When does it become clear to the people involved in making a film that the finished product is going to be a turkey? Well, if it's some direct-to-video detritus, probably "before the script is even written." But if it's a film with A-list pretenses, your Giglis, your Leonard: Part 6's, it presumably takes a while for everyone to realize what they're doing. A bad screenplay can be salvaged. A bad performance can be muted in the editing booth. An incoherent mess can be streamlined. But at some point, if things are really dire, it probably becomes obvious to enough people on the production that things are not going to end well, and their job is just to finish the damn thing and move on to the next project.
1941 is a massive turkey. It is incomprehensible and unfunny, and it is those things for almost two and a half excruciating hours. It was actually not a box office bomb, making three times as much as it cost at theaters, and I feel sorry for every single person who bought a ticket to the latest blockbuster from the man who made Jaws and Close Encounters, and had to sit through this piece of shit in a dark theater. At least I got to pause it and take a break. Watching this from start to finish straight through might have destroyed my mind.
The film is ever-so-loosely based on the bombardment of Ellwood, when a Japanese sub shelled an oil refinery near Los Angeles in early 1942. After Pearl Harbor there was a lot of paranoia on the American coasts about what the Japanese or Germans might get up to, and the shelling of Ellwood fed into that sense. We are introduced to a Japanese sub off the California coast at the very beginning, and then at the very end it does some shelling. In the middle, a whole bunch of mostly-unrelated nonsense happens, and a huge cast of famous and semi-famous people show up for a few minutes here and there as the plot determinedly refuses to actually go anywhere. A lot of stuff gets destroyed - planes, tanks, a house, a paint factory for some reason. It's all supposed to be funny and almost none of it is. I don't know whose decision it was to make this material into a slapstick comedy - Spielberg has a well-known love for Stanley Kubrick, so at some point I'm pretty certain he saw 1941 as his Dr. Strangelove. But between his ham-handed direction (seriously, everything gets destroyed, it is exhausting) and the joke-free screenplay, the film is neither funny nor poignant. It's not lifeless, at least, because at any given moment about 5 different things are happening on screen. But it's all so tiresomely vaudevillian. One of the characters, I am not making this up, is a ventriloquist dummy, and the film treats it like it's a real person. That is the type of film this is.
John Milius, who is most famous for tough-guy movies like the Dirty Harry pictures and Conan the Barbarian, has a story-by credit, but I'm going to go ahead and assign most of the script portion of the blame to the writing team behind the Back to the Future movies, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale. It's not clear whether they wrote a semi-serious script and then Spielberg decided to go jokey a la Strangelove, or whether it was jokey to begin with, but most of Zemeckis' early work was pretty doofy, so I'm going to assume it's the latter. There was one joke in the film that actually made me laugh, for a solid 1 joke/150 minute ratio. A lot of the humor, to be fair, is visual, which really has to fall more on Spielberg's shoulders than the screenwriters. If you think the sight of a tank plowing through a warehouse full of paint cans is inherently funny, well, this might be your favorite movie.
The cast is sprawling and almost no one comes out with their dignity intact. John Belushi's character, if it can be called that, is an overeager spin on Bluto Blutarski. Dan Aykroyd is a soldier who loves America but also has a thick Canadian accent. Treat Williams spends most of the film attempting to rape another character - this is, obviously, played for laughs. Slim Pickens and Warren Oates trade on their names and their well-established personae to join in the "fun"; Pickens, in particular, is on the wrong end of a very long scene that revolves around his character's bowel movements. Ned Beatty is a clueless oaf who willfully destroys his own home (he does, however, have the film's one funny moment). Christopher Lee and Toshiro Mifune(!) play the film's Nazi and Japanese villain, respectively - both of them play their scenes fairly straight, but neither has much to do but yell and argue. Robert Stack plays the military head honcho, and he is probably the one actor in the film whose character acts in consistently logical ways, and never has to do anything humiliating.
I don't want to waste much more time on this film, because I have wasted too much on it already. It is awful. When the James Bond series bottomed out, at least one could still enjoy the various tropes of the series. Same with the worst Star Trek movies. There are no redeeming qualities to 1941. It is stupid, it looks awful, and there are no performances in it that are even worth mentioning again. Spielberg, at least, must have known he had a bomb on his hands when he watched the dailies, and he has at least had the good sense to stay the hell out of the comedy business since then. Let us never speak of this movie ever again.
Well, just a little bit more. Bullet points.
The opening scene is an homage to Jaws. Instead of a shark, it's a Japanese sub. That seems like a really presumptuous thing for Spielberg to do, to already be self-referencing this early in his career.
Slim Pickens does a riff on his famous "survival kit" speech from Dr. Strangelove, rattling off all the garbage in his shit-kicker character's pockets for the Japanese sailors that capture him. It's actually vaguely amusing, but then they flush the character right down the toilet (puns!) by having him swallow a compass that the Japanese need for some reason, and then having them force-feed him prune juice.
The one funny joke - Ned Beatty is having a heart-to-heart with his daughter about the USO dance that she is going to go to that night, and he tells her that it is her duty as an American to sleep with the soldiers. It came as such a surprise that someone had done something unexpected and funny that I had to rewind and watch it again to make sure I heard what I thought I did.
Robert Stack's character cries at Dumbo, which is actually pretty cute.
It's widely-accepted conventional wisdom that Jaws was the first modern summer blockbuster. Coming out right smack dab in the middle of the auteur-driven 70's, June of 1975, Jaws was an enormous, inescapable hit, and is effectively the foundation upon which Steven Spielberg's career was built. It would be two more years before George Lucas created the still-followed template for the special effects-driven franchise film, and three more years after that before Michael Cimino put the final nail in the coffin of the auteur 70's with the disaster that was Heaven's Gate. But Jaws was a harbinger of a film, for good and for ill, a movie that delighted audiences and critics and also paved the way for the destruction of the weird, personal, studio-backed movies that those New Hollywood directors like Scorsese and De Palma and Hal Ashby were making during this period (filmmakers that Spielberg has never hidden his admiration for).
Given that context, what maybe stands out at first blush to me about Jaws is how unassuming it is. It has the one special effect, so it is technically a "special effects-driven blockbuster", but that effect sucks, and is in the film for a total of no more than about 10 minutes. Mostly what people do in Jaws is they talk about just what exactly they are going to do about this enormous shark that has taken over their beach, and then when they finally formulate a plan, those people talk about what they are doing, and why they're doing it. And then eventually the shark shows up, and they make their stand, and it's over.
Here is the briefest of plot summaries, because most people have seen this film, and I don't feel that I need to go blow by blow. A shark kills a girl on Amity Island, a summer destination off the New England coast. The new police chief, Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) suggests closing the beach until the shark is dealt with, but the politicians talk him out of it because they need summer dollars, and are afraid that once the tourists are scared away, they won't come back. So the beach stays open, and the shark kills a little boy. Brody (temporarily) manages to close the beach, and calls in, among others, a shark expert named Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss). Some local yahoos claim to have killed the shark but Hooper convinces Brody that the shark they found isn't the same one that has killed two people already, and after one more person is killed by the shark, Brody hires a salty local shark hunter named Quint (Robert Shaw) to take him and Hooper out on his boat, the Orca, where the three of them will take down the shark. It proves a significantly more difficult task than they anticipate, and the shark manages to eat Quint before Brody finally kills it.
There's a bit of nuance that I've left out but honestly the story is fairly streamlined (with one exception, which I'll get to) and that plot summary pretty accurately sums up what happens. The stakes are set up efficiently (Brody's concern for public safety is overridden by the short-sighted avarice of the town mucky-mucks, until they have no choice but to listen to him), and the story really hinges on, at most, five characters (Brody, Hooper and Quint, plus Brody's wife and the town mayor). Six if you count the shark. The danger that the shark poses to the community, both in terms of safety and in terms of the economic impact, is easily understood.
Where the exception to the streamlined nature of the story lies is in the back part of the second act, when the film goes a little flabby. In Duel, most of the film's surprises had been deployed by the end of the first act, so there wasn't much left for Spielberg to do but repeat himself, in slightly different ways, as the film chugged along towards its climax. Jaws is significantly better paced, and it opens up and reveals itself to the audience in bits and pieces all throughout. But what that means is that, given how slight the bare bones of the story actually are (shark menaces population, shark is dealt with), the stall before the third-act shark hunt goes on just slightly too long - specifically, it goes on exactly one kill too long. The girl who is killed at the beginning, that sets up the entire plot of the film. The little boy who is killed after the town higher-ups refuse to close the beach, that sets up the central conflict of the film, and what the stakes for everyone are. The third kill, the man who is eaten by the shark (in lieu of Brody's own son, who was also in its vicinity at the time)? Well, it gives Brody a direct connection to the danger that the shark possesses, I guess. But Brody was already on board with that danger. And more importantly, we were already on board with that danger. The little boy's death proved how short-sighted the mayor and his cronies were acting. The third death feels like an unnecessary button, an answer to a question that no one was asking any more.
