John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV

Cult Movie Review: The Green Slime

2013-05-24T06:06:00.000-04:00

When I was five years old and living in New Jersey, a TV station out of New York, WABC, (Channel 7) aired The 4:30 PM Movie every week day.

And via this 4:30 PM Movie platform, I was introduced to a multitude of cinematic treasures. For instance, this was how I first encountered all the Planet of the Apes films, The Omega Man (1971), Soylent Green (1973), and, yes...The Green Slime (1968).

Alone among those titles The Green Slime has gained quite a reputation as something of an anti-classic. Specifically, it has earned only a lowly score of 3.7 from user/reviewers on the Internet Movie Database.

In additions, books such as The Official Razzie Movie Guide and Son of Golden Turkey Awards have pretty well mocked and eviscerated the film too.

The former resource calls the movie a "camp classic" while the latter describes The Green Slime in this fashion: "Some of the worst American actors meet some of the worst Japanese special effects in this multinational fiasco."

So that's the conventional wisdom.

The New York Times was slightly more forgiving of The Green Slime, however. Critic Howard Thompson opined that the film "opens promisingly, keeps it up for about half-an-hour but then fades badly. There is a quiet, tingling efficiency about these early scenes and very little nonsense. The trick photography and stratospheric effects are neat and clean. And the plot itself isn't half bad for this kind of operation."

I had not watched The Green Slime since 1976 or thereabouts, but when a dear friend of mine named Robert offered to lend me his DVD of the movie (recently released thanks to the exquisite Warner Archive), I jumped at the opportunity to screen the film again and re-assess.

So, today... The Green Slime?

Well, first off, I believe The New York Times' Howard Thompson was actually more accurate in assessing and describing the film's strengths and weaknesses than the professional and amateur mockers have been.

In 2011, the film's special effects have undeniably aged poorly, and the actual Green Slime monsters probably never looked particularly convincing, let alone scary, to adult eyes. Not even back in '69. It wasn't really until Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), perhaps, that space monsters were suitably scary on-screen, and The Green Slime looks almost prehistoric by comparison.

I might also add that the science as presented in the film seems ludicrous. And that the acting is -- termed politely -- stiff. Blow dried might be a better description.

If we're keeping count, one might note that much of the dialogue is risible...and thus humorous. The view of scientists is pretty cliched too, with one professor's irresponsibility walking hand-in-hand with his idiocy.

And last but not least, the overt swinging sixties vibe (down to the awesome theme song and scantily clad astronaut ladies drinking champagne...) readily encourages the prevalent "so bad that it's good" interpretation of the film.

So please, take all these negative points as absolute givens if you decide to watch The Green Slime. Don't say I didn't warn you, okay?

But playing devil's advocate now, this Japanese production filmed at Toei is also -- to my surprise -- constructed on some pretty sturdy film craft. The film's director, Kinji Fukasaku (1930 - 2003) is well-known as a favorite of Quentin Tarantino's and even in The Green Slime, one can detect the reason behind his admiration.

No, this isn't The Yakuza Papers (1971) or Battle Royale (2000) -- not by a long shot -- yet Fukasaku is the same artist; one extraordinarily gifted with visuals, especially talented at selecting the very right shot at the right moment.

The upshot is that a producer could actually mount a shot-for-shot remake of The Green Slime in Hollywood today -- featuring big-name actors and upgraded special effects -- and it would probably be pretty damned good.

"We found something strange up there, sir."

The Green Slime is the story of a planetary disaster in the making. The multi-national UNSC (United Nations Space Command) learns that a rogue asteroid, named Flora, is on a collision course with Earth.

In fact, it will strike in less-than ten hours. Stalwart Commander Jack Rankin (Robert Horton) is assigned to destroy the asteroid before catastrophe occurs. Unfortunately, Rankin's assignment will also involve relieving his old friend, Vince Elliott (Richard Jaeckel), from command of the international space station, Gamma 3...and seeing his old flame, Dr. Lisa Benson (Luciana Paluzzi), again.

But Jack is a non-nonsense kind of officer, and rushes in where angels fear to tread. On a rocket mission to the rocky surface of Flora, Horton's team detonates several explosives in short order. The threat to Earth is pulped, but a single glop of indigenous green slime lands on one astronaut's pants.

Upon return to Gamma 3, the crew celebrates the mission's success, unaware that the green slime has begun to grow in the decontamination chamber. In fact, the Green Slime thrives on electricity, and soon becomes a walking, cyclopean, tentacled monstrosity capable of "feeding on energy and discharging energy."

The Green Slime can also regenerate at a "frightening" rate. Even one drop of spilled Green Slime can regenerate a nursery full of these squeaking monsters. In other words -- to quote Alien -- "you don't dare kill it!"

Very soon, Jack realizes that there is no choice but to abandon and then destroy the overrun Gamma 3 station, lest the alien threat reach planet Earth...

"If he's right, those things are going to be all over the place!"

As I wrote at the start of this piece, it's easy, from a casual viewing, to detect what's bad and unintentionally funny about The Green Slime.

I do not now and never shall deny any of those important elements.

But solid film criticism isn't merely about plucking low-hanging fruit from the vine. In some instances, it's about excavating those things that get buried in favor of the obvious. And the fact of the matter is that The Green Slime is highly entertaining for a number of reasons, and it seems fair and judicious to enumerate those reasons in this review.

In particular, I recommend that viewers pay special attention to the visual compositions, and the ways Fukasaku uses the frame to create an escalating sense of tension.

For instance -- effortlessly and perfectly -- Fukasaku shifts to hand-held shots in the interior of a small spacecraft set just as the movie's protagonists undertake their important mission to Flora. The sudden shift from a more stately grounded camera to the hand-held shots supports the story's rising anxiety level.

I also admire how the director dramatically marshals whip pans and intense camera pushes during the big "reveal" moments and the sustained battle sequences.

There's nothing wrong with any of these compositions, and in fact, many are actually quite gorgeous. If you just try not to focus on the floppy-armed monsters, and look at the particular shots, there's a level of real artistry apparent.

And not all the special effects look terrible. There are some inventive angles here of the Green Slime climbing up an Infirmary wall, edited in reverse, apparently.

That sense of artistry extends to the film's numerous space sets, which have sometimes been termed "cardboard." I didn't see that much, frankly, except in a few short sequences where Gamma 3's doors appear momentarily light weight. And on the contrary, the surface of the planet Flora as visualized here is quite dynamic and intriguing: a live-action studio set of considerable intricacy, color and depth. In the days before CGI, everything had to be built -- including whole planets -- and The Green Slime's foreign Flora looks like fantastic on DVD.

I could also comment on the effective choreography and early wire-work in some of the flying/battle sequences in space, a precursor to such EVA battles as we've since seen in Moonraker (1979), among other films.

With all this good work, it is a mystery to me why a clearly capable director allows his poorly-designed, silly-looking monsters to get so much damned face time on camera. This film could have been significantly improved by some shock cutting, by featuring dimmer light in a few moments, and by other techniques that could hide or mask the fakery. If those steps had been taken, The Green Slime might be remembered very differently today.

In terms of atmosphere, The Green Slime is gloriously a product of its time and specific context, the late 1960s. This was our world in the midst of the Apollo Program, with a moon landing on the horizon. Accordingly, the film benefits from the same kind of 1960s retro-futurism and can-do attitude as TV series like Thunderbirds or Star Trek.

That means the film is veritably filled with astronauts in red and blue jump suits, bustling about and moving quickly into action to face danger and save the world in the process. Launch a space mission to save the Earth in under ten hours? No problem! Just hit the accelerator! The Green Slime goes into laborious detail showing space cruiser launches, futuristic cities and other examples of man's "high technology" in this possible future. The breadth of imagination in terms of production design and miniature work on display here is not so easily dismissed, even if we have outgrown both miniatures and can-do futurism.

In terms of the world it presents, The Green Slime offers an irony-less view of can-do space adventuring, with serious men and women going about their business without tongues-in-cheek. In today's hipster world, this is just something else to laugh about, no doubt, but The Green Slime is the product of a more optimistic age. One in which we all believed -- without question -- that man would conquer space. I find this facet of the film charming and innocent, I must admit. The film's confidence in us, in mankind, is one of its finer qualities. This faith is reinforced in the subplot that many critics find so deplorable, the Rankin-Elliot rivalry.

Specifically, Rankin is all about the job, damn the consequences. We're all expendable!

And Elliot is the opposite, willing to save his men at the expense of the mission.

In the end, both men -- and both approaches -- are required to save the day. This plot-point alone seems evidence of a more innocent, less polarized time in our world. Today the answers to a lot of our national and international problems are both liberal ones and conservative ones, but no one wants to admit that fact. It always has to be either/or; not a little bit of both.

The Green Slime's dueling commanders -- fighting over the love of a woman and the path to success -- each must compromise a bit, and come to see the validity in opposing approaches. Is this particularly deep? Perhaps not, but it's another byproduct of The Green Slime's more optimistic epoch..

I've written a lot here about the things I admired in The Green Slime, in part because I enjoy highlighting positives more than I do writing a review focusing on some weak dialogue, or bad special effects.

The Green Slime is not a great movie, but it is enjoyable and it boasts some visual distinction. Snark about the movie can be found elsewhere. Like, lots of elsewhere...

In the final analysis, whether or not you enjoy this film depends largely on your perspective of a common criticism. Many reviewers have complained that the film features effects that make it look like "a Godzilla movie."

If you think that comparison is a valid criticism and a sign of "bad" cinema, then don't waste your energy on The Green Slime. You won't be that into it.

On the other hand, if you believe the comparison to Godzilla films is actually a positive, then by all means, sit back, relax, and have a good time with this silly movie played ever-so-straight.

Movie Trailer: The Green Slime (1968)

2013-05-24T05:05:00.001-04:00

The X-Files 20th Anniversary Blogging: "Die Hand Die Verletzt" (January 27, 1995)

2013-05-23T06:06:00.000-04:00

This second season episode of The X-Files (1993 – 2002) is one of the sharpest, most stunning social critiques in the entire catalog.

In “Die Hand die Verletzt,” Mulder and Scully deal -- in storied New England -- with the Satanist equivalent of “Cafeteria Catholics,” religious practitioners who pick and choose which edicts and dogma they want to believe in, and ignore the rest.

But when you’re dealing with the Devil himself, it’s dangerous to break faith, as the episode suggests in no uncertain terms.

“Die Hand die Verletzt’s” brilliance arises from the inventive notion of “lapsed” Satanists: one-time believers who are now doing so well that they no longer find it necessary to obey the edicts of their (dark) Lord.

They are punished (egregiously…) for their trespasses, of course, and so the episode begs the question: why do humans insist on pledging fealty and devotion to divine beings, and then promptly impose their own judgment about that deity’s wants and desires over its clearly stated ones?

In other words, if you believe in the Bible -- Satanic or otherwise -- how much personal “interpretation” is really allowed?

This X-Files episode could have very easily -- and very controversially -- been a story directly about Christianity, and that’s sort of the point. The episode critiques “the faithful” as people who claim to be of a certain “tribe,” but who don’t actually want to conform to their tribe’s belief system. This fact alone might be read to suggest that there is no God.

Because, after all, if you really believed in a deity, why would you wish to incur his or her wrath?

Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) investigate the unexpected and unusual death of a high school student in Haven, New Hampshire, and Mulder believes the murder may be occult-related

Although Scully and Mulder don’t know it, the school board and PTA in this sleepy town consists entirely of lapsed Satanists who have watered down their faith. As a result, an evil substitute teacher/demon Ms. Phyllis Paddock (Susan Blommaert) arrives (presumably from below…) at the local high school to wreak havoc and remind the wayward souls who really calls the shots.

Before long, a local teenage girl, Shannon (Heather McComb) claims to have unwillingly participated in black masses in her cellar, and to have performed as a “breeder” for her Satanist parents. Soon, she apparently commits suicide.

Mulder and Scully find no evidence to substantiate Shannon’s report of devil worship in Haven, but even the duo from the F.B.I. soon feel the controlling hand of the devil at work through the extremeley frightening Ms. Paddock.

Once more, we can’t sufficiently discuss an X-Files episode without noting how cleverly it plays on real-life, current events of its time period.

In particular, the year 1992 saw the release of the F.B.I. report by Agent Kenneth V. Lanning (of the Behavioral Science Unit) on “Satanic Ritual Abuse.”

That report -- which is name-checked directly by Scully in the episode itself -- notes that there is no “corroborative evidence” for all the reports of Satanic abuse in America in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The author writes: “We now have hundreds of victims alleging that thousands of offenders are abusing and even murdering tens of thousands of people as part of organized Satan cults.”

The reason for this mass delusion, or insanity, Lanning suggests, is that Satanism -- the old “Devil made me do it” excuse -- offers “the simple and clear cut explanation for a complex problem,” meaning child sexual abuse. Lanning also relates the Satanism “cult” fear directly to the “Stranger Danger” idea of the 1950s, which also created a mass scare in American suburbia, but didn’t account for all that many cases of abuse, globally-speaking.

“Die Hand die Verletzt” turns such findings on their head, and makes a funny claim. There are Satanists everywhere in small-town America, the episode states, but -- humorously -- they are no more devout or zealous (and therefore dangerous…) than most American Christians.

Apparently, faith of any kind is really hard to come by these days, to paraphrase John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)

By turns funny and ominous, “Die Hand dieVerletzt” is a sharp critique of human nature, and its apparent desire to believe in a Deity… but then second-guess that all-powerful deity for sake of personal convenience.

I had a Catholic college professor (and film instructor) who introduced me, back in the late 1980s, to the derogatory term “Cafeteria Catholic.”

Cafeteria Satanists.

He explained that these people looked across the smorgasbord of Church doctrine and belief, and picked and chose what edicts they wanted to obey, as if choosing toppings from a salad bar.

This way, they could use birth control and not worry about their immortal souls.

Or they could be pro-life, but then instruct their pregnant teenage daughter to get an abortion if the need arose.

I’m not trying to pick on Catholicism per se, or even Christians in general here. I suspect the same “Cafeteria” approach is present in virtually all forms of faith, and perhaps even sci-fi fandom, as a reader suggested to me recently.

People claim they are true believers, but what they really mean is that they have selected a belief system that mirrors or reflects their already-entrenched belief system. In other words, they shop for a religion that mimics a pre-existing state of mind, and tend to ignore facets of that religion that simply don’t line up with what they already like.

Mulder expressly comments on this very notion in the episode by remarking to a lapsed Satanist that indeed there is a difference “drinking grape juice instead of wine at communion.

“Die Hand die Verletzt” charts this universal phenomenon, humorously using Satanists as the “faithful” satirized. The Satanists are depicted as typical American suburbanites, worried that the musical Grease has the “F”-word in it, for instance, and looking to climb the ladder of American success.

As long as these “good folks” believed that Satanism could make them upwardly mobile or successful, well, they were Satanists. But when they achieved their goals, it turns out they didn’t need their “God” to help them anymore. He was cast-off, neglected.

What this episode of The X-Files describes, then, is a kind of selfishness about religious faith. These men and women aren’t in it for a God of any kind. They are in it for themselves. They get to claim faith (and therefore righteousness), at the same time that they reserve the right for themselves not to do something that they don’t like, or find unsavory (like sacrifice babies on an altar to Ba’al, for instance…)

What remains impressive about “Die Hand die Verletzt” is that the manner in which the narrative and tone travel from pointed satire of organized religion in America to stark, demonic terror, scene-to-scene.

The tipping point in that transition is a sustained, brilliantly-directed sequence in which young Shannon (McComb) reveals her personal history in a coven. The camera intently circles the young witness as she goes on and on, describing a litany of inhuman horrors. From this point on, the episode moves away from examining religious hypocrisy and delves full-bore into terror.

Rather surprisingly, “Die Hand die Verletzt” makes no bones about the Devil’s existence as a “real” force on Earth. The kids in the woods raise a demon, Mrs. Paddock, and she is a terrifying embodiment of the Serpent.

In fact, once she begins prosecuting the lapsed Satanists, the overall suggestion is that Mulder and Scully couldn’t stop her, even if they had all the facts at their disposal. The episode thus casts a malevolent spell as it broaches its denouement, and our heroes are forced to reckon with the point of view that -- from a certain perspective, they were “in league with the Devil” on this particular investigation.

“It was nice working with you,” Mrs. Paddock writes on a chalkboard in the local high school to confirm this idea. The message is chilling for what it suggests; for the idea that agendas aligned for a time, and Mulder and Scully were part of a plan beyond their own wishes, desire, or control.

The overall episode becomes funnier (and even tongue-in-cheek), however, when one starts to consider it in light of all the conspiracies about public schools acting as breeding grounds for the “evils” of secularism.

Then there’s the belief that Satanists have infiltrated the Federal government and are persecuting Christians, and so Mulder and Scully’s unwitting “alliance” with the Devil here suggests that imaginary conspiracy as well. Were the episode done today, it wouldn’t be about the bugaboo of Satanism, but probably Sharia Law infiltrating schools and government. The monsters change, but the (loony) fears remain the same.

I often write that The X-Files is the Star Trek of the 1990s, the pop-culture phenomenon that defined a generation. Episodes like “Die Hand die Verletzt” prove the point well. The episode works as social commentary, as tongue-in-cheek comedy, and in the end, as absolute horror show. Even better, the episode never feels off-message, or possesses the wrong tone. “Die Hand die Verletzt" holds a mirror up to the audience and asks us to consider the things we believe, and even, ultimately, the way that we put those beliefs to practice.

Next week, the epic double feature: “Colony/End Game”

X-Files Promo: "Die Hand Die Verletzt."

2013-05-23T05:05:00.000-04:00

Collectible of the Week: Stretch Armstrong (1976; Kenner)

2013-05-22T06:06:00.000-04:00

“Grab hold and pull! You can stretch 13” STRETCH ARMSTRONG up to four feet. Squish him, scrunch him, stretch him out. He always returns to his original shape, ready for any wild position kids can think of!”

--Ad copy describing the capacity and capabilities of the unique action figure, Stretch Armstrong.

One of the most popular (and no doubt strangest…) toys of 1976 was Stretch Armstrong, from Kenner.

Essentially, Stretch is a muscle-bound, blond-haired “hunk” (garbed only in briefs…) who -- because he came filled with dark-colored “gelled corn syrup” -- could be stretched, pulled and tied into the aforementioned “wild positions.” Stretch Armstrong’s toy box implored kids to “stretch him long…watch him return to shape again!” Sometimes, this advice was followed too closely…

Stretch Armstrong -- soon to be the subject of a major motion picture, apparently -- became so popular in the late 1970s that other “stretch” creations were added to his universe in the years 1978 and 1979. These included the ultra-cool Stretch Monster, described as having “green scaly skin, devil’s eyes, and a half-man, half-lizard look,” Stretch X-Ray, and for the little ones, Stretch Octopus.

Today, it is exceedingly difficult to find an original Stretch Armstrong who hasn’t been bled out or otherwise mishandled. I had a Stretch Armstrong as a kid…for about five minutes, but always really wanted the Stretch Monster, who seemed very menacing and cool, and who would have been a perfect villain to combat Steve Austin or Jaime Sommers in Kenner’s Bionic line..

Below, some commercials for Stretch and his adversaries.

Model Kit of the Week: Revell Space Station

2013-05-22T03:03:00.000-04:00

Cult Movie Review: Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013)

2013-05-21T13:29:00.000-04:00

(Note: In the following review, I will discuss, obsess on, and lovingly caress spoilers of all kinds, so be warned now, before you proceed…)

“There will always be those who mean to do us harm. To stop them, we risk awakening the same evil within ourselves. Our first instinct is to seek revenge when those we love are taken from us. But that's not who we are...”

Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), in Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013).

I now understand that the thing which really primed me to enjoy and appreciate Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013) is...Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013).

I screened that movie adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel on opening day, and was blown away by how relevant, experiential, and intimate the director had made the familiar material.

Although I love and admire the original book, there can be little doubt that the legions of high school students reading it right now find it a chore, or worse: a “dead text.”

But negative reviews be damned, Luhrmann has revitalized Gatsby and made it live and breathe for modern audiences. Rap music, 3-D photography, and other contemporary stylistic touches have rendered it entirely of the moment, and will open up an understanding of Fitzgerald’s work for generations yet to come.

For example, Luhrmann’s modernization of the work permits viewers to understand that the American Dream hasn’t changed much hanged in ninety years -- nor has Wall Street -- and thus help us to identify with Nick and Gatsby in a way that a traditional period piece simply would not.

Well, Star Trek lives again too, and in very much the same fashion I describe above, thanks to the efforts of J.J. Abrams and Into Darkness.

Although it may be sacrilege to say so in some circles, there are probably folks who would also consider Star Trek a “dead text” at this point. The franchise began almost fifty years ago, and the milieu which gave rise to it -- Kennedy’s Camelot -- began and ended before I was even born.

However, in ways large and small, epic and intimate, Star Trek: Into Darkness breathes fresh life into the franchise, and makes it relevant to today’s world. Although the narrative concerns the future of the 23rd century, the movie is really about today -- the world around us -- and its message is transmitted in the way that contemporary audiences can best receive it: in 3-D, with lots of lens flare, and in J.J.’s preferred mode of expression: pastiche.

The film’s story is not -- as I had feared and fretted -- all about a revenge-mad terrorist armed with a weapon of a mass destruction, but rather about the ways that heroes respond to acts of terror, and fear.

