucrative chunk of culture (already the highest grossing Trek of all time) during his first year in office showcases as its exemplar of heroic maleness a man remarkably similar to his loathed predecessor (let alone Kirk’s similarity to Obama’s foe in last year’s election)? Twenty years ago a Star Trek film may have questioned the viability of such a leader, but this film is far too busy looking for things to eviscerate.
Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has described our contemporary cinema as one of concentrated efficacy, and it is in this instance that this new Star Trek logs its most glaring acquiescence to Lucas’ hegemony. The perfunctory manner in which entire planets are destroyed, or evil is vanquished, or a young hotshot assumes command of a starship, removes all sources of tension, leaving the viewer (or at least those with any resistance left to the perennial blockbuster onslaught) feeling throttled rather than engrossed. This efficacy largely began in the 1970s with Star Wars and Jaws, and more thrills at ever-increasing rates have been offered up summer after summer on thousands of theaters simultaneously ever since. For the past quarter century, the Star Trek films also utilized bigger budgets and prime Cineplex release dates in the search of boffo box office, but The Series as a whole always felt out of step with the narrative trends of the day, admirably preserving its tendencies of earnest pontification. As Hollywood guns blazed, average shot lengths plummeted, and “Summer Movies” became a genre, the Stark Trek franchise stubbornly maintained a slow, inquisitive burn as it probed more than popped. At the center of these films were deep, timeless questions. Sadly, this new film has only answers in the form of payoffs to which the setups hardly have time to register. That’s progress for you.
Depending on whose account you trust, Gene Roddenberry either thought the idea of a Star Trek: The Young Years a worthy extension of his vision or a laughable indulgence. But even if we accept an attempt at an origins story (practically a compulsory move for any franchise these days) what has resulted is at odds with the tone that Roddenberry cemented firmly for his brainchild. One thing that Wars and Trek have always had in common was their existence as the work of a sole mastermind; Lucas and Roddenberry each maintained an equal mastery over their creations, employing talented, if pliable, stewards to tend their gardens. It’s clear that this Enterprise has room on the bridge for only one captain, so Abrams’ blockbuster ambitions (informed by his fervent adherence to the gospel of Lucas) have elbowed Roddenberry out of the chair. Abrams as an auteur is less the yeoman that Lucas found in Irvin Kirshner and Richard Marquand, so this Star Trek is his baby entirely. (2)
But is it necessary to discuss this film entirely within the context of another, altogether separate series? Has this become something of a false dichotomy? It’s now fair to conflate the destinies of Star Wars and Star Trek, as the latter has prostrated itself to the mandates of the former. Abrams has said in a recent interview that he has always preferred Lucas’ series, and sought to implement its lessons of aesthetic and narrative vigor in Roddenberry’s lumbering universe (3). However, if one evaluated each on its own terms as revenue-generating Hollywood product (the barometer most suited to the task, considering how thoroughly all ideological divergences have been purged) it could easily be said that Abrams’ film is vastly superior in both sentimental and aesthetic acumen. That Star Trek is so utterly superior to the past three Star Wars films is faint, if significant, praise. Abrams has a natural photographic eye whereas Lucas compositions have always been leaden, the most obvious evidence of which is the universal preference among fans for The Empire Strikes Back, which was not directed by General Lucas himself. The protégé also commands the ability to elicit identifiably human emotions from his actors, which his predecessor famously lacked. Abrams’ affinity for his human characters provides the film with a merciful absence of humanoid robots. Instead, Abrams has the decency to populate his films with biological creatures, and this touch of warmth keeps the film from feeling like an auto show or toy convention, giving it a leg up on most recent science fiction.
What’s most dispiriting about this film is that for a younger generation unfamiliar with the franchise’s venerable history, this new entry (and its future sequels) exists cozily alongside every bombastic franchise that soaks up summer dollars before returning to the trough at Christmastime with Unrated and Collector’s Edition DVDs. Rather than spark a renewed interest in the series’ previous installments and their progressive optimism, Star Trek is more likely to inspire anticipation for its own sequels – along with graphic novels and video games. Sequels which will continue to pay lip service to the window dressing of Star Trek lore while pulling further away from the original premise of Roddenberry's endeavor. Abrams’ film has eradicated, along with the hapless planet Vulcan, its own past, consequently destroying a better future. Through a wormhole, indeed.
Yet again, we’ve imagined a future nestled within an imaginary past. This film envisions a destiny rooted in the mythologies of violence and misanthropy that have plagued our popular culture for most of the postwar era. Roddenberry’s vision of a better way of conducting our affairs no longer has a place at the table (or, to be accurate, market). J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek has dreamed for us a colossally stupid and banal future, which should position it well within a culture hungry for squeeze and release arcs tucked within insipid master narratives. A pity the collective imagination has developed such a ravenous appetite accompanied by such a limited capacity.
Star Trek / USA / 2009 / Color / 127 min. / Directed by J.J. Abrams / Written by Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci, based on the television series created by Gene Roddenberry / Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg, Bruce Greenwood, Leonard Nimoy, Karl Urban, Eric Bana, Zoe Saldana and John Cho / Presented by Paramount Pictures
NOTES:
2 - For a humorous and detailed account of Lucas’ obsession with brand maintenance, see “The Empire Wins,” collected in John Seabrook’s Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing – the Marketing of Culture.
3 - Paradoxically, Abrams expresses admiration for the “optimism” of Star Trek as “positing a future that is incredibly inspiring,” while claiming that his film is necessarily in “the shadow of George Lucas,” and thus must be made to beat Lucas at his own game, rather than opt for any sort of alternative. The interview can be accessed at http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2009/01/star-trek-dir-1.html
Either due to the unavailability of footnotes and superscript on Blogspot or my inability to figure out how to use them, I’ve resorted to a simplified, MLA-inspired method of annotating this and future essays. While aesthetically unappealing, these notes still serve the same purpose as traditional footnotes. With any luck, Blogspot will soon allow for footnotes, or I will figure out how to use them. Suggestions are welcome.
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