The crux of the movie rests in that third act trip that Brody, Hooper and Quint take in pursuit of the fish. First, I should remind anyone who was half (or less) paying attention that the last time I saw Robert Shaw was way, way back here, where he played the brooding Soviet menace. It's not a particularly memorable villain turn, and most people probably don't even remember that he played a Bond villain. Shaw has two moments in Jaws that are iconic, which is two more than most film characters get - his introduction, where he interrupts a meeting by scraping his fingernails across a chalkboard and proceeds to tell the townspeople that he'll catch the shark if they pay him his fee, and the story that he tells about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis:
It occurs to me that the boat trip represents three distinct styles of acting (and if it doesn't, just go with me for a minute). You have Richard Dreyfuss' twitchy Method weirdness. You've got Shaw's old Hollywood scenery chewing. And then you have Roy Scheider's lived-in naturalism. Perhaps the adjectives I've used give some indication of where I'm going with this - more than anything else, Jaws really made me appreciate just how good and interesting (and probably underappreciated) of an actor Scheider is. He carries the movie from beginning to end, and even when a couple of hams like Dreyfuss and Shaw show up to steal it away from him, he is always there, the solid anchor embedded in the sea floor, keeping the whole thing from spinning out of control. There's a scene after Hooper has come to the island, when he comes over to have dinner with the Brody's. Dreyfuss is talking to Lorraine Gary (who plays Mrs. Brody) and Scheider, telling them some story while they look on in quiet attention, and the entire time he was talking my eye was drawn inexorably to Scheider, casually opening and pouring a bottle of wine as Dreyfuss speaks. That's a movie star. Given no lines, he was still doing more interesting things than his costar.
So eventually the shark shows up, and....it looks like shit. There's no other way around that fact. I actually wrote, "the shark really looks real enough" at one point, before it had appeared above the water in any capacity. When it's still underwater, attached to whatever rig it's attached to in order to get it to move, it looks real, and scary. Brody has that famous moment when he's chumming the water and the shark just appears out of nowhere, all gaping maw and black eyes, scaring the shit out of him. There, it looks great. By the end, when it's sweeping its head back and forth across the deck of the broken ship, trying to eat Quint and Brody, it's an ugly grey puppet. That has the unfortunate effect of sucking some of the terror out of the film's climax, and is at least a counter-argument to the idea that practical effects are always preferable to CGI (a counter-argument to that is that if it was a CGI shark, it might look even worse.) Despite this, I think the ending is well set up, with Quint sliding into the monster's jaws, screaming the whole way down, and Brody, alone (because Hooper has been forced to hide under the water after the world's most ill-advised plan involving a shark cage), improvising, and successfully carrying out, a plan to destroy it. And when the monster is killed, it's a triumphant moment, much more so than the fizzle at the end of Duel, with the shark going up in an explosion of fishy viscera.
All of the good parts of Duel are also good here, and the pacing of this film is significantly better than that earlier one. Spielberg takes his foot off the gas a little too much - there is an even tighter (and scarier) thriller to be made of this material, but he's a sentimental type, and he gives the film over just a little too much to Brody's wet noodle of a family. I land on this being a very good film rather than a great one, but someone could convince me that I'm being too harsh towards it. It's really good, and Spielberg crafts a real story out of a fairly thin premise (which, granted, was also a bestselling book, but it's still a slight premise for a big-budget feature film.)
A few bullet points:
Amity Island follows in the long tradition of Spielbergian Anytowns - there's a bare hint of local color, but mostly it's just a generic Seaside Resort, the kind that families the world over go on vacation. For all of his talents as a filmmaker, Spielberg is simply not that good at creating the sense of a real, lived-in space. He traffics in emotional warmth (to a fault sometimes), and yet his films can still feel a little cold because his settings so often feel like less than real places.
Dreyfuss goes way, way bigger than necessary in his second scene, when he views and comments on the remains of the first victim. I kind of just don't like Richard Dreyfuss very much, I have to admit.
When Dreyfuss and Scheider encounter the chewed-up fishing boat in the middle of the night, John Williams' music is really nicely subtle and creepy. Reminds me of Howard Shore's score for The Silence of the Lambs, which I guess would be more accurately phrased as, Shore's Silence of the Lambs score reminds me of Williams' Jaws score.
I knew the severed head was coming and it still gave me a jolt. That's a quality scare.
When we get back to Quint at the beginning of the second half, he is a lot less taciturn than he originally appeared to be, when we met him at the meeting in the first act. His constant stream of chatter starts to get a little irritating.
This one is for a very, very select audience, but Quint sounds a bit like Rob Mariano, the way he talks with his teeth. If you don't know who Rob Mariano is, you have made wise life choices thus far.
The "put Hooper in a shark cage" plan may have been the most ill-advised thing any film characters have ever done. It goes bad immediately. There is, from its inception, a zero percent chance for it to succeed in any way.
Brody pretty much kills the shark entirely by himself. Granted that by the end of the film he's the only one left in the boat, but most of the things that Quint and Hooper do on the way there adds up to jack shit when push comes to shove and the shark has to be killed. Hooper is hiding underwater, Quint is dead, and Brody formulates and executes a plan that has nothing to do with either of the other two or their planning.
The film sort of just...ends. Brody and Hooper swim back to the island, they banter for a little bit, and then Spielberg cuts to a shot of the island as the credits come up, no music, nothing. Duel ended in a similar way. I don't know if that's a particularly Spielbergian way to end a movie, but it's kind of jarring.
Somebody can check my math if they want, but by my count Steven Spielberg has directed 28 films in his 40-year career (if you count Duel and toss out his segment of the ill-fated Twilight Zone movie, and also the did-he-or-didn't-he Poltergeist), and while I started this marathon with Duel, his feature film debut proper is The Sugarland Express, released in 1974. Terence Malick has been working for almost the exact same amount of time as a feature film director, and in his entire career he has directed a total of six films (if you spot him To The Wonder, his latest film that premiered at last year's Venice Film Festival and has seemingly disappeared since.) Malick's debut, Badlands, premiered in theaters in October of 1973, beating Spielberg's debut by almost exactly six months.
It's hard not to think of Badlands while you watch The Sugarland Express - it is something of a weird coincidence that two of Hollywood's most revered filmmakers debuted within months of each other with films that bear a striking superficial resemblance to one another. Both are based-on-true-story pictures about a rural couple evading the law and getting themselves in deeper and deeper with each subsequent action. In each movie, one half of the couple is largely responsible for the action, while the other passively tags along (in Badlands, Martin Sheen's character is the take-charge half of the couple; in Sugarland Express, it is Goldie Hawn's character who is ultimately responsible for what happens.) The comparison pretty much falls apart at any deeper level though, which is why Badlands is a bonafide classic, a major new voice planting his flag in the soil, while The Sugarland Express is an answer to a trivia question. Malick and Spielberg occupy opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of sheer bulk of output, and how a person feels about those two modes of artistic creation is something of a litmus test. Spielberg's highs are probably not as high as Malick's, while his lows are much lower, but Spielberg has a body of work that, taken as a whole, is almost unmatched in cinema history, and Malick's is just too slight, for my taste, to be held up against masters like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock.
The Sugarland Express begins as Lou Jean Poplin (Goldie Hawn) breaks her husband Clovis (William Atherton, probably best known as the "this man has no dick" guy from Ghostbusters) out of a fairly low-security prison in rural Texas. Lou Jean had also recently done time for a variety of fairly minor crimes, and she is concerned that the 2 year old son that they have together will be permanently taken from them and placed in the foster system, as he is currently in the custody of a foster family. On the way out of the prison, the Poplins' car is stopped by Officer Slide (Michael Sacks) and after a brief chase, the couple takes the officer hostage and orders him to drive them to their son's current foster home. The trail of their commandeered police vehicle is quickly picked up by Captain Tanner (Ben Johnson) and as they drive across the state of Texas, they are followed by a caravan of police vehicles led by Tanner, as he tries to end the standoff peacefully and save Officer Slide's life.
It's unfair to continue comparing this minor film to one, in Badlands, that is studied in film schools, so I'll only say one more thing along those lines, and that is that Malick immediately has an idea for exactly what sort of tone he's looking to strike in his film (contrasting Sissy Spacek's character Holly and her childlike naivete with the sociopathy of Sheen's Kit Carruthers), whereas Spielberg never figures out the tone he wants to set for the story of the Poplins. There is a distinct tenor of "the wacky shenanigans of rural folk" that permeates the film, especially in the first half, so that when Spielberg asks us to care about the fate of the people involved, it's a lot harder than it should be. When the Poplins first break out of prison, they hitch a ride with an older couple who had come to visit their son, and when the car is pulled over by Officer Slide, Lou Jean hijacks it while the couple is out on the road talking to the policeman. Slide tells the older couple to stay there by the side of the road as he takes chase, and they are revisited a couple of times, still standing at the side of the road and gently bickering with one another, for a bit of very low-level comic relief (their fate is ultimately left entirely unresolved by Spielberg, who eventually, for good reasons but still jarringly, abandons the subplot completely.) Later in the film, there is a big pileup crash involving the police convoy which has a very, very distinct Blues Brothers vibe to the way it's shot and edited. And towards the end, as the Poplins and Officer Slide approach their destination, they are greeted by crowds of well-wishers who have staged a makeshift (though surprisingly thorough) carnival at the center of town; less than about 5 minutes later, the violent climax of the Poplins' journey takes place. It's like one of those sitcoms where the couple spends 21 minutes insulting each other, and then in the last minute tack on an unearned bit of sweetness. Spielberg aims towards a sort of heartbreaking poignancy, but the bulk of the film is simply too wacky for it to take hold.