In short, Into Darkness is a spell-binding, thrill-a-minute film that accomplishes the one thing that the 2009 reboot did not, and which I desired to see more than anything else in a sequel. Star Trek: Into Darkness restores the Gene Roddenberry franchise as a vehicle for social commentary by noting that the bad guys win when we go “dark” in response to bad deeds.

Accordingly, the film plays as a recap of the difficult "War on Terror" years since 2001, years in which America condoned torture, holds suspects in perpetuity without trial, launched a pre-emptive war, and has relied on advanced, push-button technology to destroy enemies from afar, in violation of law and perhaps morality. Into Darkness is about who we have let ourselves become…all out of irrational, overwhelming fear and anger.

But, as Star Trek has long suggested, the best way to battle darkness is to bring it into the light…to expose it for what it is. To my delight, this J.J. Abrams film understands and transmits that notion in a fashion that a dozen interchangeably “dark” superhero movies simply do not. Kirk in this movie is angry about his loss and looking for vengeance, but because of his friendship with Spock, Scotty, and others, he is soon able to see that revenge cannot be the quality that defines him. He's better than that.

We should be better than that too.

The purists will complain -- just as they complain over Gatsby, and just as they complained when The Next Generation first premiered in 1987 -- but in their stubborn refusal to accept the passage of time and embrace modern audience appetites and movie techniques, these folks will also miss out on the best and most relevant Star Trek movie in possibly thirty years.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

In Star Trek: Into Darkness, the U.S.S. Enterprise under command of James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) undertakes an unauthorized mission on the inhabited world Nibiru.

In contravention of the Prime Directive, Kirk and his crew, including the half-Vulcan first officer, Spock (Zachary Quinto) attempt to save the primitive inhabitants from extinction by volcanic eruption. The mission to quiet the eruption is a success, but with qualifiers. The natives, for instance, see the Enterprise in their sky, and begin the worship of it as a God…

Upon return to Earth and Starfleet, Kirk is called on the carpet by his superior at Starfleet Command, Admiral Pike (Bruce Greenwood), for his actions on Nibiru. Those incidents were reported by Spock, who Kirk saved from certain death on the planet. Spock believes Kirk should not have violated Starfleet Regulations, while Kirk believes that Spock should have trusted him.

Meanwhile, the shadowy John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) -- an agent for the secretive security branch of Starfleet called Section 31 -- goes rogue and launches two terrorist attacks against his former superiors. He destroys an archive in London, and attacks command personnel in San Francisco.

Captain Kirk requests permission to pursue the terrorist to the end of the galaxy if need be, and in that quest is provided a new, highly-advanced weapon by Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller): 72 highly-advanced stealth torpedoes.

Marcus orders Kirk to go to the edge of the neutral zone near Klingon space, where he is to fire the torpedoes from a safe distance at an uninhabited province on the alien home world of Kronos. There, intelligence suggests, Harrison is believed to be hiding.

Spock objects to a kill order for a man who has not even stood trial for his crimes, and Scotty (Simon Pegg) resigns his commission rather than take aboard 72 weapons of unknown origin that could damage the Enterprise.

Upon reaching the neutral zone, Kirk reconsiders his orders, and takes a team down to Kronos to arrest and bring back Harrison.

This act which enrages Admiral Marcus, and opens up a world of secrets involving Section 31, the true identity of Harrison, possible war with the Klingons, and the existence of the first battleship in Star Fleet history…`

“I surrendered to you because, despite your attempt to convince me otherwise, you seem to have a conscience, Mr. Kirk.”

One important thing to understand about Into Darkness is that it is indeed the victim of a terribly generic marketing campaign.

Previews and trailers stress a mad man, acts of terrorism, and even the dreadful line “I will have my vengeance,” which -- if memory serves -- does not appear in the film.

As I described in my post, Threading theNeedle, the advertisements and posters evoke memories of The Dark Knight (2008) and Iron Man 3 (2013).

Similarly, the title Into Darkness is also outright dreadful, and a deliberate misnomer. This is not a film about Kirk, Spock and the Enterprise crew traveling into darkness, but rather about finding the antidote to the darkness in their lives -- in friendship, for instance -- and staying true to their convictions and beliefs in the process. T

he movie isn’t angst-ridden or broody, or particularly dark for the apparent sake of narrative and thematic “maturity.” It isn’t a film about ugliness. Instead, Into Darkness is about finding the best within oneself when times are worst, and that path of light being the key to dispelling encroaching darkness.

In terms of the social commentary, Star Trek’s (2009) destruction of Vulcan is now, clearly, the 9/11 of the franchise and the galvanizing incident behind the plot line of the sequel. Star Trek: Into Darkness follows-up that context, and reveals a Starfleet Command in chaos and confusion over how to respond to looming threats.

There is a direct, multi-faceted parallel between the years 2001–2013 and the events in the new Trek timeline. I’ll enumerate as many as I can, for they are legion.

Point 1: The John Harrison/Bin Laden connection

John Harrison, the villain of Into Darkness is a former agent of Section 31, a shadowy covert organization in Starfleet. He was "awakened" by Admiral Marcus and trained in 23rd century technology and intelligence to help Marcus countenance looming threats such as the Klingon Empire.

Osama Bin Laden, the late terrorist who struck America on September 11, 2001, is, in some circles, believed to have been trained by the CIA (corollary to Section 31, in Star Trek) to battle the Russians in Afghanistan with the mujahedeen.

In this case, Harrison also turns against those who trained him, and uses that training and knowledge to strike back at his former masters.

After two devastating terrorist attacks on Starfleet and Earth, in London and San Francisco, Harrison escapes without a trace to an uninhabited province in unfriendly territory.

Historically-speaking, we know that Bin Laden sought sanctuary in the rough mountain patch separating Pakistan from Afghanistan, particularly the inhospitable landscape of Tora Bora.

Bin Laden’s proximity to a sovereign country possessing nuclear capability and a population by-and-large hostile to America, became a central issue in tracking him down, and contending with him.

That precise dynamic plays out in Star Trek Into Darkness as Kirk must negotiate his proximity to the Klingons, and not allow Starfleet to become visibly involved in an incursion into such sovereign territory. Provoking the Klingons -- like provoking Pakistan -- could mean "all out war."

Finally, John Harrison is called his full-name only once in the film, and though it is abundantly familiar to Star Trek fans, it plays differently in terms of the post-9/11 milieu. Khan Noonien Singh sounds not entirely unlike Osama Bin Laden. Three word names, both consisting of apparent Middle Eastern-sounding origin. This resemblance may seem slight, but played out in this alternate universe timeline, I believe the connection is significant.

Point 2: Photon Torpedoes and Drones

The way to get and destroy Harrison, ostensibly, is by use of new, modified 23^rd-century torpedo in Star Trek: Into Darkness.

These torpedoes can be fired from a great distance to destroy the terrorist. As others have written persuasively, this aspect of the Star Trek plot boasts a clear corollary with our continued drone attacks in foreign countries, including Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan. This “push-button” war raises questions of morality in both circumstances.

In neither instance is there a declared state of war, and therefore no permission to launch decapitation strikes deep inside sovereign territory.

But in both cases there exists the opportunity to kill with impunity, without repercussions, and to do it in such a way as there are no casualties for the “heroes.” This opportunity tends to make war seem "clean" and "pretty," especially to a detached citizenry. No pilots endangered, no boots on the ground. Just death from above, and from a great distance.

Point 3: The Klingons and Iraq

Following Al-Qaeda’s surprise attacks on New York City and Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration immediately began conceiving a way to legitimize a war…with Iraq.

Al-Qaeda was headquartered in Afghanistan and had no links to Iraq or its despotic ruler, Saddam Hussein, and yet the Administration began to lobby for war with that state.

This fact is revealed in Bob Woodward’s text Bush at War, which notes that “Before the attacks, the Pentagon had been working for months on developing a military option for Iraq…Rumsfeld was raising the possibility that they could take advantage of the opportunity offered by the terrorist attacks to go after Saddam immediately.”

In Star Trek: Into Darkness, Admiral Marcus is similarly, unhealthily obsessed with the Klingon Empire and believes that war with the Empire is inevitable. He is looking ahead to a next, possible enemy, instead of dealing with the enemy that already exists (John Harrison).

Accordingly, Marcus and Section 31 have begun to hyper-militarize Starfleet, and laid the ground-work for a new war against an enemy who has not yet struck. The U.S.S. Vengeance, a super-battleship, has been secretly commissioned for a war that, as of yet, has not been launched.

In fact, a torpedo strike into Klingon territory would be just the thing to give Marcus his desired war, wouldn’t it?

And at one point in the film, Marcus yells at Kirk that if war comes, Starfleet needs a decisive man like him making decisions, calling the hard shots.

In other words, he's the decider.

And if Starfleeet dare pick someone else, someone open to facts instead of fear (someone like John Kerry or Jim Kirk perhaps), you might risk "nuclear mushrooms" over American cities.

The corollary to the War on Terror Age couldn't be more precise.

Point 4: The Private Soldier

Star Trek: Into Darkness also suggests that because Starfleet boasts clear regulations and orders of conduct that its officers must heed and obey, other, less “principled” soldiers may be required in the event of war with the Klingons...to fight in accordance with Marcus’s cut-throat new principles (learned from Khan?).

Accordingly, U.S.S. Vengeance is manned with “private” security forces, just as a private security firm, Blackwater operated in Iraq.

The idea here, roiling under the surface is that Starfleet Regulations -- like the Geneva Conventions -- are "quaint" relics of a bygone time, not to be honored in a time of war-mongering and fear-hysteria. Good soldiers no better than to break the laws of engagement, but what about hired guns?

Point 5: The Torture Debate

In Star Trek: Into Darkness, Captain Kirk accepts John Harrison’s surrender, and then spends the next minute-and-a-half beating him, attacking his prisoner for his murderous deeds in London and San Francisco.

But Harrison is stoic, and endures the abuse without pain, or even expression. Finally, Kirk must stop. He has achieved absolutely nothing through his display of brutal and primitive violence. He has not weakened Harrison, and he has not learned anything whatsoever about Harrison’s motives or plans.

Again, this moment in the film is very clearly a corollary for the on-going debate about the use of torture on “enemy combatants.”

Notably, Kirk only succeeds in hurting himself -- embarrassing himself, too -- in physically attacking his prisoner, a man in his custody and therefore under his protection. This brutal physical assault has the effect of making him look weak, not Khan.

Worse, it makes Kirk lose the moral high ground for a time.

And again, that’s exactly what happened to America at Abu Ghraib and in covert CIA bases the world over. Instead of living up to our ideals about how to treat prisoners, we sacrificed our ideals out of fear and anger.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Star Trek: Into Darkness is that its writers show the courage to diverge from our dark recent history in their idealized version of the future. Kirk eventually realizes it is wrong to kill a man from a distance without benefit of a trial. He hunts down Harrison/Khan and captures him for just such a trial (though we don’t see it). The best way to deal with terrorists is in the light of day, not in the shadows.

In real life, we know that Bin Laden was hunted down and executed without trial, an act of revenge that in no way illuminates America’s true and hopeful nature as "the shining city on the hill." The point is that we have to be better than our enemies in our beliefs. That's what attracts allies to America; that's what makes us strong.

Star Trek: Into Darkness thus suggests that the “good guys” win when they remember their true values, not when they descend to the level of barbarian, or give in to passing surges of blood-thirst or vengeance.

This subtext represents a very Star Trek-kian principle, and I am happy to see it enunciated in an age of such thoughtless violence. Every other blockbuster movie is about a hero meting revenge for some terrible wrong. It's nice to see a blockbuster, for a change, where the heroes stop short of vengeance, take a breath, and remember who they are.

The Mirror Crack’d: Into Darkness as a Pastiche affirming the universality of the Kirk/Spock Bond.

J.J. Abrams’ preferred mode of operation, I would submit -- based on his film career -- is pastiche.

You can see it clearly in Super 8 (2011), a film that dynamically apes the Spielberg filming style, and uses and adapts elements from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). I have read some complaints by Star Trek fans about the ways that Into Darkness “apes” previous moments in Star Trek history, namely the denouement of The Wrath of Khan (1982).

A pastiche, of course, is an artistic work “in a style” that imitates that of another work or artist. But I would submit where a film like Nemesis apes the plot-line of The Wrath of Khan, Abrams goes one better with his frequent, post-modern nods to the Trek franchise.

His Star Trek is set in a different timeline, in an alternate universe (not unlike the Mirror Universe, for instance), so some events actually have legitimate cause to repeat. History is going to repeat itself, more or less. And it is in the excavating of that "more" or "less" that Abrams seems to have so much fun.

The point seems to be that no matter how much the "new" time-line alters the course of cosmic events -- like the destruction of Vulcan -- some events are indeed pre-destined, or pre-determined Kirk and Spock are meant to join up…in every universe. And Kirk is meant to be Captain of the Enterprise in all realities too, at least for a time.

John Harrison/Khan fits this same template of pre-destiny.

In any universe, Kirk and Khan are going to meet, clash, and he will only be defeated by, in the words of Prime Spock (Leonard Nimoy), "a great personal cost."

The only thing that can defeat this powerful villain, is the combined force -- and friendship -- of Kirk and Spock. In the canon universe, it is Spock who dies to save the Enterprise. In Into Darkness, it is Kirk who goes into the warp core to face his own death.

This is not a blind, empty repetition of Star Trek lore, it is an outright assertion of the importance of the Kirk/Spock relationship, and its value in the face of villainy.

Those viewers who see Into Darkness as merely ripping-off the Wrath of Khan are missing the point entirely. Instead, the “mirror” scene of Into Darkness at the reactor core is a beautiful statement about Kirk and Spock’s connection in any reality. They will always be friends and they will always be willing to sacrifice themselves for their family: the Enterprise crew. Khan will never win, in any universe, because he lacks the special bond that Kirk and Spock share.

Quite frankly, we could not get to this vision of a friendship that spans universes without Abrams’ penchant for pastiche, without his willingness to appropriate sign-marks and symbols from Trek history and re-purpose them for today's audiences

The very thing that some Trekkers complain about as a weakness is, in fact, a strength of the film, and also of Abrams’ vision of Star Trek. He is not repeating what has happened before, he is revealing to us how, in the face of a “mirror” universe, some values such as friendship -- and Starfleet Regulations -- endure.

With Kirk and Spock together on the Enterprise, the universe shall, more or less, “unfold as it should.”

This appreciation for Abrams’ modus operandi does not preclude me from criticizing certain aspects of the drama, however.

Although everyone has bent over backwards to appreciate Benedict Cumberbatch’s villainous performance as Khan, I would suggest his success in the role arises from his own qualities as an actor, and not the writing of the character.

I recognized him as a strong presence in the frame, in other words, but not as Khan. I recognize Pine and Quinto and the others as the Enterprise crew, but the writers have brought almost no “old series” signifiers to allow permit long-time viewers to recognize Khan as the same man from “Space Seed” or Wrath of Khan.

Would it have been too hard to have Cumberbatch quote Milton, or Dante, or Melville, just to remind us old folks he’s the same fellow from Space Seed?

There is precious little of “Khan” in the writing of the Khan character in Into Darkness, which makes him seem a more generic villain than need be. It’s a good thing they cast an actor with such strong physical and intellectual presence, but watching the film, I never felt like this Khan was the same man I had met before. Cumberbatch brings immense focus to the role, but not the larger-than-life theatricality of Montalban. I missed that aspect of the character, as well as his sense of literacy and history.

I also feel that some of the changes in this time-line are going to cause problems for the writers down the line. If a man can trans-warp beam from San Francisco to the heart of the Klingon Empire, there is no need for Star Trekking of any kind whatsoever.

Somehow, future movies will have to address the fact that the transporter device is now a better, more efficient means of travel than starship and warp drive.

But frankly, these are quibbles with a movie that is exciting, emotionally-affecting, funny, and incredibly entertaining. The social commentary about the post-911 age permits this film to live up to Star Trek’s most noble tradition of being about something more than spaceships and lasers, and J.J. Abrams’ penchant for pastiche transforms the film into a meditation about the depth of the Kirk and Spock bond, no matter the universe, no matter the situation.

So like The Great Gatsby, Star Trek endures, and finds a meaningful place in the pop culture of the 21^st century.

And again, once more the sky's the limit...the five year mission begins again. I can't wait to see "what's out there...."

Movie Trailer: Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013)

2013-05-21T06:15:00.000-04:00

Theme Song of the Week: Captain Video and His Video Rangers (1949)

2013-05-21T03:03:00.000-04:00

Late Night Blogging: RVs at the Movies

2013-05-20T23:11:00.000-04:00

Ask JKM a Question: The Cult-TV Faces of?

2013-05-20T16:04:00.001-04:00

An anonymous reader writes:

“I always enjoy those “Cult TV Faces of” galleries you post on your web journal and I wondered how you come up with the categories and examples, especially after doing it for so long?”

Thank you for the question, Anonymous.

Going back to some of my sci-fi series themed books in the 1970s, I’ve been obsessed with genre conventions that repeat again and again, like the over-sized vent-shaft, or the Silicon-Based Life-Form, or the Sargasso Sea.

I have a good enough knowledge of TV history that I can usually remember four or five examples of each convention or “Cult TV Face” off the top of my head. But then I need to do research and look for more examples of each, and, indeed, this requires oodles of Googling. I dig a lot into my extensive DVD library too, for some of the more obscure examples.

Sometimes, my attempts don’t pan out.

At one point, I was going to create a post called the Cult-TV Faces of “Diseases,” but I realized that it’s very difficult to capture in an image the idea of a disease. The old age disease of Star Trek’s “The Deadly Years,” for instance, looks very different than the pustule-popping plague of The X-Files “F. Emasculata.”

So the best galleries, in my opinion, are those that capture the idea (like “The Most Dangerous Game”) in a powerful image.

I can’t always find what I’m looking for, either.

I was going to post a gallery of TV gargoyles recently, only to find there weren’t more than four or so images that I could find/remember. So I had to scrap that one, alas, since I always attempt to include at least nine images.

I haven’t run out of clichés or genre conventions yet, though sometimes it’s hard to think of a topic that has been covered by nine or ten different programs over the years, and then find the appropriate images. Still, this is the kind of stuff I really like.

I added “Cult-TV Theme Watch” at some point a year or so ago because I felt I wanted to describe what the galleries represent. It has to be meaningful that so many series have explored the same ideas, even if created in different decades. Why does our art keep returning to these conventions?

Thanks for your question! Don’t forget to ask me questions at Muirbusiness@yahoo.com

Cult-TV Theme Watch: RVs.

2013-05-20T13:01:00.000-04:00

An RV or recreational vehicle is a vehicle (or sometimes trailer) that comes kitted-up with every aspect of the modern home or house.

The RV has been the vehicle of choice in several cult-tv series over the decades, especially in narratives that involve characters and families on the run from villains, or otherwise on the move.

Rather unconventionally, an RV emblazoned with Captain Marvel’s logo -- a yellow lightning bolt -- is the home base for youngster Billy Batson (Michael Gray) and Mentor (Les Tremayne) in Filmation’s live-action Saturday morning series, Shazam (1974 – 1977). It seems odd that the RV should be decorated with Captain Marvel’s symbol, since his identity is a secret. This would be like Clark Kent driving a car with a Superman “S” on the hood.

The TV works of Chris Carter often feature individual episodes featuring RVs. In Millennium’s (1996 – 1999) “Beware of the Dog,” for instance, the opening stinger involves two nice retirees pulling up into scenic Bucksnort in their RV…when fierce canines attack and kill the senior citizens. And The X-Files (1993 – 2002) episode “Bad Blood” involves several vampires from Texas that happen to live in a trailer park, as Mulder (David Duchovny) learns.

In the final seasons of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on the Sci-Fi Channel, Pearl Forrester (Mary Jo Pehl) chases Mike Nelson and his robot pals on the Satellite of Love in a Volkswagen van turned into a rocketship. In a few episodes such as “Riding with Death,” Pearl, Bobo (Kevin Murphy) and Brain Guy go camping in the RV-turned spaceship on another world, one inhabited by “pods.”

During the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 – 2003), Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) battles an Ancient, all-powerful Goddess called Glory, and in the episode “Spiral” decides to get out of Dodge with Dawn, Giles, Spike and the rest of the Scoobies in an old RV. This decision to flee Sunnydale sets- up a road-warrior-ish battle between the racing mobile home and several knights on horseback.

In the cartoon series Ben 10 (2006 – 2008), young Ben Tennyson and his cousin Gwen spend a summer vacation riding around America with their grandpa, Max, in his high-tech RV, which is outfitted with “plumber” technology. This RV -- affectionately known as "The Rust Bucket" -- becomes the home base for Ben after he first is bonded with the Omnitrix, and granted the capability to transform into different alien creatures.

Finally, on the AMC original series, The Walking Dead (2010 – present), kindly old Dale (Jeffrey De Munn) makes his RV the ad-hoc “home” for a group of rag-tag survivors of the zombie apocalypse in Georgia. The van endures for the first two seasons of the series, as does Dale himself.

The Cult-TV Faces of: Recreational Vehicles

2013-05-20T06:06:00.000-04:00

Identified by SGB: Shazam! (1974)

Identified by Josef Karl: Millennium: "Beware of the Dog."

Identified by Chris G: The X-Files: "Bad Blood."

Identified by SGB: Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Identified by Carl: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: "Spiral."

Identified by SGB: Ben 10.

Identified by Chadzilla: Flash Forward.

