Category: Movies

The Joker and John Wick

Todd Phillips’ move Joker isn’t out yet, but critics have seen it. While many have given it glowing reviews, others have said that it glorifies real-world patterns of violent behavior. Plot synopses have led some to worry the film might normalize the beliefs of the incel community, which has produced several murderers already.

Todd Phillips responded to that criticism in an interview, saying,

The movie still takes place in a fictional world. It can have real-world implications, opinions, but it’s a fictional character in a fictional world that’s been around for 80 years. The one that bugs me more is the toxic white male thing when you go, “Oh, I just saw John Wick 3.” He’s a white male who kills 300 people and everybody’s laughing and hooting and hollering. Why does this movie get held to different standards? It honestly doesn’t make sense to me.

This comment has gotten a lot of attention on Twitter. I’ve seen some people argue that it’s a faulty comparison because John Wick’s victims provoked him to kill them, by attacking him and killing his dog. Others are saying that Phillips has a good point, and those critical of violence in media shouldn’t get to pick and choose which violence they abjure.

The people who say it’s a bad comparison are correct, but not for the reasons given.

It’s not a bad comparison because of who gets killed, or the motives of the main character. It’s a bad comparison because the movies operate in two different rhetorical modes. Or, to put it another way, because not all fictional worlds are the same.

The John Wick series are solidly action fantasy movies. The copious violence is choreographed and balletic; combination fist/gun/knife/car/axe fights that would be impossible in reality. The main character belongs to an international secret society of genteel super-assassins, with its own baroque customs, currency, and global infrastructure. This is a fictional world that is blatantly unreal. No one worries about John Wick inspiring copycat crimes because it would be literally impossible. Behaving as John Wick does requires living in a world that doesn’t exist.

Joker, from its marketing and reviews, appears to be working in the rhetorical mode of psychological realism. This is the same mode as a great deal of mainstream literature—fiction which concerns invented but believable people, doing things that didn’t happen but believably could have. Phillips admits this in another interview, saying, “I literally described to Joaquin at one point in those three months as like, ‘Look at this as a way to sneak a real movie in the studio system under the guise of a comic book film.’” So while the world of Joker is, as he says, fictional, this depiction of it is striving to be realistic. That’s why people are criticizing it in a way they don’t criticize John Wick.

John Wick 3 valorizes a kind of violence that doesn’t (and can’t) actually happen. Joker, according to some critics, valorizes a kind of violence that does. Those critics may turn out to be wrong, but they aren’t hypocrites for treating the two movies differently.

Ghostbusters (2016)

 

1455576670739Ghostbusters was the earliest franchise I can remember getting really into, coming even before my devotion to Star Trek. I had all the the toys–the firehouse with a grill at the top for slime to seep through, the proton pack with its yellow foam beam–watched the movies over and over, wore out videocassettes of the cartoon show. (Fun fact: some of the most memorable episodes of The REAL Ghostbusters were written by J. Michael Straczynski.) So seeing this new remake was a heart-in-my-throat nostalgia bloom from the opening teaser on. Fortunately, and contrary to the impression I got from the seriously underwhelming trailers, it’s also enjoyable as hell. The ensemble cast is delightful, especially Kate McKinnon who steals every scene to announce that she’s a big damn movie star now. The jokes all land. The cameos are delightful (the last one, during the end credits, especially). The inevitable callbacks to the original are done with self-aware humor, and with enough new twists thrown in to avoid feeling perfunctory. Sure, the plot gets a little floppy in the third act, but I didn’t give a damn while I was watching because the movie is unrelentingly fun. I don’t generally even like comedies, and I left the theater feeling giddy. If you’re going to remake Ghostbusters at all, this is probably the best possible way to do it. Easily recommended.ghostbusters-2016-cast-proton-packs-images

Science Fiction Movie Rankings, 2010-2015

It’s been a fairly excellent decade for science fiction cinema so far. Here’s how I think these past few years stack up. I’ve divided the notable SF films of this period into five tiers of quality. While the tiers are hierarchical, the entries within them are not specifically ordered. I’m also not counting Marvel or DC comic book movies here, which are being asked to pursue different goals than standalone films.

Tier 1: Instant Classics

Not only among the best of their time, but of any time.