I've never really known Goldie Hawn in anything but late-period self-parody mode; she has a certain relaxed charm here as the fairly dim Lou Jean, although she's in over her head when the script asks her to emote, and while I won't call it a surprise that she presented a confident lead performance here (I knew she'd won an Academy Award early in her career, and that there must be some reason she became a star) it was still nice to be reminded of her effortless ability to be cute and engaging. Atherton and Sacks are fine as her co-stars, neither makes a major impression but Atherton has some nice moments with Hawn, and Sacks has a good scene with the two of them where he attempts to help them work through an argument (he identifies himself as a marriage counseling pro, which is probably true for a lot of real-life lawmen, especially in small towns). The real star of the film is Ben Johnson, who infuses what could be the cliched role of the stern Texas policeman with a real degree of humanity - I would almost recommend the film simply for his performance, which is one in his very long career that I think has been somewhat forgotten. He'd won the Oscar a couple of years prior for playing another, fairly similar Texan in The Last Picture Show, and he had carved out a long career before that playing variations on that character, because he was really, really good at it.
I don't mean to be quite so hard on this film - it is reasonably, though very slightly, successful, and it is narratively coherent even if its tone is all over the place. It doesn't aim that high, and if it is ultimately less interesting than Duel, it is probably because it feels like a film that was supervised much more closely by the people who actually paid for it. What I suspect, just from my own intuition, is that they wanted a light touch which Spielberg ultimately balked out, which is why the film is so internally inconsistent from moment to moment. The graft doesn't completely work, but there are enough small pleasures here to make it a worthy part of Spielberg's canon.
(There are at least two different versions of Duel, due to its origin as a TV movie-of-the-week, a 74 minute television cut that ran on ABC in 1971 and a 90 minute theatrical cut that played overseas in 1972. I'm not entirely sure if the 74 minute cut is available so obviously the version I am working from is the 90 minute theatrical one.)
It's not news that the made-for-TV movie has mostly disappeared from the television landscape. Broadcast networks have almost entirely given up on them, and the cable channels that still make them are bifurcated into two camps - the big prestige pictures from the art-house networks, like last year's HBO-produced Game Change, an Emmy-baity bit of insta-politics starring bonafide movie stars, and bottom-of-the-barrel shlock like Sharktopus, produced by Roger Corman and starring the remains of Eric Roberts' career. There is effectively no ground for a lark like Duel, a low-stakes but well-produced thriller starring a B-list actor that desires nothing more than to come into America's living rooms and entertain for 90 minutes. I don't necessarily lament that fact (bad TV movies significantly outnumbered good or even average ones, and young directors like the 24 year old Steven Spielberg are probably better off honing their craft in the DIY, indie film style than in the employ of a corporate-owned network) but it's a salient fact when watching Duel to recognize its time capsule quality.
Duel began life as a Richard Matheson short story which was published in Playboy, and which he eventually expanded into a TV movie length film. Matheson is probably most famous either for writing I Am Legend, which has been filmed several times, or for his handful of Twilight Zone episodes, including the classic Shatner-starring "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (the gremlin-on-a-plane episode); I feel very confident in saying that he was the much bigger name on the film when it was produced. It unquestionably reflects Matheson's paranoid horror sensibility; Spielberg has been forced to bend his style into the shape of Matheson's script, rather than the other way around.
The film divides very neatly into thirds. The first act begins with our hero, David Mann (played by Dennis Weaver, who I gather was something of a That Guy for 60's and 70's era television) traveling into the boonies outside of LA in his sad, red/orange Plymouth Valiant on some sort of business-related trip. Along the way he passes (as in, goes around on a two-lane road) the ugliest, grimiest oil tanker imaginable, and is slowly but inexorably drawn into a game of cat-and-mouse with the sociopathic, unseen driver of the truck, who the film suggests was just looking for an excuse to make sushi out of a hapless driver. Mann manages to escape the chase when he crashes into a white picket fence outside of a rural diner, and the second third of the movie has Mann discover that the tanker, which he thought he had lost, is parked outside the diner, and then indulge his own paranoia about which of the customers at the restaurant is the driver of the truck. The final third picks up the chase on the road once again, with the driver of the tanker escalating the conflict to its breaking point, and Mann desperately searching for a way to end it.
It's something of an understood phenomenon that Spielberg is a much better beginner than he is a finisher. Raiders of the Lost Ark opens with a bravura action setpiece involving a man being chased by a gigantic rolling ball of death, and ends with people closing their eyes. Jurassic Park's most famous moments mostly involve the pre-sabotage "Holy shit, dinosaurs!" scenes, and it goes without saying that Saving Private Ryan is quite possibly the film with the most precipitous dropoff in the history of film from the stage-setting opening sequence to the long, intermittently interesting slog that follows. Duel falls right into this same category - the first act plays like the tautest, most viscerally exciting thriller you'll ever see, and then eventually things go flabby. A long opening scene tracks the passage of Mann's car from city to country, while the soundtrack is made up of nothing but diegetic sounds, the radio, the car, the sounds of nature. Spielberg takes the time to build the tension from the moment Mann first encounters the truck to the point at which he's barreling down the highway at 90 miles an hour, in serious danger of his life, and the entire sequence pre-diner takes less than half an hour. Cut it by about 5 minutes and it's a memorable episode of the Twilight Zone; add another 15 minutes and it's your grandfather's favorite Mannix, the one where Mannix is chased by the psycho truck driver for the whole episode and eventually outwits him.
But this is a movie, and there is still an hour's worth of material to pad out before we get to our conclusion. There are a handful of secondary characters in Duel, but none of them (with the possible exception of Mann's wife, who he has a phone conversation with midway through the first act) makes much of an impression. Mann is the only character of note in the film, and the script has to figure out a way to filter his perception of what's happening to the audience. The script makes an unfortunate, though probably not surprising, choice in the second act by including a narrative voiceover from Mann's perspective. I honestly wasn't sure that that's what it was doing at first - when it first happens, with Mann standing in front of a mirror at the diner, I assumed (given how I'm attuned as a 21st century film watcher) that it was simply a bit of soundtrack overlap, and the scene of Mann looking in the mirror would soon cut to a scene of him talking to someone at the diner, out loud, about what was happening. But no, this is spoken internal monologue, and it is really jarring. Mann is confronted by a diner full of taciturn, shit-kicking good old boys who all wear similar boots to the ones the driver of the truck wears (the only positive identification he has of the person who is menacing him, and I'm not sure if one would genuinely expect to find modern-day cowboys in the wilds of Southern California, but it's a nice nod to the film's Western roots, so I can go with it), and Mann slowly loses his mind, first in his interior narrative and eventually outwardly, as he tries to figure out how to deal with the fact that his tormentor is apparently sharing space with him. The film picks back up once we get back to spoken dialogue between Mann and the person who he identifies as the driver - the voiceover is not a fatal problem for the film, but boy is it a wretched choice.
So Mann eventually gets back on the road for the third act finish, and although it's a significant improvement from the static second act, the fact that we basically know all there is that the film wants us to know about the driver of the truck at this point robs the film of some of its suspense. The slow rollout of the truck driver's malevolent intent in the first act ratches up the tension in stages; the danger represented by the truck in the third act starts at 10, so there's nowhere for the tension to really go but down. The film futzes around with a strange interlude with the driver of a school bus, filled with supremely obnoxious children, asking Mann to help him give the bus a moving start - Mann insists his car is too small to do it, the bus driver insists he's wrong, eventually Mann is proven right, and then the truck shows up to menace Mann again. This scene in particular really belies Duel's TV movie roots, and wikipedia tells me that it was indeed added to the theatrical release to pad out the running time; it goes from nowhere to nowhere, but allows Weaver to yell at a bunch of children for immediately climbing all over his car the moment he stops to help out, which is extremely weird but kind of funny.
Ultimately, the biggest sin of the third act is the anti-climax that ends it. I won't give it away for anyone who hasn't seen this and wants to, but the movie really comes to an abrupt and deeply unsatisfying end. The choice is made very early on to make the truck itself the villain of the piece, and while I appreciate the sort of mysterious terror that this gives to the film, it means that, in the end, Mann's quest doesn't end with a satisfying payoff against a real-live person, but an (unsatisfying, in my mind) payoff against an object.