Identified by SGB: The Walking Dead.

Identified by Chadzilla: Grimm (2011).

Star Blazers Episode #10

2013-05-19T06:06:00.000-04:00

One of my friends and regular readers here -- who goes by the handle SGB -- has written a few times in the comments section about the powerful emotional content of Star Blazers (1979), the 1970s animated series re-purposed from Japan. The tenth episode of the series aptly establishes that content, and is all the better for it.

Here, the Argo is, at long last, ready to leave the solar system and make a dash for Iscandar to retrieve the life-saving Cosmo DNA.

But before the Argo leaves the solar system, the crewmen and women must make their goodbyes to Earth, and Earth Command. Captain Avatar notes solemnly that it might be even worse to be stuck on Earth than facing danger aboard the Argo. “They can only wait. We can act.”

As time to communicate with Earth runs out, Nova arranges for each crew member to get five minutes on“the telecommunicator” with family and loved ones. Mark Venture telephones his Mom and Dad, and talks to his brother Geordi, who is building a model of the Argo in the living room when the connection goes through.

Meanwhile, Nova speaks to her own parents, and learns that her mother is obsessed not with the impending end of the world…but with finding a suitable husband for Nova upon her return.

These “goodbyes” to family are emotional enough, but then the episode follows up on such heartfelt moments with the revelation that men like Avatar and Derek Wildstar are even worse off.

They have no one on Earth to even say goodbye to. Talk about feeling lonely...

Until the last few frames of episode ten when Desslok appears, there’s not a twitching, threatening Gamilon in sight, and that’s a very good thing, as Star Blazers diagrams the emotional impact of the Argo’s journey. The crew must not only accept its mission, but the vast distance from Mother Earth. And the people from Earth are hungry for hope…any hope.

“We have a great need of news of the Star Force…can we hope?” asks the Earth commander.

In short, this episode makes up for the last several middling weeks of Star Blazers, which merely tread water in terms of narrative The focus here is rightly on the crew and the fact that it carries the weight of the world upon its shoulders.

The only negative I can point out, as before, is the detail surrounding the “star warp.” Already -- several episodes back -- the Argo has jumped twice, and yet this episode again explains the concept of folding space all over again. And also, I’m not quite clear why the star jump distances have been so short. The first jump barely took the Argo from Mars to Jupiter.

Still, this entry is a very strong episode in the series, and all of “galactic space” is ahead. Only 315 Days left…

Star Trek Week: Final Post

2013-05-18T13:01:00.000-04:00

And so Star Trek Week comes to an end. It flew by!

I hope you enjoyed re-visiting this durable franchise with me, and I appreciate all your great comments and thought on all things Trek. I'll be curious to read all your thoughts regarding Star Trek: Into Darkness in the coming days, weeks, and months.

I will be reviewing the film bright and early on Tuesday morning, May 21st. Don't forget to check it out. (Hint: I loved it.)

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Saturday Morning Cult-TV Blogging: Star Trek: The Animated Series: "Yesteryear" (September 15, 1973)

2013-05-18T11:11:00.000-04:00

The blockbuster J.J. Abrams' Star Trek film (2009) is not the first (or only...) Trek installment over the years to alter the franchise time line in some fashion (or, more accurately, create a separate or alternate time line). In fact, this kind of temporal tweaking was occurring in the series as early as 1973. September 15, 1973, to be precise.

That's the air date of story-editor D.C. Fontana's heart-felt episode, "Yesteryear."

It's the second episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series broadcast on CBS in most U.S. cities, and -- not entirely unlike the popular Abrams' film - it was heavily Spock-centric in nature.

"My ideas were these," Fontana told me in an interview for Filmfax in 2001: "Can we see Vulcan? What kind of story can I tell there? And can I involve Spock?"

In answering those questions, Fontana created what is undeniably the most popular episode of the animated series, and one that is also regarded as "canon" by most Star Trek fans.

"Yesteryear" opens at the planet of the Guardian of Forever (as seen in "City on the Edge of Forever.") A group of Federation scientists stand watch at the mysterious time portal as Kirk and Spock return from a visit to Orion's past.

However, something strange has occurred in their absence. The scientists don't appear to remember Spock at all. A baffled Captain Kirk hails the Enterprise, and Scotty has no memory of the half-Vulcan science-officer either. "Something appears to have changed in the time line as we know it," Spock suggests.

Indeed, this is an accurate supposition, and the first officer of the starship Enterprise in this "new" time line is now an Andorian, Mr. Thelin. Upon returning to the starship, Spock also learns that in this universe, he died at age seven, during a dangerous Vulcan rite of "maturity" called the Kahs-wan.

Equally as troubling, Spock's death at a young age caused the dissolution of Sarek and Amanda's marriage, and Amanda was subsequently killed in a shuttle accident on her way home to Earth.

Again, I thought reflexively of the new Star Trek film, which also makes Amanda a casualty in an alternate time line.

Kirk and Spock soon realize that, in their original timeline, Spock must have actually traveled back in Vulcan history and saved his younger self from dying on Vulcan's Forge during the Kahs-wan, a ritual involving 10 days in the desert without food, water, or weapons. However, when the Federation scientists "replayed" that part of Vulcan history (some twenty-to-thirty years prior...), Spock was unavailable -- in Orion's past with Kirk -- and therefore unable to return to Vulcan and save his younger self.

In hopes of restoring himself and the timeline, Spock masquerades as Sarek's (Mark Lenard's) cousin "Selik," and returns to Vulcan in the past, near the city of ShiKahr.

There, he comes to the assistance of his younger self as the seven-year old Spock and his pet sehlat, I-Chaya, are attacked by a Vulcan dragon called a le-matya. Fans of Godzilla will recognize the roar of the le-matya as being that of their favorite Toho monster...

Unfortunately, I-Chaya is poisoned by the dragon and young Spock seeks help from a local healer, braving Vulcan's Forge and thereby passing the Vulcan rite of adulthood. For his beloved pet, however, it is too late, and the healer offers Spock a choice. The sehlat's life can be prolonged for a time -- but the animal will feel terrible pain, or the healer can release the beloved pet from all his suffering...and end his life now.

Young Spock makes the decision to end his pet's suffering, and in doing so decides that the path of his own life will follow in the Vulcan way: logic and the total repression of all emotion.

When elder Spock returns to the present on the Planet of the Guardian of Forever, he informs a waiting Kirk that the timeline has indeed been altered (or a new one created...). "One small thing was changed...a pet died," Spock informs his Captain. "Times change..." he concludes later, and in a way, that could be a tag-line for the new Star Trek too.

"Yesteryear" has always been one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series, in part because of the difficult but valuable message about pets, and caring for pets. When young Spock asks whether it is right to mourn the loss of his pet, his older self notes with compassion that "every life comes to an end when the time demands it," and thus there is no need to be sad about it.

What is sad, Spock insists, is a life that has not been lived well.

Frankly, I'm amazed that a pet's (on-screen...) death made it past the censors and onto network television, on Saturday mornings, no less, in the 1970s. Filmation's Lou Scheimer, producer of the Star Trek cartoon, told me in an interview in 2001 that "a pet's death had never been done on a children's program, and it was touching and provocative. Dorothy was instrumental in making it so creative."

When I interviewed Fontana, she told me that there was indeed a "worry about the death of the sehlat," but that "Gene Roddenberry told the networks" that she -- Fontana -- would "take care of it," in a way that acceptable. It was a story, that Fontana put "so much" of herself into...and it certainly shows, even today. If you've ever lost a beloved pet, or worse, had to make the choice of life for death for a beloved pet, you will find yourself quite moved by the last act of "Yesteryear."

Watching this episode again last night brought me right back to a terrible Thursday in April 2003, and the death of my first cat, Lulu. Our doctor offered us a similar choice: a short-term respite (through a difficult blood transfusion), or a merciful "passing" right there...and thus an end to suffering. We chose the latter option and it was -- and remains -- devastating, but I've always believed we made the right choice for her; the same choice Spock makes for his pet in this Star Trek episode. Perhaps Vulcans and humans are quite alike after all...

Another intriguing aspect of "Yesteryear," especially in light of the 2009 film, is a scene involving young Spock being bullied by other Vulcan children about his human half. Although in the cartoon (again, a Saturday morning show...) nobody calls Amanda "a whore," the insults are still pretty harsh.

One child tells Spock that Sarek brought shame to Vulcan by marrying a human. Another informs Spock that he can never be a "real Vulcan." This scene -- with different costumes and sets -- is played out almost exactly in the Abrams film. (And indeed, it was a moment mentioned in passing by Amanda as early as the Fontana live-action episode "Journey to Babel.")

Another reason to admire "Yesteryear" is the scope of the story. Before Abrams' film, this cartoon segment probably represented the best view of Vulcan we were afforded in Trek history. In "Yesteryear," we see the interior of Sarek and Amanda's home, the deserts of Vulcan's Forge, and a futuristic metropolis (not to mention some hover cars). These things were possible only because of animation...a live-action series of 1973 could simply never have afforded so many varied sets, props or locations.

In light of the 2009 chapter of the Star Trek story, "Yesteryear" looks even more fascinating than ever. In it, we see how a time line is changed permanently (if only in regards to a pet's destiny...), get more than a passing glimpse of modern Vulcan, and once more delve into the difficult choices Spock made in childhood: the selection between Vulcan or human philosophy.

All in all, this may be Star Trek: The Animated Series' finest hour.

Next week: "One of Our Planets is Missing."

Saturday Morning Cult-TV Blogging: Star Trek: The Animated Series: "Beyond the Farthest Star" (September 8, 1973)

2013-05-18T09:09:00.000-04:00

In 1973, Filmation presented Star Trek: The Animated Series, one of the lesser-celebrated but no less worthwhile jewels in the Star Trek crown.

Filmation's Lou Scheimer had Gene Roddenberry on board as an executive consultant, and Dorothy Fontana served as the series story editor. The entire cast, save for Walter Koenig (Chekov), returned to provide the voices for their characters, the crew of the original starship Enterprise.

The first episode, "Beyond the Farthest Star" (by Samuel A. Peeples; directed by Hal Sutherland), starts routinely with the opening credits, a nice, if rough approximation or re-creation of the live-action series credits. Only with "starring the voices of" as the legend, rather than simply "starring."

As the half-hour opening installment begins, the Enterprise is cruising on the "outer fringe" of the galaxy en route to "Quasar M-17," when a strange "radio emission" is intercepted by the crew. A sudden increase of gravity (or "hyper-gravity") drags the Federation starship off course, and it promptly falls into the gravity well of a dead star. The Enterprise manages an orbital insertion in the nick of time, and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) soon detects a strange alien starship also trapped in orbit. He determines that it has been locked there, trapped, on the magnitude of "300 million years."

An investigation of the ship (which boasts a biological, organic design; presaging many 1970s productions such as Alien [1979]), reveals that aliens destroyed their own vessel because they had accidentally taken on a malevolent, formless life form who was seeking escape...into the heart of the galaxy. This creature, a "magnetic organism without mass," makes it back to the Enterprise with the landing party, and begins to run wild there. Captain Kirk (William Shatner) seemingly chooses suicide and certain destruction rather than freeing this evil life form from its ages-old captivity...

As you can tell from this brief synopsis, there are many familiar elements here; or rather, some elements that would one day become familiar to Trek-dom.

From the original series, we have an age-old, formless entity of pure evil, like Redjac in "The Wolf in the Fold." And future Treks, including Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, would also involve an alien entity hoping to escape a planetary prison via a starship.

Like Star Trek efforts including "Where No Man Has Gone Before," Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Next Gen's "The Nth Degree," a definable landmark in the galaxy is visited by the Federation in this story; here the outer rim; (in other cases, it's the edge of the galaxy or the center of the galaxy).

So, generally, how does Star Trek: The Animated Series compare to original Trek? It is clearly designed for children (it is a Saturday morning series, after all), but to utilize a common phrase, it is "light years" ahead of other Saturday morning fare from the same decade. On Star Trek -- as early as this first episode -- one detects the ideas at work. The Animated Series is not so much simplified as streamlined. And, it's immensely entertaining.

But anyway, Filmation has done a remarkable job of recreating the original Enterprise interiors, costumes and production design. In this episode, there are several nice insert shots of classic Federation hardware such as tricorders and communicators...and they look just right. The transporter console is familiar too, and the bridge looks great. The level of fidelity is more than respectable...it's astonishing.

What's different? Well, interestingly, you can already detect how Gene Roddenberry was incorporating new and fascinating ideas into the franchise; updating the Trek universe. For instance, a pan across the bridge of the Enterprise reveals a second turbo lift (to the left of the view screen; to the right of Engineering). We would next see a second turbo lift on the bridge next in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Satisfying the curiosity of many, this episode also reveals for the first time some of the details of what specifically Spock sees inside the "blue glow" of his library computer viewer. At one point it's just a sine wave, signifying the "heart beat" of the alien, but it's still a neat glimpse. .

What's changed? Well, first and foremost, there's an alien navigator, the three-armed Mr. Arex, sitting in Mr. Chekov's spot. He's a little bit gimmicky for my taste (three arms; three legs), but at least he isn't designed and executed to be a joke.

More genuinely fascinating, Federation technology has been updated. It now includes "life support belts" which eliminate the need for space suits in inhospitable environments. I like this idea a great deal, and think it's both inventive and keeping in the spirit of the original Trek's vision of the future. It seems that personal force fields generated by small belts is not only a nice cheap expedient (like the transporter...) for getting into and out of weird environments, but I kind of think the belts tart up the uniforms nicely. To me, Star Trek isn't truly about the hard days of early space travel (leave that to another favorite, Space:1999, please...), but rather the era wherein man has tamed technology and it is easy, simple-to-use and -- again -- streamlined.

Perhaps life support belts aren't inherently dramatic (like space suits); but then again neither is the transporter. A shuttle launching and landing is much more interesting, isn't it? That's okay, though, belts and transporters feel "Trekkish," and get us into environments where otherwise it would be hard to go.

Uniquely, the bridge is now equipped with an "automatic bridge defense system," a turret that lowers from the bridge ceiling in times of danger and can target any object in the room with a phaser array. Although this turret is hijacked by the evil alien in "Beyond the Farthest Star," it perhaps should have stayed in the live-action franchise. I got tired in The Next Generation (in episodes like "The High Ground" and "Best of Both Worlds") of watching Lt. Worf leap over a furniture barrier between his station and Captain Picard when confronted with unfriendly interlopers on the command deck. Any alien could apparently just beam onto the bridge and punch crewmen or hijack them off the ship. An automatic defense system might have actually come in handy. An intruder beams in - zap 'em! It's easier on the legs than jumping hurdles.

Another change: We see Engineering, and it looks familiar enough, save for the new "engineering core." That's different terminology than we've been accustomed to on Star Trek. It's really just a giant glowing hatch in the Engineering deck floor, ostensibly leading down into the anti-matter/matter reactor.

"Beyond the Farthest Star" is a colorful episode, and an advantage of animation is that alien spaceship designs and planets are not restricted by live-action budgetary constraints. Here, the alien ship is organic in design, consisting of individual cells or pods that have been "burst open," (again, think Alien...). The scale of this alien ship is something that couldn't be accomplished back in the day of the original Trek; and the landing party's tour of the derelict reminded me a little of the Krell tour in Forbidden Planet.

"Beyond the Farthest Star" isn't a favorite fan installment of the animated series, but it gets the job done, and is overall very impressive. Watching this episode now, it's clear that Star Treks would have benefited from incorporating more, not less of this series.

Series Primer: Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973 - 1974)

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In 1973, Filmation Studios, the animation house responsible for popular Saturday morning cartoons such as Journey to the Center of the Earth and Fantastic Voyage, joined forces with the Great Bird of the Galaxy, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, to continue the Star Trek mythos. Together, these two powerhouses of the genre produced a program that, even today, remains one of the most imaginative installments in Star Trek's long history: The Animated Series (1973-1974).

"It was 1972 or 1973, and I thought it would be a great time to do an animated Star Trek," Lou Scheimer, then-president of Filmation, told me in an interview in the year 2000. "Gene loved the idea, but there had been some problems between Roddenberry, Paramount and NBC, and basically, they weren't speaking to each other."

The root of the problem was simple: creative control. "In those days, it was difficult to deal with networks on Saturday morning shows without them getting involved creatively," Scheimer explains.

But, according to series director Hal Sutherland, a veteran animator who oversaw more than 20 episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series, Roddenberry emerged victorious and nabbed "carte blanche" creative control of Star Trek's first TV resurrection.

With the issue of creative control settled, Roddenberry manned the helm of his new starship and recruited a first officer in Dorothy Fontana, author of many of the live-action Trek's most popular episodes (including "Journey to Babel").

Serving as series associate producer and story editor, Fontana initially expressed some reservations about animation, because it "is usually for children, and there are certain stories you can't tell." She also felt, however, that animation offered the potential to visit places never envisioned by live-action Trek. All kinds of "new life forms and new civilizations" could appear cheaply, without the limitation of building expensive sets or applying costly make-up.

Despite animation's potential, budget was an immediate problem. The production had woefully little money to spend, and that meant there had to be cuts in the cast. Accordingly, the crew of the Starship Enterprise was downsized. Though William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, Jimmy Doohan and Majel Barrett Roddenberry all returned to the bridge, there was one casualty (and he didn't even wear a red shirt.)

"There was only so much money to spend and we couldn't afford everybody," Fontana recounted to me. The axe fell on Walter Koenig, whose character, Lt. Pavel Chekov, was eliminated from the format. "We said to Walter, you're not forgotten," Fontana explains, and the actor was hired to pen an episode of the first season instead ("The Infinite Vulcan").

Adjusting to the world of animation was a difficult task for some Star Trek veterans, even after the casting issues were resolved. Sutherland describes the dilemma. "Filmation was extremely busy and Roddenberry never knew when to quit. At one point on the first episode, we had just three days to start production and meet our deadline, and Gene kept pushing for improvements. I finally said, 'Gene, we're locked into the deadline, we've got to do this!' To his credit, he stepped back and said 'okay, we're done.'"

The schedule remained tight, however, and Filmation labored to produce a quality Star Trek. "I had an office at Filmation," Fontana describes, "and I was in the same building where the animation was done. Unlike many companies, they didn't farm out their work to foreign countries. Everything was done in-house, and the artists and recording studio were all together."

This closeness resulted in a complicated but orderly process of episode assembly. Scheimer outlines the routine:. "Dorothy and her writers wrote the scripts, Gene would offer his input, and then it was story-boarded."

Next, as Sutherland relates, the director took the reins. "After reading the script, I'd create instructions for the animators, working from storyboards. More often than not, I'd work well into the night, sometimes at my office, sometimes in my dining room at 3:00 am."

From there, Trek's cast beamed in. "People are surprised that you record the actors' voices before you start animating," Scheimer notes. "Everyone thinks the voices are added later, but the animator wouldn't know how to do it. He needs to hear the voices before he knows what the emotion is. So we'd record the voices from the storyboards, which are basically illustrated bibles. Then we'd do the full animation."

And painstaking animation it was too, at least by Scheimer's estimation. "Everything was done by hand," he emphasizes. "There were no computer graphics, and we did a lot of stock scenes of the characters walking and talking. We re-utilized that material in different settings and different combinations."

But if recreating the physical universe of Star Trek proved a hardship, working with the experienced cast was a dream. "De [Kelley] was one of the sweetest human beings I ever met, and Jimmy [Doohan] was highly versatile," remembers Scheimer. "Jimmy worked with Filmation again on Jason of Star Command. On Star Trek, Jimmy and Majel [Roddenberry] did a lot of voices for us."

The late Majel Roddenberry, for one, enjoyed her transformation into Star Trek's weird and wild animated characters. "It's like seeing a caricature of yourself," she related to me during a telephone interview in 2000 for Cinescape. In addition to resurrecting Nurse Christine Chapel, the actress gave voice to the new alien crew-member, Lt. M'Ress, and more than a dozen other guest roles. "I was the wind, the trees, a mountaintop, and anything that spoke," she laughs.

And what was it like conveying emotions, personality and character with only your voice as a tool? "It was very imaginative. You almost couldn't give a bad performance."

Yet even as Star Trek was lovingly resurrected behind the closed doors at Filmation, word about the series was leaking out and fan response was surprisingly hostile. "Lou [Scheimer] took a hit from the fans," Sutherland confides. "They had no concept of the agony or effort that went into that show."

Remembering an unpleasant confrontation with a fan at a convention, Scheimer just laughs it off. "Let's just say the fans were very...concerned."

But concern quickly morphed into enthusiasm when footage of Star Trek: The Animated Series was finally unveiled on the convention circuit "I went to the World Science Fiction Con in Toronto," Fontana recollects, "and I had a reel of the opening, of the Enterprise flyby. There were skeptics, but when we ran the reel, the fans cheered. From that little clip, they realized it was really going to be Star Trek. It was a triumphant moment after months of hearing it wouldn't be any good."

In fact, fans were so enthusiastic,their excitement actually became a security problem for Filmation. "We had Trekkie invaders at the studio all the time," Sutherland remarks. "Trekkies showed up pretending to be fire inspectors or janitors, and we'd discover them searching through our waste baskets."

Such enthusiasm was an understandable reaction, however, since animated Trek often went where no Trek had gone before, even boldly touring a Vulcan metropolis in "Yesteryear." "I had wanted to see Vulcan in 'Journey to Babel' with a matte shot, but it got cut out," Fontana explains. "So I went back to the description from that script and said 'let's do this now.' I wanted to see a city with parkways and trees, with growing things, and with unique spires. And we achieved that with animation."