ExMachinaEx Machina – Alex Garland shooting his own script in his directorial debut. This story about the ethics of artificial intelligence and gendered expectation is that rare beast, a science fiction movie that 100% respects the intelligence of the audience. Every obvious question of premise gets immediately addressed by the characters. The performances are compelling, and the SFnal ambition staggering for a film with only four real characters. The intersections of masculinity, technology, and capitalism are picked at until they bleed, and Garland manages a more sensitive exploration of female objectification in just a few scenes than, say, Under The Skin manages in its entire runtime. The suspense mounts and mounts until an inevitable ending that’s simultaneously harrowing and triumphant, insisting that we accept Ava’s definition of freedom over one that we might be tempted to see as more just. I’ll be thinking about the nuanced interplay between narrative expectation and models of consent in this film for years.

SnowpiercerSnowpiercer – Bong Joon-Ho crafted a film here that’s as conceptually and visually ambitions as anything on the list, making good story choices every step along the way. We’re prepared for it be a standard movie of class warfare; what we get is something more like a mortal rebellion against an unfair god–a war that can only ever end in pyrrhic victory–waged via one shockingly original set piece after another. The result is like nothing else I’ve seen, an action movie where the triumphant conclusion is the death of all humanity. One of those movies where going back to look at a clip of a single scene all too easily turns into re-watching the entire thing. (Though I will cop to a personal bias here:  I am a sucker for stories that take place in a linear restricted space. Trains, standing in lines, mine shafts, infinitely deep stairwells, whatever. I always love it.)

Tier 2: Great Movies

Movies that stood out from the pack, and that should be part of the conversation about science fiction cinema for years to come.

HerHer – This movie comes so close to being in Tier 1 for me, but doesn’t quite make it. It’s wonderful all the same. I’ve never seen a Spike Jonze movie I didn’t like (though Where The Wild Things Are I did not love), and this one is easily my favorite. It’s science fiction as metaphorical exploration of human romantic relationships, especially relationships that challenge notions of self and social propriety, and is whip-smart in pursuit of that end. But what keeps it out of Tier 1 is that it downplays exploring its own premise–that of an artificial intelligence so advanced that it forms a real romantic relationship with a human. The one (excellent) scene that invested more in science fiction than metaphor, wherein Samantha recruits a surrogate, embodied woman to join her relationship with Theodore, almost feels like part of a different movie. By not investing in the SFnal premise, the movie neatly insulates itself from questions of consent (Samantha begins her life as a purchased consumer product) or the nature of human versus nonhuman desire (touched on toward the end of the film only as a metaphorical growing apart of the main characters). Off the edges of the screen there’s a eucatastrophic AI singularity, with no apparent influence on society. Its only purpose is to make inevitable the end of Samantha and Theodore’s time together. This all works just fine narratively; the movie is elegant as can be. But I strongly believe that somewhere out in the universe of possible stories is a version of this tale that takes the science fiction as seriously as it does the emotion.

Gravity_PosterGravity – Alfonso Cuaron communicated the visceral inhospitality of space like no other director ever has, and made it beautiful it the same time. That accomplishment alone is enough to make this movie great. What keeps it out of Tier 1 is the unfortunate dialog and score–which sounds like it should be a huge deal, but in this movie makes up a relatively small part of the whole. The rebirth metaphor powering the narrative struck others as more effective than it did me, but I wasn’t put off by it. This movie earns its place in the SF movie conversation via awe-inspiring technical accomplishment, on a historical line with The Matrix and Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

FuryRoadMad Max: Fury Road – This is the first movie in years that I paid to see more than once in the theater. The plot is stick-figure simple, but within that formula George Miller executed so perfectly and with such verve that it felt like a reinvention of the action tentpole. The visual vocabulary of Mad Max: Fury Road is pristine, effortlessly tossing off details that feel fully realized through just the perfection of their iconography. (The Doof Warrior, for example, the blind guy with the flamethrower guitar whose name isn’t even in the movie.) Add in the amazing diegetic score, and you already have enough to make this movie a hit. But what makes it great is that, on top of all those elements, it’s a startlingly progressive story about violence against women, and how those women stand up to and overcome it. Titular Mad Max is, frequently literally, just along for the ride. It’s not forced or didactic or self-satisfied, every move is earned. That Miller was able to fit all this into a package sufficiently uncontroversial that it reached screens intact is miraculous, and we might end up looking back on it as a kind of turning point in big-budget cinema history.

