R.CAllen

Hoo boy

What was good about this movie? Well, it had a pretty good sense of humour, strong character work from its established class of players, its absolute darkest moments are well executed (the Bad Guys’ approach to, attack of, boarding onto, and eventual complete destruction of the Enterprise has all the slow yet paradoxical quickness of a home invasion or act of arson; to steal a phrase from what I thought was Dickens but Google informs me was either John Green or Ernest Hemingway, the whole thing happens “slowly, and then all at once”. It’s very well paced and overall was really well done! And everybody being thrown about from side to side of whatever room they were in during it felt really good, them undergoing the changes in orientation as the ship tumbles end over this time around didn’t feel like a soulless action-movie exploration of a space the way it did in the last one or in, say, something like Inception (2010) but as a modern update of what they were trying to do in the old series every time they’d shake the camera and have everyone fake the effects of space turbulence, it was probably some of the best application of modern techniques to that old grammar that this series has done since Nero fired a hole through the side of the Kelvin and a redshirt was dragged by explosive decompression from the comforting sounds and sights of Starfleet into the silent and empty vacuum of space) and ummm, welll, they decided to forego the striptease scene this time around so that’s a point in its favour.

But what was bad about this movie? Oh, no, where to start. On the one hand this film represents a genuine effort to grapple with what Star Trek is, with who these characters are and what they should and can want out of life, with how they deal with their both textual and extra-textual predecessors (I mean, sure, Kirk’s dead dad in this movie is this character’s actual dead dad but in a far more real way Kirk’s dead dad here is William Shatner’s Kirk, the real Kirk, and the real show and the real crew), and in a very true way this is a proper Star Trek story, a tiny little parable about the dangers of fear and mistrust and xenophobia on one level but on the more immediate level much more about Spock and McCoy grousing at each other and with Kirk delivering a little moral at the finish line. When it’s trying to be Star Trek it comes the closest this dumb reboot series has come so far to being about what Star Trek is about but much of the time when it’s trying to be a typical blockbuster action movie it falls flat on its face the same way the first two tries at this dumb thing did. Everything that should be under-explained or subtly explained is over-explained (I’d have to go through the dialogue with a highlighter but basically any time any character talked to any other character about why they should or shouldn’t go somewhere or do something that was explicitly related to the plot, or had to justify after the fact why they did something, well, I noticed it and not in a good way at all, it took me out of the movie, that always takes me out of the movie if it’s done badly and to be fair once or twice when they did this it wasn’t done half-badly, I think the best they got at it was when Spock volunteers McCoy to go with him into the bad guy spaceship to set up the music scheme but even the beginning of that could have done with a re-write) and everything that should remain unexplained or unaddressed isn’t (why do they have the line with Kirk’s boss in their first conference scene where she says the only other ship at the starbase isn’t ready for space yet or something to that effect while also having the final time-lapse of the new Enterprise being constructed? You don’t need both, movie! If you don’t want me to connect the dots beforehand about the final fate of the crew, if you want to dangle the possibility of change for this crew after everything’s resolved here, then you don’t need that line, and if you decide you do need that line because otherwise nerds will be upset that they end up with this new ship out of nowhere then you certainly don’t need that final time-lapse of the ship being built.) and everything that vitally needed to be explained wasn’t properly addressed (how exactly are the bad guys remaining young or healing themselves or whatever it is that they’re doing? Star Trek isn’t magical realism where this explanation can be absent, and it isn’t David Lynch where this explanation can be only merely alluded to or half-hinted at, Star Trek is Star Trek and action movies are action movies and so this needs to be shown to the audience in the exact same way they showed the bio-weapon McGuffin, it’s not enough to show a drained and desiccated crewmember in one scene and in a different scene much later show the bad guy with something spooky in his hand and then soon afterwards show the bad guy suspending two redshirts upside down and absorbing their lifeforce and to have another scene on a screen where the bad guy alludes to the technology they have here for doing this and then show another drained dead corpse and then have our characters say what is happening, I am barely sure I know how it happens and I’m a dumb aspie nerd [basically, I think that Krall has one half of this superweapon created by the Ancient Ones that he found on the planet, he’s got the Gatekeeper and that kills people one or two at a time at close range and transfers something of their natures and selves into the guy who kills them, he lends this out from time to time to his two (or more?) underlings and they use it for the same purpose, but once he gets the Keymaster and plugs it into the Gatekeeper it becomes active as this big bio-weapon, for some reason half of this ancient superweapon is harmless on its own and the half he has had all along is this terrible and awful thing, I don’t know, I am not entirely sure, I’m mostly confused because I think we see the drained redshirt corpse on the Enterprise either before Krall gets onboard and/or I’m not sure that the discovery of the drained redshirt corpse is paired with a change to the monster mask worn by any of the bad guy alien actors, in any case the raison d'être of these new Star Trek bad guys is not as cleanly explained to the audience as I’d like and while the fact that who these guys are and how they came to be is intended as a Shyamalan twist is probably partly to blame for that messiness that’s still no real excuse) and while that’s pretty much my biggest beef with every big dumb action movie out there these days I felt that it was particularly egregious in this case.