"Yesteryear" also referenced the popular live-action episode "City on the Edge of Forever" (by Harlan Ellison), by showcasing a journey through the Guardian of Forever time portal. On this occasion, time travel robbed the beloved Mr. Spock of his very existence, leaving a puzzled science officer to correct the corrupted time line. In order to repair his reality, Spock returned home to his planet, Vulcan, to confront a boyhood version of himself. Along the way, Spock's beloved pet Sehlat was destined to lose his life. Shockingly, "Yesteryear" broke a long-standing TV taboo by depicting the death of a pet. Scheimer thought it was a beautiful and courageous decision. "A pet's death had never been done on a children's program, and it was touching and provocative. Dorothy was instrumental in making it so creative."

Another episode, "The Time Trap," by Joyce Perry, reflected the politics of the day, specifically detente. "I had this idea that a Klingon ship and the Enterprise would get trapped in a Sargasso Sea of space and be forced to cooperate to escape," she describes the memorable tale. Perry's only problem was getting the former enemies out of the crisis. "I remember telling Gene this bizarre notion that two ships could combine engines and became more powerful as one than they were separately. I explained it with a straight face, but was afraid he might laugh me out of his office. Instead, he was quiet for about 30 seconds, then said,'that's pretty good, do it!' And, in the finest Trek tradition, a story about cooperation was forged.

Writer Larry Brody contributed another interesting tale to the animated Star Trek, "The Magicks of Megas-Tu." In this adventure, the Enterprise crew traveled to an alternate universe and encountered Lucifer. The author had initially wanted Kirk and company to encounter God instead, but the network quickly shot down that provocative notion.

"I was producer of a series called Police Story and it often showcased the home lives of cops. Anytime we had a cop and his wife in bed together, holding one another, and we had to take it out. The network would not allow married people to be in bed together. On the other hand, if the episode was about a cop and a mistress having sex in bed together, it was perfectly okay to show, as long as if, by the end, they broke up to show that having sex wasn't right. If you can show immoral sex instead of moral sex on TV, you can also show Satan instead of God on Star Trek, I guess."

Even though Brody's original concept did not survive network interference, he was happy with the creative process behind-the-scenes. "I did the story a couple of times and I asked Dorothy to see the final draft. She said 'Gene's rewriting it, but it has nothing to do with you. He always does rewrites.' But the story wasn't changed, and if there were clever jokes, they remained in. The changes mostly involved dialogue."

Though Star Trek: The Animated Series was very well-received, even winning an Emmy Award, the production team had a difficult time keeping up with the demand to produce new episodes. More than anything else, the rigorous schedule may have been the cause of the series' demise after 2 seasons and twenty-two episodes.

"In animation, they order a set number to begin with, like 16, and that's your first year," Fontana explains. "If you're going to do more, it is in increments of six, and then they rerun the liver out of the earlier episodes. That's because of the time lag. Animation takes longer than live-action, and you have to write a year ahead."

Still, Scheimer is adamant that the Saturday morning series could have lived long and prospered had it been given just a little tender loving care from parent network NBC. "If it aired today with the same ratings it would be considered a whopping hit. But little kids didn't watch it. They weren't our audiences. I always hoped it would air at night. But Star Trek was difficult because it had limited budgets, loads of story, and several characters to juggle in 22 minutes."

"Majel Roddenberry seconds the opinion that re-framing Star Trek in animated form -- within the hectic confines of television production -- was problematic. "We wanted characters on the order of Disney rather than what we got, but the show featured some of the best stories of any Star Trek series."

Brody, who later produced HBO's Spawn and The Silver Surfer cartoons, isn't shy with his praise for the 1970s animated enterprise. "It was a grown-up show that talked about important topics without compromise. I appreciate that because I work in animation now and it's not that way. Today, Saturday morning programs are infomercials for toys."

Fontana concurs. "There is this tendency to put down animated work as kid's stuff, but you have to consider the artistry that went into it; not just the writer, but the actors who made themselves available. And the artists who drew the show were really good..."

Star Trek Week: Ranking The Star Trek Movies

2013-05-17T16:00:00.000-04:00

I am out seeing Star Trek: Into Darkness at the very moment this tally posts, so that new movie will not be included in the roster below, but here is my (no doubt controversial…) ranking of all the Star Trek films, best to worst.

Tier One (Meaning Classic, or Great)

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

2. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

3. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Tier Two (Meaning good)

4. Star Trek (2009)

5. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)

6. Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

7. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Tier Three (Meaning, not-so-good, and sometimes downright awful)

8. Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

9. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

10. Star Trek: Generations (1994)

11. Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

Star Trek Week: Star Trek (2009)

2013-05-17T14:00:00.000-04:00

(Re-post from 2009).

Long story not so short: Star Trek is in good hands.

Different hands, to be certain. But good hands nonetheless.

The J.J. Abrams big-budget film accomplishes the very mission many industry insiders and long-time Star Trek fans had judged impossible just half-a-decade ago, during the Berman Era doldrums of Nemesis and the TV series, Enterprise. It actually welcomes new fans -- and general audiences -- into the Trek fold with a well-dramatized, beautifully-cast, emotionally resonant tale of Kirk and Spock's youthful beginnings.

This movie is that rarest of birds, a blockbuster summer movie that lives up to the hype. It is fast, fun, and frenetic, the very qualities you would desire and seek in an epic space saga.

Penned by Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the new movie genuflects appropriately to Star Trek''s storied tradition with the presence of the franchise's elder statesman, Leonard Nimoy in a significant role. Simultaneously, however, the movie adopts a warp speed trajectory straight for the unknown, essentially re-booting the franchise and the beloved core characters with new and therefore unpredictable destinies

Call this delicate and dangerous dance The Abrams Maneuver: a deft strategy that permits this cinematic enterprise to operate on two levels at once, appealing both to the hardcore aficionados on the basis of knowledge and nostalgia, and to the unconverted masses on the basis of the new cast's pure charm, the dazzling visualizations, and some rock 'em, sock 'em action scenes...the likes of which previous Treks could never have imagined, let alone afforded to execute.

This radical Abrams Maneuver -- creating an alternate timeline while maintaining the beloved characters and core spirit of Trek -- was no doubt deemed necessary because, to utilize a metaphor from author David Gerrold in his Encounter at Farpoint novelization of 1987, commanding the U.S.S. Enterprise has become rather like "making love in a fish bowl." Everyone has an opinion of your performance, and there isn't much room to maneuver.

Ditto for the franchise itself.

In other words, forty-five long years of accumulated continuity, arcane rules, and byzantine history had effectively hobbled creativity (and more importantly, spontaneity...) to the point where Star Trek had dropped out of warp and was suffering from a terminal case of "replicative fading" (a cloning disease named in the Next Gen episode "Up The Long Ladder").

The new Star Trek of 2009 has injected much-needed youth, vigor, inspiration, and spontaneity into the franchise's faltering heart beat. The era of all Starfleet officers getting along, not eating red meat, wasting time on the holodeck, and endlessly sitting around discussing tertiary domains of subspace and reversing the polarity of the deflector array is -- at long last, history.

Instead, the characters we see on screen in J.J. Abrams' Trek are recognizably human once more, just as they were in the landmark, classic Original Series. These men and women fumble, get drunk, weep, fall in love, make impulsive mistakes, and -- in the finest tradition of Star Trek -- do their ingenious, inventive best for a cause greater than mere self-interest.

The Future Begins

The new Star Trek depicts the story of a very angry Romulan named Nero (Eric Bana) who -- after the destruction of Romulus in a cosmic disaster (a supernova) -- inadvertently travels back in time 130 years and sets out to destroy the young Federation, starting with charter members Vulcan and Earth.

Nero's accidental temporal journey brings him back to the year (and moment, actually...) of Jim Kirk's birth aboard the Federation starship U.S.S. Kelvin.

When Kirk's heroic father is killed aboard the Kelvin, events diverge from the "prime" time line we remember from the Original Series. Without a father to guide him, Kirk (Chris Pine) grows up to become aimless and rebellious, the "mid-west's only genius level repeat offender," as Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) calls him. Kirk's story is cross-cut effectively with the development of the young half-Vulcan, Spock (Zachary Quinto), who is torn between his human and alien natures.

Both men are brilliant, but both are also incomplete...

Eventually Kirk and Spock find their way to the Enterprise bridge and -- despite their vastly-different natures -- battle Nero for the survival of the Federation. Another visitor from the future, elderly Ambassador Spock (Leonard Nimoy) helps to nudge fate back in the right direction, doing everything in his power to bring the hot-headed young Kirk and the repressed, logical Spock to an awareness that they need one another to be successful, to be complete. This is where the script works at its symbolic best. Kirk, lacking a father, needs the advice of a tempering, prudent man like Spock. And Spock, now absent his human mother, requires the inspiration and human unpredictability of the tenacious Kirk.I have considerable reservations about many specific elements of this Star Trek story (which I will explain below, in detail), but as is the case for many Star Trek episodes and films of years past, the movie is ultimately more than the sum of its individual (and sometimes faulty...) parts.

Overall, this Star Trek is emotionally satisfying and affecting (particularly Elder Spock's heartfelt, nostalgic send-off to the Enterprise). And the new cast seamlessly takes over from the Original Series cast, and the performers are all so likable that you feel a surge of good will towards them.

So yes, lightning has been captured in a bottle again: there's a familiar joie de vivre about and among this group of performers that frankly hasn't existed in Star Trek since The Undiscovered Country's send-off in 1991. This chemistry, this joy, glosses over many of the movie's significant problems. Just as in the old days, you're swept away by the colorful, well-drawn characters and their extraordinary travails, even if the individual journey raises a few questions.

This is Not Your Father's Star Trek?

The new Star Trek movie currently boasts a 96% percent critical "approval" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is practically unheard of. And indeed, I approve of it, even if I think such a high-rating is wildly inflated.

However, it isn't nitpicking to point out that major elements of the Orci/Kurtzman script are, quite frankly, a mess. I'm not talking about specific lines of dialogue or even character motivations...but rather breathtaking gaps of situation logic that you could fly a space armada through.

First and foremost, let us discuss the nature of Nero's weapon of choice, the red matter. It can generate huge, destructive black holes in space. Fine, I accept that. I can even accept that starships can safely travel through said black holes and move back and forward through time. No problem.

But why must Nero go to all the trouble of dropping red matter into the core of a planet like Vulcan or Earth with that lovely but not terribly-effective drill device?

The drill not only wastes time and is highly ineffective as we see in the movie's finale, but it is also...entirely unnecessary. Just eject that little red matter blob in orbit, Nero, and planetary destruction will surely ensue.

Black holes are so powerful that nothing, not even light can escape their crushing force. So even if you dropped a black hole near our moon, we'd be in some deep distress. Putting the red matter at the Earth's core, or Vulcan's core, just seems like gilding the lily to me.

And actually, I'm a bit concerned that at the end of the film, a black hole has been formed relatively close to Earth (in our solar system, if I'm not mistaken). That's...uh...asking for trouble. (We know this too, because McCoy gives a very convincing lecture, early in the film, about the hazards of space flight under even normal conditions.)

And also, it begs belief that a 24th century Romulan can't just up-fit photon torpedoes with the red matter and blast away at Earth or Vulcan from a safe distance, rather than going to all the trouble of deploying that unwieldy drill and being tethered to it.

Basically, the red matter threat is inconsistent and poorly-thought out. It is made to seem so all-powerful that it can destroy planets and cause time travel(!), but if that were indeed the case, you wouldn't have to delicately send particles down that drill's esophagus to a planet core, right?

That's not even the worst offense, however.

During his mind-meld with Kirk, Ambassador Spock notes that the safety of the "galaxy" was threatened by "a supernova." Huh? A supernova is dangerous indeed...to a solar system. Maybe two solar systems, tops, on a really bad day. But an entire galaxy? I don't think so. The Enterprise escaped from a supernova by going to warp speed in "All Our Yesterdays" and the galaxy was never imperiled, just the local star group.

This is another classic mistake, and what I find ironic (and yet oddly poetic...) about it is that derisive Star Trek fans have ridiculed series like Battlestar Galactica (original) and Space:1999 for forty years based on the fact that those series occasionally made such basic errors in astronomical nomenclature (confusing solar systems and galaxies.) At most, a supernova could have threatened Romulus. But it's a novice mistake to indicate it could do harm to a galaxy. This is science fiction, and again, some flights of fancy are permissible, expected and desired. But so basic an error in science (about something we already know about), is troubling indeed.

Another novice mistake: Spock actually sees Vulcan implode from the night sky of Delta Vega (a world now oddly transformed into an ice planet, though it was just kind of...craggy...in "Where No Man Has Gone Before.") Just think about this for a minute. Would we be able to see in our night sky a planetary implosion in another solar system? Of course not.

Spock isn't even using binoculars when he sees the catastrophe! Rather, Vulcan is apparently no further away from Delta Vega than we are from our moon. Before you suggest Delta Vega must actually be a Vulcan moon...it is established in Star Trek lore that Vulcan has no moons. Additionally, Star Trek lore establishes that Delta Vega is near the edge of the galaxy, and so remote a planet that Starfleet only visits the lithium-cracking station there once every quarter century. So how did Delta Vega move to within eye-shot of Vulcan?

Orci and Kurtzman's "re-boot" (set off by Nero's arrival) didn't change planetary orbits or positions. There's no way Spock could watch Vulcan's destruction from Delta Vega. Again, you suspect that these writers don't really understand the vast distance involved in outer space....that every planet isn't merely a stone's throw from another. The writers could have saved themselves a lot of heartache if they hadn't named this planet Delta Vega, which already boasts an established nature, geography, and location in Star Trek history.

These days, especially with J.J.'s terse advice to "purists" to "stay home" and not see the movie, it's convenient and easy to deride criticism like mine as coming from an anal-retentive fanatic who lives in his parent's basement and catalogs crew member serial numbers.

On the contrary, I'm merely extrapolating from the ground rules the writers have established. Their screenplay makes it explicit that the time-scape has changed as a result of Nero's intervention. Unless Nero is moving planets, or has changed the nature of "supernovas," "black holes" and other such objects (like planets...) these changes are inconsistent and impossible.

Plainly, they're sloppy, easily-avoided mistakes.

However, my admiration for past Star Trek doesn't preclude me from stating the obvious here: this isn't the first time in history Star Trek has made stupid technical or plot blunders.

In The Wrath of Khan, U.S.S. Reliant visits the wrong planet by accident, and ends up finding the evil Khan. (Oh, you wanted Ceti Alpha 6! Sorry!) And in Generations, the Nexus threat is every bit as ridiculous and inconsistent as the Red Matter is here. I mean, if Soran wanted to get inside the Nexus Ribbon, why didn't he just steal a thruster suit and fly in all by himself (instead of, say, destroying an ENTIRE planet and killing billions of people)? And Star Trek VI tells us Excelsior is carrying equipment to catalog gaseous anomalies, but in the film's last act, the Enteprise is miraculously carrying the same equipment for the same mission! Convenient!

So see, I really am being objective here. The new Star Trek makes the same dumb errors that the old Star Treks often did. That doesn't make the mistakes excusable in either scenario. All instances represent...sloppy writing. But by the same token, these mistakes certainly don't disqualify the films from being good, either.

Unfortunately, this new Star Trek doesn't inherit a more noble quality of the original: a sense of the universal human condition.

In previous Star Treks, the scripts always remembered Earth history and great literature, often drawing parallels between events of the 24th century and our long recorded past as a species. Khan quoted Melville in Wrath of Khan. Chang quoted Shakespeare (in the original Klingon...) in Undiscovered Country. Spock even quoted John Masefield ("All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by") in the much-maligned Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. These moments in the franchise were not elitist; were not simple affectations for the intelligentsia. They represented an explicit connection to the past that reminded viewers that no matter how far we travel into the final frontier...we take our history and legacy along with us.

By contrast, this new Star Trek pulls all of its vital quotations from Star Trek history (even Spock's Sherlock Holmes quote from The Undiscovered Country...which isn't attributed here), instead of from the wide, majestic history of human literature and myth. As a result, an important Trek idea is all but lost here. The film refers to franchise history and legacy, but nothing outside it, which makes it feel a bit insular and dumbed-down.

Also, I must wonder why we couldn't have seen a five minute scene (or hell, a one minute scene...) involving Kirk in a history class at Starfleet Academy, listening to some instructor report about the peaceful, pioneering spirit of Starfleet. Or IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations) for that matter.

Or even how the troubled Earth outgrew its "infancy" and had matured to join an interstellar community. Something -- even a token mention -- would have sufficed to remind us that Star Trek is about a future for mankind of growth and evolution.

Again, some people may state that my complaint is nitpicking, but the essence of Star Trek is optimism, the hope for a better tomorrow, and the belief that we can outgrow our violent infancy to achieve amazing things. This Star Trek has its moments of optimism, to be certain. I enjoyed seeing a man of Middle Eastern descent, Captain Robau (Faran Tahir), command a starship, for instance.

But again, I believe that if we'd had one little, tiny moment in which Kirk was in class -- kind of being an arrogant prick while an instructor discussed Starfleet philosophy -- his spontaneous idea to assist Nero and the Narada at the film's climax would have been more dramatically resonant. We would have known, as viewers, that the philosophy of Starfleet had "sunk in." That Kirk had embraced it.

The destruction of the planet Vulcan is another sticking point, honestly. I understand why it was considered necessary from a structural and dramatic standpoint. The destruction of Vulcan dramatically establishes the seriousness of the red matter/Nero threat, and it also "shocks and awes" the audience into realizing that the future in this alternate universe is indeed going to be rather different from the voyages we are already familiar with.

But still...six billion Vulcans die in the incident. And make no mistake, Vulcan too has been a symbol of optimism and brotherhood in Star Trek for almost fifty years. The Vulcans on Star Trek are equals to humans (and Earth) in importance, even though they are so very different from us in their nature. Indeed, their differences show us up a bit. As Amanda declares in "Journey to Babel," the Vulcan way is "better" than ours. The Vulcans were the living embodiment of pacificist beliefs; of diversity; of the creed that we need not be carried away by violence or anger or any other primitive human emotion.

Now, in this universe, they are reduced to an asterisk in history.

From a practical standpoint, the destruction of Vulcan and the genocide of the Vulcan race also seemingly closes off as many story avenues as it opens up for future writers. Now there shall be no Kolinahr ritual for Spock (and importantly, no failure of the Kolinahr); there shall be no Mount Seleya and "Fal Tor Pan," and no "Amok Time" return to Vulcan for Spock's Pon Farr.

More importantly, every time Bones decides to say "are you out of your Vulcan mind" or quip about "green blooded hobgoblins" in future Treks, isn't he going to feel at least a sliver of shame, given that, in Spock's own words, the Vulcans are now an endangered species? The fact that six billion Vulcans are dead sort of takes the air out of McCoy's insults. Spock can just turn to him and say, "It is unfortunate, doctor, you find genocide a source of comedy." That ought to shut Bones up.

The loss of Vulcan to the Star Trek universe carries grave dramatic repercussions, and I'm not entirely convinced that the shock and awe in this particular story was worth the destruction of so major and rich a source of lore and mythology in Star Trek canon.

When you couple the destruction of Vulcan with the writers' stated desire to destroy the Enterprise in this movie as well, you start to wonder about their emotional maturity and stability. You know, guys Khan just wanted to take over the Enterprise in "Space Seed" and he was pretty damn threatening. Janice Lester switched bodies with Kirk, and that was pretty scary in "Turnabout Intruder." One episode, saw the crew face a personal apocalypse when they began to age rapidly ("The Deadly Years.") A little more cleverness would be welcome here; not necessarily more grand gestures like destroying whole planets.

I can't write here, in my capacity as an honest, objective reviewer, that all these flaws -- the inconsistent red matter threat, the technical inaccuracies, the lack of several important Star Trek ingredients -- don't matter. Indeed, they do matter, very much. The most difficult part for me is that all of these problems could have been rectified with just one more polish of the script.

On the other hand, I can also tell you that I sat through five of the most dreadful, brain-dead theatrical trailers I've ever seen in my life, waiting for Star Trek to start (for Year One, GI Joe, Night at the Museum 2, Inglorious Basterds, and Transformers 2, respectively). I'm afraid my IQ dropped several points just being exposed to them. If that's the state of the competition, and of movie making in 2009, then Star Trek even without Shakespeare is still...Shakespeare.

You've no doubt read several other reviews of Star Trek by now, in which new cast members are alternately lauded or derided (some people like Karl Urban, some don't; some people approve of Chris Pine; others not so much, etc.) I thought everybody did a terrific job. This is a talented bunch, and I'm ready to see this fantastic cast engage in a sequel. Down to a person, I found this new crew impressive and charismatic.

Who Was That Pointy Eared Bastard?

Okay, I've shared with you -- at some length, actually -- my reservations about this bold new Star Trek. I haven't pulled my punches, either.

Now, I want to write about the reasons Star Trek is still a good film.

First, I must praise the writers. Overall, they have done a fine job of incorporating myriad elements of Star Trek lore both famous and obscure, and blending them all into a strong and cohesive narrative.

