STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS: The Bromance of Kirk and Spock

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) – Directed by J.J. Abrams – Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Benedict Cumberbatch, Karl Urban, John Cho, Alice Eve, Simon Pegg, Peter Weller, Anton Yelchin, and Bruce Greenwood.

Here’s the deal, readers. SPOILERS follow. Lots and lots of spoilers follow. I don’t hold anything back, so don’t read forward if you don’t want to read a full discussion. One last time, SPOILERS AHEAD.

For the love of Odin, will someone give Captain Kirk a man hug?

Because if no one gives him a hug, he’s likely to steal an object of worship from a non-industrialized society, drop his first officer into a volcano, violate the Prime Directive to save said first officer, file a false report, get demoted, get almost instantly promoted, fire his Chief of Engineering, almost start a war with the Klingons, side with a war criminal, put his damaged ship on a collision course with Earth, and then commit certain suicide by sacrificing himself to save said ship just so his best friend in the whole world will confess his bro love for him.

It’s a bit exhausting and STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS gets a bit exhausting in the final act; this is a film that is both highly enjoyable and oddly frustrating, a film that encourages you to not think by giving you a headache whenever you do. INTO DARKNESS comes from the Abrams/Lindelof/Orci/Kurtzman stable and it feels more like a Lindelof film in that narrative logic is sacrificed at the altar of emotional logic. Such a process can work beautifully, but it is storytelling as the mechanism of grand illusion and Damon Lindelof is its Grand Master.

I’m pretty sure you could write the entire screenplay of INTO DARKNESS in an afternoon. This is a film with big CGI pieces, a bit of yelling, and very little story. One of the things I loved about Abrams first STAR TREK film (links to all my STAR TREK reviews can be found at the Star Trek Index page) was how it felt like everyone had a purpose for being there, that every character was an actual person in their own right. I found this to be an immense improvement over the old days, which I have chided for being The Adventures of Kirk, Spock, and the People Who Push Buttons. Unfortunately, we’re right back to the old days. INTO DARKNESS is a movie about the bromance between Kirk and Spock and the People Who Say 4 Things Apiece. Bones, Uhura, Chekov, and Sulu are here either to further the Kirk/Spock bro issues or handle the plot things that Kirk and Spock can’t do in that moment, like handling an engineering crisis or talking to the bad guys on the viewscreen phone or flirting with a new female officer. Only Scotty feels like an actual other character, which has nothing to do with the importance of Scotty and everything to do with the importance of being Simon Pegg.

Lindelof seems to care little for the narrative logic of his stories, and so INTO DARKNESS has little narrative logic. When it’s revealed that the bad guy isn’t actually a guy named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) but a guy named Khan, Spock’s “logical” decision isn’t to check the Enterprise’s data banks, but to call Original Spock (Leonard Nimoy) just to ask him if he’s ever heard of a guy named Khan.

Just so we’re all clear: the Enterprise doesn’t have the internet but it does have a direct line to Spock’s secret hideout.

Just so we’re all clear #2: to get information, Spock’s decision is to call a dude from ANOTHER TIMELINE.

Lindelof’s scripts (and whatever the actual breakdown of writing credit, this feels most like a Lindelof script) tend to favor the emotional logic (and yes, those terms are often at cross purposes). All of this madness and chaos and destruction is a result of Kirk wanting Spock to admit he is, and will always be, his bro. And let me be clear – I know it sounds like I’m dogging Lindelof, but I usually enjoy the movies created around his stories quite a bit. I like INTO DARKNESS, but it’s not a smart movie and it’s not a strong screenplay. Compare INTO DARKNESS against Joss Whedon’s Avengers, and Lindelof comes off like a guy in danger of failing Whedon’s film class. Whedon gave every Avenger an arc in the movie – not huge arcs, necessarily, but everyone had a beginning, middle, and end that was separate from the film’s beginning, middle, and end. Lindelof either isn’t smart enough to do that or doesn’t care to do that or is working for people who don’t want him to do that. Whatever the case, those individual arcs don’t make it into the script. How is Uhura or Scotty or Sulu or Chekov or Bones different at the end of the film than they were at the beginning? They have experiences and they perform admirably, but they are all secondary to Kirk and Spock’s evolving friendship.

