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.

Let's Continue the Conversation

It’s really been awhile, hasn’t it?  I really don’t have an explanation for why I haven’t posted anything in a year, but now’s as good a time as any to get back in action.  Why don’t we think of it as a version of my favorite story template: somebody getting called out of retirement, though hopefully this will be for more than one last job.  And as this kind of feels like a new start, I would like to make this post a manifesto of sorts.

I would like to propose an indefinite moratorium on the word overrated: the favorite word for when we just don’t really like something that everyone else seems to love.  Don’t get me wrong: I understand the appeal.  It can be fun to hate a movie that everyone loves and feel like you’re the only one who really gets it.  I have no problem with that.  Cultural conversation needs contrarian voices.

My problem is with that word specifically.  I’m sure we’ve all used it or heard it used.  The conversation usually goes something like this:

“I just saw The Dark Knight (or Gravity or Titanic).”

“That movie is overrated.”

To reiterate, I have no problem with someone not liking those pictures or others that have wide acclaim or popular success.  We need debate and conversation.  We need people to say, “I didn’t see what everyone else is seeing.”  There is no question about this.

But isn’t the above hypothetical conversation boring?  Even if it eventually becomes an interesting, critical debate, the part with the word “overrated” is the most boring part.  And far too frequently, I think this conversation doesn’t continue.  It ends with “I liked it” and “It’s overrated.”  I know I’ve had many conversations like that.  It’s a conversation ender.

To be fair, any conversation that just involves two people giving their opinions is boring.  There is nothing interesting in saying whether or not you liked something.  The interesting part comes later in the explanation and the use of evidence from the work to support your argument.  The most interesting part will be if someone brings a particular perspective to a work that is challenging, provocative, or just something you had never thought of before.  That is perhaps the highest goal of criticism: to provide an argument or perspective that makes someone view a work in a different light.  Not necessarily to change someone’s opinion, but simply to get the reader to think about something from a different perspective.  Just saying that you liked something or didn’t like something is boring.

But here’s the thing: saying that something is overrated is even more boring.  “Overrated” runs the gamut from “I hated it” to “I just didn’t like it as much as you.”  It’s a worthless opinion that adds nothing to the conversation and allows the person saying it to avoid taking an actual stand or make an actual argument.  If you hated it, say you hated it.  If you liked it but have problems with it, say that.  “Overrated” says nothing about what you actually think.  It’s really more about what other people think: all we know is that a lot of people like whatever it is you’re talking about.  Why not just make an argument that isn’t relative to other people?

But there’s another problem with this word that I think is more sinister and troublesome.  There’s saying that you didn’t like something as much as someone else.  There’s saying that you flat-out hated it.  And then there’s saying that other people shouldn’t like it.  That last one is why this word is a conversation ender and why it has no place in rational, adult debate.  In a way, this goes back to my previous point: what does it matter what the majority of people think?  Just make your own argument.  But in another way, I think that there’s something really mean-spirited about this word.

Whenever a critic pans a popular movie (particularly if it’s a comic book movie these days), there is invariably a large, negative reaction from that movie’s fans.  And amidst the endless screams and inane babble (as Gandalf would say), the idea often comes up that the critic wants to ruin their fun, that they are being told not to like something.  Obviously, the truth is that a negative review is not an attack on people who enjoy a movie nor is it trying to ruin anyone’s fun.  The purpose of criticism is to add a perspective to the conversation, and a negative review is not about telling the reader to not like a particular movie.  Again, the whole liking/disliking thing is the least interesting part of the conversation.

But saying that a movie is overrated is literally saying that people like a movie too much and that they should not like that movie as much as they do.  It’s not about offering your perspective.  It’s about telling others how to feel, thereby denying their perspectives.  That would constitute trying to ruin someone’s fun (though it would still not constitute an excuse for the horrible behavior that occurs on the comment sections of negative reviews).  What should it matter that someone derives joy from something that you do not particularly like?  Say that you hate the movie or that someone’s argument in support of it is weak.  That’s all part of the critical conversation.  Saying that someone shouldn’t enjoy something is not.

