Starlight, Wandering from the Path, and Failure in The Desolation of Smaug

Spoilers for The Desolation of Smaug, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Wrath of Khan.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is about mistakes and bad decisions.  Just as much of An Unexpected Journey was about trying to reclaim a glorious past, for those who see The Hobbit trilogy itself as a bad decision, this theme might seem very fitting.  But as someone who sees value in it, this theme unifies a movie that might seem to just be a formless series of events and creates some emotion unseen in any of the previous Tolkien films or in very many mainstream blockbuster films at all.

Smaug establishes early on that it will be about “wandering from the path”: Gandalf warns the company of dwarves not to leave the path in Mirkwood, saying that if they do, they “might never find it again.”  The first film was about setting out on the path (literally and figuratively), forming the company, and asking its central thematic question: why would Bilbo join this quest?  Having answered that at the end of the first film (the answer: empathy), the second film takes the united heroes it has established and shows them making mistakes, which lead them to splinter their company and ultimately to fail in their quest to slay the dragon. 

The dwarves leaving the literal path in Mirkwood constitutes the first bad decision made in the film (I’m not sure Gandalf’s decision to leave the company is a mistake, though his decision to enter Dol Guldur alone most certainly is).  The Mirkwood sequence also marks when the film begins asking what causes people to make bad decisions.  There is a motif of hallucination, delirium and intoxication in the film: the hallucinations in Mirkwood, the Elf guards getting drunk, Bofur getting hammered and missing the boat out of Laketown (it just had to be the Irish dwarf, I guess), Kili’s delirious conversation with Tauriel after she heals him.  It’s fair to say that these things fall under the category of intoxication: they are things that overwhelm the characters’ reason and decision-making, causing them to do things they wouldn’t normally do.  Intoxication means they can’t see clearly, which itself becomes a separate motif in the film with three characters with a cloudy eye: one of the menacing men in Bree, Bolg, and the brief of vision of Thranduil with half of his face burned off.  And isn’t there another character with One Eye?

But these are mostly minor examples of intoxicating things that overwhelm the characters’ decision-making.  The real focus of the film is on Thorin’s obsession with the treasure of Erebor and Bilbo’s growing obsession with and thrall to the One Ring.  The motif establishes these obsessions as essentially an extension of being drunk, which makes sense in the context of these films given the way the filmmakers often characterized the Ring in LOTR as being like a drug and Gollum and Frodo as being like drug addicts.

Bilbo’s and Thorin’s obsessions are what cause them to make mistakes or do things they would not normally do.  For Bilbo, the Ring gives him the ability to do things he probably would not have been able to do without it: fighting the spiders, sneaking through the Elven-King’s halls, and entering Erebor.  But the desire to keep it also drives him into a murderous rage when he sees it near a large insect.  And most importantly, even though he knows that he should tell Gandalf about it, Bilbo hides the Ring from the Wizard.  The Ring has started intoxicating the hobbit and influencing his decisions.

Despite the Ring’s importance in the larger story, and the title of this trilogy, Thorin’s obsessions and mistakes are the primary focus of Smaug.  They are the ones with the most consequence.  It is his obsession with the treasure that leads the company into the mountain to awaken the beast.  “He cannot see beyond his own desire,” Bard says (there’s the eye/seeing motif again).  And it is his obsession which causes Thorin to turn his own sword on Bilbo.

The film’s decision to focus on Thorin rather than Bilbo has been justifiably controversial.  Bilbo does have some important things to do in the film (scaling the tree in Mirkwood, rescuing the dwarves from the spiders, rescuing the dwarves from the Elves, entering Erebor on his own), but there are sections of the film where he really does seem to disappear.  When we see him in the boat leaving Laketown, I had a feeling that we hadn’t really seen him in a while.  Given the powers of the Ring, perhaps it is fitting that Bilbo disappears from his own movie.  And it’s also probably a consequence of having a film with 15 main characters, and that’s before you add in the Elves and the Laketown characters.  Many of the dwarves also fade into the background this time.  Has poor William Kircher had more than one line as Bifur in this entire series?  At least Bombur gets to be a bouncing barrel.