Dredd-3D-new-posterDredd – A movie that’s way better than it should be, Dredd sneaks its way into Tier 2 by a deep, resolute commitment to its philosophical premise. Early on the movie tells you that the world is a hopeless place, and then, unlike every other apocalypse on the list or in recent memory, it never wavers. Dredd isn’t interested in redemption, it’s interested in nihilism. Good intentions count for nothing, principled stances go unrewarded. Its main character arc, that of Judge Anderson, is the story of an idealist embracing brutal pragmatism. And I do mean brutal; the action sequences in this film are gorgeously decadent. Karl Urban has never been better, and proves that a talented actor doesn’t need to ever show more than about 30% of his face to get the job done. Basically, this is a movie that bullseyes every one of it’s goals, while being consistently smarter than it needed to. Which makes sense when you learn, as I did only recently, that the script was written by Alex Garland, who I think just beats out Christopher Nolan for the most important SF screenwriter of this period.

Tier 3: Good Movies

Well-made movies that are easy to recommend.

AttackTheBlockAttack the Block – Before he was on the poster for the new Star Wars movies, John Boyega was patrolling council flats and protecting the Earth from alien invasion. What start out looking like class stereotypes become explorations of insecurity, and eventually camaraderie. A delightful movie of an unlikely ensemble coming together to face a common enemy. Suspenseful and funny.

InceptionInception – Nolan has an instant classic and a great movie on his resume (Memento and The Prestige, respectively), but his most recent SF offerings don’t match that standard. Inception was a cultural event when it came out, but it’s been long enough since we all saw it and liked it that we can admit that the basic idea is dumb as hell, right? The plot intricacies are delicious in their complexity and ambition, and filmmaking talent on display is top-notch. But the whole dream spies concept is really, really silly. Also, this was the movie where it became impossible to ignore that Nolan writes exclusively meager roles for women.

interstellarInterstellar – I honestly loved this movie. It did a ton of things I adore and rarely get to see. It’s a deterministic narrative, which always makes me giddy. It has a legitimate sense of galactic scale. It’s intriguingly structured; if most movies are novels, then this one is a collection of linked short stories. Almost all of the really important story choices in this film are done right. But even though I loved it, I can’t ignore that this film is oppressively self-important. It’s exhausting, being reminded over and over that it’s a film about serious events and high stakes that should be deeply meaningful. I’m fairly forgiving of pretentiousness, but it does keep this film from being higher on the list.

Source CodeSource Code – Duncan Jones followed up his wonderful debut Moon with this script plucked from The Black List of well-regarded but unproduced movies. It’s a film that uses many worlds QM to tell a Groundhog Day-esque story about trying to thwart a terrorist attack on Chicago. It’s well made and effective, but suffers from not thoroughly exploring its own premise. For example, at the end of the movie we have what is supposed to be a happy ending in which our hero Coulter Stevens has his mind transferred into a healthy body he gets to keep and use to seduce a pretty woman. But that body was previously in use by someone else, who has functionally been murdered to facilitate Coulter’s ride into the sunset. The major ethical implications of the plot are simply never addressed.

edge-of-tomorrow-posterEdge of Tomorrow –An even more Groundhog Day-esque story. I was legitimately surprised by this one. Emily Blunt is great, Tom Cruise is tolerable (!), and the plot mostly makes sense, even if the premise that gets us there feels lazily off-the-shelf. The middle 60% of this movie is as much fun as you could ask for, and while it’s bookended by weaker material–like a stab at ensemble camaraderie for the secondary characters that never really coheres–the whole remains quite satisfying.

TheMartianThe Martian – I can’t better Randall Munroe’s description of this, a feature-length version of the scene in Apollo 13 where the engineers dump a bag of garbage on the conference room table and say, “We have to figure out how to build a CO2 scrubber out of that or the astronauts die.” One part scientific literacy, one part nerdy playfulness, and two parts triumphalism, mixed thoroughly, then desiccated in the near vacuum of an alien atmosphere. It’s nice that Ridley Scott managed a good SF film in this stretch, as it makes the post-Prometheus universe that much less bewildering. Aberrations are easier to explain than full reversals.

Pacific_Rim_FilmPosterPacific Rim – “You know what would be awesome?” I might believably have thought to myself over the years, “A sort of live-action Evangelion movie with all of the giant robots fighting interesting monsters for the fate of humanity, and none of the angst.” Pacific Rim is exactly that. This movie knows that we bought our tickets to see mecha versus monsters, and devotes all of its resources to that cause. A big dumb action movie that knows its a big dumb action movie and glories in it. Fun SF fact: the baddies in this movie are so good because the head creature designer was Wayne Barlowe, of Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials, which was my most checked out book from my middle school library.