By the way, I don’t have the same problem with the word “underrated.”  Why?  Because it’s positive.  It’s all about saying that something has been unfairly maligned and deserves another chances.  It still falls into the category of telling people that their opinions are wrong, but it’s not nearly as mean-spirited.   The only purpose of saying something is overrated is to take away joy, but at its best, saying that something is underrated can add joy.  And it can actually add something to the conversation because it’s probably a new perspective and isn’t nearly as wishy-washy a position as “overrated” because people don’t generally say that a movie they disliked but didn’t hate is “underrated.”  There still needs to be evidence and an argument, but the word itself can stay.

So keep on being contrarian.  Nit-pick, overanalyze, tear down what’s popular.  Comment on cultural phenomena and analyze their implications.  But stop using that god-awful word “overrated.”  It’s a boring, mean-spirited, empty word that adds nothing to the conversation and takes up precious space for more words that could add something.  Liking and disliking is uninteresting.  The conversation is everything.

Star Trek Into Darkness: Review

“Star Trek” has always been a franchise caught between its two selves: its pulpy, space adventure self and its more philosophical, idealistic self.  J.J. Abrams’ previous Star Trek film leaned a little too heavily toward the former for my taste while mostly ignoring the latter.  Even though he had delivered a fun space opera, I was worried that Abrams and his writers just didn’t get “Star Trek”: it’s not just about spaceships and technology; it’s about family, morality, scientific ideas, and an optimistic vision of humanity’s future.

But with Star Trek Into Darkness, Abrams and his team have achieved a near perfect blend of the two sides of “Star Trek,” delivering an absolutely exhilarating entertainment that raises the bar for every upcoming summer spectacle and pulses with the ideas and values that define the very best of this franchise.

At the center of Into Darkness is a fascinating debate about the moral core of society.  After an action-packed (and slightly confusing) opening, the picture finds Starfleet under attack from a terrorist (Benedict Cumberbatch of BBC’s Sherlock) who has fled to a Klingon planet (yes, that means we get to see Klingons this time).  Trying to recapture the fugitive means risking war with the Klingons, so the head of Starfleet (Peter Weller) orders Captain Kirk to kill Cumberbatch from outside Klingon space using specially designed long-range torpedoes.

The parallel with America, Pakistan, Osama bin Laden, and drone warfare is not particularly subtle (the “Star Trek” franchise has never been very subtle about its allegories), but it works because it forces the characters to confront their ideas about Starfleet.  Spock questions the moral basis of their orders, reminding Kirk that the fugitive is being condemned without a trial.  Scotty objects to the mysterious technology of the special torpedoes on the ship and asks Kirk if Starfleet has just become an intergalactic military.  The movie asks all the “Star Trek” fans in the audience to question this, too.  Is this really what Starfleet is all about?  Is revenge really worthy of a civilized society?

While Into Darkness brings in the philosophical components that were missing from the previous Star Trek, it maintains that film’s propulsive storytelling energy.  It also finds a fascinating villain in Cumberbatch, one who poses a strong physical, intellectual and moral challenge to the crew of the Enterprise.  The intellectual challenge proves especially compelling, particularly in a standoff between two starships that becomes a battle of wits and wills rather than just a fight with laser beams.

Director Abrams has dialed back some of the visual excesses that plagued the previous film (yes, there are fewer lens flares), though he still has a strange penchant for canted angles and camera moves that constantly tilt and whirl at breakneck speeds.  What keeps the visual style from being too distracting (as I thought it was in the previous Star Trek) is the fact that Abrams does have a fantastic sense of pace and narrative momentum.  I sometimes found the visual style distracting in the first twenty or so minutes, but after that I was honestly too wrapped up in the proceedings onscreen to care too much about the visual style.

Star Trek Into Darkness really is one of those experiences where I forgot that I was in a movie theater and found myself completely involved in what was happening on the screen.  Part of this has to do with the way that Abrams and co. keep the tension and level of threat constantly building throughout the picture.  While the story takes a number of turns that I would rather not mention here, they always increase the sense of danger and never undermine it.  But the biggest strength of the movie is the way that it constantly pushes the characters to their limits.  Almost every character confronts enormous responsibilities: Trek fans should smile at Sulu admitting that he’s getting used to the Captain’s chair after Kirk leaves him in command multiple times, and there’s a particularly great moment when Uhura has to use her linguistic skills to negotiate with a group of Klingons.  It’s rare to see a film that is committed to turning its own characters into better people, and the Enterprise crew that emerges at the end of this film is much stronger and more mature than they were at the beginning.