Yet the emphasis on Thorin is more appropriate for a specific thematic focus that makes the ending of the film an actual ending.  If we think about an ending as the point where the story is over, then a cliffhanger like Smaug’s doesn’t constitute an ending.  But for me, that definition doesn’t really work.  No story is ever really over, and certainly most movie stories don’t end when the credits role.  The happy couple finally saying, “I love you” and kissing isn’t an ending.  Their lives don’t stop there, unless they’re about to be hit by truck.

I haven’t thought about it long enough to come up with the best definition for an ending, and I don’t want to propose anything too restrictive since that is the opposite of what I’m trying to do, but I have taken to using this definition for an ending: a movie can end if it has answered a central dramatic or thematic question.  I think this can apply to most types of stories, but I think it is useful for making a part of a series into a complete thought rather than just an episode.  The central dramatic question of The Lord of the Rings is: will Frodo destroy the Ring?  But the central dramatic and thematic question of The Fellowship of the Ring is right there in the title: can Frodo make this journey alone?  By the end of the movie, there is an answer: Frodo has to leave his friends to keep them out of danger, but he can’t make the journey alone.  Or to put it another way: “I’m going to Mordor alone.”  “Of course you are, and I’m coming with you.”  The central thematic question of An Unexpected Journey is: why would Bilbo join this quest?  The answer is that he empathizes with dwarves’ need to find a home.

The central thematic question of The Desolation of Smaug is: can these characters avoid repeating the mistakes of the past?  At the end of the film, we have an answer: no.

This film is not just about any kinds of mistakes.  No, this wouldn’t be a Tolkien story without the Shadow of the Past.

Memory is everywhere in Tolkien.  I already wrote about how An Unexpected Journey has a very Tolkien-like focus on the past: the framing device of an older Bilbo writing his book, Thorin’s desire to reclaim his people’s glorious past, the return of an ancient evil, even Peter Jackson’s clear desire to reclaim the glory of his LOTR trilogy.  And memory is still present in Desolation of Smaug.  Every time the characters reach a new place or meet a new character, there is a history that needs to be told.  When they reach his house, Beorn tells the company about his ancient grudge against Orcs.  When the company reaches Mirkwood, they find the ruins of the Elven gate and statues overgrown with vines: this place’s glory days were many years ago (or as a resident of Mirkwood would say about another forest in Middle-Earth: “This forest is old, very old, full of memory and anger.”).  Stuff like this is part of what I love about Tolkien’s work: it takes place in a world filled with reminders of an older world.  The Balrog is not just another monster for the heroes to fight.  It is a living memory of ancient history.

The company’s captivity in the Woodland Realm reintroduces the theme of memory by having Tauriel explicitly state it when she describes her people’s love of starlight.  The idea of starlight as memory is both strangely scientifically accurate for a fantasy story and appropriate for the history of the Elves, since the last of the Silmarils (the famous Elven jewels of the First Age, the cause of much wonder and grief) was sent into the sky as a star.  (Side note: this is Earendil, the most beloved star of the Elves; Galadriel gave to Frodo a vial with the light of this star, essentially the light of a Silmaril, which contained the light of the Two Trees of Valinor; Frodo who used it to fight Shelob, spawn of Ungoliant who helped Morgoth to steal the Silmarils from Valinor and destroyed the Two Trees in the First Age.  Shelob’s Lair is a rematch of the most ancient conflict in Middle-Earth.  How cool is that?)

The reintroduction of this theme is important because the Quest for Erebor is the quest to reclaim a memory.  When Thorin convinces the people of Laketown to help him, he uses his memories of the glory of Esgaroth and convinces them that he can return them to that past glory.  And when the dwarves finally reenter Erebor, Thorin and Balin are overcome with memories of what the Mountain once was.

The past is starlight, but the past is also a room full of the decomposing corpses of dwarves who could not escape from the Mountain.  The past is a ruined city that was turned to ash.  The past is full of death and mistakes.  And just as the adoration of the past is very much in the spirit of Tolkien, this film’s skepticism of focusing on the past is also in the spirit of Tolkien.