MelancholiaMelancholia – Probably the most controversial movie on this list. I know people who absolutely loved it, and people who hate it so strongly that its mention raises hackles even years later. I went in with very low expectations, having not been a fan of previous Lars Von Trier movies, and came away wowed. An astronomical calamity as objective correlative to explore depression? Sign me up. Bonus points for gorgeous cinematography. Certain scenes, like when the guy holds up his son’s wire contraption and discovers that Melancholia is indeed getting larger in the sky, have remained indelible. The worst thing about this movie is that it gave me enough good will toward Von Trier that I then went and saw both parts of Nymphomaniac in the theater. All of that good will is now gone.

Tier 4: Okay Movies

Movies that I don’t regret seeing, but are flawed or otherwise difficult to recommend.

predestinationPredestination – A film adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies…,” which sounds like a great idea. While there’s some quite good acting in this (especially Sarah Snook), the pacing drags, and the screenwriter made the inadvisable choice to add big picture stakes by inexpertly welding on a terrorism plot. But it’s still a rare deterministic time travel movie, which earns some points.

Europa ReportEuropa Report – The best things about this movie are the use of NASA assets to create visuals that would have once been unimaginable in a small indie film, and one truly great scene about a fatal accident in space. The rest is interesting, but slow, and story-wise the movie ends right at what, in a stronger film, would be the start of act two.

Upstream Color – I actually find this movie fascinating in a lot of ways. It starts out with the most disturbing scenes of mind control I’ve ever seen on film, and then turns into an oneiric watercolor of a film unlike anything else I’ve encountered. But with all the gorgeous acting and swirling acoustics, I ultimately just can’t get over this movie asking me to invest in the trauma of being infested with a parasite that makes one psychically connected to the emotional lives of some pigs. This may be a personal failing. Maybe, as a carnivore, I’ve developed a self-protective but pathological inability to take pigs seriously enough for this narrative device to work? This movie is one I think difficult to recommend, but might well do anyway given the right mood.

UnderTheSkinUnder the Skin – Memorable as a gnomic experience, this movie is an ultimately empty vessel built to hold a message about the commodification of women’s bodies that never actually gets communicated. The visuals are striking, and strange enough to not read as gratuitous even when fixating on Scarlett Johansson’s frequently naked body (which I’m cynical enough to think does still have much to do with the film’s largely positive critical reception). But it’s all just an object for contemplation; any interesting ideas here were brought in by the audience.

starwarsposter.0Star Wars: The Force Awakens – By far the best thing about this movie–it’s really not even close–is that it’s soon going to be the most successful film ever, and it stars a woman and a black man. That’s important for the same reasons I said above that Mad Max Max: Fury Road might someday be seen as a turning point. Beyond that, though, this movie is merely serviceable. J. J. Abrams makes the same franchise movie every time, but in this instance all he had to do was deliver a palatably fun film to a global fanbase desperate to feel uncomplicated love for Star Wars again. He did that. The Force Awakens is fast and pretty and avoids stepping on toes by being 100% unoriginal. Aside from the legitimately important casting decisions, it’s a remix album made by inferior talent, but with much much better recording equipment. For this one, “difficult to recommend” is the same thing as “unnecessary to recommend.” You’ve either already seen it, or you’re someone to whom I wouldn’t bother recommending it.

jurassic-world-poster-chris-prattJurassic World – Basically the same deal as Star Wars: The Force Awakens, except without any progressive casting and some mildly unfortunate gender stereotypes. I think I’m more forgiving of Rey in The Force Awakens suddenly knowing the Jedi mind trick than I am of Chris Pratt hypnotizing velociraptors with the power of his extended palm because Star Wars always had some conceptual silliness in it’s heart, whereas Jurassic Park didn’t. But fun enough to earn a billion dollars and lock in Pratt as a major movie star, which is nice.

Tier 5: Bad Movies

Movies not worth the time they take to watch.

Looper  There’s a scene early in Looper where a guy is running frantically to get to his back-in-time self, which is being held hostage. The threat is that if present-guy doesn’t get there in time, then the baddies will start mutilating past-guy. Which they do! He is running towards a fence and suddenly his feet are gone because they were cut off IN HIS PAST! Except… then how was he just running? Or doing any of the things we’ve seen him do, as apparently he hasn’t had feet–or hands or arms or legs– all those years. If you think about it for even a fraction of a second, it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Which is true of this entire movie. Then, as a bonus, Bruce Willis’s character motivation hinges on some really offensive Asian exoticism. I wanted so much better from Rian Johnson.

