GINO’s SCI FI CORNER

This all seems silly. Did I really spout all that nothing-ness about a whiffet of a film like Spiderman? I’m gonna focus much more on the environment and how we can break free from our dependence on oil.

I just recently bought the four disc DVD set of Blade Runner The Final Cut with the Original Theatrical release, etc. and bought the 25th Anniversary Soundtrack trilogy, which I’m listening to as I write this, so I’m in a cyber-punky, Blade Runner-ish mood, ready to expound on the single greatest film of all time.

Blade Runner came out in that magical summer of 1982, the first year I started paying attention to summer movies and their box office, and while I was obsessed with all things Star Trek II, something about the Blade Runner poster and trailers had me intrigued, it looked like a heck of a show. But the problem was, it was rated R, so I felt a little betrayed by Harrison Ford. His name was above the title, he was a star now–to my 12-year old nerd mind, that meant it was going to his head. Flush with success after Raiders, he was flaunting it in a film with sex and violence. I’d even read somewhere that he was considering NOT being in the third Star Wars film.

But everything about the trailer seemed great: the flying cars, the retro-future, the sound design, the Ink Spots singing “If I Didn’t Care. ” Sean Young with the 40’s shoulder pads and hair-do. The advertising alone had an exciting allure of greatness. Even if Harrison Ford had sold out, this looked like the film to do it with.

Then, strangely, the film flopped. After Star Trek II cranked my interest in movies up to ‘nerd level,’ I was now starting to read and listen to reviews. All the critics said Blade Runner was cold and cynical. The few people in my small town who’d seen it said it was really bad. And so part of me thought, “Good, Harrison Ford’s been slapped down a notch, he’ll be back for Revenge of The Jedi.”

So the summer ended and school started and I wasn’t thinking about the film. Except, since I lived in a small town with a movie theater that only played movies for one weekend and got their films on the 2nd run, it came to my town in early October. The movie theater had just changed hands from Mormon owners, so it was rare that R-rated movies even played in the town. Here was my chance to see it. I begged my mother, but she was iffy due to the rating. But, in a move that will have me forever respecting my mother and her morals, she went to see it first to see how bad it was. And since my mother is an avid movie lover with a good deal of sophistication, she came back from the show all raves, giving me the go-ahead to see it and saying it was a very Pro-Life movie. At the time, I couldn’t care less about that aspect, I just wanted at them special effects.

So my brother and I were there on the following Saturday night. And the moment the opening titles slammed onto the screen with the eery Vangelis score (more on that later) and the slow, rumbling sound effects,  fading in to the opening shot, I was stunned, transported to another dimension. I still get chills just thinking about it. Douglas Trumbull and David Dwyer’s work still blows my min. They all created a heavy, stifling, depressing world, and  I was fascinated. And could swear the film lasted four minutes. I still think of the scene of Roy meeting JF Sebastian as the very beginning of the movie, though it’s actually the middle.

Very few films have done that in my life. In fact, I can name them all: Rocky III, Blade Runner, Star Trek III and Back To The Future II. These are the four films that when I first saw them, I wished they would never end because I was so invested in every aspect of the film, the whole experience. Only Blade Runner held up to repeated viewings and stands as a classic. (Though some day I’ll riff on what an under-appreciated gem, Back To the Future II was.)

Movies were better than ever, I thought. Back then, I never guessed that films would stop being so great, that we as human Americans would never evolve past the 70’s and 80’s. With ET winning best picture that year, I couldn’t have guessed tha  sci-fi as we know it today has all been influenced by Blade Runner. But what made it so fresh yet such a flop back in ‘82? Well, we were used to the creepy sterile 70’s futures of Brave New World, Logan’s Run, and Rollerball. Even Black Hole and Star Trek The Motion Picture had the  clean sterile look. (However creepy Black Hole was) But Ridley Scott took the future and made it dark, terrifying yet still  awesome. I’ll never forget the almost romantic longing I felt on that first viewing as Deckerd prepares to administer the Voight Kamff test on Rachel and you can see a  flying car deep in the background against the fading red sun of  scorched Future L.A. That sort of attention to detail really set my imagination alight. The Enjoy Coke sign, the Blimps, the singing Japanese woman, all of it was thrillingly unique in 1982. I guess now for the younger generation, they can’t understand after Akira, Fifth Element, Attack of The Clones, etc. It’s like when I watched The French Connection as a young college student and thought, “Ah, just a cop movie,” and while I could appreciate it, I didn’t love it. It didn’t blow my mind.

But beyond the set design, and art direction there was a real poetry to Blade Runner. Part of it is due to Vangelis’ haunting score, but much of the credit is due to an arresting and quotable script. After seeing the movie, I rushed out to buy Phillip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” At that stage in my life, I was used to reading movie novelizations like The Empire Strikes Back or Raiders of The Lost Ark, I was completely shocked and confused that the book was  nothing like the movie.  I would soon be educated in the childish ways of Hollywood and how they change perfectly good stories for the sake of  convenience, but Blade Runner was different–the filmmakers basically took an idea and changed it for the better. Like it almost seems like they didn’t  need to buy the rights from Phillip K. Dick.  I mean not even the characters had the same names, by and large.  I read the book a couple more  times as I got older, thinking that I would understand it better, and while it was interesting and was definitely the source of the unsettling post-apocolyptic mood that was in the movie, I think the movie is better.  – Namely in that it fleshed out Roy Batty. (Baty in the book) and it got rid of the empathy boxes  and the characters Buster Friendly and Wilbur Mercer. I guess because I saw the movie first I found these details tedious and seemingly like a Star Trek episode or something from the 60’s or 70’s. They seemed very typically sci-fi-ish to me and not as interesting as the struggle to define oneself as a human.

When I saw the movie, I remember being so involved in the struggle at the end with Roy saving Deckerd it seemed right, like in real life. People in life don’t just kill people because that’s how the story ends. There’s such a strong human element in the movie, I can’t believe how critics shunned the movie for being too cold and cynical.

Meanwhile, the music is so powerful that one can’t imagine the film working at all without it. It’s like Star Wars or Superman. You wonder would the films have the same impact without their music, and in my humble opinion, the answer would be ‘of course not.’ Blade Runner’s music is no different. Vangelis, whose music in my opinon usually doesn’t work so well in films, (see The Bounty, Alexander and yes, even Chariots of Fire.) was on fire with BR. It’s a shame Mr. Vangelis is so obsessed with thwarting the fans who just want to hear the entire album played out in film order that there is no complete soundtrack in existence. The recently released BR Trilogy CD has an album and a half of cues that were not heard in the film and are pretty pedestrian New Age stuff.

Finally, I’ll weigh in the Blade Runner Director’s Cut controversy. Is Deckard a Replicant? If so, it proves that Ridley Scott has no idea of how important and beautiful his film once was. Given the meat-headed and forgettable “serious” movies Mr. Scott has made since Legend, (Black Rain, anyone? White Squall? Kingdom of Heaven?)  it’s clear that this must be the case. The fact that Mr. Scott  thinks he’s impressing everyone with his conviction that Deckard isn’t human, just shows he’s drunk with power. Like that other genius who went mad, George Lucas.

Like many a sci-fi geek, I grew up on Marvel Comics. I became aware of Spiderman when I was four when I received a Mego Spiderman doll as an Easter present and even though I wanted Batman, my brother explained that Spiderman was better because he could shoot webs out of his hands. When I had the chicken pox at age six, my mom checked out Stan Lee’s The Origins of Marvel Comics for me to read while I convelesced. Every day during that time, I would spend all day reading and re-reading that book. I liked Jack Kirby’s art in Fantastic Four #1 and in Hulk #1, I’d read the other origins and liked them fine, (except Dr. Strange,) but it was the Origin of Spiderman in Amazing Fantasy #15 that was the dessert, the reason I kept my puffy eyes glued to the book. I was fascinated with Steve Ditko’s crisp, skinny version of Spiderman, the dark inks on the blue portion of the costume, the smaller eyes, the tighter webs, the web armpits –he looked different from other heros and different from the other Spiderman renderings I’d seen. And of course, I thought the basic premise of the origin story–nerd gets powers but is too proud to stop a thief and so his uncle is killed by that thief — was vibrant, colorful, memorable and sad. There was something identifiable and easy to understand about the Lee/ Ditko work– at least to my six year-old mind.

So flash-foward to June of 1982. The majority of comics in my relatively small collection were Spiderman– but on a fateful day as summer began, I bought Amazing Spiderman #230 at the local drug store. Written by Roger Stern and drawn by John Romita Jr, Spiderman has a showdown with Juggernaut and it just about kills him. It was the greatest single comic I’d ever read, non-stop action, tense and heroic stuff, where Spidey just won’t quit even though he’s getting the crap kicked out of him. And the art! I thought John Romita Jr and Jim Mooney drew and inked Spidey so he never looked more inispring and cinematic.  Romita Jr. took the basic Spidey look from his father, but made it more muscular and with more dynamic movement. Plus, as I was starting to see in other issues (chiefly in an issue where the Black Cat “dies” after she and Spidey’s first love affair, and in another with the Vulture where he’s in physical therapy) Roger Stern could really write. He made Spiderman’s personality and private life detailed, dramatic and funny. But the issue with the Juggernaut was a standout– clearly defining why Spiderman was the best comic book hero out there.

So over the course of the next two years I bought Amazing Spiderman on a monthly basis and it never disappointed me. Roger Stern fleshed out the characters so well that they all mattered to me– even third stringers like Ned Leeds. And when Peter Parker had his usal money and girl troubles they felt deeper and more important than usual. During that two year run, Stern essentially acknowledged how lame the Tarantula was as a villain and had Spidey make light work of him only to have the Tarantula take a serum that turned him into a monster. He brought in a legitimate sense of mystery with the origin of the Hobgoblin.

And he treated us to an interesting and almost plausible origin of the Vulture, who was hiding out in a retirement community. In an issue where Peter quit school, Mr. Stern managed to create a funny and exaspserating sense that one is waiting endlessly in line with Peter as he’s sent all over campus getting signatures.

