Eugene Fischer

Tag: Movies

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.

Thoughts on the WATCHMEN Movie

Today I saw the Watchmen movie, with some trepidation.  I wasn’t afraid, as Ferrett Steinmetz is, that the film version would overwrite my own internal imagery developed from reading the graphic novel.  I understand his fear–his example, in the comments at the link, of the Harry Potter movie actors overwriting his own internal voices when he read the later books in the series is something that happened to me too, to some extent.  But for Watchmen it would be impossible.  The character voices and motions of closure that I cast between the panels are indelible.  The book is part of my personal canon (what Sarah Miller refers to as a sacred text), and I’ve read it often enough and from an impressionable enough age that my own relationship to it is ossified, inviolable.  (Ever since I read Sarah’s review I’ve been thinking about trying to explicate the core of my personal canon, and knowing that Watchmen would definitely be on it has been making me feel self conscious.  I’m not used to the things I value being as big a part of the zeitgeist as Watchmen is right now.  Somewhere in the past week I read someone exhorting to the world, “Movie reviewers: no one cares about your deep personal relationship to the graphic novel!” and I have to say I knew how s/he felt.)

So it wasn’t fear that my relationship to the book would alter that made me hesitant to see the movie.  It was fear that it would be as big a train wreck as the other movie adaptations of Alan Moore’s work have been.  From Hell and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen both bore so little relation to their source material that they could more accurately be said to be inspired by the books than based on them.  And the former was forgettable and the latter execrable.  Almost worse was V for Vendetta, which was a greater abomination despite being a better movie.  It was as though the flesh and outward appearance of the book had been flensed and draped over the philosophical skeleton of a completely different story.  From some angles the beast looks attractive, and even beautiful (such as the scene with Valerie’s letter, lifted word for word from the book and powerful in any medium), but as soon as it begins to move it is revealed to be a ghoulish chimera, and the vitality of book’s conflict between fascism and anarchy comes through as merely a sickly sendup of modern American politics.  What I feared was that the same grusome surgery might have been performed on Watchmen.

It wasn’t.  The movie is fully Watchmen, and what flaws it has are stumbles and missteps, not spasms born of a fatally rotten core.  It is easily the best adaptation of Moore’s work so far, and I think it may even be a good movie in its own right.  What follows are my ruminations, incomplete and still developing, about specific elements of the adaptation.  If spoilers are a concern for you, for either the book or the movie, stop reading now.

The biggest change to the story, and the one that people will probably discuss the most, is the change to Ozymandias’s plan.  No longer does he teleport a genetically engineered giant monster with a caustic psychic payload to New York to explode, kill half the city, and traumatize the world with its death throes.  Instead he simultaneously attackes major cities all around the world with an energy weapon based on the powers of Dr. Manhattan.  Of all the changes from the book, this is the one I have the least problem with; I actually think it is an excellent solution to two problems that Hayter/Snyder had in adapting the story for the screen.  The first problem is length.  Terry Gilliam famously said that Watchmen was unfilmable unless you made it five hours long, and the movie to be successful was going to have to be under three.  The way to make the story smaller was pare down the side characters and world building.  The story had to get smaller, and the giant monster was heavily reliant on side characters for its creation.  Black Frighter, it’s reader, and crucially it’s author: gone, and with it the caustic psychic payload.  The other problem that had to be solved was 9/11.  If Ozymandias just attacks New York, the act would be seen as derivative to a post-9/11 audience, so the attack had to get bigger.  For the story to get smaller and the attack to get bigger while somehow retaining Ozymandias’s core plan of bringing about world peace by uniting humanity against a terrifying external enemy, it was necessary to have his plot revolve around something from the primary narrative.  Dr. Manhattan is the obvious, sensible choice, and given that even at the end of the graphic novel the majority of the world thinks that he left the Earth in a rage and never returned, it’s a fairly elegant one as well.  Making Dr. Manhattan the external enemy that humanity unifies in fear of works, I have no problem with this change.  I might even like it.

Other things I especially liked:

The opening credit sequence was brilliant.  In fact, it may have been my favorite thing about the movie simply because it was not in the book, and yet was utterly tonally consistent with the book–so it was just more Watchmen.  I liked getting more Watchmen.

The Comedian was brilliantly cast.  I sometimes questioned the direction during his scenes–in particular I felt that the interaction between he and Dr. Manhattan in Vietnam after he shoots the pregnant woman should have been far more visceral–but there is no question that they got the right actor for the role.

The one thing we knew from 300 that we could rely on Snyder to get right was the visuals, and he didn’t disappoint.  I had great fears about his ability to communicate subtlety–fears that were to some extent justified–but the film is beautiful, and as excellent a translation of the art of the book as anyone could reasonably ask for.

People are sometimes cavalier in talking about act structure in movies.  I’m not really comfortable doing it, because I don’t think I really know what I’m talking about.  Maybe I should read McKee’s book one day.  But I think that, by sticking so closely with the issue arcs of the series, the movie deviated from traditional big blockbuster structure.  All of the issue opening and closing images were retained, and the issues themselves have their own tone.  The first issue with Rorschach unmasked and in prison is very tonally distinct from the issues around it, and that section of the movie has a shift in tone as well, that comes in a place where I didn’t really expect one.  I kind of enjoyed seeing a big budget movie that had the emotional beats in nontraditional places.

