Dark Night of the Soul . . . Or, Star Trek Into Darkness Review

A comment on the franchise?

Let's get something out of the way first.  I like Star Trek.  I was a fan of the reboot and the original series.  I'm a huge fan of Deep Space Nine and I think it represents a solid attempt to combine action with a meaningful debate on the morality of war, religion and about a million other things.  It was also fun as all get-out.

Which is what Star Trek Into Darkness definitely is.  Fun.  A wonton romp to just about nowhere, without rhyme or reason.  And several 'splosions.  And Alice Eve in her underwear.  Because, I mean, really.  For what other reason does her character appear except to randomly (and it really is out of the blue) undress in front of Captain Kirk?

Which is basically what this movie boiled down to.  A lot happened -- from a terrorist attack, to an interstellar manhunt, to a ten-second debate on the existential dilemma between law-and-order and justice -- but not a lot really happened.  Cribbing many of its lines from Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, it felt like a bad joke, or a poorly timed parody of a film that was deeply invested in exploring the boundary between life and death, heroism and the extent of scientific advancement.  Moreover, "Wrath of Khan" has a deeply emotional conclusion which is the ultimate culmination of decades of on-screen relationships between the central characters.

Because why not?

Ultimately, the second Trek is a silly pastiche of Star Trek tropes that descends quickly into inanity.  While it moves quickly, the pacing seems directed at brushing over its shallowness; the humor is sophomoric and the petty bickering between Kirk and Spock is just that: petty.  While it might be a spectacle to behold, it left me with a bad taste in my mouth.  It was pandering of the worst kind.

I don't recommend this movie to really anyone.   

What the What? . . . Or, Bioshock:Infinite Review

I feel as though the statutes of limitation has worn off, and I can discuss Bioshock: Infinite with a minimum of spoilers. 

Let's get this out of the way first.  Great game.  Deeply immersive, with a great plot, superb voice-acting, and a better-than-pretty-good companion.  That being said, when I pay $60-70 for a video game, I demand certain things.  One of those things is replayability; really, it's top of the list.  Great story, great gameplay, but what I really want is the ability to immerse myself in the game several times, constantly discovering more.  I want Skyrim. 

Bioshock:Infinite is no Skyrim.  Nor does it ever strive to be.  It's a first-person shooter through and through, with a beautiful environment and a pretty trippy story.  You play Book DeWitt, and ex-Pinkerton agent hired to infiltrate the steam-punkish floating city of Columbia and rescue a young woman named Elizabeth from the clutches of the evil Zachary Hale Comstock.  Yeah, if you're a student of American history, that last name should sound familiar.

Anthony Comstock

The Comstock Laws are named for Anthony Comstock, who was Post Office Inspector and helped craft and pass a series of laws in 1873 banning obscene materials from being mailed by the Federal Government.  If you think Zachary Hale Comstock would live up to that draconian moralizing, perhaps borrowing from history, you'd be wrong.  In fact, the fictional Comstock is a purposeful amalgam of several historical actors.  The name seems to have been chosen because of its vague association with the late nineteen-century and not for any particular thing that Anthony Comstock did.

Zachary Hale Comstock is a viciously racist jingoist.  Seeing the moral decline of the United States following the Civil War, he takes his magic floating city and secedes from the Union.  It's a strangely dystopian view of American history, and highlights the lingering darkness of American history.  By re-telling the American history through a lens of counter-factual narrative, the game glances at roads not traveled without examining the deep sociological and historical trends which drove the history of the United States. 

The "Battle" of Wounded Knee

Nevertheless, it is fun and one should forgive their central conceit.  I mean, really.  It's a floating city.  You knew it was fantasy going in.  But it does leave one wondering if video games should teach history.  On the one hand, at least people have the sense that history is valuable and can inform future decision.  But on the other, it's really sloppy, and tends to flatten the rich experience of both the historical profession, and the historical experience in which people actually lived.

But let's move on the gameplay itself.  I'm not a hardcore gamer, so much of it boiled down to how easy it was to move, shoot, and not get stuck on the myriad boxes lying around the map.  Uncharted 2 had this problem, as did Black Ops 2.  I refer to them as "sticky" games.  The character, instead of sliding around obstacles, often got stuck on a piece of paper strewn about and was shot dead.  Bioshock: Infinite, fortunately, did not have this problem.  Movement was easy enough, and the much-touted aerial combat was fine, but nothing to write home about. 