Weaver's performance is workmanlike, and I don't necessarily mean that negatively. He has a TV actor's weakness of not really being willing (or able) to alter the performance as he goes along, which is the sort of thing you rarely need to do when you're playing a guest character on a 48 minute episode of a television show that will only ever revert to the status quo ante once the episode is over. Mann's journey here is supposed to take him from a sad, shlubby loser who can't even fathom what is happening to him to a determined, somewhat courageous man who recognizes that his only way out is to fight back, and while he's good at the shlubby part of that the sense of steely determination never really comes across at the end. He does have a nice, expressive face, and he wears an ugly pair of early-70's sunglasses like no one's business. The film pushes very hard and unsubtly on the theme of male anxiety in the first act (there are two parallel conversations, one of which is between a radio caller and a talk show host that Mann listens to, and one of which Mann has with his wife, that both hit hard on the idea that the men of the early-70's are having a tough time figuring out their place in a world in which they are no longer the sole or even main breadwinners of their households, and the idea of the traditional male role is in rapid flux.) But it mostly drops that theme after that, which is maybe reflective of the film having trust in the audience to remember and reflect on it as the plot of the film progresses, but is also probably reflective of the fact that the script couldn't figure out a good way to work the theme back in organically. Spielberg also, after a nice, understated touch with the soundtrack in the 1st act (the sound design is really good, with the differential sound of the two vehicles' respective engines providing an underscore to the menace that the tanker poses to Mann's sad little Valiant) eventually goes heavy-handed with the music, especially near the climax. This is another problem he has evinced throughout his career, and it's one that can already be detected here.
Matheson's script never quite figures out how to efficiently tell the story it intends to tell without someone for Weaver to play off of, and Spielberg's direction spends too much time exploring dead-ends. But the suspense that they build together is undeniable, and if you can get past the fact that they come to an unsatisfactory conclusion, it's a pretty good B-movie for a lazy Saturday afternoon. Spielberg the visual craftsman is in here, no question about it, but he hasn't quite emerged yet.
And so we come to the end (but not quite the end end, stay tuned). Let us say goodbye to Captains Kirk and Picard, and Spock, and Uhura, and all of those people in the Next Generation cast who I've already forgot, by brutally ranking them.
Film Rankings:
Star Trek VI
Star Trek II
Star Trek
Star Trek IV
Star Trek: First Contact
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Star Trek: Nemesis
Star Trek III
Star Trek: Generations Star Trek: Insurrection
Star Trek V
Villain Rankings:
Khan, Star Trek II
General Chang, Star Trek VI
Giant Space Cylinder, Star Trek IV
Borg Queen, Star Trek: First Contact
V'ger, Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Commander Kruge, Star Trek III
Tolian Soran, Star Trek: Generations
Nero: Star Trek
Shinzon, Star Trek: Nemesis
Ru'afo, Star Trek: Insurrection
Sybok, Star Trek V
Favorite action scene - the Enterprise and the Reliant pursue each other through the Mutara Nebula, Star Trek II
Worst action scene, normal version - Kirk kicks Kruge into a volcano, Star Trek III
Worst action scene, Shatner can't figure out a budget version - The Rock Monsters are replaced with a big head that shoots lightning bolts out of its eyes, Star Trek V
Worst use of old cast members - Nimoy and Kelley turn them down so the producers of the film move lower on their contact list and go with Doohan and Koenig, Star Trek: Generations
Best use of old cast members - The producers ask Nimoy to appear and tell Shatner to go fuck himself, Star Trek
Best use of scenery - Present day San Francisco in all its 80's glory, Star Trek IV Worst use of scenery - Awful backlot sets stand in for the Genesis Planet, Star Trek III Favorite homage to Gene Roddenberry's somewhat shallow world-view - The Enterprise crew saves the whales, Star Trek IV
Worst homage to Gene Roddenberry's somewhat shallow world-view - Sybok takes away your "pain" and then you are under his command, Star Trek V
Swankiest Enterprise that is confined to the films - The glowy Enterprise-E, Star Treks First Contact, Insurrection and Nemesis.
Ugliest Enterprise that is confined to the films - The dumpy Enterprise-B, Star Trek: Generations
Best use of make-up - All those crazy Borg designs, Star Trek: First Contact
Worst use of make-up - The awful face stretching procedure that the Son'a undergo, Star Trek: Insurrection
I Am Too Big Of A Star For Make-Up - Christopher Plummer is only barely a Klingon, Star Trek VI
It's Ladies Night For A Change - Zoe Saldana brings a bit of real edge to Uhura, Star Trek
But Women Drivers Are The Worst - Counselor Troi takes the helm and immediately crashes the Enterprise on to a planet, Star Trek: Generations
Bronze medal, worst singing scene - Data sings Gilbert and Sullivan, Star Trek: Insurrection Silver medal, worst singing scene - Data sings the "lifeforms" song, Star Trek: Generations Gold medal, worst singing scene - Kirk and Bones force Spock into galaxy's most depressing campfire sing-a-long, Star Trek V
The Star Turn - Ricardo Montalban gives his career defining performance, Star Trek II
Not Quite Ready For Stardom - Tom Hardy is much more petulant than menacing, Star Trek: Nemesis
Can See A Star By Looking Up At The Night Sky - Laurence Luckenbill takes up physical space, Star Trek V
Best use of time travel - The cast experiences wacky misadventures in 80's era San Francisco, Star Trek IV
Worst use of time travel - The Borg travels through time for some reason and the Enterprise follows them, Star Trek: First Contact
Unlikeliest Kirk romantic subplot - Shatner's unseen "love of his life" that he had supposedly secretly been pining for for years, Star Trek: Generations
Likeliest Kirk romantic subplot - Kirk makes googly eyes at the Enterprise, Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Can Never Be Unseen Memorial Award - Uhura's fan dance, Star Trek V
I would argue that science-fiction TV shows, more than any other type of show, are built to take advantage of the medium's innate ability to explore different genres within the same basic framework week after week. A bit of hand-waving about technology or primitive civilizations and you've got a noir or a western or a screwball comedy or whatever else the writers want to do this week. There are hundreds of episodes of Star Trek TV shows and they go down all sorts of weird rabbit holes. This isn't always a good thing - the Star Trek writers, at least the ones of the modern, post-TNG era, have something of an infamous reputation as having a tin ear for comedy. But it does at least mean that, week after week, you can't really predict what you're going to get from any of these shows.
The television business demands that a sizable audience return again and again to watch the adventures of its characters, and within a time frame that means that the previous installment is still very much fresh in their minds when they are consuming the current one. Do the same thing too often and the audience gets bored (even Law and Order has to throw crazy curveballs into its cases on a semi-regular basis). A normal film series, on the other hand, does not work that way. By the time a new film hits the theaters the last one is 2, 3, maybe even more years old. The last one is a distant memory, and the series sinks or swims entirely within a "what have you done for me lately" framework. This is changing somewhat with planned-out series like The Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter movies, but for the most part film series are still mostly serendipitous - if the first one makes a big profit, then someone will want to make a 2nd, and if that does well a 3rd will be commissioned, and so on. That's not the way TV works - even a show that gets a small pickup is contracted to produce several episodes.
More and more, TV shows are being consumed by people in the way that I'm consuming this film series, at whatever pace they decide. Marathon an entire season of Breaking Bad on Netflix over the course of a weekend, that's a normal way of doing business nowadays. Marathoning a traditional film series is a different animal entirely. Formula is baked into the medium of television, so writers work very hard to subvert it as much as possible. Film series mostly happen by accident, so formula is almost demanded by the marketplace. Stray too far and, if the film tanks, you've killed the golden goose.
All of this is a long way of getting to the point that, having watched these 11 Star Trek movies in reasonably rapid succession, the formula really stands out in sharp relief in a way that it might not if you just dip in and out of a few of these movies every so often. There is our crew. The film introduces a Bad Guy. That Bad Guy represents an existential threat to A) our heroes or B) the Earth or C) some rinky-dink solar system that we will care about because there are innocent people living there. The crew fights the Bad Guy. He (or she) gets the best of them at first. They overcome whatever problem led to their early defeat, and they triumph over the Bad Guy. That's the formula for basically every film in the series (with the likely exception of Star Trek IV, an oddball in just about every way.) Each movie zigs or zags here or there, but most of them play these beats out in one way or another. They are not like the various shows, which explore a lot of very different ideas and genres. These are basically all action movies, with questions of cosmic import being, at best, explored at the very edges of the margins of the script. A bad guy is met. That bad guy is overcome. The crew lives to fight another day.