Prometheus – This movie isn’t just atrocious, it instilled in me a real existential angst. Alien is one of the my favorite movies ever, and this film undermined everything that was good about it. Everything! From the broad iconography to the most nuanced sexual politics, Prometheus revisits and then sullies its predecessor. But the two movies were directed by the same man. It is legitimately upsetting to realize that an artist can, over the mere course of decades, become so blind to things they were once sensitive to. I still marvel at how this movie happened.

Star Trek: Into Darkness –What’s that? You want to follow up a movie that used the iconography of Star Trek to tell a fun but superficial space action story with a sequel that’s a turgid, nonsensical rehash of Wrath of Kahn? And then you want to swear in the press that that’s not what you’re doing (even though it is) so that, when the movie comes out, all the most dedicated fans will feel lied to? That sounds like a pretty bad idea, really, but whatever. Here’s all the money. Go do. (I wonder whether the backlash J. J. Abrams got from whitewashing Kahn had something to do with his progressive casting choices in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.)

Jupiter Ascending  It’s actually kind of endearing, what a total exuberant mess this movie is. But endearing isn’t redeeming, and Jupiter Ascending is a junk drawer of glittering nonsense from start to finish.

The Congress –On paper this movie seems like such a fascinating idea, a half live-action, half animated adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s psychedelic novel The Futurological Congress. Unfortunately watching it feels like going on a school day trip to Toon Town, whereupon a minor character from a Tom Robbins novel chastises you for an hour. The good stuff from the book is just used as a platform for adolescent philosophizing.

John Carter – There was actually a great deal of cleverness and talent in the script and direction of this movie, but it was doomed from the start. Everything compelling about the source material had already been appropriated by dozens of other movies over decades SF cinema, with the result that this movie ends up coming off as terribly derivative and formulaic. There’s nothing good here you haven’t seen before, and nothing you haven’t seen before that’s good.

Elysium – This movie is like a cautionary tale for what the failure mode of Snowpiercer would have been: a class warfare story that oversimplifies to the point of meaninglessness. Moral implications, character choices, plot dynamics; every move this film makes is a dodge away from subtlety. It ends up reading as creative cowardice. Elysium is afraid to either take itself seriously, or to embrace being a visually extravagant cartoon. As a result it ends up being nothing worthwhile at all.

Zero Theorem – This is a perfunctory revisiting of the tone of Brazil without any of it’s satire or substance. An unnecessary ramble that even Terry Gilliam’s visuals can’t save.

Chappie – A Combat-Robot-As-Freshly-Self-Aware-Pinocchio story that compares unfavorably with Short Circuit, with inexplicable casting of Ninja and Yolandi from Die Antwoord playing versions of themselves. Farcically terrible.

Explain A Film Plot Badly

Last night I tweeted myself to sleep playing along with the hashtag game #ExplainAFilmPlotBadly. These were mine.

SNOWPIERCER

snowpiercer-53622270c9e26
Snowpiercer is the best use I’ll likely put my eyes to this summer. I’ve never seen a superior movie about the death of humanity. Powerful metaphors, creatively thorough exploration of premise, and the bravery to be ambiguous despite all the glitz. Not a minute failed to entrance, and I expect it to join the small family of movies that I never tire of rewatching. When they finish translating it, I’m going to read the graphic novel.

Edit: for a much more in-depth, equally enthusiastic reception, check out Grantland’s Snowpiercearound.

KIN-DZA-DZA!, the Soviet answer to STAR WARS

936full-kin--dza--dza!-screenshot

This evening the International Writing Program screened the 1986 Soviet science fiction film Kin-dza-dza!, which Tom Crosshill described as being iconic within the former USSR similar to the way that Star Wars is iconic in the US. It’s two hours of desolate satire set mostly on a dystopian desert planet, and like nothing else I’ve ever seen. The whole thing is available on YouTube. (Though sadly not embeddable. Hit the closed captioning button to turn on English subtitles.) According to the Wikipedia page, this year there was an animated remake, which I think I’ll have to track down.

