Star Trek Into Darkness

Space, the final frontier.  These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.  Her five year mission: to explore strange new worlds.  To seek out new life and civilizations.  To boldly go where no one has gone before.

(I could not think of a way to talk about this movie without spoiling it.  You have been warned.)

J.J. Abrams' 2009 reboot of Star Trek was (mostly) a triumph of outside-the-box thinking.  Tasked with both honoring the copious continuity of the already-established Star Trek universe, and allowing the beloved characters from the original series to have fresh new adventures, Abrams and screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman cut the Gordian Knot with a time travel plot that, while it may not have made a lot of logical sense, created a universe which honored the past while not being beholden to it.

Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and company return in Star Trek Into Darkness no longer having to justify their own existence, able to simply have their own adventures, wherever they may take them.  A new threat to Starfleet in the guise of cadet John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) emerges, first blowing up a Starfleet intelligence outpost in London and then, when the top brass gather together to determine how to respond, attacking the meeting and in the process killing Kirk's mentor, Admiral Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood).  Harrison escapes to the Klingon homeworld of Kronos and Kirk is sent on a clandestine mission to assassinate him by Admiral Alexander Marcus (Peter Weller).  But neither Harrison nor Marcus are what they seem, and Kirk is faced with a series of difficult choices as he slowly uncovers the truth.

Harrison, of course, is no such thing, and is in fact the infamous Khan Noonian Singh, genetic superman and primary antagonist of Star Trek II.  Where the Khan of Star Trek II was completely driven by his hatred of Kirk, this Khan is mostly indifferent towards Kirk, and seeks his revenge against Admiral Marcus, who awoke Khan from cryosleep to help Starfleet develop weapons to use against the Klingons, and holds his colleagues hostage to force him to comply.  Kirk and Khan develop an enmity towards one another as the film progresses, but their relationship lacks the depth that "Space Seed" gave to Star Trek II.

Star Trek (the film) pointed towards a future for this franchise that was free from the series' continuity, that could blaze its own path in whatever direction it desired.  I saw a version of Star Trek Into Darkness that honored this idea, very briefly, when Khan and Kirk team up to take down Marcus' enormous prototype ship in the 2nd act.  That was a scene that said, we do not have to be defined by the past.  Perhaps Khan doesn't have to simply be a villain, perhaps he can be something more than that, a character who exists in an all-too-unusual grey area within the Star Trek universe.  Khan had done terrible things, granted, but so had Marcus, and maybe the script could have figured out a way to thread that needle, to at least partially justify Khan's actions and make him into something different, a character who wore neither white hat nor black hat but could be useful in certain circumstances and would be, going forward, a wild card out on the edges of space, always in the back of our heroes' minds.

But then it all fell apart, as Khan returned to the previous status quo, seeking petty revenge against Kirk and being foiled by the crew of the Enterprise.  "Where no one has gone before", it's the last goddamned words of the intro, the ones right before the music kicks in.  Did no one pay attention to this fact?  Did no one think, at any point, that this movie so thoroughly and completely refuses to boldly go anywhere but the same place that previous people had already gone?  We have Khan running through the same character beats, with a brief respite in the middle before the plunge back into outright villainy.  We have Carol Marcus (Alice Eve), inserted into the franchise at the exact same time point that she was in the first film series, here mostly just taking up space aboard the Enterprise but I swear to God I expected her final scene to reveal her to be pregnant (it didn't, which is something I guess).  We have a death in a radiation chamber, and the film practically begs audiences to be impressed by the fact that it inverts the scene from Star Trek II, putting Kirk in the chamber and Spock angrily screaming for vengeance against Khan as Kirk dies.  And the emotional response to this scene is completely muted given the realities of 21st century blockbuster franchise - there is no way that a second film in a series is going to kill off its hero, so the only reason that this scene exists is to remind audiences of the earlier film.  Everything here, ultimately, relies so much on the goodwill of audiences who loved Star Trek II that it forgets to actually create an interesting and believable story for its heroes to play around in.