James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) love each other deeply, but while Kirk is willing to commit to Spock, Spock keeps getting cold feet. He loves Kirk back, but he loves him so much that he can’t allow himself to love him or else he might hurt his wittle feewings. (This is the way I feel about Hostess Fruit Pies.) What we have in STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS is two immature dudes involved in a serious enough bromance that they prove they’re bro love to each other by adopting the other’s main attribute: the emotional bro (Kirk) is willing to think logically and the logical bro (Spock) is compelled to act emotionally: Kirk’s act of bro love is to not fire any of the Enterprise‘s 72 missiles in order to kill one dude, while Spock’s act of devotion is to try and kill that same dude all by himself. For Kirk and Spock to come to a mutually contented location of bro love, all we have to experience is lots and lots of mass destruction.

To the disappointment of slashers and shippers everywhere, Kirk and Spock’s relationship contains none of the homoerotic playfulness of Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law’s Sherlock and Watson. It’s just an actual, if emotionally disconnected friendship. In the service of telling this story, however, the women in their lives are pushed to the background. While Kirk is shown in bed with a pair of “cat women,” he shows nothing more than a passing interest in Dr. Carol Marcus (Alice Eve). I don’t know which is the bigger surprise – that Kirk barely looks at her when she strips down to her undies or that he completely misses the fact she bluffs her way onto the ship for the uber-important mission to kill John Harrison, who’s hiding out on a Klingon planet.

That’s right – on a hugely important mission, Carol Marcus sneaks aboard the Enterprise by calling herself Carol Wallace and hitching a ride in Kirk and Spock’s shuttle. Later, Spock realizes this but doesn’t say anything because in a Lindelof script, even the most logical of characters is a f*cking moron forced to adhere to the needs to the script.

Carol is a new character and the script gives her some things to do, and there’s no reason why it has to put her and Kirk into a flirtatious relationship, but she doesn’t do much of anything else, either. Her whole reason for being here is the “big” reveal that she’s the daughter of Starfleet Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller). She gets a nice scene with Bones (Karl Urban) but that’s what INTO DARKNESS does instead of giving people an actual arc – they get a scene so people leave the theater going, “Oh yes, Carol had a scene with Bones and the missle and Sulu got to sit in the captain’s chair and Chekov said funny words in engineering and Bones did a, ‘I’m a Doctor’ line and Uhura got emotional over Spock 17 times.” But little of it means anything.

It’s a grand illusion – there’s little story, little movement, little nuance. INTO DARKNESS is bright and loud and fun and the cast gives great performances in nothing roles. Everyone, in fact, is good at their job: the cast, the crew, the effects people, the director, and even the writers, but the sum of their talents is far inferior to their last effort with the TREK franchise. If the goal is to give you two hours of fun at the movie theater, they succeeded, but almost all of it (and definitely everything non-Kirk and Spock related) is just done to hit you in the eyeballs and then move on to the next thing: Kirk disobeys the Prime Directive! Kirk is demoted! Robocop! Pike is killed! Kirk is promoted! Mickey! Sherlock! Kirk is going to kill Harrison! Tribble! Harrison is Khan! Nimoy! Super Big Enterprise painted black! Spock yells, “Khan!” instead of Kirk! Kirk dies instead of Spock!

In fact, when Khan is Harrison, he’s psychologically interesting. When Khan is Khan, he just punches and kicks people. Blah.

If I think about this movie as a story, it’s a wreck, but if I just want escapism, it’s a pretty good time. But just pretty good. It’s not a great time because so many of the character moments that I loved about the first movie are completely missing here. The best parts of INTO DARKNESS are the small moments when Kirk and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) commiserating over Spock. I would understand (but not agree) with the decision to make this the Kirk and Spock Bromance Show if Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto had become major stars over the past few years but they haven’t. They’re no more famous than Pegg or Saldana, and for my money Karl Urban is the best acting/star combo on the Enterprise, but his great performance is wasted because it’s so small and so insignificant. I like Chris Pine and he does a great job playing the bullheaded Jim Kirk, but put Urban in that role and there’s way more nuance and complexity to the character.

Nuance and complexity … two things that aren’t welcome in INTO DARKNESS.

Contrary to what it may sound like, I had a good time. I even went and bought a $4 commemorative cup after the movie, even though I had already bought a $4 commemorative cup for the superior Iron Man 3. I watched it at a drive-in, I had good popcorn, and I was entertained, although the drive-in experience, the popcorn, and the film all deteriorated as they went. About 30 minutes into the film I was already trying to figure out when I could see it again, but by the time the Super Big Enterprise appeared and Spock calls Spock on the phone … I was ready for the movie to be over.