I stayed with the comic right until Spidey came back from Secret Wars wearing the famous “Black Costume.” (not very forward thinking of me, I admit) but I was offended that they changed the costume and gave it powers, plus I was closing in on fifteen years old and thinking I was too old and cool for comics. So I stopped reading for awhile. Then in the late summer of 1986, I bought an issue of Web of Spiderman drawn by Marc Silvestri and inked by Kyle Baker and the art was so awesome I started collecting again. (though I couldn’t help but notice that the story was really weak, a rip off of the Most Dangerous Game) At that point, I decided to spend some of my summer job money and subscribed to all three Spiderman titles. I got the wedding issues and “Kraven’s last Hunt” and had the all-hallowed Todd McFarlane issues about Venom but while sometimes a comic or two would jump out as okay, I actually thought they were pretty crummy.

Todd McFarlane’s art, while unique, made everybody look jug-eared and like they were made out of playdough and David Michelinie was a nowhere near the writer Roger Stern was. He turned Spidey into a vapid, whiney little coward who rarely fought to the finish and often seemed to give up and be just fine about it. So in college, I gave up on Spiderman. The stories just weren’t intersting anymore and it was really occurring to me that comic books, no matter how well-drawn, were a teenagers medium. Soap operas for boys.

Then I received as a gift a boxed set of paperbacks of the original Lee/Ditko books. I started reading them with my tongue in cheek, but still, the power of the Ditko art brought back that cozy feeling of lying in bed for two weeks of no school with chicken pox, reading Spidey all day. And I re-fell in love with that era of comic books, the Leave it To Beaver era, with scenes where popular Liz Allen admonishes dumb lug and bully Flash Thompson for picking on Peter And when Flash says, “What gives, why are you defending that bookworm?”, Liz retorts, “Peter is a DREAMBOAT!” It was a simple time, with fun simple stories that still managed to be entertaining and charming. After that, I said, “Damn all convention!’ started collecting back issues again, while the Ditko comics were way out of my price range, I caught up on the Black Suit saga and many of the issues around that period. When I joined the work force, occasionally I would check in with Spidey, just to see what they were doing with him, and I collected random issues with Pete’s Parents, “Maximum Carnage” and the “Clone/Scarlet Spider” chapters. All of that was not so good, reeking of desperation, but sometimes the art was interesting.

So I write all this to let all my readers know that I understand Spiderman and the various eras of his character pretty well. I had enough of a background on the character’s history to be utterly frustrated that Sam Raimi’s films couldn’t even reach the emotional depths of a comic book– a comic book that was neatly gift-wrapped and delivered to the screenwriters with the best origin story in all of comic-dom, a great, funny hero, fairly cool villains, Hot chicks! Heart-wrenching romance!  What makes it worse is that when I first saw the full trailer, it seemed like Raimi and company got everything right.

The cinematography and art direction seemed to have the proper realistic yet comic book-y feel, Tobey McGuire looked to be a good-enough Peter Parker. I thought Kirsten Dunst was a fine choice as Mary Jane. Wilem Dafoe, he should’ve played the Joker, but sure, he’d be a good Green Goblin, I guess. (Not like anyone even thinks about the character outside comic book conventions.) It looked like it was a Hollywood home run in the vein of Superman The Movie. Then it opened and the reviews were unanimous it was a fun-filled, exciting film with heart, they said. I was really looking forward to it.

Well, it stunk. At this point, I won’t say it ruined my life or anything, because most movies stink these days, but what I can’t understand is why EVERYONE liked it. It was a bad movie with sitcom writing and character development. Really, nowhere in the film did the characters do what anyone in real life, heck what even the 2-D comic book characters, would do or say. I’d say nearly 95% of the choices made in that film were dead wrong. AND FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, THE @#%$ING STORIES WERE ALREADY WRITTEN FOR THEM!!

So, let’s back up. I’ve always been a bit blah about Sam Raimi. While Evil Dead 2 was great fun and he knows how to point a camera, Darkman, while sort of interesting, was basically forgettable. A Simple Plan? That was an unbelievable film about a small-town, responsible Jimmy Stewart type lying and killing people and doing bad things just for money. Well, guess what? Jimmy Stewart types DON’T kill people over money and surely they don’t shoot their brothers in the head because it will let them off the hook. Nice, normal people don’t do things like that. They help family members in need even at the cost of their own lives. And the whole time Raimi’s saying, “What would you do, John Q Public? What would you do in this situation? You see how even good people can be corrupted by MONEY!!!?” Uh, well, you’re character isn’t good. He’s dumb. Why’d the same basic idea work in No Country For Old Men? Because the guy who found the money wasn’t introduced as likable and trustworthy and established in the community, nor the brightest bulb to begin with. Plus, the moment in the A Simple Plan where Bill Paxton decides to kill a guy for the money happens way too soon in the film, it basically shows you that our main character is a heartless moron who isn’t thinking things through. So, A Simple Plan showed me that Sam Raimi is fairly inept when it comes to character motivation and development, which really came as no surprise since his prowess was with camera work and effects.

So while most nerds were whooping it up about Sam Raimi being hired to direct Spidey, I was wary. Despite the derring-do and the web-slinging,  Spiderman is about the characters. Then I learned the (credited) writer was David (LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK) Koepp. Well, that really got me scared. He wrote one acceptably good film, The Paper, because he used to be journalist, so in his element, his writing was fine. (Notice how the J.Jonah Jameson stuff is the only stuff that comes alive in the Spidey films. ) But he seems to have this thing for T.V. endings, (The Trigger Effect) and precocious kids who are children of divorced parents and he ALWAYS writes them like they’re on a sit -com. With groaners like those in Panic Room : Q: “Where’d you learn morse code? A: (smirk and shrug) “Titanic.” I’m guessing he’s been a divorced single parent that over-indulged his kids and was fascinated by all that they learned from watching films and tv shows written by him. Get out in the real world, KOEPP! In War of The Worlds, Koepp’s 8-year old and a fifteen year old characters cry to dad Tom Cruise BECAUSE THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT TO MAKE FOR DINNER IN THEIR OWN KITCHEN?! ??? Where, you know, in real life, the kids would be so hungry and thirsty after an alien attack that they’d just go to the fridge and start eating? This guy wrote a whole g–damned scene about something that just wouldn’t happen except, I guess,  in David Koepp’s and Steven Spielberg’s house. @*&%ing Hollywood types. So, anyway, yeah, not a big fan of David Koepp’s writing. And yes, I know several writers worked on Spiderman’s script so when I rail on it, Mr. Koepp gets the blame but it’s aimed at everyone who didn’t see this through.

The choice of composer didn’t thrill me either. Of course Danny Elfman was going to get hired as he did a number of Sam Raimi films up to that point, but I’ve never been a big fan of his, except for his score for Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. His music tends toward monotonous bombast. Ultimately, he didn’t do a bad job with Spiderman’s themes, but it’s all basically variations on his Batman score and not that hummable.

So the credits start and immediately, I get that feeling I’m in for a disappointment. The music is Batman meets Men In Black, and doesn’t seem to have any definition. And the CGI webbing and dark backgrounds seem small, mysterious, quasi-gothic like Batman. Spiderman is bright and cheery and metropolitan. I would have liked titles webbed in the air over swooping shots of New York, basically like the last shots of the film WITHOUT Spiderman in comped in? Wouldn’t that have been cool and much more epic?

So the film begins and we find our heroes on a school bus. Where are they, Nebraska? Does any urban teen, let alone a high school senior, ride a school bus in this day and age? You wanna single Peter out as a loner and the king of the nerds? How about a High School dance or in the school yard before the field trip if you MUST have a school bus in the film?

And right off the bat, Raimi and Koepp get MJ and Peter’s relationship irritatingly wrong. Next door neighbors and childhood friends have a familiarity that a subtle director would clue into, but no Raimi and Koepp come from “The Facts of Life”/Diff’rent Strokes school of character development where no one on screen ever acknowledges what one sees or says what they would honestly say or do in any given circumstanc. So, sure, MJ can be aloof and not quite nice to Peter, but you know, I attended high school with a female childhood friend, whose family history and lifestyle I was completely in the know about. And even when we got older and she got popular while I didn’t, we still shared that bond and still acknowledged each other, albeit cooly. I would imagine, MJ would say “Hey, Pete,” in any number of ways, none of them enthusiastic, so we can understand that they have a childhood next-door neighbor history. The script itself says that Peter first saw her when they were six years old, the implication that they’ve known each other and probably played together from time to time as kids. What’s with Peter’s fear of talking to her? That seemed like pure television. Even the geek-y Ditko comic book Peter Parker had no problem trying to date girls that were out of his league. And again, since Spidey has a great wit in the comics, you could show that wit with Peter’s exchanges with MJ, the one person he can be himself around.

Okay, major gripe number two about this Spiderman movie. Peter et al didn’t need to graduate High School. High School kids are the majority of movie audiences, Peter was in high school for years until he graduated in the comics, why the impatience to bring Peter and Harry together for the college years? The film is so impatient to get to the big climax and nonsensical big emotional scenes, that it just keeps hurrying along without properly fleshing out the details.

Meanwhile, the film shows Harry and Norman meeting Peter Parker in front of the science museum and Norman immediately likes Peter and becomes a sort of father figure. Again, television writing. I didin”t buy it. It would have been just as easy to establish that Norman knows Peter already and they both share a healthly love and obsession with all things scientific. Fairly easy to show a shot of Harry feeling resentful, if that was even at all necessary.

Okay, so I’m watching the film and I’m feeling nervous. The rhythm’s off. So we get to the spider bite: The tour guide announces that there are FIFTEEN spiders in a tank. Fifteen Spiders that can change a guy into mutant super powered spider person just existing side by side?

Um. Why did she say fifteen?

Why not an experiment with a single solitary spider that dies soon after and the scientists can’t possibly be aware of how Spiderman came into existence? It doesn’t have to be radiation that powers the spider bite, since sure, that would only kill Peter and I understand why that detail was updated, but for the life of me, in the movie, I didn’t understand how Peter got his powers. And if these 15 spiders exist wouldn’t someone else become Spiderman down the road? And wouldn’t the lab techs figure out who Peter was who was, since MJ announces so dramatically that there are only 14 Spiders left in the tank. And well, after there’s a guy spinning webs all over New York, wouldn’t the scientists be like, “Wooh! Find that godd$%&@ spider! We’re gonna make billions!” And okay, blockbuster lovers, I know, it’s only a movie, but hey! It was only a comic book and it worked fine without the mention of 15 Spiders for forty years. All that update did was create questions in my head when none were needed. I would buy that a spider got mixed up in some genetic experiment and bit Peter before it died — THE ONLY ONE OF ITS KIND.