I’m still astonished at how this picture manages to be a gripping summer spectacle that still embraces the sometimes corny and naïve essence of “Star Trek.”  We’ve had several films over the past few years that have confronted our post-9/11 concerns about fear, loss, justice and vengeance: Zero Dark Thirty, Munich and The Dark Knight are among the most memorable.  But to confront deeply troubling modern concerns in an exciting summer entertainment, one that truly questions the moral foundations of civilized society, but also truly believes that humanity is good and that it can and will achieve great things, well there’s several ways to describe that.  It’s bold.  It’s corny.  It’s hopelessly naïve.  But there’s another way to describe it: it’s Star Trek.

4 stars (out of 4)

The Side Effects Dilemma

So, I've been wrastling with whether or not to post a link to this review for a little while.  You see, I wrote this review a while back, but I hesitated to link it here because I didn't quite approve of one of the edits.  But I decided to go ahead and put it here.  If you care to take a look, please come back here where I will explain my discomfort with it:

http://thebeaveronline.co.uk/2013/03/06/side-effects/

Alright, so that part where it says, "Jude Law, whose serviceable performance is undermined by the ineffective writing."  I didn't write that part.  Now, this is not just some writer's ego going: "You changed the sacred words that I wrote, arghle-blargle-blargle!"  I actually completed understand why the edit was made.  Originally, I just added a parenthetical after the observation about Jude Law: "(this is a criticism of the writing not the performance)."  I guess that is rather vague.  I said that I wasn't criticizing the performance, but I didn't really say anything about it.  I will submit that I had already delivered my criticism of the writing by saying that it was conventional.  But again, I understand that the parenthetical left something to be desired.

My problem is that I actually don't agree with what was added.  I thought Jude Law's performance was better than "serviceable" (and doesn't that word just sound condescending?) and that the writing was actually effective at creating a good thriller (I believe I made that observation about the film as a whole several times in the review).  I'm not quite sure what "ineffective writing" even means.

Anyway, it's better to explain my qualms with it rather than pretending the review doesn't exist just because of one phrase.  This is likely to be my last review for The Beaver, since I'm not sure if they're publishing any more issues for the rest of the school year, and after this I'll no longer be at LSE.  But it's been very fun.

"The Wonderment of Life's Experience"

I wish I could have met him.

It must seem strange to say this, but it’s true: Roger Ebert was part of my life.  I never met him.  I only had one small moment of contact with him on the Internet.  But when I heard yesterday that he had died, it really felt like I had lost an important person from my life.  But in another way, this doesn’t seem strange at all.  Certainly movies are among the most important things for me.  They are not just a hobby, not just something to pass the time.  They are an important part of my life.  And for as long as I can remember, the Movies have been inseparable from the name Roger Ebert.

My dad raised me on movies.  Everyone was raised on movies, of course, but my dad taught me about movies.  I know that when I was a kid I watched Disney movies and Thomas the Tank Engine, but I also know that wasn’t all I watched.  Simply put: the first movie I can remember watching was The Bridge on the River Kwai.  Not exactly something most little kids watch.  My dad was ok with me watching new movies, but he wanted to make sure that I knew the classics.  He introduced me to John Ford with The Searchers and My Darling Clementine, to Kurosawa with Seven Samurai and Yojimbo.  I learned that movies had directors, not just stars.  I learned that black-and-white movies aren’t boring, and I was always confused whenever other kids didn’t want to watch a black-and-white movie.  This was my education in cinema.  And throughout this education, there was the name Roger Ebert.