Here you will find mentions of figures like Admiral Komack and Admiral Archer. Here you will witness Kirk's mythic third go at the Kobayashi Maru "no win scenario" test, and Spock's much-discussed but never-seen confrontation at the Vulcan Science Academy. Amanda spoke of other boys teasing Spock in "Journey to Babel," and again, we get to see for ourselves the bullying in live-action here. And It's not just the obvious stuff the script gets right, like Kirk bedding down a green Orion Slave Girl. Instead, I believe the writers did a fine, thorough job of extrapolating from Trek history some interesting and unique twists. I very much liked, for example, their origin for the nickname "Bones."

Another case in point: Uhura. In this film, Spock and Uhura share a romantic relationship, and though some people complained about it, I felt this was easily a relationship that could have blossomed between those characters (and I found it much more believable in nature than the Scotty/Uhura romance of Star Trek V, for instance).

To buttress this belief, I go back to three specific instances in which Spock and Uhura shared something more than mere "official" business in The Original Series. In "The Man Trap," Uhura and Spock bantered about Vulcan and the lack of moons, as well as Uhura's boredom with constantly opening hailing frequencies. In "Charlie X," Uhura teased Spock with a flirtatious song (in which she commented on his devil ears and devil eyes...). And, in some other episode that I can't remember now (Is it "Who Mourns for Adonais?"), Spock revealed a special confidence and tenderness towards Uhura in a tense moment, noting that if anybody could accomplish something difficult, she could.

Given such interactions in the Original Series, a romance between Spock and Uhura is not that much of a jump. And, in fact, it's delightful.

You see, this is where Orci and Kurtzman are cleverer than the hacks who wrote the recent Star Trek movies: they don't just blindly rinse and repeat old chestnuts hoping to elicit the same reflexive responses (Spock died in Star Trek II, so Data should die in Star Trek: Nemesis, etc.). On the contrary, it's clear they've pondered Star Trek lore and considered, in Spock's words, that there are always...possibilities. This film dwells and revels in those possibilities. What if Spock and Uhura got together? What if Chekov wasn't just a young apprentice to Spock, but a genius in his own right? What if the seeds of Scotty's weight problem began with his hunger on Delta Vega? (Kidding about that last one...).

Also, I believe a very strong case could be made that, overall, Star Trek as a franchise is really and truly the story of Mr. Spock and his life-time journey towards enlightenment. Spock began life as a derided outsider in two worlds. On the original five year mission, he found a place of acceptance and friendship on the Enterprise, but still longed to prove himself as a Vulcan. After his encounter with V'Ger, Spock came to a point of new understanding, an epiphany that logic was "not enough" and that without emotions, people can be "barren," and "cold." By the time of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, he had gone far enough to realize that logic was the "beginning of wisdom, not the end."

What I find amazing (and touching...) about the new Star Trek is that Orci and Kurtzman have given us Spock's final chapter at the same time they have provided us his first chapter, thus wackily making their one-of-a-kind film a prequel and a sequel simultaneously. Miraculously, they pull it off too, with Spock confiding in his younger self that in the future he should just do..."what feels right."

Indeed, I can see plainly why Leonard Nimoy returned for Star Trek for this opportunity. Ambassador Spock serves an important role in the story, and his long journey towards "complete person-hood" (with nudges from a fella named Jim Kirk...) reaches a logical conclusion and destination. I found it shocking and sad how wavering and weak Nimoy's voice has grown, but I nonetheless felt all his scenes granted the film a real sense of heart. To see Old Spock sending off the Enterprise on its maiden voyage was, well...overwhelming to me.

I also loved the fact that Spock gets to put into words what his friendship with Jim Kirk has meant to his life. I could not imagine a better ending for Leonard Nimoy's Spock than this one. This aspect of the film is superb.

I also rather enjoyed the fact that this Star Trek found time for a few trademark goofy moments, such as Kirk's "inflated" hands (an allergic reaction to a vaccination) and Scotty's watery ride through an engineering tube. Goofy humor has been part and parcel of Star Trek since the very beginning; since episodes like "I Mudd," "A Piece of the Action" and "The Trouble with Tribbles." I liked that this Star Trek felt confident enough to get silly. It's a good signal that the makers of the movie understand just how multi-faceted the franchise can be.

Finally, I loved that the fate of the galaxy and the future -- as usual -- seemed to depend entirely on Kirk getting Spock emotionally riled up at the right (or wrong...) moment. Again, that's very true to the series and its history (think "This Side of Paradise") but not so similar to what came before that it feels hackneyed. I could go on and on about the fun moments I enjoyed here: the pit-bull nature of Kirk (never surrender, never say die), the moment Sulu forgot an important launch procedure, the portentous first view of the gorgeous new Enterprise in space...etc.

Again, I feel strongly that the overall joyful aura of the film outweighs the specific and numerous deficits.

His Pattern Indicates Two-Dimensional Thinking

Last thing: Do you remember how in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Spock informed Kirk that Khan's battle strategy indicated "two-dimensional thinking?"

Alas, the same could be said of the Star Trek franchise's approach to depicting space battles over the years. How come the Enterprise always encountered Klingon Birds of Prey right-side up? How did various ships know which way they should position themselves to align with other traveling ships? Why did they always come at each other face to face, like lumbering elephants, or jousting knights?

Well, J.J. Abrams gets that problematic trope out of the way in this film's first scene, showing us, for perhaps the first time in Star Trek history, a legitimately three-dimensional playing field, one in which starships approach, retreat ,and combat one another using the full-scope of the interplanetary arena. This is an arena where Abrams has improved the franchise with his aesthetic approach, and it's fair in my review to note that fact.

Even better (and compensating for some of the script's scientific errors), Abrams remembers that there is no sound in space and occasionally adopts a perspective outside the hulls of the warring vessels. He lets the sound go silent (save for the roaring, martial soundtrack...) and we achieve a strange sense of distance from the attack; standing back and marveling at the epic quality of the scene. It's inspiring, actually, and lends credence to the opinion that this is one of the best visualized Star Trek yet forged.

And I guess, at long last, that brings me back to my opening point.

Star Trek is in good hands. J.J. Abrams, Orci and Kurtz seem to have recognized the very qualities that Star Trek requires to "live long and prosper" at this particular juncture in pop culture history. Those qualities are: (in random order): vigor, excitement spontaneity, camaraderie, humor, and a sense of fun...all writ large. This Trek movie is not without significant flaws, but all in all, it's quite a proper shakedown.

Star Trek Week: Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

2013-05-17T12:30:00.000-04:00

A “generation’s final journey” begins in Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), the film that finally took the crown of “worst” (and lowest grossing…) Star Trek film away from The Final Frontier (1989).

And much like that fifth franchise film, Nemesis is a movie that saw some severe post-production cuts and tinkering. Fifty-minutes have been excised from the Stuart Baird film, and many fans to this day feel that those missing fifty minutes could make a huge difference in terms of the film’s quality, not to mention reception.

The theatrical release of Nemesis, however, fails to please for a variety of reasons.

First, the film veers wildly from irrelevant fan service (pleasing the base demographic) to head-scratching discontinuities within the existing Star Trek universe. The film ping-pongs between these disparate poles, and, roughly, pleases almost no demographic whatsoever.

On top of that enormous deficit, the film’s photography is relentlessly, woefully dark. And I don’t mean the film’s tone, either. I refer to the underwhelming, uninspiring visual palette. We go from one dimly-lit chamber to another, to another, ad infinitum -- even aboard the Enterprise -- and the result is a subconscious feeling of fatigue, or even emotional oppression.

The familiar story-beats from The Wrath of Khan don’t help Nemesis succeed, either. Been there, done that.

Here, another deadly villain who is a mirror image of our hero (literally, this time…) attempts to use a weapon of mass destruction. In stopping this terrorist, a beloved Enterprise crew member is killed…and the seeds are planted for an emotional resurrection.

Overall, Star Trek: Nemesis feels, well, worn-out and exhausted. And this impression arises despite the herculean efforts of lead actor Patrick Stewart, who connects with the Picard character again on a very human, almost world-weary level. He delivers a fine, thoughtful performance, in Nemesis – one of his finest, actually -- and he almost succeeds in anchoring the movie.

Following the wedding ceremony of Commander Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes) and Counselor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) on Earth, the Enterprise-E crew heads to outer space to ferry the happy couple to Betazed. En route, however, “positronic” readings are discovered on the world of Kolarus III, near the Romulan Neutral Zone.

Upon investigation, Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart), Commander Data (Brent Spiner) and Commander Worf (Michael Dorn) discover a disassembled android prototype on the planet, a dead ringer for Data. The android’s name is B-4 (Brent Spiner), and he is a less-sophisticated machine, but one that Data nonetheless accepts immediately as a brother.

After leaving Kolarus III, the Enterprise is re-routed by orders from Admiral Janeway (Kate Mulgrew). A coup has occurred on the planet Romulus, and a mysterious new leader, Shinzon (Tom Hardy) has swept away the old government with the help of his loyal Reman shock-troopers. Now, Shinzon apparently desires peace…

Upon meeting Shinzon, Picard learns that he is human…and a clone of Picard, one originally designed for espionage. He was created some years earlier to infiltrate Starfleet Command and replace the real Picard, but the plot was abandoned and Shinzon was consigned to the Dilithium Mines on Remus. Now, an angry, revenge-driven Shinzon has delivered his vengeance upon Romulus, and Earth is next in line for the same treatment.

To that end, Shinzon has developed a powerful “Thalaron” weapon which can decimate living cells on a colossal scale, and even render a planet lifeless.

A grim Picard commits the Enterprise to a battle against Shinzon’s super vessel, the Scimitar, but in the process must put his own life on the line, as well as the life of one of his dearest friends…

Before I enumerate this film’s flaws, I should comment on its virtues. Because, hating to the contrary, they do exist.

First, Nemesis stands virtually alone among the Next Generation films in the way that it confronts time’s inevitable passage.

One persistent glory of the feature films featuring the original cast members is that they acknowledge the reality for the characters’ mortality.

People age.

They grow old, they grow apart, and they move on with their lives. Chekov changed jobs for The Motion Picture (1979), took a posting on Reliant in The Wrath of Khan (1982), and Sulu assumed command of the Excelsior in The Undiscovered Country, for example. The universe didn’t remain static, like a TV show...which hopes never to end.

Nemesis works really hard to get to the same place of “reality” for the characters, and should be commended for the attempt.

The film’s opening wedding scene -- while generally horrendous in terms of dialogue, tone, editing and overall execution -- reminds us that we have known these characters for fifteen years, and that the times are indeed changing. Riker and Troi are finally getting married, and Riker is headed off to command the Titan…after a decade-and-a-half serving in Picard's shadow. Data is moving up to the role of first officer. Worf is just visiting (conveniently, again…).

Secondly, Nemesis ambitiously attempts to shed “TV thinking” by allowing its characters to experience -- how shall I say this? -- sexual impulses. Here, there is a scene involving Riker and Troi in bed, making love. I certainly appreciate the scene in concept, revealing a more grown-up side to the characters, but again, bad execution scuttles a move towards character realism. For one thing, Jonathan Frakes is in no shape to do a love scene at this point in his career, and for another the fact that the scene ends in a weird rape/dream ruins the intent of showing normal love and sex in the future. What should have been a good character moment become, instead, icky and sort of embarrassing.

Much of Nemesis plays like this, like a good idea gone horribly south in the vetting, and the result is a remarkably schizophrenic film of a few ambitious highs and many incredible lows.

The film’s first action scene is a prime example of the latter. Captain Picard, Data and Worf visit the planet surface of Kolarus III and immediately go out driving the harsh terrain in not-at-all-advanced-looking vehicle called the Argo. It looks like a kitted up dune buggy, and runs on…wheels.

Fucking wheels?

Certainly, by the 24^th century, cars would be out-of-fashion, and wheels wouldn’t be employed when a hover-craft would so, so this vehicle looks and feels terribly out-of-place in terms of the franchise continuity and history.

Secondly, we already know from Star Trek history (“A Piece of the Action”) and Star Trek: The Next Generation history (“The Big Goodbye”) that automobiles are relics of another, bygone age. In fact, in the aforementioned TNG episode, Worf can’t even pronounce the word “automobile” correctly.

The result is that the Argo sticks out like a sore thumb.

Anyway, the Starfleet officers tool around in their new…car, and end up fighting the inexplicably hostile life-forms of Kolarus III, a pre-warp planet.

Disregarding the Prime Directive entirely, Picard, Data and Worf utilize their advanced phaser technology to fight back, and also deploy their advanced shuttle craft. The scene evokes the Road Warrior (1982) in a kind of bad way, but primarily raises so many questions. Why does Picard ignore the Prime Directive? Why are the inhabitants hostile to our heroes? If Data can scan for positronic life signs, why can’t he also scan for the aliens ahead of time, and avoid contact with them? Why can't the Enterprise just beam everyone (and all the tech...) up quickly, and minimize the interference?

This whole interlude exists in Nemesis for only one contrived reason, to introduce B4.

Yet it is never explained in the film how Shinzon found the android, or why he chose to drop him off on a hostile planet for Picard to find, or even why he felt the need to dissect B4 into his component parts.

If Shinzon had wanted to bring the Enterprise and Picard to Romulus for peace negotiations, he would have had to merely request Picard and his ship. He is now a recognized Head of State, after all. He can pretty much negotiate with anyone he chooses. Instead, the excuse seems to be that Picard was in the area (Kolarus III), and thus the closest ship available for peace talks. It’s all terribly trite and poorly-written, and worse, unnecessarily trite and poorly-written.

The terminally-conflicted Nemesis continues in this vein. It reveals a young bald Captain Picard, when the TV series established that he was not yet bald when he entered Starfleet (“Tapestry.”)

It makes another Data-type android a major plot-point, but doesn’t once bring up Lore (“Datalore,” “Brothers,” “Descent.”)

It is set on 24th century Romulus, but doesn't make even a passing comment about Amabassador Spock and his unification movement, which we remember from the series.

At one point in the narrative Data also mentions that he feels "nothing," and yet no notation is made of his emotion chip, which enables this android character to feel emotions, and which played a crucial role in Generations (1994) and First Contact (1996), and even got a passing mention in Insurrection (1998). so has Data elected not to use it anymore? Was it destroyed? A major character issue is just dropped like a hot potato.

All these inconsistencies contrast mightily with moments of extreme “fan service” in Nemesis, such as the appearance of Spot, Data's cat, a mention of a Kirk Maneuver, a nod to Enterprise’s Captain Archer, and so forth. The film simply can’t decide if it wants to break free of franchise history or wallow relentlessly in it, a fact which likely validates J.J. Abrams’ alternate universe approach to the new films starting in 2009.

As for Shinzon, he is an interesting enough villain, thanks mostly to the efforts of a very young (but also very impressive) Tom Hardy. Unfortunately, the film’s conceit that Shinzon is actually a younger version of Picard simply doesn’t work. It doesn't past muster in terms of our lying eyes.

In the scene during which Picard and Shinzon meet for the first time, there is no psychic shock as Shinzon makes his revelation of identity. Even with prosthetics and a bald head, Hardy does not resemble Patrick Stewart very much. The gulf between years is simply too great to bridge with our eyes, and so the visuals can’t inform us that Picard and Shinzon are indeed one-and-the-same person. Thus one of the major beats of the movie simply doesn’t work successfully.

Shinzon’s motives don’t bear close examination, either.

I can understand why he would seek revenge against the Romulans, of course. They created him for their own purposes, and then they enslaved him. He is their “son,” their Frankenstein monster, essentially.

But why should Shinzon lash out at the Federation in general, and the Earth in particular? What grudge do his Reman soldiers have against Earth? The Viceroy (Ron Perlman) is constantly pushing Shinzon to attack Earth. What the hell?

Because these questions are not answered, or adequately addressed for that matter, the film’s central threat falls flat. It’s fine that Shinzon is dying of an illness and needs Picard’s blood to survive, but that point doesn’t explain the character’s desire to destroy Earth.

These are all considerable problems, but the film’s desire to repeat, almost verbatim, the story beats of Wrath of Khan diminishes the final product even more. Insurrection took the same route. Shinzon gets the jump on Picard, like Khan did with Kirk, and then Data helps Picard get the jump on Shinzon (as Spock did in TWOK). Then, there’s the final battle of starships, with use of a WMD at stake, and – finally – the death of a major character. Here, Data dies, but not before transferring his katra -- I mean “data engrams” -- to the conveniently-located B4.

I know plenty of people love The Next Generation, and rightly so, but it is absolutely the wrong approach to shoehorn the people and places of TNG into the mold established by the Original Series and its characters.

The interactions are different, the storytelling-modes are different, and the feelings we have about each crew are also different. The reason most of The Next Generation movies are not very strong is that the producers and writers keep trying to make TNG characters as jaunty, colorful and funny as the Original Series characters, and the fact of the matter is…they never were. They were different, and had other strengths worth featuring. Picard’s thoughtfulness is certainly one of them, and it is too Stewart’s credit that he still projects that intelligence and thoughtfulness…even in as lame a vehicle as Nemesis.

To ape Wrath of Khan is bad enough, but to do it badly, and with a short attention span, is worse.

In 1982, fans had to wait for two whole years for Spock’s return in The Search for Spock. There was no instant gratification at all in that case. By the end of Nemesis, B4 is already whistling Irving Berlin tunes, and there is no doubt that Data lives. This short-period of mourning manages to take away from Data’s noble sacrifice. We have a replacement right here, for the beloved crew member who died...

Nemesis’s intellectual terrain involves “family.” Data is connected with a brother (or double), B4, that is untrustworthy. This journey is reflected in Picard’s experience with Shinzon, a clone and brother/son figure.

The point, showcased via Data’s sacrifice is that sometimes the brothers and sisters we choose (siblings like Riker, La Forge, Worf, Crusher, and Troi) become more important or significant to us than those boasting a biological connection.

This is a strong idea, and one that augments the relationships between the crew. Yet the idea fails somewhat because the film’s form doesn’t reflect the narrative's conclusions about the brothers and sisters "you chose.". Nemesis focuses on Picard and Data to the exclusion of almost all other characters. Though Troi gets a larger role than usual here, Riker, Worf, Crusher, and La Forge all feel like after-thoughts. A chubby, Shatner-esque Riker battling the Viceroy mano-e-mano is hardly a substitute for meaningful time spent with the character.

I should also add that Nemesis is very 2002, either by design or happenstance. The film was released in November 2002 just as George Bush 2 (the sequel) and his administration were making their big marketing push to invade Iraq and take down the regime of Saddam Hussein. The reason behind that invasion of Iraq (which ultimately came four months later…) was Hussein’s (believed) possession of WMD. The plot line of Nemesis reflects this reality because it is the tale of the Enterprise battling a tyrant who has just such horrible weapons in his possession, and the will to use them.

Of course, reality and fiction differ rather drastically. Saddam Hussein actually had no such weapons, whereas Shinzon clearly did. Picard made the right choice to commit resources to destroy him. Unlike real life, movies can tread in absolute certainties, and it’s easy to pick out the bad guys and the right "battle" to undertake. This movie reflects none of the complexity of the real life issue.

I wish there were more positive things to write about Star Trek: Nemesis, but it is abundantly a case of the echo (Nemesis) over the real voice (The Wrath of Khan), to roughly-quote Shinzon. I’m all for a new release of the film featuring the excised footage, and restoring some moments that would have made the Next Generation’s last voyage a bit more successful.

I hasten to add, it would have been truly horrible to end the original cast films after the failure of The Final Frontier. The Undiscovered Country righted the franchise ship, and gave that beloved crew a proper send-off.

Today, the Next Generation crew is arguably just as beloved as the original crew, and it deserves a proper send-off too. Nemesis just isn’t that movie.

Not by half-a-galaxy.

Star Trek Week: Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

2013-05-17T10:00:00.000-04:00

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) is another one of those mid-to-late era Star Trek movies that is not quite as bad as everyone seems to believe it is.

Simultaneously, it isn’t a particularly strong entry in the feature film canon, either.

But if Insurrection had aired as a TV-movie, by contrast, I suspect fans might have been quicker to warm to it.

The movie, with a screenplay by the late Michael Piller, boasts the aura of a glorified two-part TV episode, and in some sense, that’s a virtue. The story doesn’t push as hard as some tv-to-film adaptations might (like Generations, for example…), and Insurrection doesn’t seem to have anything to prove.

For instance, there’s no original cast member present here in hopes of drawing older fans, and no signature franchise villain (like the Borg, or Klingons), either. Instead, attention lands squarely on the Enterprise-D crew. This is the first time this team must carry a film based entirely on its own chemistry and screen presence.

Many of the flaws that later scuttled Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) are also, alas, at work in Insurrection.

These include a central plot line that, upon close examination, doesn’t make an abundance of rational sense, plus a rather forgettable villain, and a by-the-numbers action denouement, with lots of shooting and running, and bad guys engulfed in rolling balls of fire.

And yet, oppositely, Star Trek: Insurrection features some lovely and visually-poetic moments too. These primarily concern the human penchant to race through life, make decisions in a hurry, and not stop to smell the roses.

This adventure gives the stalwart Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) cause to “slow things down” and enjoy an extended moment of peace and romance on a distant Shangri-La. The movie is meant to be a long breath of fresh air too, and with some nice location shooting in Alaska, and good character moments it is that…for a while, anyway.

Much of this ninth feature film to carry the franchise name Star Trek explicitly involves a good central conceit, too: that perception dictates life, not vice-versa. Insurrection vets this conceit with some fine visuals, and even some strong (circa 1998) special effects.