Like, what was this movie even? If I had to describe it’d probably be something like “Characters, wearied and weighed down by the legacies that lie behind them, struggle to prevent a primordial grotesque version of themselves from destroying the utopian perfected launching pad for what they hope would be their better selves but in the process of triumphing over their adversaries re-discover the value of the very things that wearied and weighed them down in the first place.” It’s, like, hey you guys, what if the real new worlds and new civilizations out there were the friends we made along the way!?!? But that’s only if I’m being super generous because here’s how I would actually describe it : “A guy has to keep a thingamabob away from one space lady, so he hides it in a second space lady, but then a third space lady helps him out, there are two other space mans wandering around in the middle of this, too, oh and sometimes some of these space ladies and space mans fight.” Like, I don’t even know any more, is that a fair way to characterize a movie that had some pretty fair stretches of it that I mostly enjoyed, no, not really, no more than it would be fair to characterize The Avengers (2012) as a movie where a robot and a man dressed up as a flag repair a giant ceiling fan to keep a flying boat aloft, but every half-good movie out there stands right on that line for me where it comes close to being defined in my mind by the parts of it where it’s at it’s worst, where it’s at it’s laziest, where it’s just not very good at all. I don’t even know any more. I haven’t seen the new Captain America, I haven’t seen the Batman v Superman, I haven’t seen the new X-Men, I haven’t seen the Independence Day sequel or the Tarzan, I don’t think I’ve even been to the movies at all since maybe Hail Caesar (which isn’t so out of the ordinary for me, I guess, there was a pretty long stretch of time, nearly a decade, where I could probably count every movie I saw in a theatre on a hand a half’s worth of fingers), I decided to sort of quit with the Nightly in the dumb hope that if I absented this nearly lifelong involvement with this particular corner of the Internet then something new and wholesome and good would emerge into my dumb life out of the gaping chasm but obviously that was dumbly optimistic, obviously if I want something different I have to do something different, just not doing something doesn’t automatically change a person. Like, some dumb part of myself is glad that I’ve only seen the new Star Wars a grand total of one (1) more time since the first time I saw it (which mostly just confirmed a lot of my complaints and problems with it while introducing some whole new ones, I guess it is really hard to do these things, to make these Star Wars and Star Treks, although I did notice that the bad guy planet doesn’t actually explode like Alderaan, it gets ignited into a new sun to replace the one it consumed as fuel, which is an apposite fate for it rather than a poorly chosen one, I was wrong, mea culpa about the bad guy planet) because that’s not a road I want to go down any more. I don’t really know if I’m built for new roads but I hope at the very least I can find some way to, I don’t know, I just want to un-road.