In the end, this is a movie that posits that we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, that people are incapable of changing in any meaningful way and we are all fated to play the same roles, in the same way, with the same people, again and again and again.  That would be alright if the film cared to explore that idea with any sort of depth, but this is a movie that seemingly couldn't care less about anything but to make cheap references and remind audiences of an old movie that it actually loved on its own terms, rather than just as one enormous exercise in self-referencing.  Star Trek put together a new cast of actors playing a beloved set of characters, and discovered that those characters could still seem fresh in the 21st century.  Star Trek Into Darkness puts them together again, and weighs them down so thoroughly with the stale remnants of the previous century's stories that it suggests the filmmakers have already given up on the idea of boldly taking this franchise anywhere but backwards.  C-

Serenity

When the Avengers movie blew a massive hole in the box office in the summer of 2012, it felt like a triumphant coronation for a guy in Joss Whedon who had had a lot of well-documented struggles in reaching a mass audience with his particular brand of self-aware geekery.  I'm not a member of the cult of Joss - I have never watched a single episode of any of his TV shows (Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse) - but even I felt good for the guy, because if there's one thing that comes across loud and clear with Whedon it's how much he genuinely loves his fans.  It can be easy for the creators of cult phenomena to become jaded by the fervency of the cult, but Whedon never seems to fall into this trap, and the reverence with which he treats his fan base is something I respect immensely.

When Firefly was unceremoniously canceled by Fox after airing 11 (out of 14 produced) under-performing episodes (and, to be honest, Fox dicked around with the show in ways that were never conducive to building a large audience) it was destined to be a lamented cult failure, cherished as much for its pristine beauty (shows that only run for 14 episodes never run into the universal problem of the cult hit, which is the impatience fans have with the inevitable dips in quality of a long-running TV show) as for its merits as a TV series.  Somehow Whedon, who is obviously deeply attached to this project, managed to convince Universal Pictures to acquire the rights and bankroll a feature film, which picked up the characters where the series left off.  Serenity hit theaters in the late summer of 2005, almost three years after Firefly was given the axe.

Some back of the envelope math - something like 4.5 million people were tuning in to Firefly by the time it got cancelled.  If each and every one of those people bought a 10 dollar movie ticket to see it in the theater, the film would gross 45 million dollars domestically (and a film based on a TV show that barely made a dent in America would probably not be a huge hit overseas.)  Serenity, at a very marked-down budget, cost about 40 million dollars to make.  Add in marketing and promotion and you're at 50, 60 million dollars.  That's a shitty investment for a movie studio unless you're convinced you can pull a substantial audience who already had one chance to invest in this world and declined.

I can't really figure out if Whedon meant to set up a new film franchise, or if he just wanted to give fans one last chance to say goodbye to these characters.  The film is certainly open-ended enough to suggest further adventures, and movie studios don't usually take a chance on action-adventure films from novice directors unless they see sequel potential.  The members of the cast who couldn't sign up for multiple films were killed off on-screen, so someone at least was thinking about sequels.  On the other hand....I've watched Serenity.  And it is really hard for me to picture anyone involved as genuinely seeing this as a good entry-point for a new generation of fans.  In no uncertain terms, I think that Whedon either didn't really care about sequels, or he seriously miscalculated how newbie-friendly the film he made actually is.  Joss Whedon loves his fans, and he made a film that, I believe, is meant to please them (how effective he was in that task I'll leave to actual fans to determine).  But he didn't really make a movie that is meant for the rest of us, and it's not really a surprise that Serenity cratered at the box office, and this universe is kept alive only through ancillary media with low start-up costs (ie. novels, comics, and pen-and-paper RPG's).