Things I found mildly irritating:

Perhaps it would have been too big of a tonal shift of the type I was just talking about, but I wish that the nonlinearity of Dr. Manhattan’s ruminations on Mars had been more fully retained.  They flirt with it enough to make it recognizable to someone who has read the book, but don’t really capture the character’s perception of time the way the book does.  Maybe the only way that was ever going to happen is if they got Christopher Nolan in to guest direct that section.

I understand, given the change to Ozymandias’s plan, why they took out the electric car infrastructure made possible by Dr. Manhattan’s effortless nuclear synthesis.  But if he isn’t filling the “yeah, I’ll make whatever atoms you want me to” role in this version, then what is the explanation for the airships?

If Dr. Manhattan’s Mars citadel isn’t all one big piece of glass, the whole thing shouldn’t shatter like that when Laurie hits it.

Has there ever been a movie that included a slow motion “Nooooooo!” that wouldn’t be improved by its omission?  I suspect there has not.  I am certain that one did not need to be added to Watchmen.  (In fact, Dan seeing Rorschach’s death at all was an unnecessary and ultimately pointless change.)

Things that I think are actual flaws:

From the time Dr. Manhattan leaves the planet until the time of Ozymandias’s attack, less than two days pass.  And during those two days everyone in the developed world thinks that nuclear annihilation is imminent and they are very likely to die.  That motivates, to one degree or another, the actions of every character in the movie–save perhaps Rorschach–from that point in the story on.  And I don’t think that background is effectively communicated, which makes lots of the following action, especially Laurie and Dan’s growing recklessness, feel unmotivated.  I think part of the problem might be that Hollis Mason’s death scene is left out, and so we don’t get to see that rioting, senseless violence that is effecting people as they panic about the state of the world.

Ozymandias’s character is pared back considerably, making him much more of a stereotypical villain than in the book.  I think his is the least successful character transition, and the ending suffers for it.  In the book when he says, “I’m not a republic serial villain,” the line works, but when movie Ozymandias says “I’m not some comic book villain,” my though was, “then why have you been acting like one the whole movie?”  A character as smart as Ozymandias is supposed to be should be more self-aware than that.

The ending also suffers from being rushed.  Ozymandias “killing” Dr. Manhattan, then Laurie shooting Ozymandias, and then Dr. Manhattan’s return all happen without any emotional downbeat between them, and as a result run together.  I’m not sure if it was a matter of the editing/directorial choices, or if the scene just needed to be longer, but we definitely don’t have time to process Dr. Manhattan’s disappearance before he is back again, or to really appreciate what the conflict with Laurie and Dan says about Ozymandias’s character–yet another way in which that was mishandled.

Trying to have Sally Jupiter explain and give a reason for why she ended up loving the Comedian was simply wrong.  There is no feel-good philosophy behind that aspect of the story.  There is nothing there but an assertion that people can be this complicated, that we don’t, regardless of what some characters maintain, live in a world of explicable moral absolutes.  There can be an attempted rape, and decades later a kiss planted on a photograph, and the world keeps going on.  Trying to use that aspect of the story as a mother/daughter bonding issues and dress it up in romantic notions about parenthood was a drastically misguided idea.

Final thoughts:

I’m still processing this movie.  I probably will be for a while.  But I think I can say that it is the first Alan Moore movie adaptaion that I may, eventually, say-unqualified-that I like.  I doubt it will ever be part of my list of favorite movies, the way the book is a part of my personal canon.  The two texts will never be interchangeable for me, though I am eager to see the director’s cut of the film.  But I think it is probably a reasonably good movie, I think I liked it, and I think it was much, much better than I, at my most pessimisstic, feared it was going to be.

Sita Sings The Blues

Sita Sings The Blues is a beautiful animated movie exploring various versions of the Ramayana, with about five distinctly different visual styles and a soundtrack of 1920s jazz.   It was written, edited, directed, conceived, and everything-else-importanted by Nina Paley.  Everything else except distributed, of course.  Because film distribution companies handle all that stuff.  Right?

Not so in this case.  Despite a growing mountain of well deserved accolades, Sita Sings The Blues cannot be distributed nationally due to rights issues related to the Annette Henshaw songs in the soundtrack.  So Nina is doing that herself too.  Check out the link above:  she has negotiated and purchased a limited set of rights, enough to let her release her amazing film into the creative commons.  Completely free, full, DVD-ready downloads are forthcoming.  Also, due to there apparently being special rules for public broadcast stations, though the film can’t have a traditional distribution, WNET in New York is allowed to broadcast it.  They will be doing so on March 7, and, more exciting, have already made the full movie available in streaming format from their website.  (If you want a little taste before you watch the whole, approx. 90 minute movie, check out the trailer.)

So, Sita Sings The Blues: not only an utterly delightful work of art, but now also a fascinating experiment in movie distribution.  I can’t wait for the downloads to go live.  I know I will be giving DVDs away as gifts and having at least one viewing party.  And I will definitely be dropping some money in the donation jar, because what Nina Paley is doing is new and exciting in about ten different ways at once, and deserves admiration and support.