Anyway, looking forward to the next one, apparently Chris Hemsworth being a part of it wasn’t just some nerd clickbait thing rumour but was actually true, it’s going to happen, man, what will they think of next, man, I hope it’s not an action movie where nearly all of the action is done in a way that my eyes can’t follow it and they mostly just re-use the music they used the last times around and they give one of the best actors working today literally forty seconds of screen time where he looks and speaks like himself because that’s what they did this time. There were times when the growly obstructioning of his voice really worked, really communicated what he was going through, but often enough I literally didn’t hear what he said, same thing with Jambalaya, there were lines of hers that didn’t register. Maybe it’s me. Maybe the fact that for enough of this movie I really couldn’t see what was going on where or what its meaning was is its real flaw, I mean, I imagine the movie’s audience’s reaction is mostly going to be about whether it was gay enough or too gay (Sulu wasn’t gay enough for me, but both Jambalaya and Idris Elba were just the right amount of gay for me) and about who was dead enough or too dead (pretty sad about Anton and a little less sad about Leonard, but still, sad) and for a certain specific small sub-segment of the audience I assume a whole lot of it is going to just be about how to reconcile some of the discrepancies involved in this new timeline’s version of events before, during, and after the UPN spin-off show Enterprise that was on the air from 2001-2005 (apparently that dumb show really struck a chord with the guys who wrote this because that’s what they chose to draw on here and that just surprises me, I get putting a reference to Section 31 in the last one but what goes on here is some primo completist leave-no-stone-unturned nerd referencing to the least beloved spin-off show, I would have been less surprised to see the Delta Quadrant show up here than what does squirm its way into it, I mean, come on) but for me this was mostly just a dumb movie that made me feel bad after watching it. That might just be on me, though, and maybe I’ll change my mind if I see it again, certainly Karl Urban really gets to shine for once, if you like your Karls Urban you’re gonna love this dumb film, it totally urbanizes every karl

P.S. it’s late but I just re-read the above spew and I feel like there’s a whole lot of stuff left over here like I didn’t really address everything that bothered me about this movie and that much of what I remembered of what bugged me about it were some of the least important bits mentioned here, I think maybe my movie complaining muscles have atrophied from lack of use

Okay. What even was that? I get the desire to rhyme, parallel, and emulate what we’re familiar with and I get the desire to really deviate from those familiarities in new and unexpected ways and I even get the desire to hold out what we’re familiar with at arm’s reach and tease us with its absence and the tantalizing notion that maybe if we’re good it’ll show up but I don’t really get why anyone would decide that all three of those desires are perfectly valid ways to tell this story all at once. Why just switch back and forth between them without much in the way of rhyme or reason, don’t even pick a lane, all three of these are equally good ways to do Star Wars in the eyes of the people who made this movie so I, as an audience member, had better just go along for the ride(s). I don’t want to go on three or four different kinds of ride at once. One ride at a time, please.

Because it seems to me to be there were at minimum least (sorry, is that redundant, should I just say "least" or "minimum", is this like the scene in Deadwood with Al Swearingen insisting the newspaper says "free gratis") something like three different movies here :

1) here’s these new people, they’re really fun and exciting, watch them run around and have their new people adventures.

2) here’s the old peoples, we’ll dole them out one at a time to you, don’t rush, there will be plenty of old people around, their faces are literally getting older by the minute so don’t you worry none they’ll be old enough once we get to them

3) the MYSTERY, ooooh, the MYSTERY of who these young people truly are and the mystery of what keeps the old people away from your eyes, who can say what the answers to your questions will be, oooooh