Now, you could’ve killed two birds with one stone and had the class touring Osborn labs due to Harry’s attendance at Midtown High and Norman’s underlings are experimenting with these Spiders to perfect their performance enhancers and this one spider escapes and Peter becomes Spidey. So this way Norman’s hot for Spidey’s true identity and once he learns it, he manipulates Peter into thinking he’s just a good guy looking out for a kid whose uncle got killed. But, of course, in reality he’s trying to find how and why Peter changed into Spiderman without any side effects, etc. and Harry hates all the attention Pete gets and you know, you have a real sense of why people are acting and saying the things they do.

But back tot the film that is: We go to Norman’s lab and the film tries to show why an uptight but basically normal guy like Norman would want to test his serum to become the Green Goblin. The comics had it right, Norman was a psycho and very secretive about his knowledge and his alter ego. No one was aware of what the hell he was doing. That seems a lot more realistic than the head of the company going into a chamber in full view of his partner and basically acting like a convenient plot twist.  These Raimi Spiderman movies, I tell ya, they’re the emotional equivalent of Universal Theme Park Stunt shows. Ya know, rather than properly develop a character and story arc, simply cram it in with no logic whatsoever, just a nod to the comics history, and explain everything away in the effort to get to the big set piece.

And of course, the Goblin costume looked plain awful. As everyone says, it was a Power Rangers costume. Plus, why hire Wilem Dafoe, the guy with a scary Goblin face already and then hide it with a static, motionless plastic mask? Couldn’t he just have showed up at that stupid Macy Gray festival in a goofy, rubber, but face-hugging Goblin mask as a joke — let’s face it, no matter how you update a costume forr a guy called The Green Goblin, in broad daylight, flying around in that phallic hat and stupid outfit and you’re gonna hear, “Nice outfit, fag! ” from the mouths of New Yorkers. The Goblin outfit in the comics was pretty silly, so why try to hide it? The way to make the Green Goblin scary is to embrace the silliness. So as Norman gets more and more psycho and keeps getting beaten by Spidey, he starts really digging the mask and talking to it and his outfit becomes more garrish and the mask slowly becomes the face he prefers.

Okay, so back to Peter. He wakes up after the Spider bite and he’s muscular and he has a BIG DICK. So it’s okay, girls, he’s cool now. Lame. Anyway, he runs down the stairs and flips over the wall at the landing, a nice touch, then he goes outside and we’re treated to another pointless time waster of Petere working up the courage to talk to MJ. He follows MJ after she gets yelled at by her pop and he’s saying to himself,” …gee…uh….do you know me…. I’m Peter Parker, star of the hit sit-com ‘Saved By The Bell’…” I’d have simply had them walk to school together and she’s all, “Hey, Pete, where are your glasses?” and notices his blue eyes and how he seems different. And then his spider sense tingles and he saves her from getting hit by a car or something not too revelatory, like websbing a tray in the cafeteria then sommersaulting and sending Flash twenty feet across the hall. AND BY THE WAY, DAVID KOEPP! You beat up the toughest guy in school, sending him twenty feet down the hall, people don’t say, “You ARE a freak, Parker. ” They @#%&ing leave you alone and kiss your ass so you don’t do the same to them. Get it? This is supposed to be New York not Bel Air. And Mary Jane wouldn’t say, “You really freaked us out.” She’d say, “Man! I never knew you were such a tiger!” (Get it? Tiger! The nickname she has for him in the comics. So you know, it doesn’t sound like Kristen Dunst’s saying “Miningfroophuckbuckarucking” every time she awkwardly shoehorns “Tiger” into a line of dialogue.) And in my ideal version, I would’ve swiped the Barbara Hershey shot from Barry Levinson’s The Natural, where we see MJ’s eyes go from Flash on the ground to Peter, the new hero. but then again, my version wouldn’t have Peter beating Flash up so awesomely where anyone with a brain would say a few weeks later, “Hey, Parker, I know you’re Spiderman, dude! The way you dragged that webbed tray across the floor, and jumped over Flash, you gotta be Spiderman!” (Not that anyone in this film series has to even guess since Peter’s always showing his face to anyone who will look.)

Okay, so now Peter wants a car to impress her and compete to with Flash and that leads us to the Wrestling Arena. A whimsical throwaway in the comics where masked Peter handily humiliates a wrestler by heaving him on his back and crawling up a column becomes an overlong, overblown and irritating Wrestlemania sequence that kills the inherent drama of Spiderman’s origin. Irritating, because, number one, it was way too big, I kept thinking where do you have huge arena sized crowds for amateur night? In the comics, it seemed like a neigbhorhood gym type affair and he’s spotted by the talent agents, who says, “Hmmm… this masked character may be the gimmick I’ve been looking for…” Not genius, sure, but heck it worked. Two, this is the first of many scenes where Sam Raimi’s laziness and indecision is evident with regards to Peter’s powers. Peter can send Flash across the floor, can plow into billboards with nary a scratch yet for some reason he’s facing a Wrestler locking him in a cage match and he’s scared? And not only that, when he kicks the wrestler, the wrestler only gets stunned? I’d have had the wrestler fly into the cage, out cold and the fight’s over. And finally the creme-de-la-creme of my irritation: Who the hell’s gonna try to hustle money from somebody who just beat your tough guy, your bread and butter to a pulp and not say, “Geez, buddy! You’re the strongest and fastest, you and I are going to be RICH!!!

Pure David Koepp. That whole “Letting the thief get away” sequence made me realize I was going to hate the rest of the movie. They had the momentum and didn’t use it. The origin story of Spiderman is about hubris. And they dropped this entire important portion of the Spiderman story to make room for all the unnecessary crap that wastes the audience’s time in the middle of the movie.

The logical progression based on the comics story line would be that Peter becomes the cage fighter and starts heaping in the money and is now becoming sorta popular, and, as in the comics, the promoter insists on the mask angle to keep the mystery. And as I expected when I saw the preview of Peter in his home made Spidey outfit as compard to his fancier Spidey movie outfit, he gets a cool rubbery, fancy Spiderman costume because he has the money to get all the materials. Because he’s a rising star with the need for a fancy costume.

In my ideal version, Peter is looking at Ferraris and MJ really starts paying attention to him and you know, Peter’s all about himself and heck, I’d even have a scene where Peter reveals to Uncle Ben that he’s Spiderman and how they’ll have so much money and never have to worry again. (Since we had all that exposition about Ben being 68 years old and unemployed that didn’t really have any pertinence.) . So Uncle Ben’s advises, “Watch it Peter, with Great Power comes Great Responsibility” and Peter sort of agrees but basically says what he thinks in the comics, “Everybody’s crapped on me my whole life except you and Aunt May. The rest of the world can hang for all I care.” And presto, a few scenes later, Uncle Ben is dead, killed wherever, where the guy Peter let go is the culprit, but NOT immediately after Peter lets him go. You could cut to a Norman scene there. I understand why they made that choice in the effort to save time and to show that Peter’s desire for revenge had an immediate effect, but it took away what made the comic so unique. (And you know, critics these days keep parroting some hair-brained idea about origin stories being boring and once they’re out of the way, now you can tell your story. WRONG! Any story is boring if you’re not invested in what’s going on.  Spidey’s origin is one of the best comics ever with as good a twist as say, the 6th Sense. It needed at least an hour to be done right. Impatient bastards. Just dying to get to the explosions. )

Peter didn’t set out to stop criminals, he wanted money and had a taste of the good life. Meanwhile, if they had a montage of Spidey on all the NY late night show doing his routine, you have him doing what the comics so effortlessly did in one page, showing how the world is learning who he is and is amazed by him. So then one can include in the montage scenes of J. Jonah Jameson and Norman and M.J. and even Flash, all involved curious about WHO Spiderman is? Then! When Spiderman stops the criminal and learns his crushing lesson, you have the built in idea that people know who he is and can be either scared or impressed that he’s turned from showbiz to crime fighting. Which could lead to J.Jonah Jameson’s mistrust of his motives. But no, here’s Sam Raimi robotically sticking in a Man on the street interview scene before Spidey is properly introduced.

Also, another important wasted opportunity, there was a nice bit of retrohistory added to the comics where MJ saw Peter leave his house dressed as Spidey on the night of Uncle Ben’s murder. There’s the romantic angle that would’ve added real weight to Peter and MJ’s love affair. So, in my version, which is Marvel comics version that worked pretty well, it’s Spidey who flirts with MJ, and she’s kissing him, knowing full well who he is and why he’s Spidey, but keeps him at arm’s length when he’s Peter because as she soon figures out firsthand, it’s too complicated with villains kidnapping her and whatnot. That would’ve been  a welcome twist on the hero’s secret identity jazz. Where he doesn’t know the girl knows. The comics had it right, again. The girl has the burning crush, not the guy, but since she’s doing the right thing, she can’t let him now how much she loves him. Seems the female audience would eat that up.

But no, in the Raimi film, in the effort to have important scenes like the Thanksgiving dinner where Norman learns Peter’s identity even after he’s gassed him and tied him up and DIDN’T yank off his @$%*ing mask, (Nice one, Raimi) they rushed through any of the developments that would’ve made logical sense as well as properly introduce their character as a hero. The movie went from Spidey’s killing the criminal to a terribly timed and edited montage of everyone on the street saying “Spidey’s great!” “He’s a menace!” , etc. Again, an example of that patented Raimi/ Simple Plan Impatience.

Superman had the awesome, suspenseful introduction to our hero with Lois in the Helicopter, where you’re screaming for Clark to turn into Superman. Raimi’s so tone-deaf, he swipes the idea but adds it after the man on the street introduction so we don’t get the tension of Spidey’s main entrance as a full-fledged hero. And Raimi’s rescue scene is overstuffed with the stupid silly looking Goblin and Macy Gray and Tim Burton Batman balloons and all sorts of distractions like, “Hey, if the Goblin can throw bombs and disinegrate people, why is he bothering with other weapons? He already won the fight because now all he has to do is disintegrate Spidey with his disintegrating bomb.” And “Why weren’t Harry and MJ disintegrated with the rest of the Board?” Or at least MJ’s leg. That would’ve been guytsy, eh? Half the movie where MJ is an amputee? And again, The Green Goblin basically beats the crap out of Spidey in this scene. WRONG, RAIMI! Spidey should beat the crap out of the Goblin, in any cool fashin, like for example, webs him off the glider and and throws him against a wall, and so Norman goes back and increases his serum and you know, starts going stark raving mad in the effort to increase his strength. I learned this in college acting class. RAISE THE STAKES! Plus, there’s a crowd of people fleeing in terror, but no sense of it clicking in the public’s mind of just how awesome Spiderman is. Why? Because there were no long shots of the action from the crowd’s P.O.V.