The worst thing I can say about this long-awaited reboot of Star Trek is that it plays right into this formula, just like every other film before it, even though it is ostensibly a complete rebuilding of this series from the ground up, rather than a vehicle for a hoary old cast to take a big budget victory lap. The second-worst thing I can say about it is that its Bad Guy (Nero, played by Eric Bana, an actor who has really struggled to find his proper niche in the Hollywood ecosystem) is a complete cipher who is set adrift by the screenplay and whose actor never finds anything interesting to do with him. And the third-worst thing (I promise this will be the last) is that the meat of its plot, which takes up almost the entire back half of the film, involves a race to stop this Bad Guy that is not compelling in the slightest, and that wastes a lot of time with action scenes that go nowhere (the "Scotty gets stuck in a tube of liquid" scene is perhaps the most egregious example of introducing tension through obvious script finagling rather than through the organic motions of the plot).
But, despite all of this, the film manages to rise above these failings and be almost entirely successful, for two main reasons. One is that the main 7 of the crew are extremely well cast (with, in my opinion, one major exception that I will get to) and each of them is given at least something interesting to do, even if it's just Anton Yelchin having a ton of fun with his interpretation of Walter Koenig's weird "Russian" accent. And two is that JJ Abrams obviously completely believes in this project, and his love for the atomic material that makes up the Star Trek mythos is palpable. I know that not every Star Trek fan is over-the-moon for this new version of the series (and I also know that some fans absolutely love it) but for me, someone who is at best a dabbler in this universe, Abrams' enthusiasm for the film is palpable, and impossible to resist.
In terms of the cast, I'll start with Chris Pine, naturally. Ultimately, his job is mostly not that difficult in my opinion. Be Kirk, but don't be Shatner. I have perhaps beaten to death my anti-Shatner crusade, but it finally finds its full flowering here - Pine is fantastic, and his Kirk is, in my mind, instantly the definitive version. (Although I accept that it's hard for me to gauge how good Pine truly is, given my bias). He's charming and charismatic, and actually makes sense as the lead of a big-budget franchise.
The big problem in the cast, to my mind, is Zachary Quinto. Given what an unloved show "Heroes" turned out to be, Sylar (the sociopathic killer character that he kept playing throughout the run of the series, through increasingly implausible plot mechanics, given that he should rightly have died at the end of the first season) is right at the surface of this film at all times when Quinto is onscreen - the unemotional thing that Spock does melds too easily with Sylar's sociopathy. Admittedly, Quinto had a very difficult task here, trying to follow in the footsteps of one of the all-time great TV performances in Leonard Nimoy's Spock. I'm not sure that anyone could have done Spock justice, and I don't think Quinto is terrible in the movie. He simply never finds the right rhythms, so when he has his big emotional outburst that leads into the 3rd act, it feels less like a big dramatic moment than a natural extension of his entire performance up to that point. I'm hopeful that Quinto will find the performance going forward, but he's not there yet in this movie.
Everyone else is great. Karl Urban is nicely cantankerous, and his American accent picks a good resting point near DeForest Kelley's. Zoe Saldana's Uhura is given significantly more to do here than Nichelle Nichols ever was in any of that cast's films, and she is up to the challenge of turning Uhura into a real character (I don't love the romance plot, not because her and Spock don't make sense but because it seems a little trite to insist on coupling up your one major female character, but so be it). John Cho gets his one spotlight sword fighting scene, and seems to be having a good deal of fun, even when he's just pushing buttons on a console. Simon Pegg actually has something resembling a Scottish accent (as opposed to James Doohan's bizarre drunken Pakistani), and the comic relief nature of the character in his hands means that he's in on the joke, rather than being the butt of the joke like Doohan too often was made to be. And Anton Yelchin, although he doesn't really have much to do, sells the phrase "Captain Cork" like no one's business.
So it's a good start for this series, although not a perfect one. At the very least, I can say that I am extremely interested in seeing where these characters go next, something we will find out in a few short months.
(I'm going to skip the plot recap, because I find the plot both sort of uninteresting and too complicated for its own good. Nero comes back through time, fucks up the timeline, and eventually Kirk and crew have to stop him from wreaking havoc on Earth.)
Bullet pointin':
George Kirk's family, including his pregnant wife, is on board the Kelvin with him, meaning that there are presumably other families on the ship. The idea of families aboard Starfleet ships is pretty unclear to me. They were obviously a part of the complement of the Enterprise-D, but Picard and Kirk have both expressed regrets during this film series about not being able to have families. I guess you could argue that that's something unique to the Captain, that regulations state they cannot have a family aboard ship with them, but that doesn't really follow logically - why would the first officer (which George Kirk is) have a completely different set of rules?
The plot is too convoluted by half, but I give the writers a ton of credit for figuring out a way to both reboot the series and not negate 4 decades worth of continuity. Bringing Spock into the plot was a good idea - Nimoy deserved to do a victory lap, and old Spock giving the plot his blessing helps to anchor this film as a part of the Star Trek universe, rather than just a cash-in by a Paramount that was eager to start making money from this property again. Which they were, but still.
Why is there an enormous gorge in the middle of Iowa?
When we get our first glimpse of Vulcan, Abrams works Vasquez rocks into the background. Later, when Vulcan comes into play as the emotional catalyst for Spock's journey, it turns out that the entire planet is basically made up of Vasquez rocks.
Ben Cross looks weirdly like Mark Lenard. He's well cast simply for that fact.
I like the interplay between Kirk and Uhura quite a bit. She has a pretty barely-disguised disdain for the guy, which is an interesting character beat to insert into this new version.
The less said about Tyler Perry's awful cameo, the better. I realize that every black person loves Star Trek, that's science, but couldn't we have gotten someone better than him to play this role?
This movie had a very long pre-production history, and for a long time it was basically thought of as the "Kirk and Spock at the Academy" movie (back when Matt Damon was still the rumored name of choice to play Kirk). It's a little disappointing just how little of their Academy career is actually covered here. We jump pretty quickly from Kirk as cocky Iowa farm boy to the cadets on their first mission on the Enterprise. And Spock and Kirk are never really peers, their relationship maintains a power imbalance throughout. I am absolutely of the opinion that this movie would have benefited with more time spent on the Kirk/Spock relationship at the academy, and less goddamned Nero. But no one asked me to make the film, so what are you gonna do?
Poor Engineer Olson. Abrams' first Star Trek red shirt, sucked into the business end of Nero's drill.
The marooning of Kirk on Delta Vega is a transparent attempt to inject action back into the film, and also sets up a couple of really dumb coincidences, with Kirk meeting Old Spock and also Scotty on this barren, frozen rock. This part of the script really could have used another pass, to come up with some logical reason for why these things happen.
The Federation outpost on Delta Vega must be the dingiest place that Nimoy's Spock has ever set foot in. It looks like the setting for an Antarctic zombie movie.
The engineering deck of the Enterprise is significantly more mechanical than I can ever remember it being. It's all pipes and valves. I'm so used to the TNG's design of Engineering now, the glowing stack of pancakes surrounded by a bunch of computer screens. At least with this version of Engineering, it makes sense that the ship is constantly venting gas all over the place whenever it gets hit.
This movie has great sound design. The phaser battle when Kirk and Spock first beam aboard Nero's ship gets almost all of its power from the sound.
Nero's motives get really murky in the 3rd act. I can understand his vendetta against Spock and the Vulcans, I guess, but why does he turn his fury on Earth? And how does he know (and why does he care) that he killed Kirk's father?
A member of the Reman race, the inhabitants of the Romulans' sister planet, takes over the Romulan Senate and initiates peace talks with the Federation. The Enterprise-E, after discovering a more primitive version of Data named B-4 on a remote planet, is sent on a diplomatic mission to Romulus and there meets the Reman Shinzon (Tom Hardy), who is actually a human clone of Picard who was raised in the crucible of the Reman slave mines.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Shinzon turns out to be less interested in peace than he seems, and his true goal is to conquer not simply the Romulan Empire but the Federation as well, by using "thalaron radiation" which is weaponized on his ship, to wipe out life on Earth. In addition, the procedure that cloned him left him with a life-span that is rapidly coming to an end, so he needs Picard's DNA to reverse the process. Shinzon captures Picard and plans to undergo the procedure that will save him, but is foiled in the attempt by Data - Shinzon had planted B-4 for the Enterprise to find, and had been using him to obtain information about the Federation, but when he thought he beamed B-4 onboard his ship it was actually Data. With Picard and Data back on board, the Enterprise heads to Earth but is ambushed by Shinzon's ship on the way, and after a space battle which leaves both ships (and another Romulan ship which had entered the battle to try to stop Shinzon) partially crippled, Shinzon activates the thalaron device in order to kill everyone on the Enterprise, and tells his crew to continue to Earth and complete their mission without him. Picard beams onboard and fights his way to the bridge to stop Shinzon, ultimately killing him, but without the time left to turn off the thalaron device. Unknown to him, Data has also come onboard Shinzon's ship, and his final act is to affix a beaming device to Picard to beam him back to the Enterprise, before he destroys the thalaron weapon and in the process blowing up Shinzon's ship and also sacrificing himself. Back on board the Enterprise the crew mourns Data's loss, but B-4 turns out to have been given more of Data's memories than the crew realized, and Data will live on in a fashion through B-4.