I don’t remember my dad ever explaining to me who Roger Ebert was (though I do remember him having to explain to me why a movie couldn’t get more than Two Thumbs Up; shut up, I was little).  I saw his books lying around the house.  I saw his name on the VHS boxes and ads in the paper next to that famous, immortal expression of praise.  Roger Ebert was always part of the conversation whenever we would talk about movies.  Whenever we would watch an old movie, there was a good chance that we were watching something from his Great Movies list (though not always; one summer we did an Anthony Mann festival and I was disappointed to see that there were no Mann pictures in the Great Movies, not even Winchester ’73 or The Man From Laramie).  If we were watching a movie made since 1967, I would immediately search for Ebert’s review after seeing it.  Whenever there was a new movie coming out that I wanted to see, I would always ask my dad what Ebert gave it, and then when I started using the computer on my own, his website was the first one I would check for a new review; I can still remember how happy I was when my dad told me that Ebert had given The Return of the King 3 ½ stars.  It didn’t matter what other critics said.  All that mattered was that Roger Ebert liked it.

The archive of reviews on RogerEbert.com was a treasure trove.  I spent hours reading and rereading his past reviews to the point where it became a running joke in my family: “What’s Nick doing?”  “Probably reading Roger Ebert.”  Clearly it wasn’t just about discovering what movies he recommended.  There really was no logical reason for me to reread his review of (say) Local Hero five thousand times.  I had already seen it, I already knew it was a wonderful movie, and I already knew he thought it was a wonderful movie.  But I just had so much fun reading his reviews that I didn’t want to stop.

It was from my dad and Roger Ebert that I learned how to think about movies.  The Internet is already filling up with wonderful tributes from film critics writing that they wouldn’t be where they are without Roger.  My claim is much smaller, but no less true: I probably wouldn’t be writing this blog or have even written four reviews for a student newspaper without him.

But losing him means even more than losing a favorite critic and a mentor.  You see, something happens when you read someone’s work constantly for years.  In RogerEbert.com editor Jim Emerson’s wonderful tribute, he writes about communicating with Roger and reading his work every day for the last ten years.  I cannot claim the same kind of connection.  The only actual moment of contact that I had with him was on his blog.  He had written a post centered on the French word frisson.  He was contemplating the idea that we’re too obsessed with moments of intense excitement.  At the time, I was reading Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, a book that even my A.P. English Literature teacher thought was boring.  I had been reading it for months, and I still had a while to go.  But I loved the book.  Just like my dad instilled a love of movies in me, my mom had instilled a love of Charles Dickens.  I was reading slowly because I didn’t want it to end.  Knowing Roger’s love of Dickens, I posted a rambling comment about much I was enjoying the book despite the lack of frisson.  And he posted a response: “One of his greatest.  A world to enter.  And when he sometimes lets lose for two or three paragraphs of, essentially, prose poems.”  I was so happy when I saw this.  I still have the screengrab from the website.  It was probably something he wrote in only a few seconds, but it meant so much to me: I had just had a conversation about literature, about Charles Dickens with Roger Ebert!

I can’t claim a close connection to Roger Ebert, but I can’t deny that I really felt like I knew him.  I’m sure part of this has to do with how he completely opened himself up through his blog and autobiography: it was wonderful to realize that I could go to his website and find that he had written beautiful words about literally anything.  But I think this feeling that I knew him also has to do with the fact that I started reading his work when I was a child, and that I can’t remember the first time that I heard his name.  There’s something about things that you discover before you can even create memories.  There doesn’t appear to be a record of them in the brain, but they work their way in there to the point where you just feel like they’ll always be there.

It’s really not fair, isn’t it?  Just the day before he had posted something on his blog updating his health status.  He was going to be cutting back on his reviews, but he was starting a new website, a Kickstarter to bring his show back on the air, and possibly an app having something to do with movies and video games.  And he was going to keep writing about the movies he wanted to see: “On good days, I may wax ecstatic about a movie so good it transports me beyond my illness.”  Roger Ebert was always the best at that kind of thing, at describing the wonderful, glorious experience of seeing a great movie, the “out-of-body experience” as he called it in his review of the original Star Wars.  After months when it wasn’t really clear how he was doing, this blog post was reassuring.  And then…

It’s hard for me to think about what it’s going to be like without him.  I’ve been checking his website every day out of habit for years.  Three times today my fingers began typing the URL almost on their own before I remembered.  I’m no longer the kid who would only check one film critic when a new movie came out, but Roger never ceased to be my first stop.