We tend to think of Tolkien as THE conservative Luddite, opposed to industrialization, the internal combustion engine and progress, and instead obsessed with the idea of an agrarian English countryside that was long gone and may have never really existed.  But there is evidence that he too had some skepticism about dwelling on the past.  I already touched on this a little in my post about An Unexpected Journey: the negative ramifications of Thorin’s obsession with the past are not an invention of the films.  This doesn’t necessarily suggest that Tolkien believed Thorin’s quest was a bad idea, since the book tends to focus on his greed.  But evidence of Tolkien’s skepticism of dwelling on the past can be found in one of my favorite passages of his writing.

In the Extended Edition of The Return of the King, Gandalf tells Pippin about the decline of Gondor, a speech that is taken almost verbatim from one that Faramir (the character out of all he had created in whom Tolkien saw the most of himself) gives in the book of The Two Towers, when he tells Frodo and Sam about Gondor.  The speech in the movie (almost the same as the book; the only thing missing is a mention of elixirs, which doesn’t really add to the theme) is: “Kings made tombs more splendid than the houses of the living and counted the old names of their descent dearer than the names of their sons.  Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry or in high cold towers asking questions of the stars.”

First things first: if that passage doesn’t excite you, then there’s nothing I can say to convince you to like Tolkien.  Second: if that’s not skepticism about dwelling on the past, I don’t know what is.  Of course, the passage is about a decline from former glory, spoken by someone who wants Gondor to return to it.  The speech in the film is prefaced by Gandalf saying: “The old wisdom borne out of the West was forsaken.”  There is no denying that Tolkien valued the past and believed much of it was preferable to the present, but this speech also sees a great deal of evil in dwelling on the past.

And it is this skepticism that comes to the forefront in The Desolation of Smaug, not the sense of nostalgia that we commonly associate with Tolkien.  The question in this film is not whether or not the heroes will reclaim the glories of the past, but whether or not they can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.  And past mistakes are everywhere in this film.  Thorin has the chance to repair the rift between his people and Thranduil, but instead he chooses to scorn the Elf-King again.  Bard is haunted (and publicly ridiculed) because of his ancestor’s failure to kill Smaug, and he still keeps a reminder of it in his house (significantly, the film ends before we find out if he repeats his ancestor’s mistake).  And Thorin is haunted by his grandfather’s greed, which summoned the dragon that destroyed Dale and Erebor. 

Two characters confront him about these past mistakes.  Bard tells him in Laketown that if they enter the mountain, they are sure to unleash the same fire that destroyed Dale.  And Balin reminds Thorin that the treasure of Erebor drove his grandfather mad, while Thorin’s face is framed by the head of an ancient Dwarf statue: the past is always present.  Bard’s warning comes with a prophecy that encapsulates the temptation of reclaiming the past, and the danger of repeating its mistakes: “And the bells shall ring in gladness at the Mountain King’s return, but all shall fail in sadness, and the lake will shine and burn.”

As the company returns to Thorin’s past home, with the memory of past mistakes, of a king that went mad and a town turned to ash, what happens?  They repeat it all.  Obsessed with the treasure, Thorin turns his sword on Bilbo, and Bilbo’s remark about the barrels sends Smaug back to kill the men of Dale.  In fact, Thorin’s plan to defeat Smaug is to complete Erebor’s last, unfinished construction project: creating a golden dwarf statue.  His plan is for it to fall apart, covering Smaug in molten gold, but it is interesting that Thorin fills in the outlines of a blueprint that was set more than a hundred years before to create a golden monument to past glory that falls apart after only a few seconds.  And it all still “fails in sadness,” Smaug flies out of the mountain, “and the lake will shine and burn.”  That last part is yet to happen at the end of this film, but there is nothing to stop it.  The central question of the film has been answered: the company of dwarves repeated the mistakes of the past.