There's an infodump at the beginning that lays out the basics of this universe - inner planets, Alliance; outer planets, not; some kind of war, Reavers that eat people.  It leaves a lot of unanswered questions but it fulfills its function well enough.  The problem really sets in when we're introduced to the crew of the Serenity.  Whedon chooses to go with a show-offy 5 minute unbroken take, following Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) through his ship, as he checks in with everyone.  There are six other people aboard the ship and, while we get something of each person's personality (Jayne is a hothead, Kaylee is mousy and in love with Simon, Simon is a haughty dickface) what we don't get, and never really do, is any sense of the relationships between most of them.  That can't be helped to some degree, but what's most frustrating is just how little we understand why they are under Mal's employ.  Mal is obviously cut from the Han Solo template, right down to his wardrobe, but just based on what this film tells us about him, he is kind of an unpleasant fuckstick, alternating between unfeeling and self-righteous.  There is clearly some kind of bond between these people that is lingering just underneath the surface, but it is not shared with us here.  To give just one obvious example - Zoe (Gina Torres) is obviously the person that Mal trusts the most on the ship, and she is something close to his right-hand woman.  I am quite certain that she and Mal have a lot of history between them.  But I haven't the vaguest clue about what that history is, so when Mal really turns on the self-righteousness and basically forces the crew to go on a suicide mission for nebulous reasons, I can't remotely piece together why they all say yes.

I also can't really figure out what the crew of Serenity does.  I mean, I know what they are tasked to do in this movie - protect River Tam (Summer Glau) and figure out why the Alliance wants her so bad.  But I'm not sure what their greater goal is.  We see them go on one non-plot-related mission, which is basically an armed bank robbery.  Actually, that's precisely what it is.  Is that what this crew does?  Travel from planet to planet and rob people?  Are they just an interplanetary gang of thieves?  That seems unlikely.  So what do they do in the broader sense?  I have no idea.  This is one of the inherent benefits that the Star Trek franchise gets from working out of a military framework.  If you watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture without knowing anything about Star Trek at all, you'd probably have a lot of these same questions, but the answer to most of them ultimately winds up at "because they are under orders to do so".  That's why they go on missions, and why the crew never abandons a fuck-up like Kirk.  With Serenity, I'm just totally adrift when it comes to motivations, and that's a big problem.

The acting is a mixed bag, as one would expect from the cast of a television show.  I can see the appeal of Fillion's too-cool-for-school attitude, although I find his performance somewhat one-note.  Glau, who is asked to carry large portions of this film, sometimes suggests interesting depths to the damaged River Tam and sometimes is in way, way over her head.  Alan Tudyk does his Alan Tudyk thing as Wash (which is a thing I mostly like); the same could be said for Adam Baldwin as Jayne, who is basically playing his character from Full Metal Jacket but in space.  Jewel Staite is cute as Kaylee, although her performance is all on the surface.  Sean Maher's performance as Simon is something close to dreadful.  Gina Torres is the one actor in the main cast who seems like a significantly more talented performer than the material she's given here as Zoe - I would have preferred to watch a movie about her character than one about River.  Chiweter Ejiofor chews the scenery nicely as the guest villain, and I'm glad they allowed him to use his natural accent.  And I'm not really sure what movie David Krumholtz is in but it's not really this one - the scenes with him seem mostly like a parody of space opera films.

I can't avoid talking about the script.  To call it "in-jokey" would be doing a disservice to just how alienating a lot of it is.  People say things like this: "We're gonna explode?  I don't want to explode."  Kaylee uses the phrase "Twixt my nethers" at one point.  And people keep using the word, "gorramn" which I always thought was one of those dumb internet memes like the obnoxious "ermagerd" but is apparently some sort of in-universe term of choice.  Ultimately the blame here probably has to fall on Battlestar Galactica (the original, and then the remake for continuing the trend), for suggesting to sci-fi writers that it's okay to create words and then beat them into the ground.  It is not.  Everyone needs to stop doing this.

I can enjoy Serenity on an entirely surface level, as an action-adventure space opera that does a lot with its limited budget.  It's a sci-fi movie and it's not brainless, so its simple existence is already unusual.  The problem is that this is a lived-in universe where the lived-in part of it is obviously only meant for people who have already invested in the 14 hours of television preceeding.  That's not a huge commitment for a person to make, and on some level I'm just being lazy in not wanting to put in the effort, but a feature film that runs in movie theaters should be expected to be more friendly towards novices, and this one just isn't.