And according to Jim Emerson, Roger will still be my first stop one more time.  His last review has yet to be published.  It’s a review of Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder.  I usually never read his reviews as soon as they were published because I wanted to see the movie first.  But since I already saw the movie when it came out in the UK, I can read the review as soon as it’s published.  Apparently, he liked it a lot, which I did too, though I also agree with his brief email assessment of it that Emerson quotes: “Such a strange movie.”

About Malick’s absolutely transcendent The Tree of Life, Roger wrote: “Some few films evoke the wonderment of life's experience, and those I consider a form of prayer. Not prayer "to" anyone or anything, but prayer "about" everyone and everything. I believe prayer that makes requests is pointless. What will be, will be. But I value the kind of prayer when you stand at the edge of the sea, or beneath a tree, or smell a flower, or love someone, or do a good thing. Those prayers validate existence and snatch it away from meaningless routine.”  I felt the same way about The Tree of Life and To the Wonder, though I could never hope to express those feelings in such words.  I’m sure Roger Ebert found beautiful things in To the Wonder as well as beautiful words to express them.

I can’t wait to read his review.

A Celebration of Cinema for the Year 2012

I really was planning on doing the list earlier this year.  Most, if not all critics make their lists of the best films of the year in December before the year even ends.  Those of us without access to screenings weeks before release dates often have to wait until January to see some of the films that critics consider to be the very best.  But it just so happened that none of the films that I saw after deadline (so to speak) ended up on my Top Ten list, so really, I could have posted this during December, too.  But here I am again, just like last year, posting my list of the best films of 2012 on the same weekend as the Oscars.  Like I wrote last year, the timing actually makes sense.  As the Academy celebrates the year in film, we’re going to do our own celebration here at Esoteric.  The following is a list of what I think is worth celebrating in the cinema of 2012.

The best picture that I saw this year was Rian Johnson’s Looper: an exhilarating and emotionally powerful science-fiction film about time travel.  A scene midway through the picture provides its central image: two men are sitting at a diner, a young man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and an older man (Bruce Willis).  They are, in fact, the same man.  Willis is from 30 years in the future and has been sent back in time to be killed by his younger self: Gordon-Levitt.  Here we have those questions that we think about all the time: what would you say to the person you were years ago or the person you will become?  Are you a completely different person?  What has happened in 30 years to turn that young man into that old man?

Of course, Looper is not only about existential questions.  It’s an exciting sci-fi crime thriller.  In the future, when the mob wants to murder someone, they send that person back in time to be killed and disposed of by an assassin like Gordon-Levitt.  Eventually, these assassins have to kill their own future selves, guaranteeing that there will be no loose ends.  When Gordon-Levitt fails to kill his future self, he becomes the target of his fellow assassins.  The first half of the movie is a pulse-pounding action picture with strong characterization, visual ingenuity, and such memorable sci-fi images as a man from the future watching parts of his body disappear as his past self is being tortured.

But the heart of the film comes in the second half when Gordon-Levitt hides out from the mob on a farm where a woman (Emily Blunt) lives with her son.  And while the excitement never drops, Looper becomes a more intimate character piece in its second half as the assassin discovers the true reason why his future self traveled back in time and the disturbing secret of the farmer’s son.  Writer-director Johnson displays remarkable storytelling dexterity as he shifts audience sympathy between the two versions of the same man: between Gordon-Levitt, who begins the story as a not entirely sympathetic murderer, and Willis, who is revealed to have heartbreaking and dark motivations for his journey through time. 

The issue that always lurks at the heart of Looper is the question of how a person becomes the person he or she will be in ten, thirty or fifty years.  Will that be the same person?  Has that future been predetermined?  In its second half, Looper hones in on the most significant symbol of this question: raising a child.  The picture is filled with parental figures: a crime boss who guides a boy into a life of crime; a woman who heals a broken, middle-aged killer; and a mother who believes that with her love she can make her troubled son into a good man despite all evidence to the contrary.  It all leads up to a shattering, genius conclusion that solidifies Looper’s place as a masterpiece of science-fiction.