And so after the scene as it played in the movie, I say to myself, ‘”Gino, I says, “Gino, that was a lousy scene, with clumsy action.” Sam Raimi, the kinetic camera, cartoony action guy CAN’T do cartoony action. Who’d a thunk?

And the film just keeps getting worse and worse, with horrifying time wasters. The Goblin trashes the Bugle and puts Spidey to sleep with gas? BOR-ING! Where’s Spiderman’s Spidey sense there? Wouldn’t it have been better to have a chase through the buildings of NY and actually use some of that CGI that Sony paid for? It could’ve ended any way with Spidey captured AND UNMAKSED, of course. So then we can understand why Wilem Dafoe just doesn’t slit Spidey’s throat at that moment. And I must add that the scene with Wilem Dafoe and Toby McGuire talking to each other in costumes on the roof made it painfully clear why Mr. McGuire is constantly taking off his mask in the subsequent films. Comic book masks and costumes are bad for actors. A smarter director would’ve simply aped the iconic Romita panel of Peter unmasked and tied up in the Goblin’s hide out with Norman revealing who he is. Then all that “JOIN ME!’ monologing would’ve made sense and seemed less like a Power Rangers episode. Norman could reveal to Peter who he was and how they’re two of a kind and should take over the world. ‘(Use “The rest of the world can go hang for all I care line” see.. clever…and it ties into the responsiblilty lesson.) And you know, in the film, Norman is pissed just because Peter won’t join him. There’s no plan to steal the Gold in the reserve, there’s no turning everyone into goblins, nothing. The Green Goblin’s big idea is to have Spiderman join him and I guess hurl bombs at people who piss him off. THERE’S NO PLOT TO THIS MOVIE!

Okay, I’m going crazy here writing about this damned film, so last gripe. Peter’s in the hospital telling MJ what he tells Spiderman about her. And it’s a weird, long and totally TV sitcom monologue about he looks into her eyes and goes absolutely bananas and thinks of the best things in life… and some other baloney that I bet good money David Koepp wrote, begging MJ to deliver her “You’re really freaking us out, Peter” line. Who the hell says stuff like that in comics let alone real life? Plus I’ve always hated in all superhero comics, movies, t.v. shows etc, where our alter ego is saying, “Ahem! I’ve talked to Spiderman and he promises he’ll be at the charity ball.” To which the logical response is, “Uh, yeah, Mac, how do you know that? Are you Spiderman?” Wouldn’t a guy trying to keep a secret identity try to play down his association?

Okay, one more gripe. The climax.

The Goblin does the ‘Lady or the tiger’ bit on the GW Bridge, saying, “Should I let fall the woman you love? or drop these kids?” First, there’s no reaction shot of MJ, saying, “Spiderman? You love me?” Peter, is that you?” But more importantly, Spidey does something impossible for even a superhero. The goblin drops both Mary jain and the cable car full of kids and Spidey catches both , in sequence on opposite sides of the bridge as if one falls slower than the other. Uh, here’s the thing about physics, you can’t jump down faster than something’s falling. Movie people ALWAYS forget this. It’s like when Michael Bay made a cable car explode in the Rock. , I all know how the thick neck jocks clap their ass off at that kind of illogical stuff, but me, I hate it. (And don’t get me started on the physics of a flimsy glider being able to propel upward, lugging a fully loaded cable car.)
So anyway, it seems the clever way a deep thinking science nerd like Peter would’ve gotten out of the situation is by simply webbing The Green Goblin’s hands to the cable and the Goblin’s feet and/or Glider to the bridge, so the Goblin’s stuck to both. But if that isn’t dramatic enough, for all the above mentioned football loving morons who flock to action movies , who MUST see women dangling and falling and catching cables impossibly (because they’re greasy and full of steel splinters) and sliding down them and then falling again but to safety by improbably catching the side of a boat at a hundred m.p.h. in every action movie they watch, well, Spidey could’ve still webbed the Goblin’s hand to the cable as it fell, forcing the Goblin to save one of his sets of prisoners. That way he could save M.J., put her back on the bridge, and then go after the Goblin and the kids. And frankly, there’s a fine example of cold-hearted Sam Raimi again, having Spiderman save MJ first.

Finally, Norman and Peter finish off the film on a crummy Doctor Who set. (Where was the chase between buildings, you cheap bastards?!) And there’s none of Spidey’s patented Spider-sense charged dodges and leaps. And you gotta which wonder what uninspired stunt show meathead choreographed this crap? The Matrix was three years before this film. If I was Sam Raimi, my stunt coordinator would be from Honk Kong or at least a total Spidey nerd so there would be some grace and ballet to the fighting and not just two clowns in rubber suits slowly punching each other, like they’re in a Godzilla movie.

And sorry, but I have one more complaint about the idea that Spidey just brings Norman back to his bed and doesn’t inolve the cops. Leaving Harry to assume what happened. (Which just becomes more and more preposterous as the movie series continues with Harry acquiring the Green Goblin powers but not saying, “Oh, I guess my dad deserved to die, since he was $!%$ing hanging my ex-girlfriend and those kids over the ocean and trying to kill Peter,” then the Butler coming in and saying he cleaned the wounds. Say, anyone ever heard of a coroner?) Plus, where’s MJ to come to Peter’s aid saying, “Harry, I would’ve died if it weren’t for Spiderman. You shut up about him or I’ll never speak to you again!”

Anyway, there it is. Spiderman was a massively disappointing flick. Soon after I saw the movie, I talked to a guy who had worked for Marvel comics and bored him endlessly with these gripes and he just didn’t see it and kept boasting of the film’s success. It was like trying to explain to a gung-ho McDonald’s manager at a McDonald’s convention why their food is so awful. “BUT AMERICA IS EATING IT! BILLIONS AND BILLIONS SOLD!” And with that last shot of Spiderman by the American Flag, it was a painful reminder that the Spiderman film embodied everything wrong with American blockbusters. We’re really just becoming a stupid country that isn’t offended by illogic. And even the Marvel people weren’t bothered that a film couldn”t improve upon or even adapt the dimensions of a 2-D comic book. ‘Nuff said.

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STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT (1996)

Alright, writing about Star Trek films is getting kinda boring and I’m exposing myself as the total dweeb, nit-picker that I am, so I’m going to be brief and inform all my faithful readers that First Contact is the last Star Trek movie worth writing about. Insurrection was so-wrong-headed and embarrassing that it went far beyond Shatner’s laughable Final Frontier into “Why the @!*& did I spend the money on this boring @$%!.” territory (Really, the main bad guy is consumed by desire to get a… face-lift?) Then with Nemesis the producers were so desperate to crack that elusive normal, non-nerd demographic that they hired an action movie director who knew nothing of Star Trek and threw a veritable stew of Star Trek cliches onto the screen, including yet another retread of Wrath of Khan, treating each idea as if it were new and unique when they clearly weren’t and the movie sucked hard. (A dune buggy chase on a desert planet, that’s what this series needs! )

Anyway, First Contact hinted at what a Star Trek movie could be while still exemplifying everything wrong with the film series. I was enjoying the movie when it started. Jerry Goldsmith was back as composer with a rich new theme to start the movie off right. Then the opening shots were impressive and downright cinematic. The cinematography by Matthew Leonetti was sterile blue and science-fiction-ish. We see the crew on the new Enterprise D , they’ve been out in space with new a new ship and new blue uniforms for a year and without too much exposition or b.s., they’re ready to fight the Borg. Seemed pretty good.

Disappointingly, there’s a fight with the Borg ship that looked too busy and Star Wars-y, big football field sized starships zipping around like X-wings, not terrific or what I would have liked, but still in the arena of feature film-making.

Then they go back in time and there it is, direct from T.V. land U.S.A., we have a cheap, uninteresting post-apocalyptic 21st Century earth with our man James Cromwell outfitted in a dumb hat. (which, one may recall, is my # 1 gripe about costuming actors).

I could go on pointing out all the irritating T.V.isms that threw me out of the movie, but I’ll sum it up in one shot. At one point, the Borg are taking over the Enterprise and they’re wearing these rubber costumes. I heard or read somewhere that they were expensive, but they just look lame. Forgivable on the TV show maybe, but on the big screen, when I saw the close up of the wonky rubber boot hitting the floor to the Enterprise and the sound effect goes “clang! clang!”, once again, I threw up my hands and gave up. For the movie, couldn’t the Borg be in like hard plastic sorta C3-P0 costumes, like? So, you know, they looked like robots and not fruitcakes at a sci-fi convention?

Meanwhile Jonathan Frakes (who did a decent enough job directing the film, really, it had more style than Generations) and co. are stranded on Earth without being able to communicate with the Enterprise and no one’s freaking out. They’re like, “Gee, we can’t communicate with our vessel. Hmmm. Oh, well. ”
Then Alfre Woodard has a big cheesy argument with Picard and he, ala Michael Jackson in the Bad video, breaks some glass and looks plenty fruity doing it, and then they quote Moby Dick, even though Khan already did that back in II. But this time, it’s Picard obsessed revenge, oh, what a twist! He’s losing his mind, he’s losing his crew. Good thing he gets a good old p.c. lecture on what it is to be a flawed human from a contemporary earth woman. Zzzzzz…. how about he just uses the technology at his disposal and beams the borg out into space and then uses a quantam torpedo to destroy them, since it didn’t take too many to destroy the Borg ship at the beginning of the movie?