A few odds and ends:

The opening exposition involves nested stories, and I hate nested stories as much as I hate nested dreams.

The cute, mousy girl down in Engineering has a thing for the haughty charisma-vacuum that is Simon.  Why?  This is one of those things that is particularly alienating for a non-fan, because Simon is awful, and this sub-plot screams at me that I Just Don't Get It, Man.

I've been around the internet block long enough to know that Browncoats are a big thing in Firefly fandom, but when this movie mentions the term it never really does the work of explaining how they fit into the universe.  They were I guess the army of the outer planets that fought the inner planets?  And Mal was part of that army?

There are a lot of fisticuffs in this universe.  At least 3 separate scenes of kung-fu fighting from what I remember.  Whedon fell a little too in love with pitting his characters against one another in hand-to-hand combat.

The brief space battle at the end between the Alliance and the Reavers is very busy, with a whole bunch of ships that aren't really distinguishable from one another.

I don't really understand why the crew of the Serenity needs to use Krumholtz's equipment to broadcast the message about the Reavers that winds up being the film's MacGuffin.  It seems like there should be a million easier ways to get the message out, especially since it ends with the crew defending a location against a much larger army of Reavers, while Mal has to jump across a chasm to get to Krumholtz's stuff, Super Mario style.

Safety Not Guaranteed

You know those recut trailers on youtube, the ones that turn The Shining into a goofy comedy, or The Big Lebowski into an uplifting buddy adventure?  This movie is basically a feature length version of one of those things.  Take a movie about a deranged, paranoid loner and, by casting primarily comedic actors, heightening the comedy elements of individual scenes, and scoring it to a gentle, indie-infused soundtrack, turn it into a romantic comedy.  Some of it works, some of it doesn't, but since how you feel about the film I think ultimately revolves, in large part, around how you feel about the ending, I'll only say that I did not like the ending, and that because of it the movie was more miss than hit for me.

Aubrey Plaza plays Darius Britt, a 20-something interning at a Seattle magazine and the character, not unsurprisingly, is a carbon copy of the character she plays on Parks and Recreation.  She spends the bulk of the movie interacting with and ultimately forming a bond with the aforementioned deranged loner played by Mark Duplass, and you can see in this relationship why Plaza was cast in the role.  Duplass's character Ken Calloway is something resembling the mirror universe version of Andy Dwyer - they have the same self-confident, doofy insanity, but while Dwyer's craziness is soft and round and comfortable, Calloway's is sharp and not a little terrifying.  Calloway has placed the ad seen the poster in a local paper, and one of the writers at Plaza's newspaper, Jeff (Jake Johnson) takes her and another intern, Arnau (Karan Soni) along to do a story on him. Duplass's character, it turns out, is dead serious about planning to travel through time, and he sees spies and assassins around every corner.  A few different choices here and there and this is basically a slasher movie, with Plaza getting closer and closer to the man who will ultimately butcher her friends and then turn on her (and of course Plaza would get the better of him, because she's excellent Final Girl material, all prickly edges that hide a soft center).  The film even toys with this expectation, filming Plaza's entrance into Duplass's house very similarly to how a genuine slasher movie would.

But it's not that kind of movie, it's the kind of movie where Duplass romances Plaza with a song he wrote on a zither, and where Johnson's douchebag character hooks back up with an old flame who he expects to look  like something resembling Kristen Bell (who makes a late-film cameo as the girl Duplass is traveling back in time for) but who is ever so slightly bigger, and redder of hair, and older-looking than that.  I won't go too much into that part of the film except to say that it doesn't really earn its resolution.

There's a low-key good-natured energy to the movie.  I didn't find anything about it actively hateable, but I did not like the ending, and too much of the film's narrative focus is built around what, exactly, Duplass's character is up to for me to give this much more than a tepid recommendation.  C+