That good, solid work is undone, however, to a large degree, by the unnecessarily crass humor -- pimples and “boobs” -- and by many of the head-scratching narrative and plot contortions, which force a fiery confrontation when one isn’t, ultimately, necessary.

I realize my next statement will be sacrilege to some fans, but despite all these flaws, I actually find Insurrection to be the most “fun” of all The Next Generation movies. I didn't say best, mind you. Just the most fun.

By contrast, Generations is morose, broody, and overblown, First Contact is a first-class horror show, and Nemesis is dark and dreary to the point of mental exhaustion.

Thus one might make the claim that for all its flaws -- and for better or worse -- Insurrection most clearly and plainly echoes the TV series which spawned it.

So if you are a Next Generation fan, it’s difficult to see the grounds for dismissing Insurrection out-of-hand. If you think the cast, and this iteration of Star Trek is worthy, Insurrection comes closest to recreating the feel of the syndicated spin-off.

“Where can warp drive take us, except away from here?”

While on a diplomatic mission to meet a race recently made a Federation protectorate, Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) learns that his android crewman Data (Brent Spiner), has apparently acted in an uncharacteristically violent fashion while on an away team on a distant planet.

Picard takes the Enterprise into a remote area of space, the Briar Patch, and at Admiral Dougherty’s (Anthony Zerbe) urging, captures the apparently-malfunctioning Data. La-Forge (Levar Burton) and Picard soon learn that Data acted against Starfleet orders because he learned a dark and upsetting secret.

In the Briar patch is a world inhabited by 600 aliens called the Ba’ku. The rings around that world emit a unique brand of “metaphasic” radiation that makes these lucky humanoids, essentially, immortal. Hoping to harvest that radiation, Starfleet has teamed up with a race of dying, aged aliens called the Son’a on a mission to trick the Ba’ku, and relocate them to another world. Data learned of this covert mission, and sought, after being damaged, a way to stop it.

Picard refuses to permit this crime against the sovereignty of the Ba'ku, and resigns his command of Enterprise. Together with his top crew members, Picards sets to defend the peaceful Ba’ku from Daughtery and the vengeful Son’a leader, Adhar Ru’afo (F. Murray Abraham), aware that his actions will have repercussions throughout the quadrant.

Soon, however, Picard learns that a dark history exists between the Son’a and the Ba’ku, even as he falls in love with the beautiful native, Anij (Donna Murphy)...

“Nothing More Complicated Than Perception.”

I wrote in my introduction about how Star Trek Insurrection really concerns perception, and the notion that perception shapes your feelings about your life, or about life in general. The film’s opening scene is a perfect and clever evocation of this idea, a nice example of cinematic form reflecting content.

The opening credits showcase a veritable planetary Shangri-La. Jerry Goldsmith’s pastoral music suggests an absolute paradise of peace, nature, and harmony. And then -- suddenly -- the perspective changes. The “peace” we have just witnessed gives way to malevolent surveillance, as intruders appear, lurking in this Garden of Eden, gazing down with avarice and obsession upon that placid village terrain. But to the inhabitants of the Ba’ku village, nothing has changed. They don’t know they are being observed.

At first, we in the audience perceived the village as immaculate and perfect, a place of absolute harmony. But just one perception shift later and we see that is not the case at all. Paradise is endangered. A serpent is present. This perception shift also sets up the movie’s dynamic conflict of nature vs. technology.

In its own not-entirely-confident way, Star Trek: Insurrection tries to play this “perception” card in a consistent way throughout its running-time.

For example, we quickly meet the Son’a and they are a physically-repulsive race of mad schemers. In the film’s third act, we learn that they are actually identical, at least in terms of DNA, to the harmless Ba’ku…the peaceful people who inhabit the village mentioned above. As audience members we could never have seen this “identity” coming because the flesh-impaired Son’a look completely different, and ac completely different. We perceive them as a different race all together. Our perception has been off all along, and so we could not understand "the truth" of the situation.

The perception of Data changes too. He is not merely malfunctioning, we learn, he is acting according to some “moral and ethical” sub-routine. Only from the outside, we can’t understand his behavior, initially.

And then Insurrection even includes in its coda a nice little grace note in which Riker wonders if his perception of Troi is affected too by the metaphasic radiation. Worf assures him the answer is negative. Riker’s feelings for her have never changed. He’s just finally acknowledged his long-standing "perception."

The overall lesson in Insurrection, of course, is one for Picard. As the movie starts, he is rushed and harried, pining for his days as an “explorer” and rushing from one diplomatic appointment to another. His perception is one of never-ending duty, constant responsibility...exhaustion, even.

Starfleet and the Federation are in much the same boat. Recent conflicts involving the Borg and the Dominion have sapped it of its strength, and now the Federation is rushing about, making rash decisions, in an attempt to survive a challenging, perhaps life-threatening time.

But the decisions it makes while rushing about madly like this?

Not entirely good ones, clearly.

Like adding a Federation protectorate just one year after a membership petition.

Or allying with the shadowy Son’a, who boast an ulterior motive for staking a claim to the “metaphasic” radiation inside the Briar Patch.

I find it intriguing that this plot line about “rushing” was put forward in 1998, at the dawn of the 24-hour cable news cycle, and the Internet or dot.com “bubble.” It was a new age of information overload when, suddenly, we could look at our computer or TV screens all the time, and thus came to expect instant gratification, instant updates, and so forth. There was a rush to judgment before all the facts were known. We see this same trend today, to an even more alarming degree.

The un-excavated message of Star Trek: Insurrection, therefore, seems to be: take your time and get it right. Learn the facts. Make a reasoned decision. Don’t rush through things just because you can rush. CNN, j'accuse.

When we look back at this era of 1997 - 1999 today, we can see, for one example, how the nation rushed headlong into the impeachment of President Clinton over a personal moral indiscretion. Had the nation slowed down and taken a collective breath, it might not have wasted all the time, resource it worth it? Would stepping back and not rushing have changed the course of American history?s and energy to prosecute him. Today, with all the history now known, Clinton is a beloved national figure for both Republicans and Democrats, the most popular leader figure in the country. So was

Insurrection absolutely seems wary of this human tendency to leap, to rush, to push forward aggressively without proper reflection. And the film even makes its Ba’ku citizens a brand of enlightened luddites, for lack of a better term, way of technology and its "gifts." Troi notes that, again, the Ba'ku possess “clarity of perception.” Oh, they have warp drive, and can repair a positronic brain, all right, but they have eschewed such advances because they believe “When you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man.”

In other words, the Ba’ku don’t want to rush into a decision they might regret, as the 24-hour cable news shows seemed to be rushing America in a direction that, in hindsight, it might not have wanted to go, had a longer breath been taken.

For a franchise that is all about exploring the vast unknown, Insurrection makes a remarkable case that a “single moment can be a universe in itself,” and the visuals in which Picard and Anij linger in “slowed” time captures this idea poetically, with birds flapping their wings in slow-motion, water flowing a drop at a time, and so-forth. It’s a beautiful conceit that reminds us explicitly of the things we miss out on when we rush, when don’t pay heed to the stimuli around us. We live in a universe of wonders, if we stop to notice them.

I love this leitmotif in Insurrection, and can always revisit the film because of it. I think this leitmotif gives Insurrection value above its reputation.

Unfortunately, other stuff is hard to love.

For example, Riker and Geordi begin to show the effects of the metaphasic radiation before they ever beam down to the planet surface. This fact suggests that the radiation emitted from the planetary rings can penetrate the void of space, starship hulls, and perhaps even shields. This knowledge thus suggests that there is no reason for the Federation to be involved with the Son’a. It can offer its people the rejuvenating impact of this space “spa” without collecting the radiation with a harvester.

On the contrary, Starfleet could just send giant space-borne love boats -- loaded with senior citizens -- out to the Briar Patch to cruise around the planet and absorb the radiation from the rings. This plan wouldn’t help the Son’a of course, but it would allow the Federation to obey its own laws and edicts, and also glean the positive impacts of the metaphasic radiation.

If Starfleet and the Federation need not be involved, as the facts suggest, this story falls apart, since it is about corrupt Federation involvement, and Picard's revolt against it.

Star Trek: Insurrection also never makes a solid case that the Son’a could not move back to the Ba’ku planet and form a colony on a different continent or something like that, and also be healed. Daugherty notes that some Son’a will die without the concentrated effects of the rings, but at the end of the movie, Gallatin (Gregg Henry) returns, happily, to the village, and seems just fine. Isn’t this a case of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few? Ru’afo may have reached the end of his “genetic manipulation” but the other Son’a could simply return home and allw the metaphasic fountain of youth to revive them.

Also, it seems abundantly rude and short-sighted that the Ba’ku would not be willing to share their world with visitors. They are 600 in number. There’s a whole universe out there of sick and dying people. There’s an undercurrent of selfishness in Ba’ku behavior that runs counter to the movie’s belief that they are an evolved, peaceful people. They seem too passive in their involvement with the insurrection, letting Picard and his people do all the hard work, and too secretive and close-to-the-vest about their real motivations. It's hard to stick up for a people -- no matter how evolved -- who won't fight for the (adopted) home-land.

I also find it difficult to believe that the Federation can’t find some way to mimic Son’a technology, or harness the metaphasic radiation harmlessly for concentrated effect. Like much of the major plot-line, this seems contrived.

All of these dominoes force Picard’s resignation, and act of insurrection, but even that act feels forced. The story is constructed on a shaky foundation.

Star Trek: Insurrection’s humor also occasionally leaves something to be desired, as it is unnecessarily crass. Would a professional woman and Starfleet officer of the 24^th century really refer to her breasts as “boobs?” Why has a grown-up Worf reverted to puberty and been saddled with a giant zit? Is the metaphasic radiation turning him into a teenager?

There is precious little explanation for this level of reversion -- Picard doesn't grow hair for instance -- and so Insurrection goes for easy and crass laughs, when it should be smarter and wittier than that.

And, having learned nothing from Kirk, Spock and Bones’ill-advised rendition of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in The Finale Frontier, Picard, Data and Worf here sing Gilbert and Sullivan in an absolutely groan-inducing sequence. And Patrick Stewart -- who normally exudes power and dignity -- is downright embarrassing doing a mambo dance. This is not how I want to see Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

I suppose this kind of humor is a subjective thing. I did laugh, for example, when Riker activated the Enterprise’s “manual steering column,” which is, essentially, a video game joystick. This moment thus proves (comically) that the other bridge personnel on the Enterprise are entirely extraneous, which is a fact I often suspected…

Lastly, when you finally get down to it, Insurrection is yet another Star Trek movie about a revenge-mad villain attempting to unleash a weapon of mass-destruction. It’s a Wrath of Khan repeat, with the Briar Patch doubling as the Mutara Nebula.

This unnecessary repetition of a Trek touchstone is a shame, because there are some moments in Insurrection that are not only delightful and true to Star Trek’s highest ideals, but downright lyrical and poetic.

I like Insurrection better than Nemesis, for instance, because I feel that there is real heart behind it, and an appropriate message for our times, about smelling the roses. The movie is all-too-flawed, to be certain, but it isn't flawed because of a craven desire to "appeal" to all audiences, for instance. Insurrection fails, perhaps, by honoring the spirit of the TV series that spawned it too closely.

That's the kind of failure that, as a Star Trek fan, I can live with.

But again, if you like Next Gen, and love these characters, exactly what's the beef with the good-hearted Insurrection?

Star Trek Week: Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

2013-05-17T08:30:00.000-04:00

Star Trek: First Contact (1996) is likely the finest of The Next Generation feature films. In part, this is so because the film combines an extremely popular villain, the Borg, with an extremely popular idea in the franchise: time travel.

In part, First Contact also thrives because the film is more action-oriented and visceral than some of the other entries in the canon. The screenplay, by Brannon Braga and Ronald Moore also goes through fewer contortions than Generations did to fashion its compelling tale. Where Generations seemed confusing and contrived, First Contact feels stream-lined and sleek.

Perhaps most importantly, Star Trek: First Contact – while occasionally gory and quite violent – remembers that the core of Star Trek’s appeal does not rest in warfare and hatred, but rather in the exploration of the “human adventure.”

By ending on the high note of humanity’s first contact with the Vulcans, First Contact honors Star Trek’s important legacy of hope and promise. This vision of a better tomorrow (and of a better humanity, to boot), differentiates the franchise from virtually all other space adventures, and makes the film a pleasure to watch, even fifteen years after its theatrical release. An average Star Trek movie can excite you with space battles, certainly, but only a very good one can tap into the inspirational nature of Gene Roddenberry’s celebrated creation.

Accordingly, film critics approved of and admired the film, and First Contact remains one of the best-reviewed Star Trek films in the saga’s history. Variety wrote: “Star Trek: First Contact" is a smashingly exciting sci-fi adventure that ranks among the very best in the long-running Paramount franchise. Better still, this is one TV spinoff that does not require ticket buyers to come equipped with an intimate knowledge of the small-screen original. Fans and non-fans alike will line up for this wild ride, and many will be repeat customers.”

Lloyd Rose at The Washington Post praised Jonathan Frakes’ direction, and opined “There are moments of visionary beauty in this film that rank with "Metropolis," with Josh Meador's interior vistas in "Forbidden Planet" and Irvin Kershner's and Ralph Quarrie's work in "The Empire Strikes Back" -- that is to say, with the best fantasy films ever made.”

As a reviewer and unapologetic Trek fan, I boast deeper reservations about First Contact than Rose apparently did, and feel that while the film is indeed the best of the Next Generation cinematic efforts, it still falls short of the cinematic majesty and scope of The Motion Picture (1979), or the sheer emotionality and humanity of The Wrath of Khan (1982).

Part of the reason that Star Trek: First Contact doesn’t work on the same rarefied level as those aforementioned titles is that many of the earthbound scenes involving James Cromwell’s recalcitrant Zefram Cochrane boast no effective foil for the mischievous inventor of warp speed technology. Riker, Troi and Geordi are beloved characters to be certain, but they are never really established effectively in the script as larger-than-life personalities with the heft to match Cochrane note-for-note and blow-for-blow. As a result, the film’s pace lags badly every time First Contact returns to Earth and the Borg are shunted off-screen.

By contrast, the Borg themselves (itself?) are incredibly effective in design, concept and execution. They are visually-inspired, dynamic villains, and First Contact benefits strongly from their presence, even if aspects of their culture (namely the Borg Queen) now seem contradictory and unnecessarily muddled. As a longtime Star Trek fan, I was also disappointed with some of the shoddy continuity in the film, especially because in most cases the flaws were unnecessary and could have been easily rectified in post-production.

But such quibbles aside, Star Trek: First Contact remains a fun and involving science fiction adventure. It’s an eminently sturdy entry in the long-lived franchise, and comes close to recapturing successfully the character chemistry that made Star Trek: The Next Generation so beloved an endeavor.

“A group of cybernetic creatures from the future have traveled back through time to enslave the human race... and you're here to stop them?”

In the 24^th Century, the cybernetic Borg attempt a second invasion of Sector 001, the home of the human race. Instead of warping to planet Earth to join the battle, however, Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and the U.S.S Enterprise-E are ordered to stay away. Starfleet fears that Picard’s traumatic experience being assimilated by the Borg could make him an “unstable element” in the critical defense of Earth.

With his crew’s support, Captain Picard ignores Starfleet’s orders and assumes control of the fleet battling the Borg Cube. Able to hear the Borg’s thoughts, Captain Picard pinpoints the cube’s weakness and destroys it, but not before a Borg escape craft opens a temporal anomaly and travels into Earth’s past.

Caught in the energetic wake of the escaping Borg sphere, the Enterprise crew can only watch as Earth of the past is assimilated by the cybernetic organisms. The starship follows the Borg to the past, to April of 2063 in an effort to prevent the change. There, they learn that the diabolical aliens plan to scuttle Earth’s “first contact” with alien life forms following the successful test flight of Zefram Cochrane’s (James Cromwell’s) experimental warp ship.

Picard realizes he must preserve the timeline, or the human race will become…Borg.

Before long, the Enterprise herself is infested with Borg invaders. Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) is captured by the Borg Queen (Alice Krige), who requires the information stored in his android brain if she wishes to access the ship’s computer and stop Cochrane’s historic flight.

Meanwhile, on Earth’s surface below, Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes) must convince Cochrane to make his historic flight…

“I am the beginning. The end. The one who is many. I am the Borg.”

The Borg are really no-brainers as movie antagonists. The most beloved episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation remains the two-parter “The Best of Both Worlds,” concerning a Borg incursion into Federation space. The Borg are such popular villains because they promise a fate much worse than death.

It’s one thing to be killed by drooling, murderous aliens; it’s another thing entirely to have your individuality wiped away and your intelligence sublimated into the Borg Collective. In that state, your memories belong to the Borg. Your physicality belongs to the Borg. Your very soul…is theirs.

Somewhere inside, you may want to struggle against the Collective or Hive, but you can’t succeed. You must stand by and watch in a kind of living Hell as the Borg exploit your knowledge and exploit your body, perhaps even condemning your very loved ones to the nightmare of being “one” with the collective. It’s a horrid fate to imagine, let alone endure.

The Borg threat also works remarkably well in the context of The Next Generation, a series that -- through the inclusion of half-Betazaoids, Klingons, androids, the blind and other colorful characters -- champions diversity as a worthwhile human ideal.

The Borg destroy diversity, making all life-forms conform to their vision of perfection, thus making them a perfect adversary for our colorful and very individual 24^th century heroes.

Assimilation into the Borg group consciousness is such a powerful, frightening notion that it would be nearly impossible to ruin the threat of the Borg in a two-hour motion picture. And yet, First Contact almost achieves the impossible by giving the Borg a heretofore unseen new ruler, a single individual called the Borg Queen.

Now, let me be plain: Alice Krige is remarkable as the Borg Queen here. She gives a performance simultaneously terrifying and sensual. Similarly, her appearance is both frightening and incredibly sexy. And yet the very idea of a Borg Queen represents a terrible undermining of the original notion of the Borg: a collective life form.

Now, suddenly – after several years of Next Generation episodes – we learn that that the Borg are ruled by an individual leader? By the equivalent of a Queen Bee? And worse, this Queen Bee is apparently seeking a human mate? Here, it is plain she seeks not to make drones of protagonists Captain Picard or Data, but to make them her lovers and companions, co-rulers of the lower Borg caste.

In one fell swoop, then, the terror and anonymity of assimilation is largely undone. For one thing, the Borg can maintain individuality after assimilation, as the presence and personality of the Borg Queen prove. For another, our heroes don’t face total erasure of individuality. Instead, they get to hob-knob it with the sensual, if sadistic, Borg Queen. There are some humans who may not consider that arrangement so terrible, frankly, given her overt sensuality…

I understand the (flawed) thinking that individuals make a “better” enemy in a movie than a group of bad guys, but the popularity of the Borg as a collective in the Next Generation TV series proves the fallacy of such thinking. First Contact invents a new character in the Borg Queen that -- while beautiful and menacing -- totally undercuts the terror of the Borg equation.

Her presence raises important questions too. How does the Queen exist in multiple dimensions at once, since First Contact suggests that she was present on the Borg ship with Locutus, although though we never saw her there in “Best of Both Worlds?”

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, how do the Borg survive (into episodes of Voyager) if their multi-dimensional Queen keeps getting destroyed? How many Queens are there? How does she die? Does Star Trek now possess an un-killable character? Also, because she can apparently be in more than one dimension at a time, why does the Queen have to bother with sending a message to the Borg of her time by sensor dish? Why not just transition from one place to another, one time to another?

Another serious problem in First Contact again comes down to how writers Ronald Moore and Brannon Braga choose to highlight crew interaction. Specifically, superficial “movie thinking” undercuts what could have been incredible scenes of conflict and drama between Enterprise team members.

Here, Patrick Stewart delivers an incredibly well-written Moby Dick speech about the Borg, explaining in detail why he won’t fall back again, why he won’t let the Borg win. Stewart does a terrific job with the material. It’s the monologue of an obsessed, driven man, and it works quite effectively in terms of the character we love, even if it seems logical that he would have exorcised these Borg demons already, given the span of time between “Family” and First Contact.

But forget all that. Picard gets called on the carpet and called out for his obsession with Borg… by Lily (Alfre Woodard), a one-time guest star in the franchise. She goes toe-to-toe with Picard and points out how his pursuit of the Borg doesn’t make sense. She’s known him for maybe a few hours, when she makes the speech.

I’ll be blunt: this confrontation should have occurred between Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher (Gates McFadden). She has known Captain Picard longer than anyone else aboard ship, she can speak from experience -- not hear say -- that his orders usually make sense, and she boasts the standing as chief medical officer of the Enterprise to stop Picard in his tracks if he is acting in a manner that is dangerous to the well-being of the starship’s crew.

If this were an original cast Star Trek movie, do you have any doubt that it would have been McCoy calling Kirk on the carpet over his behavior, as he did, explicitly in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), to name just three incidents? McCoy could do it because he was Kirk’s confidante, and because he had that standing as CMO to question a captain’s behavior.

Again, Crusher – who shares breakfast with Picard every day as we know from the series – is that person in The Next Generation universe. Yes, Stewart and Woodard are powerful in the confrontation scene together, but it doesn’t resonate deeply in terms of Star Trek history, because Picard doesn’t get checked by one of his own, by one of his crew. These movies are supposed to be about how starship crews work together to resolve problems, right? Shouldn't the person who actually knows Picard be the one to question him? You may recall, I had a similar problem with how Generations used Crusher. She should have been Picard's "Nexus" ideal, given their relationship there. And she should do her duty as CMO here, in First Contact. It's not that I have a thing for Crusher (though I like her just fine). It's that as a member of the team, when there is an opportunity to use her character appropriately...she should be thus used. And she never is. In any Star Trek movie. Even Chekov, Sulu and Uhura had moments in the sun in the original Star Trek films when there was opportunity.