The first sound heard in Moonrise Kingdom is a thunderclap, and indeed a cloud of melancholy hangs over Wes Anderson’s tale of young love in an island town during the 1960s.  When two twelve-year-olds run away from their homes, the entire island becomes involved in the search for them, and all the while, a storm is preparing to strike.  As hilarious as the picture is, the characters are all so deeply sad and melancholy.  Even the children have a certain sadness just like the adults.  The young lovers are seizing their chance for a romantic adventure out of the young adult books that the girl reads constantly.  But the end of childhood is approaching in the form of a storm that threatens to wipe out the carefree kingdom that they have created for themselves.  Anderson brings to the picture his inimitable visual style, his witty dialogue, and his love for the beauty in things that are destined to fade.

Near the beginning of the dreamlike Turkish police procedural Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a police officer tells a doctor that he could tell the story of their long night together as if it was a fairy tale, and that perfectly describes the style of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film: the story of the hunt for a dead body in the Anatolian steppes.  Two men have already confessed to a murder, but they cannot remember where they have buried the body.  So begins a long night as the prisoners, several police officers, a prosecutor, and a doctor drive through the landscape searching for the corpse.  They appear to be journeying through a dream or a fairy tale with ghostly images of headlights floating through hills of waving grass, statues of monsters hidden beside the road, an anecdote about a woman predicting the exact day of her death, and a girl who walks through a village carrying a light in the dark like an angel.  But the fairy tale ends when the sun rises and the body is found.  And the story shifts from the dreamlike landscape to a cold, hard city.  There are no angels here, just the wife and son of a murdered man.  Now, the mysterious story of the woman who predicted her death has an explanation.  And a doctor discovers that some truths are too terrible to be told.  The dream is over.  The only thing left is an autopsy.

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is far from just being a history lesson: it is a dynamic, thoroughly engrossing picture about the exciting, messy process of democracy.  Daniel Day-Lewis commands the screen as the 16^th President trying to get the 13^th Amendment passed through the House of Representatives.  His portrayal is incredibly human, bringing us the image of an often quiet, very eccentric man who could still use the power of his voice to sway others.  Tony Kushner’s script is fascinating and accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of turning the legislative process into an exciting entertainment.  Spielberg and his gifted cinematographer Janusz Kaminski make the picture a wonderful visual experience with depths of light and shadow filling the film’s many interiors.  And Day-Lewis’ performance is not the only great one in the film: Sally Field brings powerful resonance to her portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln, and Tommy Lee Jones has fury and thunder as abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens.  Lincoln is not a rosy-hued look at the passage of the 13^th Amendment.  It acknowledges that this came about through shady backroom deals and compromises.  But in Stevens, the film finds a powerful moral center: after Stevens compromises his values on the floor of the House, one of his fellow abolitionists asks him with disgust if he would be willing to say anything.  Stevens responds that yes, in fact, he would be willing to do and say anything to end the evil of slavery.  This picture is Hollywood entertainment at its finest.

The Dark Knight Rises, the towering conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, is one of the great screen epics.  The film centers on a former superhero who is old, broken and past his prime.  It confronts him with a villain who is physically stronger and possesses a strong sense of his own moral righteousness.  The battle between these two characters takes place in a nightmare extension of our own reality in which the wealthy aristocracy is cold and oblivious to the people below them and the mob that replaces them is actually no better, in which the proliferation of nuclear technology comes back to threaten the American Empire, and in which the practice of invaders claiming to be liberators, so familiar after the Iraq War, is instead used against an American city.  In that vein, it is fitting that the picture would be about people whose sins come back to haunt them: about the child of a former enemy who returns to fulfill her father’s goals, and about two people who thought they had buried a city’s evil only to find that it has literally been building up underground.  While it doesn’t challenge the conventions of the superhero film like its predecessor, The Dark Knight Rises does create an incredible emotional power.  Part of this is due to the performances.  Christian Bale continues his portrayal of Bruce Wayne, not only as a superhero but as a man trying to bury his past; Michael Caine brings extraordinary emotion as he tries to talk Bruce out of his self-destructive behavior.  And Anne Hathaway steals the show as the Cat to Christian Bale’s Bat.  Nolan mounts an impressive spectacle that manages to give weight to both the grand and the intimate.  Nowhere is this more apparent than the sequence when a child sings the National Anthem at a football game as a masked villain lays out the final pieces of his plan and walks down a hallway to his destiny.

Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths is a wonderful, explosive mix of violence, pitch-black humor and surprisingly thoughtfulness, the story of two dog-nappers who must flee a mobster when they kidnap his dog, while their friend (Colin Farrell) struggles with a screenplay idea.  Sam Rockwell gives a wild, outlandish performance as a man obsessed with the excitement of movie violence, a performance only matched by the quiet soulfulness of Christopher Walken’s work as Rockwell’s partner, a man with his own history of violence.  The picture is funny, sickening and exhilarating, not at all surprising from the writer/director of In Bruges.  What is surprising is the thoughtful way McDonagh weaves America’s history of violence into the proceedings, particularly the violence of racism in the 20^th Century and the atrocities of the Vietnam War.  Farrell’s screenplay idea includes an unfinished scene involving a Vietnamese man preparing to commit an act of revenge for the atrocities at My Lai, a scene that Farrell can only see ending in violence.  So he doesn’t want to finish it.  The solution that Walken provides for this scene is one of the most thought-provoking and moving moments in any film this year.

Michael Haneke’s Amour is a love story about death.  More specifically, it is about inevitable death, death that you can see coming for a long time but have no power to stop.  It is a love story about an old man whose wife has a stroke.  Director Haneke simply watches the husband care for his wife as she slowly slips toward death.  He must feed her, wash her, even help her to use the toilet.  Eventually there comes the moment when her words stop making sense, and he realizes that he will never actually have another conversation with his wife.  They used to talk about music, poetry and art, but even though she is still alive, they will never do that again.  The next step is inevitable.  There is no hope, no last minute cure.  The picture is almost unbearably painful at times, but what keeps it together is the simple fact that this is a film about true love.  The kind of love that is simply flowers and candy would not last this long.  The love onscreen in Amour is true love.  It’s not pretty, and no one writes poetry about it.  No one, that is, except Michael Haneke.

The Cabin in the Woods is a picture charged with excitement and originality.  It appears to be a horror film about a group of college students being chased by monsters through the woods.  At least, it appears so from the trailer.  In fact, the first scene of the film is straight out of an office comedy.  But the office is no ordinary office.  It is the control center for a real-life horror film.  The script from Joss Whedon and director Drew Goddard dances back and forth between comedy and horror as the office workers in the control center monitor the actions of the college co-eds who have stumbled into their trap and take bets on how they will be killed.  But the picture doesn’t just stop at that twist.  As the film progresses, more secrets are revealed, and more and more hell breaks loose.  The film works as a fascinating deconstruction of the horror genre, but it works even better as a wildly original entertainment.

One of the reasons why I go to the movies is to see pictures like Safety Not Guaranteed: a film so completely unexpected, so funny, and so full of humanity that I forget that I’m sitting in a movie theater while I’m watching it.  The picture finds a young magazine intern (Aubrey Plaza) assigned to investigate an incredibly eccentric man (Mark Duplass) who claims to have invented time travel.  She convinces the man that she wants to time travel with him, and as he tells her his paranoid stories, involves her in crimes, and gives her his training lessons for the journey she’s sure is impossible, she falls in love with him.  The movie enfolds so naturally and effortlessly that we hold our breath, hoping that this experience isn’t too good to be real.  Even though it loses a bit of its magic in the third act, the picture still ends up being an absolutely wonderful experience.

