By Your Re-Bootstraps

I had three big problems with Star Trek: Into Darkness.  (Four if you count the bland stupidity of the title.)  In order to talk about these problems, I’m going to have to spoil the movie for those who haven’t seen it, so:

FAIR WARNING: PLOT DETAILS DISCUSSED BELOW.

KEEP READING IF YOU’VE SEEN THE MOVIE.

IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE, AND YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN IT, THEN READ NO FURTHER.

ABANDON ALL SURPRISES, YE WHO ENTER HERE.

*

*

*

*

Okay.  Here we go.

The Three Who Are One.  One of the things that made the original Star Trek unique and memorable was the way Dr McCoy went from a bit player to a regular.  If you watch the first season all the way through, you can see the show evolve from a two-way dialogue between Kirk and Spock to a two-way dialogue between McCoy and Spock about what Kirk should be doing.  I don’t know whether Roddenberry had this in mind from the start, or it was the actors and writers who helped develop it, but by the beginning of Season 2, it’s canon: McCoy reacts with his gut, Spock reacts with logic, and Kirk balances the two by finding a way between the two extremes.  But in New Trek, Kirk is the one acting with his gut—he even says as much to Spock in New Trek 2.  Which completely eliminates the necessity of a triangle.  In New Trek, Kirk has become McCoy.  

Texas Rangers In Space.  If you’ve ever read Harlan Ellison’s original script for City On The Edge of Forever, then you know how different it is from what was finally televised.  One of the many changes that Gene Roddenberry made to it was the episode's inciting incident.  Instead of McCoy accidentally injecting himself with a drug that drove him bonkers, there was a crewman on the Enterprise who was addicted to a hallucinogenic drug, and it was this crewman who cause the whole time paradox.  If I remember it right, Roddenberry told Ellison in so many words that nobody in Star Fleet—nobody ever in Star Fleet—would do drugs deliberately.  End of story.  Which is not to say that there couldn’t be One Bad Apple, or that everyone on the Enterprise was pure and unsullied, or that they couldn’t be weak or misguided.  It’s just that there’s a line that would never be crossed—a line, say, where the weakness couldn’t be supported into strength, or the misguided turned to the correct path, or the bad apple redeemed.

How would Roddenberry have felt about the black ops Star Fleet initiative that shows up in Into Darkness?  Hard to say.  It reflects our time as much as Roddenberry’s original vision reflected his, so in that sense there’s a certain necessity to it.  But what it also reflects is this weird self-flagellating undercurrent in a lot of action movies these days that say The Real Enemy Is Us.  (When they’re not saying We Only Ever Fight When The White House Is Destroyed.)  That kind of fits in with Season 1 Original Trek, at least in my mind, where there’s this rolling loop of Kirk pointing out the evil behind Fear Of The Other, or making a plea for mercy, understanding and tolerance, when he isn’t making a play for some alien hottie. 

But see, to me, that falls under M for Misguided.  And say what you will about Peter Weller’s Admiral Marcus—misguided he ain’t.  Which is why I think that, in Original Trek, he would have been an alien, and the whole debate about pre-emptive attacks against a potential enemy would have been played out in the same triangle format as Kirk/Spock/McCoy, with two warring alien factions and the Federation taking the place of Kirk.  Making the enemy an earthman—making him a Star Fleet Admiral?  I don’t think Roddenberry would have allowed it.

Stardate WTF.   The original premise of the reboot was that Kirk grew up without a father, which changed everything in his life.  It also seemingly changed everything in Christopher Pike’s life, since he never wound up crippled from visiting that off-limits planet with the green-skinned space hoochie girl.  And I can buy that.  But what I can’t buy is that, if we’re to believe what we’re seeing in Into Darkness, then (SPOILERS) a couple of hundred years ago, Khan didn’t go off into  space in a rocket full of cryo-chambers, but wound up a prisoner of Star Fleet.  Now maybe in all the excitement I missed the part where Admiral Marcus rescued Khan and his men from that rocket sometime after Kirk’s dad died, but either way, this is a MAJOR change from what was supposed to be an established universe up until 25-odd years ago.  And that bugs the hell out of me.  Either say this is a completely different universe, or stick to the single change in the established universe and see how it plays out.  Don’t play both sides against the middle, or change the rules as you go along.  (I know, I know—why should I look to the guy who created LOST for internal consistency?) 

Seriously—the more I think about this, the more it bugs me.  It bugs me even more than Spock shedding tears.  Spock does not shed tears, JJ.  Spock is the guy who sees someone crying and observes “Your face is wet.”  (He doesn’t yell “KHA-A-A-A-A-AN!!!” either, pal.)

So Kirk is McCoy, Star Fleet is corrupt, Spock cries, and God knows what else has changed in what was supposed to be a single-cause reboot. 

Verdict:  whatever it is we’re watching may be fun and engaging, but it ain’t Star Trek.   

SNIKT!!!!

X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Not to be too hard on the film, but the verdict is still out on the question, "Can you make an interesting movie about a hero who can't get hurt, a couple of villains you can't kill, and a bad guy who can't die 'cuz he's in the sequel?" Really. Just shoot me in the head so I can forget the whole thing too, okay? Oh wait--you don't have to--it's been a week and I don't remember a fucking thing. (So if my mutant power is the ability to forget bad comic book movies, does that mean my X-Men field name is Lethe?)

Sidebar discussion: on the plus side, given how many times Logan shrugs off pain and comes back from the dead, Wolverine is now officially the Marvel version of Superman. On the minus side, Wolverine is now officially the Marvel version of Superman. With a cigar. That he never lights up.