It is this ending that I think makes The Desolation of Smaug special.  There is no denying that the film has problems.  I don’t mind the Kili-Tauriel romance, and I actually really like Tauriel as a character, but I don’t think a crude sexual innuendo is the best way to start off a fairy-tale love story.  The continued emphasis on digital rather than practical effects is also disappointing.  The CGI orcs are less interesting than the practical ones in LOTR, and while most of the effects look very good, holy moly does the molten gold look fake.  The CGI also tends to mean that the action scenes usually lack a real sense that the characters could get hurt.  The barrel chase scene is fun, but it relies primarily on a sense of kinetic energy rather than a sense of jeopardy.  I also don’t understand the decision to turn the dwarves into super heroes who can pretty much do anything.  The first movie introduced an idea that I really liked, that these dwarves aren’t really warriors and aren’t particularly suited for this quest, but the series hasn’t followed through on that.  They all seem pretty capable to me.  And while there are some great images (I love the wintry atmosphere in Laketown), sometimes I think the digital grading goes overboard, particularly in Mirkwood where a general washed-out brown look replaces what seemed from the production videos to be a darkly colorful and almost psychedelic-looking forest.  Of course, not all of the storylines get a satisfying ending with Legolas fighting Bolg and then riding off to… fight him again?  I like ending the movie with Gandalf captured, but I’m still not sure about the Dol Guldur stuff.  If he has faced Sauron and survived, will the Balrog in Fellowship be as formidable?

But there is so much in the film that I do think works, not least of which is the actual dragon Smaug.  He looks fantastic, and the whole scene with him and Bilbo is terrific.  Here is an actual villain in this series who is smart and cunning, and I love that he is actually able to challenge how Bilbo sees Thorin.  Most of the individual dialogue scenes work very well.  As much as I disapprove of the trousers line, I very much like the scene when Tauriel and Kili talk about starlight and moonlight.  I even think the borderline maudlin healing scene has a nice fairy-tale quality to it.  And despite the lack of jeopardy in the action scenes, most of the movie has a very exciting feeling of adventure.  And then there’s that ending.

How often do you see something like this?  A mainstream, blockbuster movie that ends with the heroes failing, with something bad about to happen that is the heroes’ fault.  The Empire Strikes Back ends with failure, but it also ends with optimism about rescuing Han Solo.  The Wrath of Khan ends with Spock dead, but Khan has been defeated, and there’s hope that Spock can come back (“life from lifelessness”).

Oddly enough, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (released about a month before) has a similar ending, complete with a sense of failure and a town being hit with fire from the sky.  Even still, Katniss does strike a blow against the Capitol, and the ending reveals a revolution in progress.  Smaug ends with complete failure.  While it is a better movie than Smaug, I also think Catching Fire slightly botches its ending by cutting to what is essentially a Mockingjay screensaver, reinforcing the sense that the movie was really just a trailer for the next one.  I also don’t think the forgettable, mumbly credits song helps very much.  Whatever emotions we’re supposed to be feeling (anger, excitement, despair), the song just backs away from.

Formally, the ending of Smaug functions better.  Rather than backing away from the emotion of the ending, it confronts it with a confident directorial flourish.  Jackson’s other Tolkien films usually fade to black at the end (the exception being Unexpected Journey) and always wait until well into the credits to bring in the anachronistic credits song.  In Smaug, Jackson starts the song (loud, mournful, and surprising) right after a cut to black, even before the credits have started.  It’s a bold choice that could put people off, especially Tolkien purists, but it perfectly fits with the emotion of despair that the film ends on.  If the film doesn’t work for you, I can’t convince you to care about it or feel this particular emotion, but seeing it the first time, I found it very powerful.

And again, the sense of failure is something special in the ending of a blockbuster movie, and more specifically, it’s something that isn’t found elsewhere in the Tolkien films (the ending of the book of The Two Towers comes the closest).  For me, this ending provides a justification for the trilogy decision.  If the whole thing was done as one film or two films, the same story moment would happen, but it has much more impact as the ending of a film.  Making a blockbuster, fantasy movie about mistakes and failure, and ending that movie with the heroes being wrong, making mistakes, and failing, whatever other problems there are, that ending is worth it.

Star Trek Into Backlash

Spoilers: Star Trek Into Darkness, Star Trek: Generations, Iron Man Three, The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Boy did I not see that coming.