As the first part of a trilogy, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is not a complete narrative, but it is a complete emotional experience, a grand and glorious adventure.  Martin Freeman gives a wonderful performance as Bilbo Baggins, the home-loving hobbit who is convinced to join in an adventure with a wizard and thirteen dwarves, an adventure that will have important consequences leading to the story we know as The Lord of the Rings.  Director Peter Jackson does not disappoint in delivering spectacular action sequences: standouts include an encounter with three trolls, a rollercoaster battle with goblins, and a cliff-hanging climax in a mountain forest.  But the most memorable moments are quiet dialogue scenes.  The lengthy opening party scene at Bilbo’s home in the Shire is reminiscent of the wedding scenes in The Godfather and The Deer Hunter in how it establishes the many characters we will follow on the journey: it features two particularly wonderful dialogue sequences in which Gandalf the wizard tries to coax Bilbo to go on the adventure and a cautious dwarf attempts to talk his leader out of the quest.  One of my favorite moments comes later in the picture as one of Bilbo’s companions realizes that he has never known what it is like to have a home.  But the most memorable scene in the entire film is the confrontation between Bilbo and Gollum beneath the Misty Mountains.  Here is where Bilbo finds a very special gold ring and makes a crucial decision to spare a life.  In returning to Middle-Earth, Peter Jackson has created another stunning adventure.

A list of ten films is certainly not enough for a celebration of film, so here is a list of the other pictures that I enjoyed in 2012 (in alphabetical order):

Argo: Ben Affleck’s 1970’s-style thriller about the attempt to rescue six Americans from Iran after the 1979 revolution using a cover story from Hollywood.  The opening sequence depicting the storming of the American Embassy in Tehran is masterful cinema.  A summer entertainment for adults.

The Avengers: Joss Whedon’s exhilarating comic book epic was one of the finest mainstream entertainments in years.

Beasts of the Southern Wild: A dreamlike examination of nature and destruction from a child’s point of view.  Young Quvenzhané Wallis has a commanding screen presence.

Bernie: Richard Linklater’s biting dark comedy starring Jack Black as a beloved man in a Texas town who almost gets away with the murder of a widely-hated old woman.

Brave: Pixar’s visually wonderful film about an independent-minded Scottish princess and her mother.

Django Unchained: Quentin Tarantino’s violent, funny and disturbing slavery-western-exploitation picture.  Jamie Foxx creates a classic Western hero and Christoph Waltz brings great emotional resonance to the film.

Flight: Denzel Washington is fantastic in the role of an alcoholic pilot who comes under scrutiny after he pulls off a miraculous landing of a broken airliner.  Director Robert Zemeckis returns to live action with an intimate character study that also happens to contain an airplane crash that is one of the most terrifying sequences in recent film history.

The Grey: A harrowing film about survival in a land of ice and wolves with a fantastic lead performance by Liam Neeson and surprisingly thoughtful dialogue about life and death.

The Hunger Games: The exhilarating adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ novel about a futuristic dystopia where teenagers fight to the death on national television.    

Killing Them Softly: A fascinating crime picture about a stickup that sends shockwaves through a community of New Orleans criminals.  Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini and Richard Jenkins give great performances as people who have spent far too many years in their lives of crime, and the robbery scene is a masterpiece of suspense.

The Master: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ambitious and elusive film about a cult leader and the disturbed war veteran who encounters him.  I must admit that I still don’t understand this picture, but I also have to admit that I have never seen anything quite like it.

Prometheus: A thought-provoking and visually astonishing science-fiction/horror film from Ridley Scott about a group of scientists searching a distant planet for the creators of humanity.

Red Hook Summer: Spike Lee’s messy, exhilarating return to Brooklyn with an astonishing performance by Clarke Peters as a preacher with a secret.

Silver Linings Playbook: David O. Russell’s romantic comedy about a man just released from a mental institute and a woman with her own emotional problems.  Jennifer Lawrence gives an exciting, high-wire performance.

Zero Dark Thirty: A thrilling and horrifying account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.  Jessica Chastain is terrific as the woman who doggedly pursued him, representing an entire country that destroyed its soul in a decade-long pursuit of vengeance.

Since I did not have a chance to see everything I would have liked to see this year, here is a list of all the films that I wanted to see but missed: Anna Karenina, Cloud Atlas, The Deep Blue Sea, Haywire, Holy Motors, The Impossible, The Imposter, The Kid With a Bike, Rust and Bone, Side by Side, This is Not a Film, The Turin Horse.

And here we are again, at the end of a year in cinema and the start of a brand new one…

The UnMasterful "Hitchcock"

The new film Hitchcock has just opened in the UK, leading to a new milestone: my first negative review, which can be found at the LSE Beaver.

http://issuu.com/readbeaveronline/docs/785/18