That’s the thing about illusions – they’re showy and they’re fun, but their entertainment value is brief and fleeting and I end up appreciating the skill in pulling it off more than the illusion itself.

______

When he’s not using a tribble a dead tribble as a lab rat, Mark Bousquet is doing some writing himself. He is the author of multiple novels and collections, including the recently released The Haunting of Kraken Moor, Gunfighter Gothic, Stuffed Animals for Hire, Dreamer’s Syndrome, Harpsichord and the Wormhole Witches, and Adventures of the Five. He has also published a review collection entitled Marvel Comics on Film, which covers every cinematic and TV movie based on a superhero from the House of Ideas. A complete listing of all his work can be found at his Amazon author page.

FIRST BLOOD: God Didn’t Make Rambo. I Made Him.

First Blood (1982) – Directed by Ted Kotcheff – Starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Brian Dennehy, David Caruso, Bill McKinney, Michael Talbot, Chris Mulkey, and Bruce Greenwood.

Every once in a while everyone is reminded there’s a reason you don’t let other people make up your mind for you.

I’ve never seen FIRST BLOOD or any of the Rambo movies, but somewhere along the line I made up my mind that because of all the clips and parodies I’d seen, I knew what the movie was about and therefore didn’t need to see it.

Idiot.

FIRST BLOOD is not Sylvester Stallone’s finest film (that would be Rockys 1 and 2) nor his most enjoyable (that would be Expendables), but it might very well be his finest performance. Stallone plays John Rambo, a Special Forces vet of the Vietnam War struggling to find his place in the post-Vietnam world. He walks into the wrong town, meets the wrong sheriff, and ends up starting a new “war” with an increasing amount of cops.

Stallone is brilliant, and so is the film.

FIRST BLOOD is an amazingly good movie, much more a character study than the balls-out action film I was expecting. There is violence here, but the manner in which it escalates is one of constant restraint and inevitability. Most impressively, the violence here is cloaked in sadness as Rambo is a veteran at a time in our nation’s history when veterans were shunned rather than celebrated. In today’s pro-military climate, the idea of a veteran being escorted out of town by the sheriff the moment he arrives in town feels wrong, but as a nation we continue to struggle with the care and treatment of returning veterans, especially those, like Rambo, who are suffering from mental rather than physical afflictions.

As the film opens, Rambo is visiting the home of Delmar, a fellow soldier in his special forces unit. He’s walking – or drifting, in the parlance of the late ’70s/early ’80s – and discovers from Delmar’s mom that her son has died from Agent Orange poisoning. It’s a wonderful scene, with Delmar’s mom not trusting of the stranger and Rambo politely showing her evidence that he and Delmar were, indeed, friends. At this stage in his career, before he largely traded in his acting chops for star power, Stallone displays a incredible vulnerability. He’s this massive puppy dog, looking for some kind – any kind – of port in the storm. Stallone’s voice has been slagged over the years, and parodied as an evidence of his (or his characters’) stupidity, but here it’s his face, open and empty, that makes him come across as almost simple.

It’s a wonderful approach to bringing Rambo to life. Stallone’s portrayal is almost Alien-like in how it unfurls over the 90 minutes, going from non-threat to the deadliest threat around.

In small town Washington, Rambo’s path crosses with that of Sheriff Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy), who firmly tells Rambo that his kind really isn’t wanted around here in a small town. Rambo asks if there’s a place he can get some food, but Teasle just wants him gone, so he drives him to the city limit, pointing him towards Portland. Rambo watches Teasle turn and leave, but then decides he’s going to go back to town, after all.

What’s brilliant about the way Dennehy and Stallone play their conversation in the car is how they feel each other out. Teasle is open but firm, and Rambo is cagey. There’s no pyrotechnics here. Just two men having a conversation that they’ve clearly had before with other drifters and cops. It’s a conversation neither want to have, but Teasle has reached his breaking point long ago and decided it’s best if drifters are ushered through town rather than allowing them in and opening up the idea that they might want to stay. For Rambo, this moment is the breaking point. When Teasle leaves him standing at the end of the bridge, it’s one rejection on top of one disappointment too many.

Before Teasle’s car is out of sight, Rambo walks back across the bridge towards town. Teasle isn’t playing and arrests Rambo for vagrancy.