I've watched a handful of Next Generation episodes, of varying quality, but the one that I always think of first when I think about the series is "Tapestry". I won't go into the details of the plot (most of you people probably know it better than I do anyway) but it's an episode about the way our experiences create the person we are, and that we should treasure all of them, both the positive and the negative. It's an effective episode of television - it's about a Big Idea, and it plays around with alternate timelines and other fun science fiction conventions, while also revealing a nice bit of backstory about Jean-Luc Picard.
Star Trek: Nemesis attempts to find its way to a similar theme. Shinzon and Picard have the exact same DNA, but they have lived completely different lives, and are very different people (and they are implicitly and explicitly compared to B-4 and Data in this). Shinzon is angry and vindictive, and is willing to commit monstrous acts of genocide in pursuit of his goals; Picard, naturally, is a scholar and a humanitarian, and believes in peaceful exploration. It's probably not a surprise when I say that this idea never coalesces in the slightest - Shinzon and Picard don't seem remotely similar on any level, and it is only through exposition that we would even know that they are clones. Given that The Next Generation is a series about ideas more than it is about action, it's a fairly major indictment of all four of these films that they almost entirely botch their ideas (with a bit of leeway for First Contact, which I was underwhelmed by in general but at least had some vaguely interesting thoughts about revenge). There isn't really all that much effort put into any of the ideas that these movies are nominally centered around, and Nemesis pretty much gives up on its idea after the first act.
However (record scratch).
Taking that as a given, that the ideas here are a complete non-starter that aren't even really worth discussing, then what is here is surprisingly successful. In particular, I'd posit that the third act of the film is the most well-realized section of any of the TNG films - tense, exciting, filled with top-notch action and ending with a real emotional payoff (even if it basically repeats the exact same beats as Star Trek II). A good third act can paper over a lot of sins, and this is a really great third act. None of the Star Trek films have done a particularly great job of exploring the deeper ends of their bench, and the four Next Generation films were mostly interested in Picard and Data, with everyone else circling their orbit. But of all the performances in all 10 films so far, I might like Stewart's here the best of the entire lot, because he manages to find depths in his personal quest that aren't really present in the script at all. I don't think Nemesis is quite as good as the two best Original Series films (II and VI) but I think it is the one Next Generation film that can at least stand in their general vicinity.
Bullet pointin':
The opening scene aboard the Enterprise has Picard giving a speech about duty and honor and leading men into battle, and then the big reveal is that he is giving the best man speech at Riker and Troi's wedding. This reveal makes him seem like a seriously narcissistic weirdo.
His speech eventually becomes emotional about how much he loves Riker and Troi, and I have to take the film's word for it that the emotion has been earned in the television series, because it certainly hasn't in the film series.
In the future, cymbals will still be the same shape and size, but they'll be made of green plastic.
Data croons a standard for Riker and Troi, because Brent Spiner had albums to sell.
On the planet where they find B-4, the away team of Picard, Data and Worf, after picking up the pieces of the android, are under assault by an entire army of Mad Max rejects. No one ever seems the tiniest bit perturbed by this fact - the action direction here is pretty poor, with all the effort being poured in to making sure the three seem capable of battle, and no effort being placed on the actors giving believably frightened performances. I can't stress just how outmanned the away team is - we know they will make it out okay, because it's early yet, but they shouldn't know that.
B-4 acts like child Data, and everyone is really shocked that he exists, but doesn't Data already have one brother called Lore who's evil?
Spiner's performance as B-4 ends up making sense once we get to the big emotional payoff at the end of the film, but it has the unfortunate side-effect of seeming to have been dropped in from a completely different film for the bulk of the running time. Picard is doing tense, serious acting with Shinzon, discussing all sorts of monumental things, and in the background B-4 is basically eating paste.
We get a Janeway cameo. For fans only, meaning not me.
The Remans, whose planet is only habitable on the dark side, look like Nosferatu. It's one of those things that's way too obvious to be called clever. Was the Reman/Romulan split ever dealt with in the series? The film dumps a bit of exposition about it, but it all seems very cursory given that we're given this whole other race in this movie who are intimately tied to one of the major races of the Star Trek universe.
Dr. Crusher on how the Romulans managed to clone Picard: "They've probably used a hair follicle...." Haha, baldy.
Shinzon explains away the fact that Tom Hardy doesn't actually look that much like Patrick Stewart by saying that all the violence he's experienced has altered his face. Kind of stupid, but suspension of disbelief isn't totally out of the question. But later, when Picard is looking at an old picture of himself from the academy, it's a picture of Tom Hardy in uniform. That's sort of contemptuous. We know Hardy and Stewart don't look alike. You've hand-waved it away, and we will process it in our own way. Move on.
Hardy was clearly not yet ready for movie stardom. It's weird watching this now that he's a reasonably big star - it makes sense that an actor of his caliber would be asked to carry half the film in retrospect. But at the time, he was a nobody, and what he's asked to do in the film is well beyond his means. He just seems like a petulant child, and he is unable to carry any of the menace that he is supposed to.
Have we ever seen fighter jets in the Star Trek universe? I don't think I have. Picard and Data commandeer one when they escape from Shinzon's ship. Fighters don't fit, somehow, even though they should be a logical extension of everyone's military tactics. Big ships blast each other with lasers and torpedoes, that's just the way battles happen. (This is obviously nothing more than a function of television-sized budgets in 1967, but I'm just spit-balling about the implications of that fact.)
Poor Gates McFadden has to do a lot of expositing in this movie.
Shinzon's offensive manuever that he runs against the Enterprise is named after himself, but the Enterprise's defensive manuever is named after Kirk. Fuck that noise.
The crew of the Enterprise-E are pulled away from a diplomatic mission by Admiral Dougherty (Anthony Zerbe) in order to deal with a seemingly malfunctioning Data, who during a clandestine operation observing the primitive Ba'ku people on a remote world, revealed the presence of the mission to the Ba'ku. The crew travels to the planet and manages to deactivate Data, but their suspicions are aroused by the Admiral's insistence that they leave the system immediately after completing their mission. While on the planet, they discover a Starfleet plan to remove the Ba'ku, who are in truth a technologically-advanced species who have been granted immortality by the planet's unique properties, from the surface without their knowledge. The Federation are working with the Son'a people, a race that engages in a grotesque skin stretching ritual that seemingly keeps them alive. They are led by Ru'afo (F. Murray Abraham), and plan to harvest the immortality-granting rings of the planet in order to use its gifts for the good of the wider galaxy, but the success of their plan means the desolation of the planet.
Picard, who has become close with one of the Ba'ku, Anij (Donna Murphy), has moral reservations about this plan, and also suspects that it is not endorsed by the full Federation, so rather than complying with the Admiral's order to leave the system he and the bulk of the command crew (everyone but Riker and Geordi) go down to the surface of the planet to help the Ba'ku defend themselves against the Son'a/Federation plan. While the Enterprise travels away from the planet in order to deliver a message to Starfleet, the crew on the planet learn that the Son'a and the Ba'ku are the same race, the Son'a having left the planet as rebellious teenagers who balked at their elders' insistence that they not engage with the wider galaxy. They have returned because they desire the planet's healing properties under their own control, and are using the Federation to achieve that end. Picard and company manage to stop the Son'a and restore the Ba'ku to their bucolic existence through a bunch of convoluted plot mechanics that, quite frankly, I don't feel like detailing.
I feel like I have less to say about this movie than about any of the other Star Trek films thus far. It's not a successful film like Star Trek II. It's not a noble failure like Generations. It's not a spectacular, epic failure like Star Trek V. It's just a run-of-the-mill failure. A bunch of shit happens, our heroes get in and out of a handful of scrapes, then they complete their mission and it's over. In some ways it's possibly the most Bond-like of all of these films, albeit one of the lousy Roger Moore ones - there's A Girl who our hero romances, there's a deformed bad guy who is a complete lunatic, and there's a pretty decent amount of action. Even the two women in the cast get to shoot guns at things in this film, which I guess is a decent consolation prize since first place, "developing interesting characters who the audience can identify with," is off the table. You'd think that all that action would lead to a film that was exciting, but you would be 100% wrong.
The biggest problem here is that there is just nothing remotely cinematic about this film. Oh, it has all the trappings of cinema - a sizeable effects budget, location shooting, Oscar-winning guest stars (sure, F. Murray Abraham is more of an answer to a trivia question than a major film star but, still, he did win the damn thing). But the plot is so wafer thin, and so padded out by extraneous nonsense that the film is absolutely anchored to the Earth as "a movie based on a TV show" rather than an actual film that can stand on its own. Insurrection is an episode of TV. There is nothing at stake here really, and the reset button is liberally deployed at the end of the film. Among everything that happens in this movie, the thing that will probably have the most lasting effect is Riker shaving his beard. Three movies in to the Next Generation's run on the big screen and creative bankruptcy has already set in; the film series ended after the next one because people stopped showing up, but you can see the seeds of its destruction here. This movie reflects a tired and bored creative team that was out of ideas.