So for me the best parts of Movie 1 were things like Rey scavenging for parts and sledding down a sandy hill or clinging to a wall in the interiors of a superweapon above a deep abyss and the best parts of Movie 2 were the handful of existing imageries (the X-wings, the Falcon, I guess for my purposes in Star Wars the ships are basically people) from the Original Trilogy brought to the screen with a level of motion and semi-verisimilitude that all those millions of dollars can really offer and the best parts of Movie 3 were none of it, come on, give me a break. And any time I would get comfortable with one of these movies another one of the movies would decide that it’s its turn now. Sometimes with no, really no, warning. I mean, for a concrete example here, this is a movie that’s okay with killing off Max von Sydow but Oscar Isaac gets to come back because … of the sequels? I am okay with a movie where Max von Sydow gets killed, I’m sure there’s some super cool Campbellian worldview where the old man dying at that point in the narrative really makes a lot of sense, he gave the USB drive to Oscar Isaac, sets everything in motion, dies to show what’s up with the bad guy, he has fulfilled his role in the movie and we don’t need any more of him, right? But, uh oh, Oscar Isaac has the same deal, fulfills his role in the movie, sets everything up, but he’s not really dead and comes back later and then disappears from the movie’s very end because, guess what, he’s not really needed this time around. I assume when this movie was in the early stages and they had a big whiteboard and they were figuring out how to route their characters through the handful of scenes and moments and nearly-meaningful action sequences (e.g. what was the deal with the jibbjabbler tentacle monsters and the two rival gangs? What was that for? What was its purpose within this movie?) they got a little antsy about who goes where when and decided to simplify things, cut it down from three guys to two guys, and maybe they figured that Poe being out of the picture for half the film was somehow like Han disappearing from the final Death Star battle until the very end of Star Wars, maybe they figured him showing up there would be feel like a great big surprise, and it did, to me, but not in a good way at all, because this is a movie with the courage to hold Luke Skywalker offscreen but not the courage to follow what I assume the meaning of their two big new characters is, that the fate of the galaxy doesn’t lie in the hands of the most daring pilots on their secret mission(s) but in the ordinary people who are proved to be extraordinary by the choices they make. I don’t know if a no-Poe post-Jakku cut of this film would magically solve my issues with it the way a nearly-no-Jar-Jar cut of Phantom Menace seems to blow away some fans problems with that mess (and this is not to say that there’s something wrong with the character or whatever, he’s great, I’d gladly watch a movie about him) (btw that goes for Jar Jar too in addition to Poe) but this seemed like the most prominent example of how uneven and uneasy this film was to me. Poe feels to me like something out of or actually more in keeping with Movie 2, he’s not from the Orginal Trilogy (duh-doy!) but he feels more of it than out of it, if that makes any sense, he’s exactly what you would expect from a Star Wars sequel or even a Star Wars videogame, an EU work, and while this is obviously all arguable and personal to the view of every audience member, our other two heroes don’t. For one thing, they’re actually heroes, this is a movie where their lives really change, he doesn’t, he, what, gives up his jacket and loses his volleyball, it’s a day at the beach for him. Yeah, I guess he really is my Jar Jar for this, I’m focusing on him (and, I’d like to emphasize again, he’s really good in this actually, but him coming back and getting a quick hug with Finn doesn’t feel right to me, it’s like if the Star Wars ’77 had a Death Star space battle where Beru flew alongside the X-wings in Luke’s speeder) rather than the movie’s myriad other problems.

- okay how many scenes of them talking to a giant Andy Serkis were there, I lost count, because frankly even if there were only two that was one too many. Why am I being forced to see the same scene over and over again? The movie is already basically a poem, a symphony, a whatever-you-wanna-call-it of another movie, that movie we all really like, which was in and of itself intended to remind the audience of earlier movies and visual methds of storytelling, so I’m okay with watching a movie that’s just there to remind me of an earlier movie but please pretty please can this earlier movie not be the exact movie I am watching right then and there. That’s too much movie reminding. Flick my ear, movie, sure, but don’t flick my ear like that. Flick gentle and firm and with purpose, I know how I like my ears to be flicked but this wasn’t it.

- Are we okay with planets being blown up or not? Just the bad guy planets? I’m not sure confusing a weapon with its target is the vast improvement in storytelling this movie wanted it to be, I got what I needed from the hologram of this new thingamabob being bigger than the old Death Star, I don’t need to have this new Sequel Trilogy Death Star be a world entire unto itself. It shouldn’t snow on the Death Star, JJAbrams or whoever was responsible for this, I saw this movie on literally Christmas Eve and I didn’t need for my only sight of snowfall to be amidst a genocidal machine. It’s bigger, it steals away the sunlight and uses it to shoot five angry red things at the faraway goodies, that’s more than enough, adding to that doesn’t so much gild the lily as maybe crossbreed the lily with the bee. And, who knows, maybe it was a good idea to do it this way. Maybe it was brilliant. But what does that leave for the next guy? There’s two more of these movies (three, actually, minimum, because come on, this is 2015, none of us were born yesterday, they turned the Hobbit into three films, they split the final installment of every action-adventure fantasy sci-fi makebelieve in two like they’re King Solomon adjudicating the fate of a hooker’s baby, basically we all know that the Sequel Trilogy isn’t going to be anything less than four movies minimum and even if they don’t defy God and numbers and just keep it to three like everyone wants then there’s still what’s coming down the pipeline in thirty-eight years when they drag poor John Boyega out of bed and pay him twenty-five million dollars to die so aging millennials can have a feeling in their old cold hearts) and they got to blow something really big up in at least one of them and it’s going to need something new about it too. Even the Return of the Jedi Death Star was a teensy bit different than the Star Wars ’77 one, remember? You gottta plan for the long haul. Conserve your strength. Gotta make these Death Stars different.