The main comment I have concerns their magic system.  Yeah, you can shoot crows and fire from your hand, but calling it a "vigor" instead of a "plasmid" doesn't change the fact that you're shooting fire and crows from your hand.  It's just magic by another name.  As such, it's not really that useful, or even that much fun.  Most of the time I ran around shooting people.  The vigors added very little tactical advantage.  But they were fun to look at. 

My hands are on fire! 

That seems to be the takeaway of the whole game.  The world is beautiful. 

The actual plot?  Just so-so.  Save the girl, beat the bad guy, flee the scene.  The many twists they introduced were fun, but never spectacular, though told in an original and innovative way.  Kudos for that.  But the conclusion left me scratching my head, trying to rectify what I'd learned playing the game versus what I learned at the final reveal. 

It sort of made sense, but only for the final third of the game.  Everything before that seemed to contradict, or at the very least not conform, to the final reveal.  Which is okay, I suppose, but it doesn't lend itself to wanting to replay the game to figure out how the storytellers were able to capture that effect.  It felt . . . lazy. 

So while it was fun at the time, it wasn't a great amount of fun.  The technical wizardy was evident, and appreciated, but couldn't quite make up for the fact that the plot was thin, confusing, and ultimately self-contradictory.  Would I recommend this game?  I'm not sure.  Maybe if you get it on sale, or rent it from a RedBox.  Otherwise, save your money and read a good book instead.

Django Unchained . . . Or, American Violence We Need

Between going to the beach and doing homework, this weekend I saw "Django Unchained," Quentin Tarantino's obsequy to spaghetti westerns, and an odd critique of American slavery.  I say odd because though the movie is a revenge thriller of the usual variety, Tarantino phrases it within the mythos of the American south.  That is, while one would normally expect to see a lone gunman wandering the west in search of redemption, Django is a gunman in search of his wife in the American south, particularly Mississippi.  Discovering she has been sold to a plantation owner who specializes in the buying and selling of fighting slaves (think dog-fights but with black men).  Since it is a revenge flick, everything you'd expect to happen, happens.

But it takes an odd course to get there.  From the trailers, it is obvious that Django allies himself with Christopher Waltz as a bounty hunter.  The buddy-cop theme is played to perfection, without the slapstick we'd normally expect.  Instead, we're offered a discrete rumination on the horror of slavery, the perverse peculiarity of this American institution, and the ridiculous contradictions inherent in the system. 

Despite all that, I thought it was a good movie.  A bit on the bloody side, with the Tarantino-esque ridiculousness of the whole thing, but it felt visceral and thrilling and downright amoral.  Slavery was the obvious bad guy, with various minor bad guys along the way.  The moral lever was tilted toward Django the entire time and despite killing men in cold blood, we were meant to assuage our collective guilt with the assurance that they were slave traders and guilty enough to deserve death. 

Nevertheless, I thought it was a good movie, and I would quickly recommend it.

Wonder Woman and the Ubermensch

I was chatting recently with my Residence Director, a black woman who identifies as bi-sexual, about why Hollywood will never make a movie about Storm, the X-Man of African descent.  Basically, it boiled down to the fact that she's black, and she's a she.  Hollywood wouldn't dare make a movie with a female protagonist who isn't also white.  But it got me thinking as I consider all the hype around proposed Wonder Woman movies.

First of all, the original storyline for Wonder Woman would just have to be scrapped.  The whole Amazonian thing is kind of weird.  As Ubermensch Jeff Clayton has observed: "Wonder Woman was originally conceived as some 1940's male bondage-fetishist's fantasy of what a feminist hero should be like."  The updated storyline has some interesting twists, essentially tying Wonder Woman to Greek mythology in a way that is both satisfying and more-or-less consistent with our idea of Wonder Woman.

Intriguingly, though, Wonder Woman, though originating in a place that is definitely not white America, or any other Anglo-Saxony sort of place, is depicted as full on white.  I just have a hard time imagining that the people who read comic books are also the people who would freak out if someone with a skin color other than white was the main character.  

So maybe there is hope for a Storm movie; we just have to pave the way.

The Gift . . . Or, More Awesome Sci-Fi

Movies this good make me wonder just what writers and producers in Hollywood spend all their time up to.  It's so rich and spare and well-developed that I can't believe I don't see this on my TV every night.