Snarky coda:

Suck on this, bub!

Shouting Around The Rocks Desire Under The Elms. Great set. Great opening. Great Mother Courage echo at the end. In fact, everything that was silent in this production was great. But once people opened their mouths? I don't know about you, but if a volcano erupts when somebody says "Hello" to it, and then erupts again when somebody says "How are you?" and "Look at that sunset," I've stopped listening by the time it erupts over "I killed our baby."

Make it so-so.

Sidebar discussion: there's this thing that happens with out-of-town shows that transfer to Broadway. They get great reviews for the intimacy and detail of their original production, and somewhere between (for instance) Chicago and the St. James Theatre, they mutate from Mozart to Mount Saint Helens -- from a chamber piece to bad grand opera with all of the melodrama and none of the music. This happens all the time when the Brits bring a production over here; it's like they feel they have to yell at American audiences in order to get their point across. Although what point Brian Dennehy was trying to make by roaring out vowels without consonants for 90 minutes is beyond me.

Snarky coda: If you're pissed because Carla Gugino didn't get a Tony nomination, then you haven't actually seen the play.

SPOCK: Logically, this movie should suck.
KIRK: Shut up and kiss me.

Star Trek. Remember how you felt when you saw Iron Man last summer? Remember that gleeful high you got when you realized that it was not only fun, but smart, and well-written, and emotionally engaging? Multiply that by ten and you have the Star Trek reboot. As Bart would say, "Set your faces to stun." By the time you read this, I will have seen it again.

Sidebar discussion: e-mail me and we'll have one at a bar. So little time, so much to geek about.

Snarky coda: It's so totally a bromance now. But wasn't it always?

Almost as much fun as the movie? Seeing this commercial in Imax five minutes before the previews start:


Go, Ally!

The Perfect Valentine's Day Gift

For the man who has everything (and gets everyone):

You too can romance aliennes, turn enemies into lovers, and canoodle with Joan Collins, all while favoring your right profile. Yes, women with Sixties hair the universe over will take one look at your really weird sideburns and become full-fledged sluts for the Federation. Talk about boldly going where no man has gone before.

(I figure this either going to be Skidoo bad or give-yourself-a-headache-laughing funny. Or, in Star Trek terms, this could be first-season gold or third-season ap-cray. I'll let you know. Because you really do need me to read this, so you don't have to.)

Edward Gorey meets Star Trek

Did you know that Edward Gorey was a massive Star Trek fan? I sure didn't. Not until I saw the drawing above and went here.

Euripides' First Law

There's a review of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer which describes the film this way: "It's miscast, underwritten, muddily shot, and slackly paced, but there's something captivating about its unabashed shittiness." I don't know about you, but when I want to be captivated by unabashed shittiness, the last thing in the world I think of doing is revisiting one of the pleasures of my youth after it's been manhandled by the writer of My Super Ex-Girlfriend, the producer of Elektra, and the director of Taxi with Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon. I didn't see the first FF movie, and I have no intention of seeing this one. So instead of running out to the half-price 11 AM show at the AMC in on 42nd Street, I lugged my archive edition of the Fantastic Four to Ozzie's on 5th Ave and read these issues over morning coffee and a blueberry muffin:



























Initial reaction: there's a complete disconnect in my head between the epic nature of this storyline and the fact that it's confined to two issues. And that includes one of those iconic Kirby Photoshop-before-there-was-Photoshop splash pages. Two issues that contain enough material for a miniseries -- it's like the equivalent of one of those not-a-word-wasted Cornell Woolrich short stories that get Hitchcocked into a two-hour movie. Two issues. In today's comic marketplace, a storyline like this would either be paced for the 6-issue trade or stretched out for the 12-issue hardcover. And it would have four artists. And the last issue would ship a year after the second-to-last issue. (Talk about your unabashed shittiness.)

The other thing that struck me was how (blanket generality alert) the direction of storytelling in all media everywhere seems to progress as a rule from larger-than-life to smaller-than-life, as if there's a trade-off to be had when realism enters the picture. Call this Euripides' First Law: when myth is treated realistically, not only does it lose its mythic stature, but it threatens to become a sour and bitter undermining of everything that the original myth stood for. Which is not to say that realism is a bad thing: about the best example of the Euripides approach to comic myth is Watchmen, and it don't get much better than that, folks. But just like not every artist is a Kirby, not every writer is an Alan Moore, although you wouldn't know it to look at all the Moorish (and Millerish) memes that have infected comics over the last 20 years under the guise of "exploring" this or that character or event.

Remember the lesson of Star Trek. If Realism is the termite in the church of myth, then looking at what's happened to the Fantastic Four since the days of Lee and Kirby is like looking at what happened to Star Trek since the days of Roddenberry. The original series (talk about mythic) has melodramatic music accenting every moment of tension and excitement; technobabble is at a minimum; there's an undercurrent of primitive energy that can only be described as sexy. And every series from Next Generation on took the myth further and further from that energy source -- trading the melodramatic horns for hushed violins, upping the technobabble to the level of a separate character, and shrouding everything in reverence. But since by then the termites had eaten away every trace of divinity from the Gods, the church of Kirk, Bones and Spock was empty of all but worshippers.

Which is to say that the blessing and the curse of exploring is that you end up with maps that say "Here is a crack house" instead of "Here there be dragons." Personally, if I have a choice? I'll take the dragons:

It Was Twenty-Five Years Ago Today . . .

(as long as we're in anniversary mode):