I’ve always believed this a major flaw in the Next Generation movies: they give the supporting cast members little to do, and farm out the dramatic work to guest stars inside of established characters. The Moby Dick scene would have been infinitely more powerful if Gates McFadden – whom we know and love as Crusher – had been given the opportunity to stand up to Captain Picard. I wrote above how Riker, Geordi and Troi don’t seem equal to the task of countering Cochrane here. The same is true of Crusher in First Contact: she’s written like a doormat. She remains on the bridge, without questioning orders, while Lily enthusiastically performs her job as chief medical officer.

This reveals -- as we see time and time again – that there’s definitely a pecking order in the Star Trek: The Next Generation movies: the men get better roles than the women do, and Picard, Riker, Worf and Data get the lion’s share of the drama, while the rest of the characters are afforded only brief moments that play as the equivalent of shtick. Troi gets to play drunk, for example. In First Contact, Crusher not only shirks her duty to hold Picard’s feet to the fire over a bad decision, she actually loses a patient (Lily again…) who is under her protection. That’s the best the writers could come up with for a character who raised a son, overcame the tragic death of her husband, commanded the Enterprise from time-to-time and even headed Starfleet Medical?

In short, for First Contact, the writers decided to go out and invent a woman tough enough to challenge Picard, when a woman already in the Next Generation stable could have done it just as well, and it would have resonated far more with the Trek fan base. All they needed to do was to write Gates McFadden a decent part.

In the introduction to this piece, I wrote about some careless errors in the film. Let me name just a few. At one point, Picard tells Lily the Enterprise consists of 24 decks. Later, Worf’s security chief replacement reports that the Borg control "deck 26." If we’re to believe Picard, that deck doesn’t exist. By looping “24” over the “26” dialogue, this would error would not have occurred. I just can’t believe that nobody was checking continuity on a major studio’s tent-pole franchise.

Other matters of concern include the origin of Zefram Cochrane. He is a character from the original series episode “Metamorphosis,” and one with an entirely different look and origin (in terms of home planets, apparently) than what this movie establishes. But First Contact feels no obligation to explain the discrepancies in Cochrane’s biography.

Also, since when can Captain Picard hear the voices of the Borg? Is this a common side effect of those who have been separated from the Collective? If so, did Hugh, the Borg refugees of “Descent” and Seven of Nine also hear Borg voices in their heads whenever they encountered them?

In spite of such problems, Star Trek: First Contact is a highly entertaining movie with many dramatic and visually-appealing high points.

Prime among these is the zero-gravity sequence in which Picard, Worf and Hunt must battle the Borg on the exterior of the Enterprise hull, on the main deflector dish. This scene is splendidly-directed, buttressed by incredible special effects, and it features an undercurrent of anxiety throughout, as the Borg – slowly becoming aware of Picard’s interference – begin to menace the crew as the team works to stop them.

I remember, circa 1994 or so, I was deeply disenchanted with the Star Trek universe and consequently looking back at Space: 1999 (1975 -1977) with much appreciation, because I felt that the world of the Enterprise had become too safe and predictable. Space adventuring was no longer dangerous. Now it consisted of vacations on holodecks, endless resources and material wealth, courtesy of replicators, and even families living on the saucer section while exploring the final frontier. I lamented the fact that not once in Star Trek: The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine up to that point, had any main character been seen in a space suit, actually reckoning with the actual environment of space. The crew members of Starfleet seemed to me too insulated from danger.

So I was delighted that Star Trek: First Contact included this zero-g sequence and put my qualms to rest, at least momentarily. The zero-gravity action scene in Star Trek: First Contact reminds us that these men and women are in a dangerous profession, and that even with all the comforts of “technology unchained” in the 24^th century, they must still sometimes go out into space with precious few resources to fight enemies, or attempt to repair their ship. The zero-gravity fight scene is actually my favorite in the film because it is so tense, and because it features so many nice character touches, from Picard’s unconventional cleverness (blasting a Borg into space by shooting the deck of the ship…) to Worf’s “always be prepared” mentality, bringing a blade out into space with him. It’s terrific stuff.

I also enjoy the climax of Star Trek: First Contact tremendously because it remembers that Star Trek isn’t always supposed to be about battling hostile aliens. This is one of the reasons why I’m not all that impressed with Star Trek Online. It’s a game about going out to other worlds and fighting aliens, about firing phasers and engaging in battle.

For me, that’s but one small aspect of Star Trek, and not, for me, the one with the most appeal. Star Trek: First Contact features great battle sequences, but more than that, ends on the high note of first contact. It shows us an important and inspiring scene in human history, our first, peaceful meeting with extra-terrestrials. In this case, the humans who broach that contact are fatigued from war, and not “perfect” (like our 24^th century protagonists).

And yet they lead with trust and peace, and a wonderful, new era is opened up because of their willingness to go out on a limb. Frankly, I find the final scenes of First Contact absolutely inspiring, reminding us of the better angels of our nature. We can greet the unknown not with fear, paranoia and suspicion, but with hope and peace and trust.

In ending the film on this high note, rather than the (admittedly-satisfying) defeat of the villainous Borg, First Contact remembers and honors the highest aspirations of Gene Roddenberry and the Star Trek saga. Remember “the human adventure is just beginning?” the tag-line of Star Trek: The Motion Picture? First Contact literalizes that motto, and shows us the wondrous beginnings of man’s odyssey to the stars, beginning with the first moments of brotherhood with another race. It’s a fantastic and inspiring story-point.

I also appreciate the creativity involved in Data’s subplot in First Contact. I didn’t care for how Data was utilized in Generations…as a veritable bi-polar psychotic. Here, he seems more...balanced. He faces temptation as the Borg perform an assimilation in reverse. Usually, the Borg apply mechanical prosthetics to biological skin. Here, they apply biological skin to a mechanical apparatus. It’s an interesting idea, especially since Data suggests early on that he can’t be assimilated by the Borg. The Queen proves him wrong, and in a diabolical fashion that tempts Data. We never really believe he has turned to the dark side...but as Data suggests, a few seconds can feel like eternity when we're uncertain of his exact motivations.

I understand that Star Trek fans are divided on the subject of Frakes as a director. He gets good performances from the cast here, and manages several action scenes nicely. Judging by First Contact, he certainly seems up to the center seat...the director's chair.

Between the zero-g action, the up-lifting last moments of first contact, and Data’s unique experience being Borgified, it’s largely futile to resist First Contact, a high-point for the Next Generation cast at the movies.

Star Trek Week: Star Trek: Generations (1994)

2013-05-17T06:15:00.000-04:00

Can one bad concept, executed poorly, scuttle an entire movie?

That's the primary question to ask regarding the seventh feature film to boast the Star Trek name, 1994's Generations.

As Trekkers no doubt recall, Generations offers the irresistible lure of combining two generations of franchise characters and two exceedingly popular casts. The film's prologue is set in the 23rd century days of Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and crew (in this case meaning Scotty and Chekov), while the movie proper is set some seventy-eight years later, in the era of Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and his stalwart crew (Riker, Data, Worf, LaForge, Crusher, and Troi). The film's climax stirs the ingredients together and brings forth both Kirk and Picard to double-team the film's nefarious villain, Dr. Tolian Soran (Malcolm McDowell).

This sounds like a slam dunk formula for space adventure success, no?

It is, perhaps, until you consider the mechanism by which the two generations are combined. While all Star Trek films feature flaws of one type or another, Generations endures seismic contortions to bring together two captains from disparate eras, in the process creating a narrative sinkhole from which little emerges unscathed.

That sinkhole is called "The Nexus" or "the energy ribbon," and the script -- in true TNG techno-babble fashion -- generically describes the outer space phenomenon as a "conflux of temporal energy" that passes through our galaxy every thirty-eight years or so.

Alas, the Nexus is perhaps the most inconsistent plot device to feature prominently in a Star Trek film, thus causing many more problems than it solves. And because it plays such an important role in the film, logical questions about it are not easily side-stepped or avoided.

In addition, the screenplay by Ronald Moore and Brannon Braga feels schizophrenic. The book-end scenes involving Captain Kirk are filled with wit, nostalgia, pathos, and real humor, but the middle sections of the film are slow, tedious and lugubrious. Brent Spiner's delightful Data is transformed into a clown and a coward by the addition of an emotion chip, and the script badly mishandles the noble Captain Picard too, making him seem emotionally unstable and a sexist prude. As a feature film introduction to these beloved franchise characters, Generations serves both heroes poorly.

Yet despite such problems, Star Trek: Generations features many memorable and enjoyable moments. The exciting prologue reveals the inaugural flight of the U.S.S. Enterprise B, and there's also an impressive action scene involving a saucer separation and planetary crash. Generations also presents a laudable thematic leitmotif about mortality. It's not what we leave behind that's important, establishes Captain Picard, but "how we've lived" that matters. Picard, Kirk and Soran -- in various ways -- all embody this search for meaning in life.

In terms of its cinematic appeal, Generations re-uses the familiar TV sets, but cinematographer John Alonzo does a brilliant and beautiful job of up-fitting them for the silver screen. The cinematic lighting of these familiar sets lends a beautiful and affecting sense of melancholy to the dramatic proceedings. Some scenes are literally bathed in apricot sunlight, as though a golden age is burning out, coming to a rapid end. This too fits both the movie's narrative (which witnesses an end to Enterprise-D) and the thematic drive, which suggests that "time is the fire in which we burn."

I've re-watched the first five seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the last year or so as part of my continuing retrospective of the series, and discovered a new appreciation for the series...one I didn't expect to find, but did. Yet love The Next Generation or hate it, Generations is not a high point in the franchise, rather a testament to the difficulty of moving beloved characters from one format to another.

The New York Times' Peter Nichols noted that Generations is "flabby and impenetrable in places, but it has enough pomp, spectacle and high-tech small talk to keep the franchise afloat." I largely agree with the reviewer in terms of the movies flaws and strengths. Generations really is flabby (feeling overlong and confusing) and impenetrable (largely because of the Nexus), but the film is also, often, quite spectacular in visualization.

"A quick run around the block..."

In the 23rd century, Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), Captain Scott (James Doohan) and Commander Chekov (Walter Koenig) board the U.S.S. Enterprise-B for its maiden voyage, a short sojourn around the solar system.

Unfortunately, two El-Aurian ships carrying refugees to Earth have become caught in "The Ribbon" -- a dangerous space phenomenon -- and require rescue. The Enterprise, under Captain Harriman (Alan Ruck) is not prepared to meet the challenge, but Kirk and his team step in. Several El-Aurians are rescued, including Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) and Dr. Soran (Malcolm McDowell) but during the rescue attempt, Captain Kirk is lost and presumed dead.

Seventy-eight years later, the crew of the Enterprise-D celebrates the promotion of Lt. Worf (Michael Dorn). Even as Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) receives grave news regarding his family on Earth, the android Data (Brent Spiner) attempts to become "more human" by installing and activating his emotion chip.

The Enterprise receives a distress call from a nearby Federation facility, and discovers that it has fallen under attack, apparently by Romulans. A lone survivor is Dr. Soran, who is now working on a powerful Trilithium device -- a weapon that can destroy stars -- to shift the path of the Ribbon.

As Picard learns, Dr. Soran actually wishes to return to the Ribbon, so that he can enter into an alternate dimension called "The Nexus," a world of fantasy and bliss where his family still exists. Allied with Klingon renegades Lursa and B'etor, Soran hopes to destroy the sun in the Veridian system even though it means the deaths of millions of intelligent life forms, and thus rendezvous with his loved ones.

Picard attempts to stop Dr. Soran on a desolate planet surface while Riker battles the Klingons in orbit. After Picard enters the Nexus, he realizes he must enlist the help of the legendary Captain Kirk...

"Time is the fire in which we burn..."

Star Trek: Generation's problems begin with the concept of the Nexus. It is a ribbon of energy that travels the galaxy. If you happen to be touched by the Nexus, you are transported to an alternate reality without time in which your thoughts dictate reality.

The Nexus/ribbon is incredibly intriguing in concept, and I've always appreciated outer space mystery films that deal with altered realities, such as Solaris. Indeed, you get the sense that this kind of depth is precisely what Generations was aiming for.

The problem is that the rules governing the Nexus are inconsistent. Follow the logic with me: According to Guinan (Whoopi Goldbeg), you can't go to the Nexus. The Nexus must come to you. This is why the film's villain, Soran, is using Trilithium, a quantum inhibitor, to destroy stars. The accordant changes in gravity in the aftermath of the star's destruction offer the opportunity to re-direct the ribbon to a planet where Soran is waiting. There, he can be absorbed by the Nexus and returned to his family.

Yet, at the beginning of the film, Captain Kirk is absorbed into the Nexus (and assumed dead by the rest of the galaxy) after the Enterprise-B enters the Ribbon. So in this case, you can go into the Nexus. You can get to it by ship, directly contradicting Guinan's spoken testimony and Soran's belief that there's "no other way" to get inside the Nexus.

As has been asked by many fans on many discussion boards, why can't Soran merely fly a ship, or a thruster suit into the Ribbon, just the way the Enterprise B flew into the Ribbon? If, for a moment, I were to buy this whole "it has to come to you" deal, why not park a spaceship in front of the Ribbon, turn off your engines, and let it just happen. Same thing with a thruster suit.

Bluntly stated, there is no need for Soran's over-complicated plan to put millions of lives in danger by destroying stars. It's all a false threat and a contrivance. The film demonstrates, through Kirk's disappearance, that you can go to the Nexus, and that it doesn't have to come to you. Are we supposed to believe Guinan and Soran, or our own lying eyes?

The next inconsistency arises over the use to which the Nexus is put. Apparently, since the Nexus can shape reality according to thought, those trapped in the Nexus can choose to leave it any time, and return to any point in the timeline.

In the film, Picard solicits the aid of Captain Kirk and opts to return to the point five minutes before Veridian III is destroyed, to stop Soran. Why would he choose this particular time, and not a day earlier, in Ten Forward, when he first meets Soran aboard the Enterprise? Worf's security men could thus arrest Soran, and two star systems would survive. There would be no casualties, either. The Enterprise wouldn't get destroyed. End of story. Why would any person in his right mind -- let alone an incredibly intelligent starship captain -- choose to return to a point in time wherein Soran already holds all the cards, and the die is cast, as they say?

And there's more. When Picard and Kirk return from the Nexus, they are very quickly outmatched. In short order, it appears that one of them will have to sacrifice their life on a rickety bridge atop a hill to stop Soran from destroying the star. Thus, I submit, Kirk and Picard should have put their heads together for about five seconds and determined to let Soran win, and permit the Nexus to take them again. Why? They're losing.

They can go back into the Nexus, leave again, pick another time to return to the real universe, and make a second, hopefully better-planned run at Soran. The Nexus, in fact, offers the possibility of infinite do-overs. It seems criminal to lose Kirk permanently in this story, when the Nexus allows characters to rewrite time again and again. I have a difficult time believing that the two best Captains in Starfleet history couldn't engineer a solution, together, that would spare both their lives and save the universe, given the Nexus's unique temporal properties.

In short, never has a gimmick in a Star Trek movie been quite so...gimmicky. The Nexus is a black hole of plot contrivance that sucks away all the good will the film generates. And it's not like that good will is that abundant in the first place, in part because of the film's sour and off-key depiction of the hero.

The Measure of a Man: The depiction of Captain Picard in Generations.

What I appreciate so much about Captain Picard is that his character was conceived as a man and as a captain very different from Captain Kirk. We didn't need an imitator...we needed a successor with his own style, approach and personality. That's precisely what the writers and Patrick Stewart gave us in the TV series. That fact established, Captain Picard as he was in the series is not an easy fit for a Star Trek movie. He is introspective, occasionally morose, emotionally detached from his crew, and not at all the standard action hero type.

In the series, Picard was always much more effective as a traveling diplomat and mediator than as a starship commander in combat situations. He surrendered the Enterprise in two of the first four episodes of the series ("Encounter at Farpoint" and "The Last Outpost"), and got his clock cleaned by an eighty year-old, broken-down starship in a war game scenario against Riker in "Peak Performance."

But Picard's admirable intellectual and diplomatic qualities don't really get audiences behind the character in a bigger film setting. When a Klingon Bird of Prey de-cloaks off the port bow of the Enterprise, Picard's response here is simply a befuddled "what?!" He can't even conceive of the possibility that a Klingon ship could be lurking nearby. He thus appears unimaginative. Just compare Picard's confused, ineffective response in Generations with Kirk's decisive reaction to a cloaked Klingon Bird of Prey in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984). Kirk spots the ship before it de-cloaks, and gets in the first licks with photon torpedoes. Is competence in the center seat too much to expect of Picard?

In Generations, Picard is also handily defeated in hand-to-hand combat with Soran. He fails to stop the scientist's dastardly plan, and must resort to cajoling Kirk back into action. Then, Kirk fights Soran and ultimately dies trying to reach a remote control (yes, a remote control). So not only does Picard fail against Soran once, but the second time around he also gets a Starfleet legend killed because he can't handle himself in a fist-fight. Remember, he's supposed to be the film's hero, and again, the portrayal isn't very flattering.

To top it all off, when at film's conclusion Riker notes that he never had the chance to captain the Enterprise, Captain Picard says, essentially, "don't worry...we'll get another one!" (Really: "I doubt this will be the last starship to carry the name Enterprise). Again, contrast Kirk's feelings of guilt and remorse over the destruction of his beloved starship in The Search for Spock with Picard's nonchalant, off-handed response in Generations. The impression is that Picard couldn't give a damn that the Enterprise is destroyed. He's lost ships before (the Stargazer), has done so again, and well, he certainly appears confident he'll get another shot at command, I guess. The script provides Picard not one word of regret that the Federation flagship has been destroyed. And he doesn't tell a soul, either, at least on screen, of Captain Kirk's noble sacrifice.

Then, bafflingly, after the moving death of Kirk and the destruction of the Enterprise, the film stops for an emotional scene in which Data cries after discovering that his cat, Spot, still lives. I wonder why the film could not have stopped, long enough, to feature a memorial service for Captain James T. Kirk, with a moving eulogy delivered by Jean-Luc Picard. Picard is a man more of words than action, and such a moment would have played to his strengths as a character; his intellect, his ability to contextualize a situation in terms of history and philosophy. If we get tears and sadness over a cat, why not tears and sadness over a legendary starship commander's sacrifice?

I maintain that the reason so many fans hunger for the return of William Shatner as Kirk today is because Generations failed so spectacularly to bring adequate closure to the character. He dies in virtual anonymity -- as if he were never there -- on a distant, unheard of planet. Had Picard eulogized him in a formal service, describing how he had "made a difference...one more time," the fans would have felt that their hero had been treated with at least some decorum and respect. His life could have been contextualized and rendered meaningful.

I'm still not through complaining about how Picard is treated in this film, either. Early on, he is given the news that his brother and nephew have died, and indeed, how awful. We get a long dialogue scene wherein he weeps and discusses at length the end of "the Picard line." This is why we see a Star Trek movie, right? To watch a character weep in his quarters over the death of family members. Is Picard so hopeless at interpersonal relationships that he's given no thought to the idea that he could still have a child? And isn't it rather selfish to be worrying about the end of the family line when his sister-in-law has lost something a lot less abstract, namely her husband and son? Something about this whole scene is way off, in terms of Picard's character. He comes off as inappropriately concerned with himself.

And then the final straw is Picard's Nexus fantasy. Here, he visits a nineteenth century world, where a prim and proper Victorian woman -- one we've never seen before -- is his wife. She wears a traditionally frilly 19th century dress and pretty bows and ribbons in her hair, and she dutifully dotes on Picard and his brood of children. So, we are meant to believe that this brilliant man of the 24th century secretly longs for a demure woman of the 19th century; one to keep his home clean and raise his kids, You wouldn't know that he was such a traditionalist from his previous attraction to the rogue, Vash, or from his relationship with Lt. Commander Nella Darren (Wendy Hughes) in "Lessons." Do the writers here remember the episode "Family," wherein Picard was defined as the brother who looked to the stars and the future, while his brother was the conservative traditionalist who looked to the past?

In the choice of fantasy mates for him, Generations transforms Picard -- the intellectual renaissance man of the future -- into someone who appears sexist to us, now, living here in the 21st century. It's a ridiculous choice of fantasy for the character, and one that suggests the writers -- after writing for him for so many years -- have no absolutely no idea who he is. The woman in Picard's fantasy should have been a woman that he respected: Dr. Crusher. She is a match for him in terms of intellect, opinion and physicality. Why wouldn't Picard imagine her as his dream woman, particularly after the events of "Attached?" More importantly, why wouldn't the writers think of Beverly Crusher, now that they were now longer constrained by the "no change" edicts of a weekly series, where you must keep everyone available for future dalliances with sexy guest stars? Frankly, in this Generations scene Picard comes off as infinitely more sexist than Captain Kirk ever did. Kirk may want to screw every woman that moves, but Picard apparently desires a chaste doormat for a life partner. Again, it doesn't ring true of the man we'd known for seven years and over a hundred adventures.