I'd Watch This . . . Or, Star Wars That's Cool

So, it's not often that I get excited about Star Wars anymore.  I'm interested to see what Disney has to offer, but I'm not excited.  This short anime by a fan makes me feel the same visceral pleasure that I experienced during my teens for all things Star Wars.  If Disney could reproduce this, I'd watch it.

What Sunshine Got Wrong And So So Right . . . Or, Why I Like Boring Sci-Fi

I like boring sci-fi.  I like the science fiction where not a lot happens.  I like exploring derelict space ships, the limits of human understanding, and the void between our aspirations and our accomplishments.  In short, I'm okay if a gun never goes off, nothing ever blows up, and no one dies in my science fiction. 

That means that I really enjoy movies like 2001 and 2010 (although there is violence of a kind, it definitely drives the plot), Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Contact, Moon, and Sunshine.  The highlight, of course, is Contact, Robert Zemeckis's adaptation of Carl Sagan's book of the same name.  It's a beautiful soliloquy on faith, belief, and love.  It also doesn't have a lot of action.  Sure, the first time/space machine gets blown up by fundamentalists, but even that was understated and served to advance the plot.

Sunshine, Danny Boyle's film about humanity imperiled by a dying sun, is predicated on an explosion.  When I think about it, I tend to group it with other 'splosion-will-save-us-all movies like Armageddon, Deep Impact and The Core.  Ostensibly, they're all sort of science fiction.  At least, if you took the science-y bits out, it wouldn't work.  Two of them have space ships; the world is imperiled in all of them; and some sort of techno-babble is needed to save the world (which at this point is about all we can expect from our science fiction--woe to our science illiterate public).  In the end though, the world is saved when the asteroid is exploded, or when a series of nukes are able to restart the spin of the Earth's core, jumpstarting its stalled magnetic field.

I have a feeling these were all funded in part by nuclear apologists, or written by people who saw nuclear weapons as more than just humanity-killers.  These movies, in my mind, all have the subtitle: "Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."

In that respect, Sunshine isn't much different.  In the movie, the sun is dying.  We're not really told why, but if you listen to the director's commentary, you get a really nifty, scientific explanation.  Basically, a chunk of dark matter fell in and disrupted nuclear fusion.  The only way to save the sun is to dislodge that chunk so fusion can resume.  Here's where the Bomb comes in.

In order to save themselves, humanity mined half of all the fissile material on the planet, shoved it on a ship and shot it into the sun, and planned to detonate it to knock that chunk of sun-killer back into interstellar space.

Of course it failed.

Fortunately, humanity had just enough fissile material left over for one more go.  And this is where our story picks up.  The Icarus II (you know, because no one reads anything other than Greek mythology) is heading to the sun to deliver its cargo when it picks up the distress signal from the Icarus I.  They have a choice: stay on mission, or divert to see what happened, and maybe salvage the boom-juice from the first mission in case their's isn't enough.

In this movie, either option would have satisfied me.  Watching the ship recede behind them, listening to the distress signal, wondering, letting their curiosity drive them mad, would have made for an intriguing movie.  Perhaps they would have received some sort of indication that someone was still alive on the ship; oh, the complications that would have inspired. 

Instead, the decision is made to go ahead and see what happened and as you can imagine, things go badly.  Some miscalculated by a fraction of a percent, but this close to the sun, that means a lot.  And people die.  And the ship is nearly debilitated.  And they don't find out what happened on the Icarus I.  That miscalculation--that decision--not only meant they nearly lost their lives, but also imperiled the continued existence of humanity.  Heady stuff.

And the movie at this point could have continued to make deep insights, tell compelling story, and build on the stresses of fallible human beings engaged in a last ditched effort to save everything.  Instead, (and trying to keep it pretty spoiler-free) someone starts killing people.  The crew has to hunt down the bad guy (whoever he might be) and continue the mission, which suddenly seems all the more imperiled.  

The movie is visually beautiful, the sound work is stunning, and the acting understated and believable.  So it's a tragedy that it had to take such a sudden and dramatic turn in the second act.  What began as good science fiction devolved rather quickly into pure action for no reason than that it would probably sell tickets. 

The premise is great; the science is great; the decisions are real and believable and delightful.  So while the movie isn't perfect, it still ranks in my top 10 favorite science fiction movies.  Give it a shot.