- was Jakku threatened at the end or was it really just the new Resistance base with General Leia and Viscount Ackbar and Model Of A Modern Major Ken Leung and whoever else was invited to come play that day? That’s not enough. You can’t blow up like half a dozen Alderaans and then expect me to care about a mere single solitary knockoff Yavin IV, that’s not the way this game of ever-increasing threat escalation works, first you come at me with a knife, then I come at you with a gun, then it’s two guns, then it’s an anonymous stormtrooper holding a weird fake lightsaber-alternative in a really bad pre-emptive attempt at a final lightsaber duel which kind of ruins the impact of the actual eventual true lightsaber fight, and at the end we all get to go home and ruminate about how this is a movie that doesn’t seem to really understand when less is more, when more is more, and when enough’s enough.

- did they add in extra dialogue after they shot it? I, umm, don’t really know how movies work. Clearly! But at least one of Finn’s quips in the hotseat of the Falcon’s guns seemed to be ADRed or Foleyed or what-have-you, and they give Han Solo his best line (“Move, ball”) when his face is off screen and in a way that made me feel they only remembered after they shot his scenes that probably one/fifth of Han Solo’s appeal is him saying mean things to objects, inanimate or otherwise.

- the dialogue in general wasn’t quite up to snuff, I mean, when it comes to a Star Wars film you probably gotta grade on a curve but even still there were about three problem areas here :

a) a not-entirely-unwelcome emphasis on heavily emotionally inflected repetition, people would say things twice sometimes, and not in the usual boring blockbuster way of one character saying back what that character said to him earlier (umm, let me see for an example, “What? You didn’t get the memo?” and “Always keep your footing!” from the first Nolan Batman, which really has more than a little to answer for in terms of this movie, well, probably all big movies now really) but in a way that would sometimes work and sometimes not, I feel like more than once characters would say something and then literally moments later say/scream it again, was I hallucinating, was I having a stroke, I don’t know but I’ll tell you what I’m not going to go back and see this dumb movie again to find out anymore than I would replay a good Star Wars videogame after finishing it right back to the beginning until the very end

b) hey, remember when the guy said the thing in the earlier Star Wars movie well here it comes again but slightly different or whatever. And, yes, that kind of comes with the territory here but even so at its best this only works so well, you can kind of see it in the works of some good EU authors when they’re trying to hew closely to an established vocabulary or syntax or what-have-you of this galaxy far far away, but it’s probably better restricted to keeping a character saying the kind of things that character would say (some people are really good at this when it comes to, for example, Darth Vader) rather than just trying to keep the people in Star Wars saying things that sound like Star Wars.

c) the nonsense words weren’t good nonsense words! When the people in the Middle Trilogy spoke or sung nonsense it was good nonsense, it sounded good in my ears, but now my ears are older and the nonsense sounds all wrong. Both the alien language nonsense words and the makebelieve technobabble nonsense words didn’t have quite the right ring to them. By the by, I think this is basically my entire screed summed up into fifty or so words although maybe you only need two, “I’M OLDER”, that does it, that explains why this movie is bad.

- everybody gets full marks just for showing up as far as I’m concerned. John Williams? Full marks! Ben Burtt? Full marks! Tiny floating practice-drone thingee? Full marks! You all did your part.

- Daisy Ridley holding out that lightsaber with that look on her face, pleading and desperate for her life of struggle to have meaning and purpose, come on, I’m not made of stone. I just don’t understand how a movie that has it within itself to end that way doesn’t have it within itself to practice some restraint in a few other areas too.