The car ride and bridge sequence are designed to be read as sympathetic to Rambo. Here he is, a vet, walking to reconnect with war buddies, saddened by the loss of one of those friends, and now denied the chance to sit down and eat some food at a diner like a normal person. Teasle sees his own actions as keeping the town free from a potential problem, while Rambo sees Teasle’s actions as denying his chance at normalcy. Given that Rambo is now taken into town, booked, and then abused by some of Teasle’s cops who do not understand the mental damage his service has caused (which we start to understand through flashbacks), Rambo gains the audience’s sympathy, which is critical, given that he spends the rest of the film injurying and killing all sorts of cops as he lives normalcy behind for the comforts of the “jungle.”

All of the action scenes are great, and the film does an excellent job showing us how Rambo is so dangerous, but the action itself takes a backseat to the psychological study taking place. Rambo was a kid, trained by the army to kill, then sent back into society, so he’s been knocked back and forth from normal to jungle to normal settings. What the army did to him and what Vietnam did to him, however, isn’t so easily forgotten. The jungle, as it were, does not let him go, and so when Teasle denies Rambo’s chance at normalcy (eating at a diner) and then the cops that represent the normal world’s authority figures begin acting like his enemies in the jungle, Rambo decides to flee back into the jungle, running into the forest outside of town and living in the “jungle,” again, the only place where he now feels comfortable.

Where he now feels normal.

The jungle is a world Rambo understands, and so when he breaks, that’s where he runs.

Rambo’s old commanding officer, Colonel Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna) arrives on the scene to save Teasle’s cops from Rambo, which Teasle thinks is absurd. “Why did God make a man like Rambo?” he asks as the casualties start to pile up. “God didn’t make Rambo,” Trautman declares by way of introducing himself to Teasle. “I made him.”

Dennehy and Crenna (who is also fantastic – there’s a case to be made that FIRST BLOOD is one of the very finest action movies around) do the jurisdictional dance as well as anyone because the contention between Teasle and Trautman isn’t about jurisdiction, at all. It’s about methodology. Too often in these “locals vs. feds” confrontations, it’s just a p*ssing contest, but here it’s really about the best way to diffuse the situation. Teasle’s manhood has been questioned by Rambo (who injured almost all of Teasle’s deputies and put a knife to the sheriff’s throat, telling him to back off so no one else would get hurt), but where he wants to stop Rambo by sending waves of troops at him, Trautman wants to save his ex-soldier.

Crenna’s performance is powerfully reserved. You can see the pain in his face and hear it in his voice when discussing Rambo. Trautman built this kid into what normal society thinks of as a monster because that’s what the army needed, but he knows that the army hasn’t done right by Rambo since then. You can’t just “turn it off” and be normal again. What Rambo has seen, done, and become is too far removed from normal for that re-transition (or de-transition) to occur.

As much as Trautman is sympathetic towards Rambo, he’s not blind to what’s going on, accusing Rambo of wanting all of this to have happened. Trautman’s accusation recontextualizes that earlier scene on the bridge – now it’s not a scene about Rambo wanting normalcy, as it originally appeared, but wanting the excuse to head back into the jungle by forcing the normal world to reject him, yet again.

That’s good storytelling, kids.

Trautman is not trying to save Rambo from Teasle (or Teasle from Rambo) as much as he’s trying to save Rambo from himself. In the scene’s climactic sequence, Teasle comes at Rambo with violence and Rambo takes him down with violence. Trautman comes at Rambo with words, however, and the largely silent Rambo now gives voice to his circumstance: he’s scared, lost, unable to integrate back into society. The jungle, as horrible as it was, gave him an identity that he could be proud of having and great responsibilities, but back in society, he can’t even hold down a menial job.

It’s Stallone at his best. Rambo’s breakdown and surrender is a powerful display of vulnerability and probably should have ended with his death. By having Trautman walk Rambo outside and into custody, however, the film gives Rambo, Trautman, the army, and society to redeem themselves.

FIRST BLOOD isn’t just a great war movie, or great post-war movie. It’s a great film, and a powerful reminder that the events we read about in the papers and history books and watch on the TV were moments that were actually lived by real people, and that we can turn the channel or close the book, but the people who lived those moments cannot.

THE RIVER: First Thoughts on ABC’s Throw Everything at the Screen Horror Show

The River (2012) – Episodes 1-3: “Magus,” “Marbeley,” and “Los Ciegos” – Starring Bruce Greenwood, Joe Anderson, Leslie Hope, Eloise Mumford, Paul Blackthorne, Thomas Kretschmann, Daniel Zacapa, Shaun Parkes, and Paulina Gaitan.

Join us on Twitter: @atomicanxiety!