Bullet pointing:
The scenes of the idyllic Ba'ku planet are something like The Lord of the Rings shot by James Cameron on a shoe-string budget.
When we first meet the Enterprise-E crew in this film, they are doing some diplomatic work, meeting with some alien race or other. The aliens put some weird beaded thing on Picard's head as a sign of honor and respect, and Riker and Troi roll their eyes because they are racist xenophobes I guess.
I couldn't begin to explain whatever hurdles were jumped through in order to bring Worf aboard again. He was putting in time on Deep Space Nine but they obviously had to find a way to bring him back around for every one of this cast's films.
Picard's ploy to stop Data involves singing some of the score from the HMS Pinafore and I mean really.
The Baku are really off-puttingly precious. They're like hobbits, but instead of being endearingly earthy, they're pretentious and self-righteous.
Data: "In the event of a water landing, I have been designed to serve as a flotation device" (blowing up a balloon sound). Funny jokes!
Worf has a pimple. Everyone in the cast gets "younger" in some fashion due to their proximity to the Ba'ku planet's rings, but Worf comes out by far the worst. Riker shaves his beard, Geordi's eyes get fixed, Picard's equipment starts working again I guess because he's all up on that Anij lady, but Worf really gets put through the adolescent ringer. Mood swings, bad hair, the whole nine yards. He came back for this shit?
Picard dances a mambo on the Enterprise all by himself, which I guess is also a symptom of the rings turning everyone's clock back, but could just bit a bit of contractual wrangling that Patrick Stewart insisted on. Maybe he was learning the mambo during breaks in filming and wanted to show off.
Picard and Anij have a bit of chemistry, it's not bad. All things considered, their interactions are perhaps the best part of the film. They're not great or anything, this is pretty standard romantic drama territory, but they are better than most of the lazy shit around them.
I think the morals of this film are kind of ass-backwards, but I don't really care enough about the topic to detail why.
F. Murray Abraham's performance stays pretty close to 11 the whole way through. At one point, it gets so hammy he starts bleeding from the exertion.
During the initial Son'a attack, as the Enterprise crew evacuates them from out in the open, a Ba'ku kid and his pet space gerbil trip and he screams out "Father!" because it's important to stack the deck here. Data has a long conversation with this tow-headed youth and it is truly dreadful. Has there ever been a little kid on Star Trek that everyone didn't immediately want to punch in the face?
The Baku can slow time for some reason, which Anij demonstrates to Picard. You almost get the impression that no one working on this film gave a shit about it.
The two women of the crew have a brief conversation about the planet making their boobs more firm and I should probably complain but honestly, at least it manages to allow the two women a chance to interact. Would've been nice if it was under less stupid circumstances but whatever, you take what you can get.
"I wouldn't be surprised if history remembers this as the Riker Manuever" is a phrase that Geordi says during the Enterprise's big battle scene with the Son'a. I mean, this is fan-fiction. This is not a real script.
F. Murray Abraham kills Admiral Dougherty by putting him in their face-stretching machine, and it's pretty gross in a PG-13 way.
The dumb Son'a face-stretching thing makes significantly less sense once the big reveal is made, even though the movie thinks it explains it. The Son'a broke away from the Ba'ku 100 years ago, and the movie posits that they were so upset about losing the benefits of the Fountain of Youth planet that they went to any means (meaning face stretching) to hold on to their youth. But the face-stretching mutilates their appearnce into something so grotesque that it's pretty hard to believe that the entire group of them went along with it. No one said, hey guys, maybe we should either say sorry and return to the magical immortality world or, failing that, grow old like normal people rather than, you know, turning ourselves into freak-show horrors? Their face stretching made sense when it was just some dumb cultural thing.
Lol, holodeck'd. I really can't explain exactly what happens in the climax of this film - Picard et al. make use of a holoship (a ship with a giant holodeck that could replicate a large space) that the Federation had planned to stuff the Ba'ku into as a way to get them off the planet. They get the Son'a on that ship through plot wizardry so that when the Son'a think they've succeeded with their ring-harvesting plan, they've actually just been inside a mock up of their ship's bridge, and it's all fake. When F. Murray Abraham finds this out, his performance goes from 11 to 1 billion.
A bunch of shit happens after this, including the final confrontation between Picard and Ru'afo, but it's all so lazy and uninteresting that I'm taking the rest of the review off. See you back here for Nemesis.
The Borg launch a new, concerted attack against the Earth, and the Enterprise-E is instead sent out to patrol the Neutral Zone because Starfleet is concerned that Captain Picard's personal history with the Borg will override his judgment in battle. As the Enterprise crew learns that the battle is going poorly they disobey orders and head to Earth just in time to lead a renewed attack on the Borg ship and defeat it, but not before an escape pod gets away. This pod travels back in time to 21st century Earth and takes the Enterprise along with it, where the crew discovers that the Borg has changed the future and converted the entirety of humanity into members of the Borg Collective - they've managed to do this by destroying the capability of Zefram Cochran (James Cromwell) to launch Earth's first warp ship, therefore delaying humanity's first contact with alien lifeforms long enough for the Borg to take over instead. The Enterprise destroys the pod but, unknown to them, survivors infiltrate the Enterprise and begin assimilating its crew.
A group on Earth led by Riker, Geordi and Troi work to salvage Cochran's work and attempt to launch the warp ship at its designated historical moment, while the rest of the crew of the Enterprise battles the Borg menace on the ship. Data is captured by the Borg and meets the Borg Queen (Alice Krige), who attempts to reverse engineer him into a Borg, grafting human flesh on to a mechanical body. As more and more of the ship is lost to the Borg, Picard's officers plead for him to destroy the ship and the Borg along with it but he refuses, a fact which Cochran's colleague Lily (Alfre Woodard), who had been brought aboard the ship for medical attention, realizes is due to Picard's desire for vengeance against the race that once assimilated him. Picard, confronted with the reality of his obsessive quest by Lily, acquiesces to his officers and sets the ship to self-destruct, but he is thwarted by the Queen and the newly-assimilated Data. As Cochran's ship lifts off from Earth, the Queen orders Data to fire on it, but he proves to be a disloyal member of the Collective, and deliberately misses Cochran's ship before destroying the Borg Queen and the rest of the threat aboard the Enterprise. The warp ship, having safely completed its flight, returns to Earth, and a Vulcan ship touches down that night, proving to humanity that it is not alone in the universe. The Enterprise travels back to the 24th century, having defeated the Borg and restored humanity's future.
I feel very comfortable stating, without qualification, that the Borg are the most interesting villain in the Star Trek universe. They have a clear goal, one which makes a certain kind of twisted sense from their point of view, they are (within reason) an unstoppable force, they have no particular reason to ever listen to a rational argument for why what they are doing is wrong, and they are weird and creepy looking in the best body horror tradition. The Klingons or the Romulans or any of the other Bad Guy races in the Star Trek universe can be effective here or there, but too often rely on the sort of implied racism that says that any entire group of people can simply be thoroughly incompatible with the ideals of civilized society, a dumb and reductive idea.
I've read that the producers of the series had trouble figuring out how to deal with the Borg after they'd been introduced. The Borg were supposed to serve a role closer to, say, the Klingons, being an antagonist that the Enterprise would scrap with on a regular basis, but they were such an effective and terrifying enemy that the writers realized they had to pull them back a little bit, because if they showed up too often the Enterprise would have to thwart them again and again, robbing them of much of their power. So they only ended up showing up a handful of times in the Next Generation series (although I understand they were much more of a major antagonist in the Voyager series).
The big screen adventures of the Next Generation crew were tailor-made for a Borg-related story, and the second film in the series was the perfect time to introduce them to a film-going audience. Get the first film jitters out of the way and then dive back into the series with a film built around Picard and crew's most terrifying enemy. And I think parts of this film hint at what might have been, but on the whole this has been the most disappointing film in the series so far.