Last summer, there was a picture called Star Trek Into Darkness.  I was in the UK when it opened a week before opening in the US, before there was much of an advance word on it from American critics.  I didn’t really have any particular expectations for it, having enjoyed but not loved the previous J.J. Abrams Trek film.  Upon seeing it, my response was what you might call ecstatic.  And I saw this as an opportunity to practice an aspect of film criticism that I had never before experienced: putting out my opinion of a film before knowing what other people think about it.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that many people did not share my opinion.  True, the general critical consensus on it was fairly positive, but a major part of my review was the opinion that unlike the 2009 film, Into Darkness was true to the spirit of Star Trek by combining an action-adventure with the kind of moral debate that usually defines the best of Star Trek.  Yet, a conference of Trek fans declared it to be the worst Star Trek film.  Yes, worse than Final Frontier and Generations (the one that killed Captain Kirk by having him fall off one of those standard movie rickety metal bridges; spoilers, I guess, for perhaps the lamest of all movie deaths).  Despite the positive critical opinion upon release, I think the general opinion on this film, particularly in the fan/nerd community, is negative.  Not just negative.  I get the sense that a lot of people really hate this movie.

Matt Singer already has a really good piece at The Dissolve revisiting this picture and charting the initial praise and backlash, so in some ways this piece might be a little redundant.  But this is as much about revisiting my own opinion as it is about revisiting the film.  I gave four stars to a film that so many people hate.  Essentially, the question is: did I blow it?

I would say: not really.  Looking at the picture again, I would not change my positive opinion of the film, but there definitely are parts of my review that I would change.  I think I was correct in assessing the picture’s quality as an entertainment, but thematically, I saw more in it than was really there.

Let’s start with what I got right: for about 90% of its running time, Star Trek Into Darkness is an exhilarating entertainment.  Much of this is probably due to the direction and Abrams’ constantly moving camera, which in the tumbling to the Earth set piece actually has a reason for all the tilting and whirling.  But loathe as most people are to giving credit to Orci, Kurtzman and Lindelof, their script gives the film a constant sense of mounting jeopardy and tension, something that definitely registered for me when it was released.

You see, another movie by the name of Iron Man Three came out just before Into Darkness, a movie with a celebrated/infamous twist.  At around two-thirds of the way through that film, the supposed villain known as the Mandarin, played by Ben Kingsley, is revealed to actually be an actor playing a character at the behest of a businessman played by Guy Pearce.  I feel pretty confident in saying that literally zero people in the world saw this twist coming.  In a time when we seem to know everything about a movie long before we see it, a lot of people celebrated the fact that Iron Man Three was able to pull off a twist like this.  And a lot of other people really hated it.

To be fair, most of this hate was kind of dumb, mostly along the lines of the old they-changed-it-from-the-source-material-it-sucks kind of thing.  But the thing is, I didn’t really care for the twist either.  In fact, I think it may have ruined the movie for me.  I have never read an Iron Man comic, so I could not care less about fidelity to the source material, and I like that Marvel took a big risk when it could have just coasted on fan adoration.  And the twist itself is fine: it’s a clever, funny moment that really did take me by surprise.

But the question that I want to ask people who really like the twist is this: did you enjoy the last third of Iron Man Three more than the first two-thirds?  Because I really did not.  There are lots of problems with that last section of the picture.  Everything feels rushed and perfunctory.  Tony Stark does not seem particularly concerned about Pepper: he knows that she’s in danger, but he’s still making all of his usual quippy remarks.  Even the celebrated airplane rescue happens so quickly that it lacks the sense of jeopardy that it could have had.  And the overarching problem is that there is a real lack of tension throughout this last act of the picture, which is disappointing considering how much tension and threat there is in most of the film.  And I do think the moment when the tension drops out of the picture was when the film replaced a villain who was generating a palpable sense of threat for most of the running time (the rest of the movie would not have functioned otherwise) with a character who was kind of boring.  I don’t really care about the twist.  What I care about is that the twist sucked all of the tension out of the film.

The other interesting thing about Iron Man Three’s twist is that it became a kind of rallying point against the J.J. Abrams Mystery Box.  Iron Man pulled off a big twist about its villain by not drawing a lot of attention to it in the marketing.  Whereas most of the marketing for Star Trek Into Darkness was centered around the mystery of who the villain was.  “Who is he?”  “We can’t tell you.”  “Is he Khan?”  “No.  Maybe.  We’re not telling.”  “It’s Khan, isn’t it?”  And so many people, myself included, went into Into Darkness knowing that the villain would be Khan.  To be fair, this may be indicative of the echo chamber of online film writing.  Just about everyone who writes or is obsessed with online film journalism knew that the villain would be Khan, but I know many people who were genuinely surprised in the theater.