Plus, in another monumental wasted opportunity, typical of Star Trek movies, the good guys go out on the hull of the ship to fight the Borg and it’s a BORING scene. Now at the time, I was tinkering with my own Star Trek movie ideas and dreaming of a fight on the hull of the ship in the space suit jet packs from The Motion Picture, where they’re zipping all over the nacelles and warp engines, so when I read there was a fight out on the hull in First Contact, I was somewhat excited, albeit a little perplexed at how Hollywood was always reading my mind and taking my ideas. Anyway, leave it to Star Trek to take a cool idea and make it completely flat and uninteresting. They move in slow-motion, and have gravity boots. Zzzzzz….

Then finally, Picard and the Borg Queen have it out and Picard’s saying, “Yes, I remember you! You tried to mate with me! YES! YES! It all comes back now!!!” Well, that’s funny, I hadn’t seen too many episodes of Next Generation, but I did see Best of Both Worlds and I distinctly do NOT remember Picard having any interraction with the Borg Queen. So, since she was a new idea and they were revising history, how about spending a little money and showing a flashback because when a character describes a major event in a movie with lines of dialogue, it feels like a play. And I don’t like watching plays much, especially in a movie theater. And there’s poor, stranded Alice Krige having to suddenly play rejected by Picard and angry at him for SPURNING HER! (”HEAVENS TO MURGATROID!!”) Well, sorry, it doesn’t work. I never witnessed her desire for him, so I don’t buy at all that she feels rejected by him. And why’s she getting mad in the first place, she’s a bleepin’ borg?

So that’s it. That’s been Star Trek for the last four movies. TV on the big screen. Maybe it will be different with this new movie directed by a TV guy who made a very TV-ish Mission Impossible movie with a plot basically ripped off from Mission Impossible 1 and True Lies –right down to a wife who doesn’t know her husband, our hero’s an agent and a caravan on a bridge–, who, from all reports, wants to cast his new Trek with young and gorgeous tv type actors, but you know we Trekkies are always hoping for a brighter future.

Warp ahead!!!

STAR TREK: GENERATIONS (1994)

Now, just for context, I absolutely don’t like any incarnation other than the classic Shatner/Nimoy Trek, so this probably won’t be the most analytical review on the subject. I think the Next Generation films were textbook examples of a television producer’s complete inability to think like a big screen movie maker. But even on its own small screen terms I felt The Next Generation was pretty crummy television. Where TOS had the vibrant colors, the cool 60’s music, Shatner! Nimoy! the fights, the babes, and above all, the more interesting and lasting themes and social commentary, Next Generation spent seven years regurgitating old themes and in most cases making them tiresome with Levar Burton, using that Reading Rainbow voice, saying something about a warp cores or Data talking about fractile codes and learning emotion and blah blah blah. Once or twice they lobbed a good idea out there, but even when the show showed signs of a pulse, like having Picard turn into a Borg, they all wussed out, and in classic television style, Picard was instantly cured and brought back to normal in one episode.

Umpteen episodes of the TNG series made me throw my hands up and say, “They just don’t have it.” I see it like this: In 1966, Gene Roddenberry was an ex-cop, ex-airline-pilot, regular joe making a living in the tv business and he cast a show with reliable, working stiff actors with charisma who took the job seriously but not too seriously and they all created magic. By 1987, after millions of fans had been fawning and drooling all over “The Great Bird” on the convention/cruise circuit and the like, he had this enormous head and a serious moneymaking franchise to live up to. Plus, like George Lucas, Rodenberry ceased to be just a guy working in “pitchas” now metamorphasisizing into one of those clay-footed Gods he was always trying to deflate on the show. So, now looking down from Mt. Olympus Roddenberry chose stentorian-voiced, super serious Shakespearean Patrick Stewart to boom out his grandiose notions of humans evolving into socialist, peace-loving weenies. And taking Patrick Stewart’s cue, the rest of the cast poured a lugubrious over-earnestness into their one note performances and lo’ there came to pass a television show with the Star Trek name that had flat uninteresting characters, sissy action, uninspiring effects, dopey ship design, HORRIBLE MAKE UP(say what you will about the 60’s spit and paste stuff, Spock and the Vulcans look cool) , lifeless unhummable tv wallpaper music (except for, of course, Goldmsith’s and Courages themes and fanfare. ) and above all, no magic. (I notice the same phenomenon happened with the second Star Wars trilogy, instead of fresh, likeable, not-too-serious actors like Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill creating something new and exciting, Liam Neeson and co. were moping about, so preoccupied with their part in history that they distanced the audience, and were shadows of who came before.) So, in the case of Star Trek: The Next Generation, it was no longer cutting edge, socially relevent sci-fi television, but ‘they’ve done all this before, only better’.

And in the case of Generations, the story that they already did better was Shatner’s disastrous Star Trek V. Instead of Spock’s brother looking for God, we have a non-descript Malcolm McDowell looking for Heaven of some sorts. And in each case, you have completely unmotivated villains committing needless crimes to find answers that any third grader could probably answer fairly credibly. i.e., Seems kind of retarded to look for God on a planet as is trying to move a planet to get into something that he could just beam into. So, here’s Generations, a film rife with stupidity, continuity errors and paradoxes in one of the biggest wasted opportunities in the history of science fiction movies.

I saw the film when I was two years out of college, when Star Trek movies were losing their lustre but still something to look forward to. I wasn’t nuts about the prospect of having to sit through a big screen TNG movie , but part of me hoped that maybe the show was hampered by television budgets and the fifty minute format. Maybe they’d bust out with a real barn-burner of a story. And while I heard that Kirk was going to die, I never for one minute imagined that he’d die falling off a bridge. So without reading much about the film– not really interested in the behind the scenes interviews with Patrick Stewart and Rick Berman, I went to see the film on opening day, November 2004, with low expectations, very little pre-knowledge and slight hopes that it would be good.

Now, I have to point out here, that Generations has hands down the BEST opening title sequence of the entire film series. (an object floating in space, what is it? Oh, a champagne bottle, crashing on the new Enterprise! If only ST:TMP opened with that much flair)

So after being somewhat impressed and ready to see a cool movie, the film immediately let me down with television thinking. Kirk opens the bridge doors and walks into newspeople with head cameras. HEAD CAMERAS!!! PAH!!!

It’s the late 23rd century. We’ve scene floating suitcases in the first movie. You’re telling me we can’t have floating ominpresent camera balls from the 1980 Flash Gordon movie? News people are going to wear headgear in 2290? In an era of holodecks and transporters? C’mon! (and in the next movie LevarBurton acquires robot eyes, so one would think at the very least, that TV cameras of the future would be based on that technology.)

Okay, so yes, a minor gripe but still, I’m looking for this film to wow me and already it’s giving me what I fully expect from television hacks. Then the dialogue. “Captain Kirk meet Demora Sulu.” “Your father is Hikaru Sulu?” “Yes, you’ve met her before when she was so high.” Ah, thanks for telling us. Hey, how about Lt. Sulu Jr. simply says, “Hello, Captains, great to see you again.” to Chekov and Kirk. And Kirk’s line, “It wouldn’t be the Enterprise without a Sulu at the helm” explains who she is. Because you know, Sulu nearly gave up his career for Kirk and Spock and was seen at Kirk’s apartment drinking wine from a futuristic (television prop! television prop!) test tube, so you know, KIRK F***ING KNOWS SULU HAS A DAUGHTER! Then Scotty says, “Well, Captain, it’s like you always say, if you want something you have to make the time.” Wait. Kirk’s been bestowing old Scottish fart platitudes on Scotty? Since when? And Kirk says “It’s good thing you’re an engineer. With tact like that you’d make a lousy psychiatrist.” Written and approved by a team that clearly doesn’t know or understand the characters.

Then they leave spacedock and there’s an admittedly funny bit with Kirk saying “take us out”, to pompous applause. And then the plot starts with this Nexus ribbon that kills Kirk for the time being. giving him a more interesting death scene than his actual death, but still, the opening is basically like Spock’s death in Khan. So what started out as an average Star Trek film with Shatner, Scotty and Chekov, now shoots forward 80 years to Picard and company, testing our patience with gimmicks on a boat. And the film comes becomes a duck in the water.

After his awe-inspiring title sequence, director David Carson suddenly stops making a motion picture and doesn’t even use the most obvious camera moves and transitions. Before leaving the Kirk era, we’re treated to an impressive pan across the damaged section of Enterprise B and then we dissolve to a still ocean and the HMS Enterprise sitting in the water? BORING! Seems like a bonafide movie director would pan down the hull of the seafaring Enterprise to the crashing waves in the same manner that we left the last one. You know, with a flourish.

So then there’s Data, boring old Data with his tiresome quest to be human, starting his section of the film doing something seemingly out of character for cheap laughs. He pushes Dr. Crusher in the water and Levar Burton, still unable to shake his Reading Rainbow delivery, admonishes with, ‘That was not funny! Hmmm. I would’ve laughed if I was there. Seemed funnier than what happened to Worf. But that’s just the tip of the iceburg. By the time Data’s saying “open sesame” to a tricorder, I was ready to leave the theater. BUT FIRST! In a shocking scene of how-low-can-you-go, cheap-ass television mentality, Geordi unscrews Data’s head to insert an emotion chip, revealing a cheeseball dome of plastic and blinking christmas lights. Say, fellas, ain’t nobody seen the Terminator? They’re still in 1966 TOS territory! At least the androids made out of goop in “What Are Little Girls Made Of” were creepy. All they can do on the show is talk about how human Data can be and he’s got a screw off head with blinking lights? COME ON!

Meanwhile, Picard finds out his brother and nephew are dead, leading to some of the worst ham acting ever to come out of Star Trek. I said ever. (and that’s saying something) Every TNG lover always loves to slam Shatner, and heap the praise on old baldy, but if you put David’s death scene from part III next to Picard’s nephew’s scene, Shatner wins by a lightyear. I literally expected Stewart to bellow, “Heavens to Murgatroid!” The lip spluttering, “F-f-falling in love!” Ha! Ha! Ha!