Kin-dza-dza! part 1

Kin-dza-dza! part 2

A Brief Review of GRAVITY

The visual effects, action scenes, sets, and sound design are all brilliant, which is good because the dialog and score are largely terrible. The physics of an important scene where Dr. Stone has parachute ropes wrapped around her leg is very, very wrong. I still mostly loved it, and think it should be a lock for a VFX Oscar. Likely my favorite SF movie of 2013.

Thoughts on TO THE WONDER

As we were leaving the theater I said to my two friends, “That was my first Malick. Are they all that shitty?” And both my friends and an elderly couple leaving the theater ahead of us stopped to assure me that no, To The Wonder was an unusually shitty entry in his ouvre. But it’s one I found so lacking, I may never be motivated to give him another shot.

In my eyes, Terrence Malick’s To The Wonder was a cloying masculine power fantasy that thought itself a tender rumination on love and loss. Ben Affleck’s character, the male lead, is a fully abstract cypher who is nonetheless subject to the passionate devotions of Olga Kurylenko’s and Rachel McAdams’s characters, both of whom are treated leeringly by the camera in their every scene. Neither woman behaves in a remotely human fashion, as they are equally prone to infantile behaviors like playing coquettish games of peek-a-boo and randomly spinning in place to communicate contentment. They treat Ben Affleck’s affections as the world’s only desirable thing, and when he eventually spurns each one for the other, they both treat the event not as a betrayal, but as a tragic loss that they’ve somehow brought on themselves. After Kurylenko finally convinces Affleck to marry her (by, it is somewhat implied, giving up custody of her daughter) they grow increasingly unhappy. An Italian woman shows up to tell Kurylenko that she should just leave him and take control of her life. This woman is then characterized as unstable and dispensed with entirely. Kurylenko does eventually have an affair, so Affleck physically intimidates her and then divorces her. They cry together that the marriage has to end, and she decides to keep his last name. She goes home to France and wanders the woods licking trees, returning finally to the place where the relationship began and reflecting that it was all worth it because it was love for love’s sake.

So, to recap: an identity-free man is universally beloved by gorgeous, fetishized, frequently naked women. His transgressions against them are internalized by those women as personal failures they must strive to overcome, and their transgressions against him can brook no forgiveness. Ah, l’amour.

There is also an almost unrelated thread in which Javier Bardem is an ambiguously faithful priest who goes about his days meeting parishioners and ruminating on his relationship with Jesus. This thread is better in that it is not constantly offensive, but not a lot happens.

And that’s all. The music was nice. The cinematography was lovely. The editing style was distinctive. But the actual narrative content of the film ranged from boring to atrocious. I’m extremely unimpressed.

Thoughts on SOURCE CODE

I just finished viewing Duncan Jones’s second movie, SOURCE CODE.  Stop reading now if you don’t want spoilers.

Overall: enjoyable movie that posits the reality of Many Worlds QM. What I find myself most struck by leaving the theater, though, is that at the end of the movie there is a reality in which Colter Stevens has, essentially, murdered Sean Fentress and stolen his body.  This is the happy ending; Stevens gets to live on in a new body with a pretty girl.  But it’s hard to really be happy about it given that that body was in use by someone else.  Are we to think that by saving so many people, Stevens somehow earns Fentress’s death?  That would be a difficult argument for me to accept.

Also, since at the end of the movie there is a reality where there are two consciousnesses that think they are Colter Stevens, it stands to reason that the next time Source Code is used, there will be three. Then four. Then five. The identity Coulter Stevens becomes a trans-universal memetic virus taking over human body after human body.  There are a few possibilities here.  (1) The process continues until there are eventually whole relaties populated mostly by Coulter Stevenses, none of them knowing that they are all, on the inside, the same person.  Or (2) the need to find a body with a close enough biological match means that there are a finite number of Stevens-habitable corpuses walking around, in which case once all of them are used up he starts overwriting himself. Here some subset of male humanity is Stevens-infected, but after that the disease is stopped.

Of course, in every reality where Source Code is proven to work, the program gets expanded to include women, different body types, etc. so that there will be the greatest possible room to work in the event of another disaster.  As the number of people proliferates, so do the number of trans-universal memetic identity viruses.  Eventually there are whole realities where most human beings share one of, say, 25 different personalities.  And eventually some of them would have to discover that they all have memories of being part of Source Code.  At which point Source Code is no longer top secret.  The possibilities are known, and it become explicitly what it has always been implicitly: a tool of inter-reality war.