I also submit that Data is done a grave disservice in the film, begging for his life from Soran, and cackling like a madman. His belief that his "growth as an artificial life form has reached an impasse" is an interesting element on which to hang a story, but making the android a court jester and sniveling coward hardly does the character a service. What's the point? That to be human is to be an obnoxious, smug jerk?

Again, this judgment is not a reflection on Brent Spiner or on the character of Data as seen in the TV series overall; just a comment on the quality of writing and decision-making that informs Generations.

"You know, if Spock were here, he'd say that I was an irrational, illogical human being by taking on a mission like that. Sounds like fun!"

I haven’t pulled many punches here regarding Star Trek: Generations. The film doesn’t work in terms of science fiction premise, in terms of internal consistency and logic, or in terms of the main characters, primarily Picard. But, the film does succeed on at least two other specific fronts: spectacle and commentary on human nature.

It’s funny that Trek fans dislike Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) when, in many ways it felt true to the almost tongue-in-cheek spirit of the original series. But that film also committed the cardinal sin of being very poor in terms of special effects presentation. By contrast, Generations doesn’t really capture the spirit of The Next Generation, but proves absolutely thrilling in terms of visual presentation. The section of the film devoted to the Klingon gambit to destroy the Enterprise is absolutely enthralling, and as jaunty, fun and engaging as any moment in the movie canon. Furthermore, the separation of the saucer section and subsequent crash on the planet surface is rendered in breathtaking and tense terms. These moments capture the Star Trek spirit beautifully, particularly Data’s unexpected expletive (“Oh shit…”) as the sequence begins. A sustained set-piece, the crash of the Enterprise is something that fans have desired to see dramatized for years, and Generations doesn’t disappoint.

William Shatner and Patrick Stewart also prove delightful together in the film. It really is great to see these two men stand shoulder-to-shoulder, working together and playing off one another. I only wish the script didn't have to go through so many contortions of believability and logic to bring Picard to Kirk. People can criticize Shatner's acting all they like, but I find his final moments in the role -- his acceptance of death -- immensely moving.

I also must acknowledge that Moore and Braga have done an admirable job weaving together some of the thematic, human elements of this particular tale. In one way or another, Kirk, Picard and Soran all grapple with their mortality, and their legacy in Generations. For Kirk, he’s done nothing in the Nexus that matters, and to him a life without meaning is not worth living. It is better of him to die having achieved something important.

Picard, meanwhile, has never devoted his considerable energies to family, and now he wonders if upon his death, he’ll be remembered at all, or if the Picard name will be consigned to dead (rather than living…) history. And Soran, of course, wants to escape the bounds of mortality and live forever with his loved ones in the nexus. His legacy is to be remembered here, in reality, as a monster. Each one of these characters must contend with life and death in Generations, and a viewer can see how that thread affects each of them. Again, I’ve been tough with the writers here, but in having three primary characters grapple with aging and mortality, Generations certainly aspires to be Star Trek at its best. The film has something meaningful and true to convey to all of us. How do we look at the passing of time? Are our lives burning up as the days and hours pass? Or are we building up a legacy that will inspire those who come after us?

So Generations is visually gorgeous (perhaps second only to The Motion Picture in terms of cinematic appeal) and certainly, it hopes to be more than just another movie chapter in Trek history. Yet the film stumbles over Kirk’s legacy. How can we know that Kirk’s life meant something important if Picard doesn’t share his sacrifice with his own crew and contextualize his sacrifice for us? Generations also trips over Picard’s character, making him seem selfish, incompetent, and sexist. And the contrived nature of the Nexus damages the film’s sense of credibility and logic almost beyond measure. The concept is confusing and confused, and Generation suffers mightily for it. As I noted above, the film feels schizophrenic, lunging from a weeping Picard to a psychotically-humorous Data, and back again.

I am now and shall always be a Star Trek fan. But Generations is not the franchise’s finest hour, and in fact, I rank it very near the bottom of the movie pantheon despite the occasional moments of tremendous spectacle and the worthwhile message regarding mortality. Good thing First Contact (1996) came next.

Star Trek Week: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

2013-05-16T16:00:00.000-04:00

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) is widely championed as the finest of the Star Trek films featuring the original TV series cast, and for a multitude of good reasons.

Yet, in many substantial ways, 1991's Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, also directed by Nicholas Meyer, actively competes for that title.

The sturdy foundations of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan are many. First and foremost, the film features a strong literary bent that adds a new and even poetic sense of realism to Gene Roddenberry's far-flung, Utopian future. Revolving around death and re-birth both personal and cosmic (vis-a-vis the Genesis Device), The Wrath of Khan never fails to prove deeply affecting. And, of course, the film is endlessly exciting, a tense technological space duel between two evenly-matched opponents and starships.

While never a shallow copy of Khan (like 2002's Nemesis...) Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country attempts a similarly ambitious alchemy. This sixth film in the franchise grounds its tale of interstellar rapprochement in the Western literary canon (this time the oeuvre of William Shakespeare), as well as in current 1990s-world affairs, namely glasnost. Or as Leonard Nimoy called it, "the Wall coming down in space."

The Undiscovered Country also reveals beloved Star Trek characters grappling with old age, and more specifically a hardening of their perceptions and sensibilities about the universe, a kind of metaphorical "death."   These aren't the idealistic, energetic young space adventurers we first met in 1966. They have grown jaded, and more than a little cynical over the long decades. As Captain Kirk notes to Spock in the movie, "I'm really tired," and you can detect that exhaustion in his carriage and in his gait.

But also -- with Star Trek's trademark sense of optimism about the future-- this sixth Trek film sends these aging icons out to pasture in glorious, heroic, even transcendent terms. They fly off into the proverbial sunset both literally and metaphorically.

Notably, Star Trek VI: Undiscovered Country also obsesses on issues such as prejudice, death and "change," all while preparing franchise fans for the inevitable fact that "all things end." These issues are woven into the very fabric of the film through the literate screenplay, the darker-than-usual, Gustav Holst-inspired musical score by Cliff Eidelman, and director of photography Hiro Narita's autumnal -- and then wintry -- visuals.

Such qualities make the sixth Star Trek film a very good movie, but the film also functions ably as great Star Trek, re-visiting core (and sometimes very funny) concepts of the franchise one last time, and even bridging the gap between Trek Classic and The Next Generation.

An important factor in terms of critical appreciation for this final Trek movie also involves visual flourish.  On this front, The Undiscovered Country is undeniably the most confidently realized of all the Trek films, reveling in dramatic camera spins, suspense-heightening cross-cutting, and other tools of a formalist's quiver.

In colorful, pulse-pounding fashion, the film emerges not just as a glorified TV episode then, but as a proper cinematic farewell to the most beloved and charming space heroes of a generation.

"Guess who's coming to dinner."

While cataloguing gaseous anomalies in Beta Quadrant, the U.S.S. Excelsior under Captain Hikaru Sulu (George Takei) encounters a "subspace shock wave" of dramatic proportions.

It originates from Praxis, a Klingon moon that serves as the Empire's "key energy production facility."

This event quickly reverberates in galactic politics. The accident at Praxis, caused by "over mining and insufficient safety precautions," inspires the Gorkon Initiative, a move by the Chancellor of the High Council (David Warner) to seek peace with the Federation. This peace, incidentally, will involve the dismantling of Starfleet star bases and outposts along the Klingon/Federation "Neutral Zone."

Captain Spock (Leonard Nimoy) volunteers Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and the U.S.S. Enterprise as the peace initiative's "first olive branch." Just three months shy of "standing down," Kirk is to escort Gorkon's vessel through Federation space to Earth, for a summit with the President of the United Federation of Planets.

The idea of peace with the Klingons does not sit well, however, with several Starfleet officers, including Admiral Cartwright (Brock Peters) and Kirk himself. While Cartwright terms Klingons the "alien trash" of the galaxy, Kirk -- still bitter over the Klingons' murder of his son, David Marcus -- believes that Klingons can't be trusted. He knows that there is an historic opportunity for peace, but wonders "how on Earth" history can get past people like him.

After an awkward state dinner between the Klingon delegation and the Enterprise staff, the peace process goes awry when it appears that Kirk's starship opens fire on the Klingon battle cruiser.

The alien ship loses gravity, and in the ensuing chaos Chancellor Gorkon is assassinated by two helmeted hit men wearing Starfleet uniforms and gravity boots. While attempting to ascertain what has occurred, Kirk and Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) are arrested by Gorkon's chief of staff, General Chang (Christopher Plummer) and held for trial.

Aboard the Enterprise, Spock and his Vulcan protege, Lt. Valeris (Kim Cattrall) attempt to clear Kirk's name and solve the mystery of Gorkon's assassination, even as Kirk and McCoy are found guilty of conspiracy and transported to Rura Penthe, a dilithium mine and penal facility deep inside the Klingon frontier, often referred to as "the alien's graveyard."

Kirk and McCoy contend with an alien "chameloid," Martia (Iman) on Rura Penthe as Spock and the Enterprise crew determine that a new Klingon weapon -- a Klingon Bird of Prey that can fire while cloaked -- was utilized to frame Kirk and the Enterprise. It seems Klingons, Romulans and Starfleet officers are conspiring together to destroy the peace process, and maintain the current political status quo.

With the help of Captain Sulu and the Excelsior, Kirk and the Enterprise crew set out one last, grave mission: to stop the next assassination attempt, this one directed at the UFP President.

Unfortunately, there's a traitor in their midst...

"So...this is goodbye"

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country virtually obsesses on the idea of things ending; on the notion of inevitable change and the various human responses to such change.

This leitmotif is encoded right there in the film's sub-title: The Undiscovered Country.

In Meyer's film, Gorkon defines Shakespeare's descriptor (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I) as being a reference to "the future."

In fact, as we remember from Hamlet, "the Undiscovered Country" is a direct reference to death.

I first saw this film while attending university, and my Shakespeare professor had fits over what he detected as the film's grievous mistake regarding this famous passage. But it isn't actually a mistake, I submit. Rather, the debate about "the Undiscovered Country" is part of the film's tapestry about two diverse cultures coming together without sacrificing each's sense of identity. In "the original Klingon" version of Shakespeare, as the film makes plain, "the Undiscovered Country" may very well be the future.

So Star Trek projects an "Undiscovered Country" that is both death and the future. In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the main characters -- good and bad -- battle over the direction of a future that few of them will actually live to experience (Spock is an exception, of course, given his extended Vulcan life-span).

In other words, this is a film which is both an "end" (a metaphorical death) for the beloved dramatis personae of Star Trek, and a bridge to a distant future as it is projected in the TV series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, set decades beyond Kirk's time. Both realms, both destinations, are a mystery.

Given this backdrop, allusions to death, endings, and time's passage dominate Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. For instance, Chang quotes from Henry IV when he leaves the Enterprise: "Have we not heard the chimes at midnight?"

Again this quote re-contextualizes Shakespeare in terms well outside the Bard's original meaning. Here, Chang is noting the lateness of the hour. He departs the starship after a long night of drinking Romulan ale, but the hour is also late for Gorkon, and for peace. In just moments, an assassination attempt which Chang orchestrates will be launched. Chang is "marking" this anticipatory time with his quip to Kirk, and again, it portends death, change and endings.

In a scene set in Spock's quarters early in the film, Lt. Valeris studies a painting: a representation of the Biblical "expulsion from Paradise." When Valeris asks Spock why he keeps this work of art in his quarters, he replies that the painting serves as "a reminder" to him "that all things end."

Coming so early in the film -- one widely advertised as the final voyage of the starship Enterprise -- this discussion is of great significance too. Here is Spock -- a character many of us grew up with -- accepting, his own mortality and the change of the status quo. He soon tells Valeris that this journey represents his final voyage aboard the Enterprise as a member of his crew.

The universe shall unfold as it should. All things live and all things die. All things end

Even Star Trek.

Spock's acceptance and "faith" in a universe of change is contrasted strongly in the film with Kirk's stubborn refusal to brace change. The good Captain admits in the film that he is "terrified" of change, of a world with "no neutral zone," where the Klingons are allies. It is almost easier, like Chang, to believe in the concept of "no peace in our time" than to accept the possibility of something new...and unknown.

Importantly, Gorkon is also an example of Spock's approach. He begs Kirk, on his death bed, not to let matters "end this way." Again, it's clear from the screenplay's obsessive language about endings that a chapter of history is closing and the future is up for grabs.

When such "death" or "ending" centric dialogue is coupled with visuals such as a doppelganger of Kirk being disintegrated (on Rura Penthe), one begins to detect how deeply this Star Trek movie treads into the territory of "the future." Spock even asks, at one point, if both he and Kirk have grown "so old, so inflexible" that they have "outlived their usefulness."

His comment is a wonderfully wry one, reminding us that these beloved characters are people, not flawless Demi-Gods. They make mistakes, they stumble, and they don't always do the right thing. It's the most human portrayal -- apologies to Mr. Spock -- of the characters in any of the feature films.

And that humanity even extends to expressions of prejudice, as The Undiscovered Country ably notes.

In addition to Cartwright's description of the Klingons as alien trash, Kirk terms them "animals," and admonishes Spock to "let them die." Chekov quips "Guess who's coming to dinner," a direct reference to director Stanley Kramer's 1967 film about race relations in America.

In the same vein, Scotty argues that Klingons "don't place the same value on life as we do," creating a separate category for his enemies.

These are repellent remarks, and yet they make a powerful point. Even heroic characters such as Kirk, Chekov and Scotty boast a blind spot when it comes to their opinion of "an enemy. " Can you truly begrudge Kirk his prejudice towards the Klingons, given his personal loss?

We might not like or laud Kirk's attitude, but nor can we deny that it certainly makes sense from his perspective, and knowing his history. The crew of the Enterprise has spent a lifetime battling the Klingons tooth-and-nail (and phasers and photons) and now, in a heartbeat, that life is over, and the Klingons are supposed to be friends and allies. What does that sudden change do to their life's work, to their legacy?

As Kirk notes disapprovingly of his own behavior near film's end, he "got used to" the idea of hating Klingons. It's easy to fall into a bad pattern like that, especially when you're unhappy. And that, in some way, is how prejudice is born.

And this is one reason why I so much admire the original Star Trek, and this particular film. The filmmakers have permitted the beloved franchise characters their own individual, politically incorrect viewpoints. Why? So Kirk and the others can learn through experience that their perceptions are dead wrong. The Klingons are proud and can continue "being proud." And they can do so without being the villains or "alien trash" of the galaxy.

Later Star Treks, particularly The Next Generation took a different and far less dramatic, far less chancy tack. There, the Enterprise crew became above such human flaws as prejudice, and so would meet and endlessly lecture less-advanced aliens about how they must live up to Federation ideals of equality, etc.

The difference here involves how a storyteller chooses to construct a tale. Either with the characters stagnant and therefore dull, having already learned everything they need to know, or with the characters in a constant state of flux and growth, learning and making mistakes as they go.

As Kirk once noted, "we learn by doing," and that expression is reflected in the storytelling of the original series and, occasionally, in the feature films. It's more realistic, and more true to life, I submit, than TNG's direction.

I much prefer the Undiscovered Country approach, which permits the Star Trek characters both their foibles and an opportunity -- when confronted with a mirror -- to outgrow those foibles.

My only wish on this front is that the makers of the Undiscovered Country had been able to more fully realize their original vision. For instance, they wanted Saavik to be the traitor in the film. The late Gene Roddenberry scuttled that idea, hence the creation of Valeris. This substitution robs the final Star Trek film of what could have been one of the most powerful moments in franchise history. It would have been a genuine shock to learn Saavik was a conspirator and that jaw-dropping moment would have electrified the movie.

Ostensibly, Saavik would have hated the Klingons for the same reason that Kirk did: she was there on the Genesis Planet when they murdered his son. She saw it. She witnessed it all. Kirk and Saavik both lost David, but only one of them would grow and come to take away a lesson about prejudice. That would have a been a powerful side-by-side comparison, and the ultimate lesson about bigotry. If Kirk could past his resentment, why then, could not Saavik? This is a missed opportunity on a cosmic scale.

As it stands, The Undiscovered Country never exactly makes a case for why Valeris should fear peace with the Klingons. Kim Cattrall is engaging as the character, but there's no audience connection, no history to Valeris, and so it isn't a surprise that the "guest star" in this film is a bad apple.

It' a shame that in this case, some of Star Trek's greatest defenders and advocates couldn't see the larger picture. That prejudice is universal...affecting even the most enlightened of us. And also, optimistically, that prejudice can be overcome by facing change and the future head on.

And if you don't think this is still a very big issue in America right now, you haven't been paying attention to the national discourse.

"There is an old Vulcan proverb: Only Nixon could go to China."

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is great Star Trek for several reasons.

First, it lives up to Star Trek's history in that it serves primarily, as a morality play. It tells the story of a Captain Kirk who first stands in the way of history, and then, ultimately nudges it in the right direction by overcoming his own prejudice and personal shortcomings.

Secondly Star Trek uses a timely metaphor to dramatize that tale, namely the ending of the Cold War. In the film, doomed Praxis, the key energy production facility, tracks as Chernobyl, the nuclear power plant that suffered a terrifying meltdown. Gorkon tracks as Gorbachev, a man who took a chance on peace to save his people. And Kirk is very much the conservative hawk (the Reagan or Nixon) who, in the end, unexpectedly finds himself the greatest warrior for peace.

Now, regular readers of this blog are well aware that I am no Reagan fan. But I also deeply admire the fact that the man grappled with reality, changed his mind, and grew. Reagan began his tenure as President calling Russia "The Evil Empire," joked that "bombing begins in five minutes" on an open mic and erroneously claimed that a sub's nuclear missiles could be recalled after launch.  But by the end of his second term, he was Gorbachev's committed partner for world peace. Reagan walked back from the precipice and from his own, hawkish views of "winnable" nuclear war, as well. It wasn't easy for him, and it wasn't painless. His right flank savaged him, accusing him of giving up the nuclear store. But Reagan fought for peace anyway, because he believed in the cause. If that's not something to compliment one of my least favorite modern Presidents on, I don't know what is.

Going further, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country also refers to another Reagan era issue: the Iran-Contra Scandal. Here, a rogue Colonel named West -- think of Colonel Oliver North -- conspires with intergalactic (international) enemies for an illegal policy.   Even Valeris's denial of involvement, "I do not remember," harks back to North's frequent invocation before Congress that he could "not recall" details of the alleged wrongdoing.

In addition to being timely, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country also ably serves the larger franchise (which at the time only included TNG and the movies) by providing the connective tissue between generations.

In this film, we meet Lt. Worf's ancestor, Kirk's lawyer, also played by Michael Dorn. And the writers of the film knowingly set the peace conference at Khitomer, a planet referred to in such TNG episodes as "Heart of Glory." Beyond those small continuity touches, the film finally shows us the ambitious last "piece" of Kirk's era: the turbulent story of how the Klingons and the Federation learned to begin trusting one another.

On a much more amusing note, Star Trek VI seems hell bent on recycling one last time many beloved tropes of the classic series. Kirk gets to kiss a very sexy (but weird) alien woman, Iman's Martia. He is forced into hand-to-hand combat with an alien twice his size on Rura Penthe. And, of course, James Tiberius even gets to face off against a doppelganger, as he did in series segments such as "Whom Gods Destroy" and "The Enemy Within."

Then there are the submarine movie cliches the movie adopts for its final battle, as the equivalent of a German U boat (an invisible Bird of Prey) repeatedly strikes a surface vessel, the Enterprise. We saw this idea originally in "Balance of Terror," but The Undiscovered Country outdoes even that remarkable episode in terms of spectacular effects and suspense.

And suspense is important, especially when we talk of a movie concerned with endings. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier certainly had their moments, but overall they were also jokey, almost flabby affairs.   There wasn't much tension in those stories.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country corrects that deficit in spades. It jauntily plays with the very idea that this is Kirk's last mission, and so every event, every battle, takes on a new importance. These characters aren't coming back for another movie, so we wonder throughout the film...are they going to die?

Have these characters "outlived their usefulness" not just to the Federation, but to the entertainment franchise itself? This uncertainty, when combined with Meyers' dynamic cross-cutting, the mad pans, and the dazzling camera spins, makes for a highly suspenseful adventure, perfectly pitched.

"Second star to the right, and straight on till morning...

Everything comes together in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country's valedictory scene.

Bones reminds the crew that it isn't against the law "to have feelings," and Spock expresses his feelings of disdain for Starfleet rather strongly:

"If I were human, my response would be...go to hell. If I were human," he says, at news of the Enterprise's de-commissioning.

And then Kirk gives his final order from the center seat. "Second star to the right, and straight on till morning," an allusion from Peter Pan that concerns not death, or ending...but perpetual youth and immortality.

The inference is that in overcoming his prejudice regarding the Klingons, Kirk has restored his own soul, his own youth and his own innocence.

And more so, that the Enterprise crew --- especially to those who love her -- shall remain forever young in our hearts, even as it sails into retirement and the history books. That sense of youth is evident in the crew's ability here to change, grow, and surprise us even after twenty five years of going "where no man...where no one...has gone before."

"Second star to the right, and straight on till morning," is the perfect way to bid farewell to these characters. As they contemplate the end of their journeys (a Never Never Land of its own), they do so not with cynicism and prejudice, but with hope, vigor and indeed, a charming, even awe-inspiring innocence.

So as you experience that final, lump-in-your-throat goodbye -- as the original starship Enterprise flies off into the sunset and our cherished memories -- I challenge you to deny that, indeed, the franchise saved one of the best movies for last.