The other oft-cited criticism of the Khan twist is that it has meaning for the audience, but not for the characters.  They have no reaction because his name has no meaning for them.  Fair enough.  And even though the reveal of Peter Weller’s Admiral Marcus as a villain does have meaning for the characters, it’s not exactly the most surprising twist.

But the key for me is that while Iron Man’s unexpected twist sucked the tension out of the film, the less unexpected twists in Star Trek Into Darkness almost always increased the tension and the sense of threat.  When Admiral Marcus arrives, when Kirk aligns with Khan, when Khan betrays Kirk, those may make the story convoluted, but they also raise the tension.  For an action-thriller, the sense of rising tension is paramount and I think it makes Star Trek Into Darkness a superior entertainment experience.

Now, there’s the question of whether or not the movie is something more than that.  Is it really a four-star movie worthy of comparison with the best of Star Trek?  Probably not as much as I thought at the time.

Again, I’ll start with what I think the film does well.  Since I decided that revealing Khan’s presence in the film would constitute a spoiler, I did not discuss the film’s relationship with The Wrath of Khan in my review.  The first thing to say is that no one is disputing that Wrath of Khan is a better film.  There are certain things that are just facts: the Earth revolves around the sun, William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066, and Wrath of Khan is the best Star Trek movie.

And now that’s out of the way, I will argue that the reuse of much of Wrath of Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness is not actually a bad thing.  I get the sense that this is the primary reason that Into Darkness gets so much hate, particularly from Star Trek fans angered at the new series reusing some of the iconic moments from the best Trek film.  And when I heard that Khan would be the villain, I thought I would end up in agreement with everyone who objected.

But I don’t agree.  I think that the way Into Darkness uses these moments from Wrath of Khan is pretty interesting and actually introduces some science-fiction ideas into this space opera.  Recall that this new series is the result of time travel and that everything in this film takes place after time travel has already altered the past in the Star Trek canon.  Since Khan’s crew was already frozen before the events of the previous film, it would be reasonable to expect that the crew of the Enterprise would still encounter him.  Obviously, that is not reason enough to use the character again, but that’s not what I find interesting.  Originally, when the Enterprise encountered Khan, Spock ended up sacrificing his life to save the ship.  When they encounter Khan under different circumstances in this film, with the ship facing a problem that is similar but not exactly the same, Kirk is the one to sacrifice his life.

The key question that time travel stories almost always ask is: can you change the past?  In Harry Potter, you can’t change the past because everything that you do when you go back in time has already happened (Does that make sense?  No.  But I don’t think flyiiiiiinnnggg…).  The answer in Star Trek has always been that the past can be changed (as evidenced in “City on the Edge of Forever,” Voyage Home and First Contact), though usually it involves the past changing the future to something bad that the crew has to go back and fix.  Clearly the past changed in Star Trek (2009), but Into Darkness has what I think is a more interesting answer: you can change the past, but the past resists being changed.  Left to its own devices after a shift in time, the past will try to bring things back to the way they were before.  So when the crew of the Enterprise encounters Khan this time, Carol Marcus will still be there, the ship will still have a crippling problem with the warp drive and someone will still have to sacrifice himself to save everyone.  Things won’t be completely the same or completely different, but rather a strange, twisted version of the way things were supposed to be.

Continuing on this trajectory doesn’t exactly bode well for the future of the series.  I don’t particularly want all of the next ones to be reworkings of previous films or episodes (maybe Bones will be the new Gary Marshall or Spock will fight Scotty in the new “Amok Time”).  But on its own, I think Into Darkness presents an interesting idea of fate and time travel that makes it a worthy entry into the Star Trek canon.

But I do think the idea that I had of this film as an interesting political commentary is a bit of a stretch.  When I first saw it, I liked that it included a moral debate about how to respond to an act of terrorism and about the nature of Starfleet.  I love the moment when Scotty says that he’s scared about Starfleet becoming militaristic, and I like that Kirk’s decision to disobey the Admiral’s orders and not kill Khan is not just because Kirk likes breaking the rules but is instead an act of conscience.  It feels like the franchise is wrestling with itself after the militarism of the previous installment, which ends with Kirk and Spock murdering their first villain and his entire crew while they are helpless and defeated.  For Kirk and Spock, that is an act of revenge for the deaths of a father and a mother (and a planet), but the position of Into Darkness is that revenge is not worthy of a civilized society.