THEN! Ryker and his team beam onto the Armagossa (Duh!) Space Station with FLASHLIGHTS!? Not even those wonky camera hats from five scenes back but yep, good old fashioned two dollar Ray-o-vac flashlights. Except these are more futuristic in that they’re really small and don’t emit much light. They don’t even use some sort of Night vision lamp, which I think would still be outdated in the 24th century, they have battery powered flashlights. The minds behind Star Trek… What makes me laugh is how the front office can watch this stuff and not send a flurry of memos scolding them for being such backward thinking dimwits. I mean, aren’t those tanned boobs in the studios up to the minute with all the lastest security devices and technology? And I’m still talking 1994 here.
And we’re treated to yet more TV when a crewman finds a dead Romulan and says to Ryker “Commander, you better come see this.” which is really like #2 on the list of Television/B-movie dialogue cliches. Say, I have a cutting edge idea, you know, since they’re like matter of fact, scientific people of the future. Wouldn’t the crewman simply say, “Commander, there’s a dead Romulan here.” And we can still cut to the guy holding the dummy with the cheap make up, if you must have that.

It only gets worse from there. Data gets dopier and downright irritating with each subsequent scene, Malcolm McDowell is wasted, Whoopi Goldberg shows up in another one of her patented horrible hats, there’s a fight with the Klingons that uses stock from Undiscovered Country. And here’s an example of writing your characters stupid: good old boneheaded Ryker knows Geordi was kidnapped by the Klingons and he doesn’t order a complete security scan on those cheeseball sunglasses just in case there maybe a cutting edge camera in it, (evolved from those hats from the 23rd Century news crews?)

While I wasn’t blown away with their VI output, ILM completely phoned in their fx shots with this one. The Enterprise D, which I thought looked pretty unconvincing on the TV screen managed to look even phonier in 70 mm, gets beaten and crash lands on a planet in a sequence that looked like it was filmed for Thunderbirds. (The 60’s version, that is). Literally, the shot of the Enterprise coming out of the clouds called to mind a paper plate wobbling over a paper mache mountain.

And finally, when it can’t get any worse, Kirk shows up again and seems like a guest star on a TV show that he used to be a part of. And this is my biggest beef with an already nearly-intolerable film.

Okay, keeping in mind that Captain Kirk not two movies ago, refused the idea of a magic wand that would release his pain, why is he calmly accepting his existence in a dream state where his cicrumstances are always changing with the slightest thought which completely proves that it’s clearly not reality? He needs to jump a ravine to find that out when he’s got Picard in his back yard and can’t complete the act of seeing his girlfriend without the scene changing AND HE’S CONTENT TO STAY THERE? JAMES T. KIRK?!!! (The man who raged, “Be content? Be content!? BE CONTENT!!?)

And on top of that, if he’s accepting of this load of bull, why isn’t he playing catch with young David Marcus while Joan Collins folds laundry and sips cocoa in the background? We just heard in the LAST film that Kirk’s still pretty busted up over the death of his son. And uh…GEE… SEEMS LIKE THE THEME OF THIS FILM IS LIKE ABOUT DEATH AND REGRETS OF BEING ALONE AND TIME BURNING LIKE FIRE AND STUFF. Wouldn’t that be foremost on Kirk’s mind, NOT some horseshit out of left field character named Antonia? Wouldn’t that character trait be the one that unites Picard and Kirk and which they both decide to live with for the greater good, etc. etc.

Antonia. ANTONIA!!? Unbelievable that with all the stuff written about Kirk and this is the end of Shatner’s thirty years in Trek, this is the best he can come up with. Yes, if his book is to be believed turns out SHATNER conceived of the Antonia plot device. (Which isn’t surprisng when one considers the non-canonical Final Frontier plot.) But here’s Ron Moore and Brannon Braga, supposedly big fans, and seasoned writers and they went along with it — more worried about appealing to Shatners’ love of horses than to the millions of fans who’ve done nothing but watch Star Trek over and over for years and years?

You hand me that assignment and I’d be all, “Yeah, so we do Forest Gump and Captain Picard is running with Kirk and company on the Genesis planet and they stop the Klingon from killing David, then Picard watches Kirk save Edith Keeler and then Kirk raises the shields on Khan and blows the Reliant out of space before Khan knows what happens. And you know, cool stuff happens because it’s Kirk who’s going to die and we need a swan song for the greatest space hero of all time.

Anyway, Kirk dies and that’s it. He fizzles out. And so did my interest and hope for the Star Trek series.

STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY (1991)

In December of 1991, I was a senior in college, and a theater major mind you, and at that point, like Spock, I had found myself as person. My love of Star Trek was as deep a part of me as conservatism was to Ronald Reagen. Most people who knew me, knew that aspect of my character. Meanwhile, I was in a kinda screwy but mainly typical college romance, and I wasn’t getting cast in plays and had to think about my future, so I wasn’t really thinking so much about Star Trek. When I saw the trailer in mid-October, I got excited but a few weeks later I had broken up (for the umpteenth time) with the college girlfriend, so there were other things on my mind. When the film came out in December, I was down, and you know, when you’re down, you tend to gravitate toward the things that give you comfort. So I saw part VI on a sneak preview the night before it opened– even though I had finals the next day– and I liked it fine, but I wasn’t overjoyed with it. And of course, I left the theater thinking I wish my ex- girlfriend had seen it with me. “If she really loved me, surely she would have gone to Star Trek with me! So what if we weren’t going out anymore! That bitch!”

Anyway, I remember not liking Cliff Eidelman’s opening theme, it seemed too much like Danny Elfman’s Batman music, which didn’t suit Star Trek, I thought. I remember really liking the cinematography by Hiro Narita (who’s now an acquaintance — since I work in film– and the first time I met him I gushed to him about how much I liked his Star Trek VI work and how it was one of the only Trek films to actually look like a feature film, but he’s a quiet and gentle fellow, a true artist, and not the type to engage in much nerd talk.) And after Star Trek V, which was this big cracked egg in the series with no relation to any of the other films, it was good to have the movie series continuity back with Brock Peters and John Schuck from The Voyage Home and mentions of Kirk’s son and the crew’s experiences in the other films. Also after The Final Frontier, which, as stated before, boasted the worst visual effects in any film from that era, it was nice to see the starship models actually moving via motion control camera again.

There were some cool sequences, mainly the impressive zero-G death of Gorkan scene and the final space battle shot where the Excelsior and Enterprise pelt the Klingon bird of prey with torpedos.

The actors were all good, notably Leonard Nimoy, James Doohan and Walter Koenig, were also good or at least noteworthy in their small roles. And while Walter Koenig didn’t have much to do, he finally looked good and stood out as a grown man after five films of being trapped in the cub officer role. But it all felt kinda light and purposeless and not the monumenatl send-off that I was hoping for. I left the theater thinking, ‘It was okay.’

But then school ended for the Christmas Hols (as they say in England, or so I’ve read) and I had to do a work-study job to earn money and was alone whilst everyone went home. So with little to do, and desperately trying to forget my ex, like a depressed drunk, I went back to see The Undiscovered Country a record six more times. I bought the tape of the soundtrack and developed an appreciation for the darker tones of the film and its music. On the 2nd and 3rd viewings, I thought it got better and better. It did have a packed script, it covered LOTS of Star Trek ground, homages galore, a topical storyline, Kirk fighting a mirror image of himself, Spock solving crimes, a trial, Klingons, space battles, and even a correction of past continuity errors. (notably maneuvering thrusters in Spacedock as a regulation, in part III, Kirk orders one quarter impulse power which is just too damned fast!) and it was the final movie for the original crew, maybe it WAS a monumental send-off.

Well, no. It’s not. It’s actually kind of weak when you actually start thinking about its Manchurian Candidate inspired plot, which became apparent on viewings 4, 5 and 6, and when I bought the vhs with the extended scends. On the small screen, without the razzle dazzle of Mr. Narita’s bigscreen camera work, Nicholas Meyer’s and Denny Martin Flynn’s script becomes glaringly mortal and really not as tight as it could have been. But to their credit, they had to hammer it out in record time to meet the release date.

Anyway, the biggest problem with the script is that suddenly Starfleet officers are acting like weird ultra conservative jerks for no other reason than to help illustrate the sledge-hammer in the face parallels about end of the cold war. Lt. Valeris, a character we know nothing about except that she was a Vulcan who graduated at the top of her class at the academy. (???? A bad line. Don’t all Vulcans graduate at the top of their class wherever they go?!! And if not, can we see the one who didn’t, where we have this underachieving Vulcan Van Wilder? Come to think of it, I guess that was Sybok…) and Spock is just all over her, saying “you have to succeed me, and you’re the best.” But when we find out she’s one of the conspirators, it just doesn’t matter, no one’s invested enough time or interest in her character. Now, according to William Shatner’s book about the movies, Valeris’ character was supposed to be Lt. Saavik from the other films and she would have been one of the conspirators. Unfortunately, the idea was nixed by Gene Roddenberry and also, it seems, Robin Curits was suddenly deemed not good enough to reprise her role as Saavik. So they recast with Kim Catrall and changed her name. Too bad, it would have been much more believeable to get behind the idea that Saavik hated Klingons since she sort of had an implied relationship with David Marcus, Kirk’s son, and she watched him get murdered and she’s half Romulan and probably angry about all that. That would have been a good scene, right? Where Spock does the mind rape on Saavik and we find out she conspired to kill the chancellor out of revenge since she loved David Marcus. Then Kirk would have to really analyze how his words and actions influence others, torn between the memory of his son’s murder and his desire to change the galaxy for the better. )

Then you got Christopher Plummer spouting Shakesepeare and this is funny at first but it’s not as clever as everyone thinks it is. There’s a line in Die Hard where Alan Rickman sees the Nakatomi plans for world domination and says, “And lo’ Alexander looked upon his kingdom and wept for he had no more worlds to conquer.” Then he says so all the flat top, thick necked jocks in the audience will understand, “Benefits of a classical education”. Star Trek VI suffers from that kind of annoying, theater nerd, “let’s explain how intelligent we are” humor. Where if the one line was, “You’ve never heard Shakespeare unless you’ve heard it in the original Klingon,” it would be a terrific throwaway. But no, the character goes on wearing the Shakespeare quoting lampshade and it gets old FAST. Just like the title, Undiscoverd Country, while pretentious for Star Trek II, would have been sort of appropriate, and you know, TV episodes fromt he 60’s were always using Shakespeare in their titles, (By Any Other Name’, ‘The Conscience of The King’) but for this story, it’s really a square peg in a round hole. Gorkan says, “To the Undiscovered Country.” And no one’s saying, “You mad man! Shakespeare was talking about death!” Why use a phrase if it’s not a perfect fit? Why not, Star Trek VI: Cold War or The End of The Future something like that. (yeah, those aren’t great examples, but still not as perplexing as The Undiscovered Country. And really, does ANYONE remember the name of VI as The Undiscovered Country? It’s always, “Which one was that?” )

Anyway, what else? Like all Star Trek films, it doesn’t have big Star Wars effects and cool locales. Kirk and McCoy are sent to an ice planet with an underground prison but that looks like a Universal Theme park ride and not very dangerous. Due, of course, to the budget limitations, which gets me pointing the finger yet again at Paramount. Here’s the last of the series with a cast and crew that made you millions, nay BILLIONS of dollars and you can’t spring for a Klingon City or vast, imposing underground prison that doesn’t play into every cliche about prisons and doesn’t seem all that alien? I liked the prisons on the old show, where one was mind-raped by the dentist chairs with the swirling lights. That would have been more interesting, if McCoy and Kirk were actually treated pretty badly and not free to make plans of escape like it was no big deal.