- this whole thing, all of Star Wars really, now reminds me a lot of Frank Miller and The Dark Knight Returns. Another classic hugely influential work, another time where its creator returned to that milieu while seemingly abandoning all aspects of craft and attentive care which made that work so good in the first place while even still clearly clinging to their own idiosyncratic vision of what the work should be, and now a sequel where other hands manufacture something inspired by that original classic while being altogether lacking in that je ne sais quoi which made the original a classic in the first place. You want to do more Star Wars? You want to do more Dark Knight Returns? Join the line with the rest of pop culture which has been trying to do that in some way shape or form for thirty-plus years and, oh great, now you have the imprimatur of the original creator, good for you, that’s really not as much help as you might think. Some (lots? All?) of these people who are going to be toiling in the mines of the new Disney Star Wars have done really interesting things so far up until now and then this floundering mess comes out, I don’t know if the ones who are basically just babes in the woods (super condescending of me, sure, but seriously watch that Jurassic Park sequel and that stupid time travel meme movie and then tell me how confident you or anyone else should be that the guy who did those is doing a Star Wars, go on, do it) even have much of a chance. Will the Star Wars continue until morale improves? I don’t know. Maybe I have too high expectations when it comes to the idea of a Star Wars live action movie, I don’t know, maybe if I adjusted myself and pretended this was just another in a long line of hurriedly dashed-off Expanded Universe product which I gobbled up for years and years happily and greedily maybe then this would feel like a good movie. Probably not, though, it’d just my brain saying things like “that comes from here” and “but then this contradicts that” and “you can’t make the jump to lightspeed under those circumstances” and “that’s not how maps are” nonstop instead of all this here.

- I kind of kept away from the newses, the spoilers, the trailers, the hype machine, the fans, in an effort to keep this movie away from the parts of my brain which can so easily fool me into liking anything with Star Wars labeled on it and to just eagerly seeing how the pieces of ephemera absorbed in advance are apportioned throughout a film (that was kind of how I saw the Prequels, just super excited to see everything from a preview photo show up in the actual film itself). I wanted to just see a movie. I’m genuinely unsure if I would have had the reaction I did if I hadn’t done that (or if other fans/critics/humanbeings concur, haven’t yet checked out what other people have thought about this yet) or if maybe the way I feel about this movie is even attributable to any properties of the movie itself, for all I know this is all on me and my head.

- lots of pretty things to look at and see! So many big snuffling huffing beasts! Some magnificent vistas (although where they were exactly was sometimes in question, also whether they were total planetwide environments or just individual portions of a varied whole)! One or two interesting scene transitions (there was a sort of pinhole effect that seemed like something different than the usual kinds of Star Wars screenwipes)! That spy for the First Order lounging in the arms of the big pig-beast with her nifty sharktooth pattern onesie! Such colours! So many lights and darks (I think they were there because this is a movie that’s literally about the light side and the dark side, shhh, it’s a secret)! Many interesting shapes running and jumping! I’m only half sarcastic here, I think for Lucas especially a lot of Star Wars is just taking that science fiction or fantasy standard cold sterile unlived in environments that never feel as convincing as when movies are set in foreign times and places and really throwing that out the window, making sure there’s a droid to repair that window, literally, I think there’s a comedian (Dana Gould, almost certainly) who has a bit about how in the Prequels Lucas does the opposite of what every director would do if a window cleaner got in the middle of their shot, he wants that guy cleaning the windows in his shots while the main characters are speaking, he’ll spend extra money so that guy ruining the shot is a robot, he’ll put that guy in the shot deliberately, in a very real way that guy in the shot is more the point of the scene than the actual characters in it. I think that was a level on which this film mostly succeeded. Jakku feels like a place where stories happen in much the same way Tatooine in the original first one felt like a place where stories happen, it had that place-ness which real films offer when they shoot on location, if that makes even a lick of sense at all to anyone still reading these words.

- and the surprises! So surprising!

- is Chewie retarded? I don’t mean that pejoratively. I think he may actually have some developmental issues; some sort of learning disorder, I don’t know, maybe he was just hit over the head one too many times over the years. But he really seems to be choking the life out of Finn when the guy is trying to bandage him up and the half of the conversation later on with the Rebel nurse which we understand doesn’t make him come off like too bright of a guy, really. I’m sure a rewatch of the Original Trilogy would give a lot more supporting evidence for a theory of Chewie maybe having some Special Needs (umm, he doesn’t balk at suspiciously free meat on a stick in some random jungle, he can’t manage to put Threepio’s head on the right way, all that loud and inappropriately timed braying laughter). I am a little more than half serious, here, I love Chewie, he’s the best, but maybe we need to really examine his behaviour and come to some conclusions about what sort of environment he would really thrive in. I don’t think palling around with a lowlife (and now apparently semi-senile) criminal is doing him any favours.