The film intends that position to be relevant for a modern American audience, and this is where things get tricky.  There are elements of the film that clearly stand out as allegorical.  The idea of using long range weapons to execute a suspected terrorist on foreign soil without a trial has a clear parallel with drone warfare.  And there is a dedication in the credits that I did not see the first time to “our post-9/11 veterans.”  Clearly, the film is supposed to be a commentary on 9/11 and the post-9/11 world.

I picked up on much of the allegorical aspects of the film on the first viewing, mainly the parallels with drone warfare, but after repeated viewings, I am finding myself less impressed.  Again, the sense of tension in the film is key here.  The highest point of tension is when Kirk enters the warp core as the ship is plummeting to Earth.  This is a moment when the marketing for this film actually aided the experience, as we had seen shots of a ship that looked like the Enterprise crashing into the bay.  The tension is released when the ship rises out of the clouds in a moment that I still think is terrific.  The movie keeps going, but from that point on, the rollercoaster ride is basically over.  You could say that the rest is icing on the cake, except in this case, icing means the destruction of San Francisco and the deaths of thousands of people.

I’ll be honest: I got really caught up in the rollercoaster ride of this movie.  Like I said above, I thought and still think that this is a really exciting entertainment, one of the most exhilarating that I saw last year.  So, after the Enterprise rose up from the clouds, I was in a kind of daze from the experience of the previous hour and forty-five minutes.  And because of that, I didn’t really notice the problems in the end of the film.

Let’s get something out of the way first.  A lot has been made of the fact (which I did not know when first seeing the film) that Roberto Orci (one of the screenwriters) is a 9/11 Truther, someone who thinks 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush Administration designed to start a war with Iraq (at least I think that’s what their beliefs are).  I don’t think the idea that the film is specifically a Truther allegory really holds up.  There are elements that sound like that and were probably the result of Orci’s involvement (the government doing secret, evil things in preparation for a war), but the details don’t quite match up.  If it was a Truther allegory, Admiral Marcus would have found a way to blame the Klingons for Khan’s actions rather than try to “inadvertently” start a war with them.  And the ending, where a hijacked flying object crashes into a city, was not deliberately designed by Admiral Marcus, but rather a result of Marcus aligning with an eventual terrorist in order to fight a superpower.  I don’t deny that the metaphor and the conspiratorial elements around it are probably due to Orci’s beliefs, but the ending functions as a metaphor for 9/11, not really for 9/11 as an inside job.  At least, I don’t really see it onscreen.

All that said, the ending of Star Trek Into Darkness is still problematic.  Quite simply, all of this should not be happening in the last 15 minutes of the picture.  A big 9/11 metaphor can’t be the icing on the cake.  When I first saw it, this scene didn’t really have an impact to it.  It was just another big spectacle on the screen.  That’s a problem.  Is that because we’re now desensitized to this kind of destruction, as so many of last year’s think pieces would have us believe?  Maybe, but for me, I think the problem was that it came after almost two hours of non-stop excitement that I felt had reached its peak and was nearly at the conclusion.  And it was nearly at the conclusion.  The film wants to have 9/11 happen and then have a calm, mature response to it all in its last fifteen minutes.  That doesn’t really work.

In Film Crit Hulk’s (I’m not going to bother explaining, but if you’re not reading him yet, get on it) epic analysis of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (another Orci and Kurtzman script, though I haven’t seen this one), he describes a similar problem with that film’s climax (spoilers for a decades-old comic that everyone knew was getting adapted this summer).  Apparently, Gwen Stacy’s death is the climax of the film, and that is followed by a short sequence in which Peter mourns her, considers quitting, and then decides to still be Spider-Man.  I haven’t seen the film, so I can’t judge it, but Hulk argues that this tries to provide a tidy resolution but doesn’t actually deal with her death in a meaningful way.  The same could be said for Star Trek Into Darkness, which wants to have a devastating climax and a resolution that deals with that climax in about 15 minutes.  It’s just not enough time to really do that.  Is this an Orci and Kurtzman thing, or is it indicative of a general belief that a big moment like Gwen Stacy’s death or the destruction of San Francisco needs to happen right at the end of the picture?  I think most of us would probably say that a film’s biggest moment should be the climax, but clearly there are instances where it should not be.