The biggest problem here is that it's not simply a Borg story. In Star Trek II, two very different plots (the Genesis device and Khan's quest for vengeance) were sandwiched together into a film that managed to be more than the sum of its parts. In First Contact, two different plots are again sandwiched together (the Borg menacing Earth, and the inaugural flight of Earth's first warp drive) but the two stories are so completely divergent, and so wildly different in tone, that the film never coalesces into a satisfying whole. One group of characters is down on Earth having wacky adventures with the perenially-sloshed creator of said warp drive, and the other group is up in space basically re-enacting an Alien flick in Star Trek guise. The horror of what's happening in space never bleeds into the goings-on down on Earth at all (no one even knows what's happening to the Enterprise, only that they can't get in touch with them), and the goofy good vibes of Zefram Cochran and his band of misfits continually sucks the terror of the Enterprise-based scenes right out of the film. One or other of these stories should have been the film all by itself, and when I say one or other of them I mean the Borg stuff. This film promises the Borg, and by all rights its fans deserve the Borg, and no one really cares about seeing humanity's first meeting with the Vulcans. That's fan-fiction territory, not Big Screen Adventure territory. I'm sure Zefram Cochran was one of those names with whom fans were familiar, it was probably dropped here or there in the original or Next Generation series, but sometimes less is more when it comes to doling out backstory. Cochran's story is supposed to provide a lesson about the way that our heroes are simply mortal men, with all the flaws inherent to that fact, but that's quite frankly kind of a trite idea, and it's only explored on a surface level here anyway. It could have been written out of the movie without doing it real harm, but it's here and it keeps reminding you that more interesting things are happening elsewhere.
Bullet points:
Jonathan Frakes gets the opportunity to direct the film, and his debut as a director is more confident than Leonard Nimoy's was for Star Trek III. The jarring tonal shifts throughout the film are the script's fault more than his. My one complaint is that he tends to rely on cliche, particularly when he's doing the horror portion of the film. There is actually a shot of a woman looking directly at the camera and screaming, like this without the plunger (which is from 1963):
The credits continue to be a horrible, pointless time suck at the opening of the film. This film's credits are maybe the worst of the whole bunch. There isn't even a starfield, just a blurry blue blob as each credit moves from extreme close-up to in-focus.
The opening shot, on the other hand, is one of those things that allows me to say that Frakes is indeed pretty confident, and it conveys a lot of information with no words - it opens on a shot of Picard, in a machine pod, and as the camera slowly zooms out we see hundreds and then thousands of identical pods, each housing a Borg. This shot tells us about Picard's history, and it tells us about the nature of the Borg, all without any words being spoken. The scene gets less interesting as dialogue is introduced, because no matter how good of an actor Picard is, he can't help but deliver his Borg lines with his Shakespearean inflections. It is also unfortunately followed by a nested dream sequence, and if I never see another nested dream it'll be too soon.
This film introduces new uniforms. Everyone now has a grey yoke on top of a black tunic, with the color underneath the yoke presumably identifying which department they work in (rather than the mishmash of black top/colored yoke or colored top/black yoke uniforms they had in Generations.) It's a nice clean look, and I for one like it quite a bit.
There are some changes at the beginning of the film that are basically uncommented on. They are now on the Enterprise-E (Star Trek V made a big deal about the Enterprise-A, but this film doesn't linger, it simply establishes its existence and moves on), and Geordi no longer has his weird eye visor thing, having had it replaced by similarly weird blue contacts. I appreciate the absence of expository dialogue about these facts.
Neal McDonough is occupying the Memorial Wesley Crusher Console on the bridge in one of his first film roles, and he gets a decent amount to do in the film. I will refer to him as Ensign Blue Eyes going forward because I forget his character's name. An almost unrecognizably young Adam Scott also shows up briefly, as the helmsman on a ship that Worf is commanding.
I guess they fixed Data's dumb emotion chip problem where it made him act like a lunatic? It never comes up, and he is much more subdued with his emotions in this film. Data's place in the movie is much improved over what they saddled him with in Generations - he still gets a spotlight subplot, but it's a bit subtler, and he doesn't have to be the awful "comic" relief at any point.
After the bulk of the battle with the Borg Cube takes place offscreen, the Enterprise comes in to act as classic Napoleonic reinforcements, but it does so inadvertently (since the Enterprise wasn't supposed to be anywhere near the battle). Either Starfleet doesn't have the wherewithal to come up with a good reinforcement plan, the sort of thing that should be written in to any tactical plan, or they're working on a much deeper level than is immediately apparent to stop the Borg threat.
In the midst of a battle against humanity's most lethal enemy, it's good to know that Riker still has time for a bit of comic jackassery with Worf (who gets dragged back to the Enterprise through transparent script shenanigans.) Frakes gets a bit more to do here than he did in Generations, and while I think Riker can sometimes be too smarmy for his own good, it's still generally more good than bad when the script gives him stuff to do.
The time travel mechanics in this film are a total mess. The Borg go back in time just because, and their plan, which involves stopping the launch of Cochran's warp ship and using that as a jumping off point to assimilate all of humanity, has never really made sense to me. I could go into a long, discursive discussion about this nonsense but I don't see the point. The time travel aspect introduces Cochran, and I think Cochran doesn't need to be here at all, so I'll just leave it there.
James Cromwell and Alfre Woodard look like Mutt and Jeff next to each other. They are supposed to be in Montana, which unsurprisingly looks a lot like a California pine forest.
Data is tasked with delivering a bit of exposition about how ironic it is that Cochran ushered in an era of peace by using a nuclear missile (which he repurposed into humanity's first warp ship). I mean, I'm barely paraphrasing, he basically delivers that line uncut. I guess that's the value of having a robot as a character, he can do the "As you know, you are the world's leading expert on human/alien brain transplants" without having to act his way through a dumb bit of exposition-as-dialogue, because a wooden reading of a brutal bit of exposition is what you are already expecting.
When the crew of the Enterprise has figured out that the Borg are taking over their ship, Picard gathers together a commando team to go down and meet them in force. He tells the commandos not to hesitate to fire on the already-assimilated crewmembers. But wasn't he brought back from Borg-hood? If that's possible, why don't they just stun them and then de-Borgify them? I'm sure there was some reason discussed in the "Picard goes Borg" episodes, but as it stands it just seems like a plot hole.
Marina Sirtis' British accent goes in and out really bad when she has to do her "act drunk" scene with Riker after having discovered the equally drunk Cochran.
Does Zefram Cochran use the phrase "you're on some kind of star trek" in this film? Yes he does.
Alfre Woodard's performance is really kind of unnecessarily bugfuck. She has to go toe-to-toe with Picard's full-on Richard III energy when he flips out about destroying the Enterprise instead of standing and fighting, so it works for that part. The biggest problem is that her crazy energy is starkly in contrast with Cromwell's laid-back dudery. It's not remotely clear how these two even became colleagues, and the film also suggests that they are also lovers.
The Enterprise's windows are forcefields? Has this always been the case?
I have to deal with the Borg Queen. There's probably a rule that, in any series which introduces a hive-mind type enemy, it will eventually throw in the idea of a queen. The funny thing is, the way she talks it's not even clear that she serves as the classic "controls-the-troops" queen, but that's mostly because she talks in these incomprehensible philosophical riddles. Whatever the case may be about her function, she is a pretty big miscalculation. The terror of the Borg stems, in part, from their sameness, and from the fact that they're an inplacable enemy which can't be reasoned with. But Alice Krige gives us a Borg Queen who has obviously thought long and hard about the Borg's mission, and can carry on long conversations about the nature of her species. The Borg come from the same enemy family that zombies do, and zombies don't have queens, their threat is much more diffuse and therefore much more terrifying. I'm sorry that the Borg Queen exists, and she really takes away from some of the horror which should be inherent in this film.
We get a scene of that self-indulgent noir character that Picard likes to dress up as on the holodeck. He uses it to help neutralize an immediate Borg threat to him and Lily which, okay, that's moderately clever I guess but I'm pretty sure I could think of about 300,000 more useful programs if your goal is to stop the Borg than a 1940's detective novel.
Picard and co. determine that the Borg are using the Enterprise's deflector dish in order to send a message to the Borg of the 21st century to come to Earth, and Picard, Worf and Ensign Blue Eyes suit up for a spacewalk across the hull of the ship in order to stop them. The tension in the scene is ratcheted up by some pretty transparent script chicanery. The three men have to push a bunch of buttons and futz around with these big blocky solid-state chips in order to accomplish their goal of releasing the deflector dish from the ship, while the Borg slowly realize what they're doing. Every time you need to work quickly, there's a stuck lever standing in your way.
Lily's entire purpose in the plot is to be the one non-Starfleet officer on the Enterprise, so that she can force Picard to admit that he's out for revenge against the Borg and that's why he won't agree to simply blow up the Enterprise. A little bit of movie magic immediately fixes the problem, as Lily's forcing Picard to confront the reality of his quest for vengeance causes him to see it clearly for the first time, and he has an immediate about-face about his decision-making. Suffice it to say that this is not how people actually work, but the character arc has to take this necessary next step, and it'll do it by hook or by crook, by which I mean by Stewart doing some capital-A Acting.
While the ultimate horror is happening to the Enterprise as its entire crew is slowly but inevitably assimilated into the Borg Collective, Cochran is flying his ship to the sound of "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf. I guess that particular jarring tonal shift is on Frakes more than the screenwriters.
After her flesh has been all melted away, and she's nothing but a metallic skull and spine, Picard snaps the remains of the Borg Queen's neck like a fucking boss. You can tell Ahab to stop chasing the whale, but you can't convince him not to stab it in the eye a few times after it's been killed anyway.