I tell my students never to use Wikipedia in an essay as a source. It’s just a bad idea to quote a source that can be changed by a smart-ass 15 year old who’s run out of albums to illegally download, and I would never do it. Ever. According to Wikipedia (at least for tonight), THE RIVER is “an American paranormal/adventure/horror/found-footage television series.”

It’s a paranormal … adventure … horror … found-footage television series.

That’s a lot of stuff, and they didn’t even add “fake reality show,” because it’s that, too.

That means THE RIVER is five distinct genres all jammed into one show. Obviously, it’s a complete mess.

Except it’s not.

Somehow, some way, THE RIVER has actually turned out to be a pretty decent show through it’s first three episodes. The set-up is that explorer/television star Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood) has gone missing. He used to sign off every episode of his TV show with the phrase, “There’s magic out there,” and at some point he began to take that literally, so he left his wife Tess (Leslie Hope), son Lincoln (Joe Anderson), and producer Clark (Paul Blackthorne) and went looking for magic in the Amazon, promptly getting himself lost. Lincoln grew up on the show aboard his father’s boat, the Magus, but has since had a parting of the way.s Smelling a hit show, Clark has been hired to corral Tess and Lincoln into making a new show about the search for the missing Emmet.

Tess is all gung-ho to go looking, but Lincoln doesn’t want to be bothered. His dad has just been declared legally dead and Lincoln is ready to move on with his life. But since neither Clark nor us would have a show without him, Lincoln agrees and they head to the Amazon, where they hook up with Lena (Eloise Mumford), the daughter of a camera man who’s also gone missing. Lena spent part of her childhood on the boat, too, and she continues to work for Emmet doing research. Lena and Lincoln clearly have some feelings for one another, and this slow reveal of everyone’s back story adds some depth and drama to THE RIVER beyond all the scary, spooky stuff.

Also joining them is Kurt (Thomas Kretschmann), a security operative, Emilio (Daniel Zacapa), the ship’s mechanic, his teenage daughter Jahel (Paulina Gaitan), who serves as the local expert on all things creepy, and A.J. (Shaun Parkes), a camera man. This motley crew goes looking for the Magus and actually finds it at the start of a river that doesn’t appear on any maps because it’s just that spooky.

Every episode is apparently going to see the Magus going further up river on their search for Emmet and having some scary adventure. In the first episode they find some kind of winged monster locked away in the ship’s panic room, in episode two they find some a whole lotta kids’ dolls hanging from some hidden trees, and in episode three they’ve got a native tribe robbing them of their vision and hunting them down.

The show manages to generate a decent amount of tension out of these scenarios, though at times it does get a bit melodramatic. Blame that on the format of the show, which is a paranormal … adventure … horror … found-footage … reality television series.

Thematically, the show mostly operates as the first three. It’s an adventure story about the supernatural where horror stuff happens to them. The look of the show, however, takes its cues from found footage and reality ghost hunting shows. THE RIVER is created by Oren Peli and Michael R. Perry, the creative team behind the found footage movie Paranormal Activity, and THE RIVER takes the look and feel of those films and transports it to a boat on the Amazon. The action off boat is filmed by handheld cameras and stand-alone, stationary cameras. On board ship, it’s the same mix, though with a heavier reliance on stationary cameras. There’s also some “God” cameras floating around, as a decent amount of the action is filmed as if this was a regular TV drama. The crew has also found Emmet’s secret stash of private recordings he’d made that track his descent into madness, but thankfully Emmet hasn’t labeled them so it’s hard for the crew to make heads or tails of them.

THE RIVER uses these various camera techniques to great effect, switching between all of these various types of shots to help build tension. It’s quite effective, and the selection of Bruce Greenwood to play the missing Emmet Cole is perfect. He’s the best actor on the show and the most likable person (at least so far) so you can understand why everyone is risking their lives to find him.

There’s plenty of tension between the characters, too, as most of the people on board either don’t like or don’t trust one another. There’s pockets of comfort, of course, which gives everyone a safe zone: Lincoln and Lena (both hoping to find their missing dads), Clark and A.J., Emilio and Jahel, and Kurt and himself. THE RIVER teases out its secrets of both a personal and supernatural nature and while it’s occasionally a ham-fisted attempt, and while the acting isn’t exactly the best TV has to offer, the writers and actors have found a way to make it work well enough to be a rather entertaining show.

THE RIVER has an 8-episode commitment from ABC for this abbreviated first season run, and I’ve seen enough in three episodes to stick around for the season. While not the best show on TV, THE RIVER is different enough to make it unique, and well-made enough to keep me coming back.