What happens in Star Trek Into Darkness is that the filmmakers try to cram all the themes into a speech at the very end: that Starfleet and the Star Trek series should not be so militaristic and that revenge is not the right response to tragedy.  I like that the film ends with those sentiments, but this where we come to the part that I do think I was wrong about.  I don’t really think that this film is optimistic anymore.  The main characters are people who don’t believe in taking revenge, and the film is meant to be an argument against vengeance (after all, that is the name of Marcus’ ship).  But that isn’t really borne out in the drama.  It’s meant to be, I’m sure.  Khan’s “superblood” is a way to allow Kirk to sacrifice himself and be resurrected, but it also engineers a way for the audience to root against the villain’s death, to root against taking revenge.  But when I was explaining to my dad why I like this movie, why I think that there is thematic resonance here, he made a very good point: they don’t take revenge by killing Khan, but they sure do like beating the crap out of him.  I think the film wants to be optimistic.  It wants to examine itself and come out with an idea of what Starfleet, the Star Trek series, America and the world should be.  But that doesn’t really work.

So the movie fumbles in its last 15 to 20 minutes.  That doesn’t make it a bad movie.  There are problems, but for the most part, it’s a very good picture.  There is some terrific filmmaking (the way the sweeping camera work and music combine in the fall to Earth scene is really thrilling and stirring), some gorgeous images of space (that hopefully promise good things for Star Wars Episode VII), and hints of some interesting ideas.  So what if it isn’t actually a great, four-star movie?  Why have I written more than three thousand words on this already?

Because I’ve really been thinking that I need to change the way I view blockbuster cinema.  You see, I believe in popular art.  I believe in the category that includes Dante, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, and Christopher Nolan.  I believe in the idea that art can have a profound emotional effect on a wide audience of people.  But it’s taken me a bit too long to realize that I don’t believe in the blockbuster.

So what is this about?  It’s about understanding that most blockbusters are not going to be great movies, that The Fellowship of the Ring, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Empire Strikes Back and Jaws are the exceptions, not the rule.  This isn’t about lowering my standards, but rather about raising them.  I think that expecting too much of blockbusters has also allowed me to be too impressed by ones that have elements of greatness, but don’t quite follow through on those elements.  This is about making sure that I still maintain my standards, but also recognize that it might not be fair for me to demand that Star Trek Into Darkness be a great movie, to put it on a pedestal where it doesn’t belong just because part of me is very ready to believe that a mainstream action/adventure movie can be that good.  You see, that high of experiencing a truly great work of popular art is really something.  I think it’s because popular art is more focused on emotions, so when an entertainment picture achieves an extraordinary emotional power, and is also thought-provoking or challenging or thematically overwhelming, there’s nothing better.  That’s something extraordinary, and it’s not something that happens all the time, but sometimes, I probably allow myself to think it has happened when it actually hasn’t.

And I found myself thinking about this when Cannes was happening a few weeks ago.  I saw that Winter Sleep won the Palme D’Or, and I remembered how much I loved Once Upon a Time in Anatolia a few years ago.  And then I thought about how this blog that I named “Esoteric” has been sitting here for a year with an overly enthusiastic piece about a big blockbuster sitting at the top.  So I thought about this piece, and I watched some movies, and I realized that I shouldn’t be demanding that blockbusters be like The Dark Knight.  I should be demanding that they be like Edge of Tomorrow.  They should be compelling.  They should be exciting.  They should have characters I care about.  They should have interesting ideas.  Really, that should be what I demand from all films.  All films are worthy of analysis, and all films have the potential to be great.  Most won’t be great, and that shouldn’t stop us from analyzing their problems.  But simple as it may sound, sometimes I have to remind myself that it’s ok for a movie to just be very good.  Star Trek Into Darkness is not actually a great movie.  But it is very good.