My Thoughts on STAR TREK (2009)

Warning: the following containes spoilers for the 2009 Star Trek movie.

A brief sketch of my Star Trek history to start with: somewhere amongst the posessions of mine that still live at my parents’ house is my copy of the Klingon dictionary.  I never did become a speaker, but I did spend a fair bit of time reading it and thinking about it.  Also there are my copies of the encyclopedias, and the tie-in novels, and the action figures and toys.  At the opening for Star Trek: Insurrection I won two movie posters and a model of a runabout by being able to recite that Lwaxana Troi’s (Deanna Troi’s mother from Star Trek: The Next Generation) full title is “Daughter of the fifth house, holder of the sacred chalice of Riix, heir to the holy rings of Betazed.”  More than that, somewhere I have a childhood journal in which I wrote at length about the experience of being applauded by a movie theater full of people for being so well educated at such a young age, and proclaimed it one of the greatest nights of my life.

Since then my Trek fanaticism has waned considerably, as my critical sensibilities for media in general developed.  Something about starting to think carefully about what made stories work or fail to work was incompatible with fanboy obsession.  By my late teens I looked back on the days when I would proudly identify myself as a Trekker with embarassment.  Today I remember them with (perhaps slightly embarassment-tinged) amusement.  But I still retain a great deal of affection for the franchise that gave me so much entertainment as a child.  I remember the rush I would feel at each new movie when the music swelled for the obligatory camera-flyby spaceship fetishism scene when the filmmakers pulled back the curtain on the newly visualized Enterprise.  The scale and grandure of the movies hit me in a way that the television series did not.  I gave up on Voyager early, and Enterprise after a single episode.  But even if, as was the case with Star Trek: Insurrection, I came away from a movie with more complaints than praise, it was always a thrill to see the characters, the iconography, to get to take a two hour dive into the universe I revisited so often.  I had very high hopes for this reboot, with its new actors and new creative team.  I hoped that it would be a good movie in its own right, not just good Trek.  I hoped that going to see it would make me feel like a kid again.

It was everything I hoped it would be.  This is the Star Trek movie I’ve been waiting my whole life to see.

The casting was inspired; there isn’t a bad performance in the film.  Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban bring us a Kirk, Spock, and McCoy that are  immediately recognizable even as the actors bring their own interpretations to the roles.  Those roles that are significant departures from their previous incarnations are almost all improvements.  There was only one characterization that I found somewhat problematic, and it wasn’t the one that I suspect will be the most generally controversial, Uhura.

My friend Ferrett disliked the portrayal of Uhura in the movie, saying she has a “brief flare of competence” before degrading into a character who spends her time “looking cow-eyed at people and supporting them.”  I must respectfully disagree with him.  While the heart of the story is Kirk and Spock, all of the characters get their own flares of competence, moments when the story turns on what they are able to contribute.  Because of when the various characters are introduced, Uhura’s might seem lessened because hers occurs earlier in the movie, so there is much more screen time post competence flare when she is in the background.  Also, because we are closer to the climax, the narrative tension is much higher when Sulu, Chekov, and Scotty get their moments in the sun, and thus their actions seem more significant.  So I think part of what potentially makes Uhura’s competence seem undermined is structural.  But, base competence aside, I also think there is an important and laudable character change that stems from her romantic relationship with Spock–namely that she is not a passive love interest, as essentially all the female romantic roles in the original series were.  Uhura in the movie is the sexual aggressor.  The moment when she asks Spock why she wasn’t assigned to the Enterprise and Spock replies that it was to avoid any appearance of favoritism doesn’t really make sense when we first see it, because we don’t know yet that they are lovers.  If theirs is merely a teacher/student relationship, then Spock would be expressing concern about showing favoritism based on academic ability, which would be, well, illogical.  But once we learn that they are lovers, that scene is suddenly revealed to have been an uncomfortable Spock struggling with the propriety of his romantic entanglement, and a much more dominant Uhura insisting that their relationship be valued above appearances.  Uhura’s forcefulness and Spock’s easy capitulation clearly demonstrate the power roles within their relationship.  And I would argue that this is reinforced by the “what do you need?” scene between the two of them in the turbolift.  I believe that insisting on being allowed the role of an active caretaker with a partner as emotionally repressed and unable to ask for or accept help as Spock is, in fact, a dominant act.  I found Uhura’s characterization consistent, and consistently positive, throughout the movie.  It is to be hoped that there will be more of a role for her skills during the exciting parts of future installments.