And then there’s Spock solving a crime that’s all guesswork and no logic at all. He guesses about a Bird of Prey that can fire while cloaked, he guesses that its Valeris, and the big fact that they unveil is Valeris heard Kirk’s personal log and gave it to the the Klingons for use at his trial. Well, that’s a big piece of personal evidence and it seems Michael Dorn, the attorney should have checked the source and gotten Valeris arrested the moment it was used. Why doesn’t Spock arrest Valeris upon hearing the tape at the trial?

And finally, you have the assassination attempt at Camp Khitomer that’s just plain stupid. A guy, (in a Klingon costume as it turns out in the extended version, which I wish they hadn’t included, since it’s so lame) sitting in the front row, coughs, excuses himself and picks up his giant suitcase and goes about trying to assassinate Rosana DeSoto and Kurtwood Smith to start a war. Are Starfleet and Klingon personnel so used to peace and the groovy future and whatnot that there’s no security? No, tricorders to say, “Hmmmm. seems like a big gun in that big suitcase that you’re carrying in front of everybody, MR. STARFLEET OFFICER IN A KLINGON SUIT! Our tricorders detected the cheap phoney latex on your face!”

Then Kirk and company beam down and gets pretty awful with people cheering and clapping when guys have just fallen out of windows and fired phasers, you know, where in reality it would be a huge, chaotic yelling security nightmare. And I thought this in 92, long before 9/11.

Anyway, most people reading this would probably think, “Geez! This guy sure rattles on about things that are no big deal! It’s just a Star Trek film! These films are like family reunions, you’re not supposed to get caught up in the paper mache and the crap fx and plot holes, you’re just supposed to have a good time.” And yeah, I guess that’s true and I make excuses for the original tv show all the time, but I guess the difference is in the 60’s, they were doing their best with the budget limitations and television grind scheduling. But with the feature films, and billions later, Paramount and the producers started relying on the charm of the characters and the fans willingness to look the other way with all the flaws. So knowing they’d make a profit no matter what, Paramount didn’t sink much money or effort into making truly great sci-fi cinema, even though they had the actors and directors to do it. And while VI has plenty to enjoy, it just doesn’t try hard enough to make it stand on its own as a genuine sci-fi film.

Okay, I have to take a breath in my full nerd-out about Star Trek to recommend the funniest film of 2006! Idiocracy!

Written and directed by Mike Judge the guy who did Office Space and Beavis and Butthead (which, I’ve never seen a whole episode of) Idiocracy is a spot-on hilarious look at how crappy our culture is today and how bad it’s going to get 500 years from now. I’m not big on synopses since you know, every newspaper, EW article, etc. is constantly bombarding us with these kinda descriptions and I figure if you’re on this blog, you probably already know but since my readers are few, I’ll explain: Idiocracy is the story of an army shemp (played by Luke Wilson) who volunteers for a stasis experiment and remains frozen for 500 years only to wake up and find out that he’s the smartest guy in the world.

So I heard about the film for awhile and then learned that it got shelved and then had a limited release so I figured it had major problems. While I was pleasantly surprised to find out its problems were few and minor, and it was a really funny and specific film, I was shocked that a film of this quality was cast aside like a straight to video train-wreck. It’s rare these days to find specific comedies since most of the people who make comedies are the morons that Mike Judge depicts in this film, and God forbid that you tell people that they’re idiots. (Even though the movie studios tell us this weekly with their releases of Cheaper By The Dozen 2 , the absurd remake of Yours, Mine and Ours, comic book movies of Ghost Rider (?!) and Elektra(!?–like who?!!! Sure, Catwoman, Elektra, any other second banana characters to get their own movie? (Hey, how about Kid Flash?) and Saws and Captivity or say, Soul Plane, or {fill in the blank with all the shitty movies that have been pouring out of Hollywood for the last decade}.)

So, anyway, I won’t carry on about the film, otherwise I’ll be spoiling it, but I will say that all the actors are great in Idiocracy, especially Dax Shepherd, an actor I dismissed after Zathura, but who won my admiration for courageously pouring himself into playing, without any winking or wussing out, a completely believable and irritating moron. Another actor who won my trust and enthusiasm was Justin Long, whom I hadn’t heard of until I saw the trailer for Live Free or Die Hard and was thinking that he was a smarmy sitcom star, well, I was wrong, he’s a real actor and comedian and he’s hilarious as well. (I’ve since seen Dodgeball and learned that Mr. Long was also the main geek in Galaxy Quest, so I have newfound respect for his talents.)

Other than that, the film is about a future where everyone is fat, everyone wears clothes peppered with logos, there are heaps of trash everywhere, automated, robot voiced kiosks screw up constantly while uttering their corporate slogans, Costco is a city with a law school and Gatorade has replaced water since corporations bought out the FDA.
And that reminds me, 20th Century Fox must be shown that they need a new marketing director. I read that their marketing department was unsure of how to promote the movie. Which has to be the lamest, most over-used and unconvincing excuse that always comes from the studios. Weren’t they unsure how to market Forrest Gump, so they simply showed trailers that explained the enitre movie, and voila! The fat boobs in logo-laden clothes came out in droves? I don’t believe it for a second. I think the Costcos and the Starbucks and all corporations who mindlessly signed the product placement contracts, suddenly saw a film where their images were sullied and they forced the picture out of the theaters. But that’s just my hypothesis based on how the world works.

(If anyone knows anybody and has stumbled upon this blog, please tell me what happened. I’m into this kind of stuff. )

Other than that, if for whatever reason, you’re reading this blog, PLEASE! OUT OF RESPECT FOR HUMANITY, RENT OR BUY IDIOCRACY!!! The film must be seen. That is all.

Okay, I think the best sci-fi film ever made was Blade Runner, but as this blog is on its maiden voyage, it’s only fitting that I christen it with an exhaustive treatise on the Star Trek Films.

Star Trek is my favorite movie series of all time even though each movie on its own is pretty average and in most cases below par. Yes, even the all-hallowed Star Trek II is cinematically so-so (for reasons I’ll get into later) And in my opinon, the only reason why Star Trek II stands out is because, by comparison, Paramount and its filmmakers haven’t been able to make a film to top it. In 1982, it got better than average reviews and made 78 million dollars. No huge smash, by any stretch of the imagination even when you adjust for inflation. It’s just that the previous film and subsequent entries into the series were more flawed and not as good.

But if you take key sequences, elements, moods and/or ideas from all the Star Trek movies and put them together minus anything in Insurrection and Nemesis, you have a bunch of parts that add up to a satisfying, time-tested film series.

STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE (1979)

Sadly, I’ve never seen this movie in the theaters, even though at Christmas-time of 1979 I was anxious to see it. I had been, like most 70’s kids, a fairly interested fan of the show and I had the Mego dolls of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, but then Star Wars took over and I basically changed majors for awhile. So for two years, I didn’t think about anything related to Gene Roddenberry’s groovy, wishful- thinking vision of the future. Then in the spring of ‘79 I had a Hulk comic with the Star Trek Teaser poster on the back cover depicting the cast under the Phase II Enterprise , which is still one of my favorite posters, (and the first to clue me into the very notion of a teaser poster) So their marketing worked I was primed to see a glitzy new Trek film with cool effects.

December came. But at that point in my family’s history, we had moved from SF to Oregon and movie theaters in Eastern Oregon played movies for a week. And even though I didn’t pay attention to reviews at age 10, there was a certain blah-ness about the movie. Kids who had seen the film didn’t seem to say much about it. I never even saw a trailer or a commercial. Though there was a Happy Meal ad with a Klingon that ran incessantly. Ultimately when the weekend came for my family to see the film, it wasn’t playing anymore. (We went to see Electric Horseman instead, which really made me wish we’d seen Star Trek.)

But I did buy the Marvel Comics adaptation with some Christmas money and from what I saw on the page, it seemed to have a pretty good story . Each time I read the comic, I was looking forward to seeing how it played out onscreen.

I sort of found out on a fuzzy black and white TV screen in 1983. (After Star Trek II caused me to become an obsessive fan.) And like nearly everyone else, my first reaction was, “Hurry it UP!” The film’s pacing was excruciating and, as a know-it-all thirteen-year-old, I wondered how I would have ever sat through it at the immature age of ten. All the scenes that seemed to play out fairly well in a comic book were badly acted and endlessly long–especially Kirk’s return to the Enterprise. (And in the extended TV version there’s a particularly wooden scene that has George Takei and co. displaying how long it had been between gigs, as an alien ensign vacantly asks, “What about Captain Decker? He’s been with the ship every day of its refitting.” and the cast stops, like animatronic animals, and all amateurishly turn as if they were expecting the question. Coupled with DeForest Kelly’s first scene with a hokey beard– pointing his finger like George McFly, hammering out his lines, “This was YOUR idea! Wasn’t IT?!” As much as I respect Robert Wise, I think he’d been a little rusty himself.  I read once that many of the bit parts were filled with fans, and that comes as no surprise as every Joe-Schmoe Crewman and Sally Crew Girl reads his or her lines like the cue cards are in front of them. “SIR! IT’S! ON! A! DIRECT! HEADING! FOR! EARTH!” Though Stephen Collins deserves praise for being a pretty decent, know-it-all Captain Decker. )

Although I had been paying attention to film music since 1976 with Rocky, I wasn’t crazy about the score at first. I liked the opening Klingon battle music, but I thought Jerry Goldsmith’s score was too loud and corny compared to the seafaring touch that James Horner brought to the Trek II score. The sole action scene in the film of the ship going into the wormhole, an exciting throwaway in the comic, was a tedious ten minute psychadelic trip with no tension whatsoever, not even a musical cue to speed things up. Then the Enterprise went into V’ger and I completely lost interest. I turned it off and went to eat dinner, thinking, “I can’t believe I’m turning off Star Trek”, eating chicken and mashed potatoes, then returning to the TV sometime later and the crew of the Enterprise was still on the bridge staring at V’ger on a viewscreen. I remember my mother started laughing.