The characterization that didn’t entirely work for me was not Uhura, but Sulu.  The first step towards Sulu’s flare of competence is when he says that he has had training in “advanced hand-to-hand combat.”  When he said that, I thought, “Oh, is he talking about fencing?  That would be hysterical!”  I expected the fencing line, because Sulu in the original series was a fencer.  This was memorable bit of characterization.  While the original Star Trek was in many ways a groundbreaking show in terms of its handling of race and ethnicity, its portrayals are what we would today identify as tokenism.  Nonwhite, nonwesterners exist as stereotypes of the cultures they represent.  As a reaction against a television landscape dominated by white males, tokenism was a step forward; these days the bar is, hopefully, set a little higher.  But one instance of the original series transcending tokenism was when Sulu, the token Asian character, turns out to be a student of a martial art that is not ninjitsu, or kendo, or something inscrutable and eastern.  He’s a fencer!  It was a fabulous moment, and it looked for a time like it was going to be preserved in the new movie.  But, in the end, new Sulu’s “fencing” is proficiency with a katana and a fair bit of kung fu.  I understand the choice, and it made for an awfully exciting scene, but I couldn’t get away from the fact that now the movie’s only Japanese character just happens to be a master of hand-to-hand combat and wield a samurai sword.  It was an embrace of tokenism for the sake of excitement, and while it wasn’t fatally subversive of my enjoyment, it was a little disappointing.

Another thing that bothered me was Scotty’s green, crumple-headed comrade.  This character is ostensibly a Starfleet officer, and yet in both his (her? its?) actions and Scotty’s actions towards him, he is cast as mentally/socially inferior.  Star Trek didn’t need a wookie/ewok/droid wearing a Starfleet uniform.  His screen time was, fortunately, brief.  Somewhat surprisingly, other than when he was sniping at the unnamed “kids will get a laugh out of this!” character, I enjoyed Scotty, despite him being played almost entirely as comic relief.  The thing is, he is smart comic relief rather than dumb comic relief, and it turns out I’m okay with that.  (And honestly, if you get Simon Pegg to be part of your ensemble cast, you had damn well better let him be funny.)  I was slightly disappointed with what should have been his finest moment in the movie, the “Scotty saves the ship” moment when he jettisons and detonates the warp drive so that the explosion will push the ship away from the black hole.  This was problematic (especially in a movie that gets the “no sound in space” thing right!) because, for lack of a medium to propagate through, explosions in space do not create shockwaves.  There would be no push, just a vast influx of photons that would fry the ship.

But really, who cares?  It was easy for me to take off my physicist hat and not complain about things like that, because the movie does so much right.  “Red matter,” can apparently make black holes, and so long as you don’t try to convince me that I should believe it makes sense, I am fine accepting that.  The crucial thing which the movie did right on that count was to cut out all of the technobabble.  Star Trek has never been hard science fiction, and so long as we understand what function the dumb, quasi-magical whatsits serve in the story, we don’t need to know any more than that.  I’ve read Lawrence Krauss’s The Physics of Star Trek; it didn’t increase my enjoyment of the shows.  Setting aside the need to every once in a while gesture toward Star Trek being a believable future was one excellent move the filmmakers made.  Having the story take place in a time travel mediated alternate universe is another.  The obvious benefit is that it is a (fan-respectful) way to claim the freedom to retcon elements of the story that seemed dated, or are for some other reason better excluded from this reboot.  But it is also enables the creative team to change the type of storytelling that is going to characterize this new Trek.  Because of the needs of short-form episodic storytelling, Star Trek has always existed in the Status Quo-iverse: whatever the state of things was at the start of the episode, that is how it will be when the episode ends, regardless of what may happen in between.  This allows the series, if the initial conditions are successful, to continue for an arbitrarily long time, but does so at the expense stories of consequence.  This type of storytelling even extended to the movies: Spock can die, but only if he comes back; Data can die, but only if there is a replacement for him that shows up first.  But in this movie, an entire planet–a founding planet of the Federation–is destroyed halfway through, and never restored.  All signs point to Vulcan being gone for good, which has me hopeful that the alternate universe that the time travel created is the Change-iverse, where instead of the cosmic reset button getting punched at the end of every story, events will have consequences.  The Change-iverse is someplace the Star Trek franchise hasn’t gone before.  I welcome the change.