So that was my first impression of “The Motion Picture” and that impression has stayed with me to this day, (obviously as I nerdily recount seeing Klingon Happy Meal commericals) But by the mid 90’s, I bought the widescreen videocassette and at that stage, I was well-versed in the problems with the film and the budget overruns, filming with an unfinished script, clashing egos, the rush to get it done before the effects were completed, etc, etc. Seeing it widescreen, almost as good as seeing it in the theater, I started to appreciate just how how BIG the film really was. A major disservice was done to that film when it was originally transferred to vhs. A muddy print and bad choice of pan and scans made it look like a much drearier film than it really was. Compared to the other entries in the series, it really did have a big-budget epic feel to it. (albeit, a dated, disco-y big budget, epic feel) And even though it’s a ponderous bloated misfire at best, it’s still a genuine science fiction film with an interesting, provocative theme at its core– that of man and machine molding to becoming a new form of life, (and an often-repeated idea, if one considers The Borg, The Terminator, Ghost In The Shell, Matrix, A.I, and nearly every science fiction film since then)

The Enterprise model shots and effects are still the most impressive and inspiring of the series and you almost get the feeling that the ship was real and out there in deep space. (Unlike in nearly all the other films where one is clearly looking at a plastic or cgi model )

And of course, my appreciation for what Jerry Goldsmith’s score contributed to the film, and to Star Trek in general, rose tenfold over time– when I became an avid collector of film music and realized Goldsmith purposely wrote a big splashy epic score–complete with an overture–for his big splashy show-offy sci-fi movie.

(Some other day, I’ll carry on about the music of the films, one of the main reasons why I feel the series is so good.)

The highly-touted DVD Director’s cut released in 2001 hasn’t changed my opinon of Star Trek The Motion Picture much. It’s still a bore with great effects and a great musical score, but like Jeffery Katzenberg says in one of the DVD featurettes, without that film, you wouldn’t have the sequels.

STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982)

Flashback to May of 1982 and Scholastic Scope, a nation-wide school newspaper, that I happened upon in my 7th grade Social Studies class, had a black-and-white one page photo write-up on the next Star Trek film. The quality of the pics were so bad and grainy that I thought I was looking at an old issue from the 60’s. But then I noticed it was of the new movie Enterprise shooting phasers at another ship and even more intriguing, in another still, Kirk, Spock and McCoy were wearing dark military uniforms, not the ugly unisex Motion Picture booted pajamas.

At that time, I was a bespectacled 7th grade geek who got punched in the arm alot, BUT my glasses broke that spring and my parents hadn’t replaced them and I was good at baseball so kids started thinking I was cooler. One of the more popular kids actually asked me to stop hanging around nerds and to start hanging around with him and his set. Girls started smiling at me. So as I look back, that was a pivotal moment in time: I could’ve just put down the Scholastic Scope and become president of the country, but, nope, ever a nerd at heart, I said to myself, “Gino,” I says, “I have to see that second Star Trek movie!” Then after school let out for summer break, I was watching David Letterman and saw an action packed spot for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan! Phaser battles in space! A racing surface of the moon shot! Ricardo Montalbahn! Paul Winfield screaming ! Kirk shooting his phaser and wearing a cool new jacket, yelling ‘Khaaaaan!’ After the commercial, I set phasers to kill.

I begged my parents to take me and they obliged, (kicking off one of the best movie-going summers in history) But the truth is, I was bored and confused for the first hour of the film. It was one of the first films I saw where at one point I said to myself, “This is boring,” something I’d never done at that stage in my life–at age 12 I loved all movies– but this had a pace I wasn’t used to, the acting seemed quiet and stilted. I laughed at the scene in Kirk’s apartment where DeForest Kelly starts off an awkard scene with a hokey reading of “Dammit Jim, what the hell’s the matter with you?!”(I was also confused because I still had the ST:TMP comic in my mind where McCoy was scolding Kirk for wanting to be Captain of the Enterprise, but now he was telling Kirk to get a command back.) I figure now that the scene works badly because it’s been ADR’d and/or mixed badly as the voices seem too loud for the expressions on the actors’ faces. (Plus, as one finds out by watching the Director’s cut, there were a couple of important lines cut out that make sense of Kirk’s granny glasses birthday present.)

Meanwhile none of the characters ever referenced anything from the first film, Spock was Captain, which was unsettling, and worse yet, he kept closing his eyes with grief and saying things like “Sauce For The Goose ” or “Be Careful.” Khan didn’t make much sense to me, since I hadn’t seen Space Seed, any time there was a reference to him as intelligent or whatnot, I didn’t get it, he seemed kinda mean and savage and come on, he fell for the old “we’ll use their prefix code on their computer to take down their shields gag”. I know, not fair, who knew about passwords in 1982? And then there was that curly haired spaz who turns out to be Kirk’s son. For the first hour or so, I just didn’t know what the heck was going on, this wasn’t the movie the trailer had promised or the Star Trek I was familiar with.

But then the pace picked up, Kirk bites the apple and says, “I don’t like to lose.” and to the rhythm of James Horner’s pulsating strings, they pulled themselves out of the rut, went into Mutara Nebula, really had a phaser/torpedo fight, Khan set off the Genesis device, director Nicholas Meyer maximized the tension with slow zooms and sweaty palms (”Time! “Distance From Reliant!”– great stuff!), Spock died and Shatner made me tear up with his ‘the most… HUMAN!” eulogy. I could kiss the popular kids goodbye.

From then on, I became a full time dork and went back and saw all the episodes on TV and read the movie novelization by Vonda McIntyre, as well as The Making of Star Trek by Stephen Whitfield, The Making of Star Trek II by Allan Asherman, the The World of Star Trek by David Gerrold– which was a very good read– and The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture by Susan Sackett, (without having seen the first film.) For Christmas of 82/83 I got the James Horner LP album for Star Trek II, The Star Trek: (no II on the title) The Wrath of Khan 1983 calender, (which was really a rush job with pretty bad stills from the film.) and a couple of books that I later gave away because they were so odd and uncanonical, but are now probably worth a fortune: Star Trek II Biographies and the Star Trek II Plot Your Own Adventure book.

As I analyze my obsession for Star Trek, it really stems from Douglas Trumball’s effects work from the first film. I didn’t know it at the time, but the best shots in The Wrath of Khan were stock shots from The Motion Picture. And that’s what I wanted more of; I really liked the shots of the new Enterprise, all lit up, in the dark of space. But in trying to gather those shots of the Enterprise, to soak in that expertly designed and photographed symbol of adventure and the unknown, I learned all I could about the subject, like V’ger learning all that it could about the universe before returning home.

So after becoming intimate with the story and all the components, I saw Star Trek II twice more in the theaters and it all clicked. (But what about that? When one understands all the story elements and behind the scenes struggles, does that make the story better? I still don’t have an answer because in theory movies shouldn’t need research to become better or more clear.) Even though I probably would’ve told you The Empire Strikes Back was my favorite film at that time, as I look back, it was probably The Wrath of Khan. As much as I knew about the making of Star Wars, I never studied it so intensely. This was during the dawn of the VCR age when Star Trek II hit videocassette, I rented a VCR and the film on several occasions and watched it repeatedly. I bought my parents a VCR in 1987 (very late, I know) but made sure to pick up a copy of Star Trek II, for myself, along with it.

Now, knowing that film as well as I do, and I think I have every frame of it burned in my memory, my assessment is this: Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan clearly has the best plot and the most cohesive look, the best production design, the costumes were defintely the least cheesy of the series (–not by much, but still, the maroon tunics looked fairly big screen.) certainly the best space battle and the most satisfying climax and denouement of all the Trek features– Director Nicholas Meyer did have a clear vision of what he wanted to see on screen. However, in my humble opinion, since Nicholas Meyer wasn’t as familiar with the characters and the actors, it resulted in a rocky, uncertain feeling from the cast. They weren’t as comfortable as they’d be in subsequent movies. Plus there are continuity errors galore. Everyone always points out Chekov being recognized by Khan, but one that still has me puzzled is when Kirk tells his son David that he’s never faced death before. Which begs the questions, “Huh? What about your brother and his wife on the planet with the spine-eating enchiladas? And most importantly, what about poor Joan Collins, whom you had to let die so the universe could continue. I thought you spent your whole career, facing death ADMIRAL KIRK! Suddenly, cold, cold, emotionless Spock dies and you’re crying and spluttering and saying things that are just patently untrue?!”

So while I respect the fact that Nicholas Meyer gave Star Trek back it’s action-adventure paramilitary teeth and for discovering James Horner, who’s never really been able to write more original scores than Star Treks II and III, he loses points with me for tailoring the Trek Universe too much to his specifications. But that’s really a small gripe, he did resuscitate the series after TMP.

Anyway, while Wrath of Khan is great Star Trek, it’s not great cinema. The fact is, Star Trek II was made on the cheap. The film takes place on maybe four sets and has a smallish, TV show quality about it, especially when Chekov and Terrell are on the Ceti Alpha planet or when Kirk, McCoy, and Saavik are exploring the Regula Space Station. And ILM’s effects haven’t aged well , the ones that weren’t stock shots from the first movie. Probably because they didn’t have the time or the budget, effects supervisor Ken Ralston didn’t bother creating impressive shots of the Enterprise or Reliant. I think a signature of all of ILM’s Star Trek output is that the fx shots are competent and fluid but not awe-inspiring. (except for the Spacedock shots in III, I’ll get to that in a bit)

Finally, themes of sacrifice, death, acceptance and rebirth, always winners of course, but are not exactly hot off the presses, mind-bending science fiction. Though they were onto something with the whole idea of terraforming.

Which leads me to….