wonder if this movie will have a "salt the wound" one-liner

Dark Horizons – one of the better movie news sites – has over the past month been posting a Notable Films of 2010 feature, and recently Garth Franklin posted the last part (11 in total). This is perhaps the only 2010 movie release guide you’ll need. It’s well-written, is fact-heavy since the site isn’t concerned about celebrity gossip, your eyes aren’t getting murdered by ads, and the feature (and the site as well) has a clean format – I can’t stand movie news sites that have more images than words. Everybody can post movie stills and paste from a press release. Franklin saves us from bad copy and presents us with his analysis.

Dark Horizons’ The Notable Films of 2010

Let me first get my complaints out of the way because there are so few. THIS POST IS ALL SPOILERS:

-The hammerhead creature: when Jake encounters this rhino, there is an angled profile shot of it stomping and growling. It looks out of place because it looks like something you’d see in a museum-produced documentary.

-20 mil a kilo: Selfridge explaining to Grace the reason they are on Pandora. It sounds like an info dump for us made more apparent because she’d already know the reason for the party.

-Last Shadow: Neytiri tells Jake that they nickname the greater banshee Last Shadow, and he follows up with “cuz it’s the last shadow you’ll ever see.” Seems like an unnecessary line since we already know this particular kind of banshee is king predator of the sky.

-Rally Call: wasn’t feeling Jake or Quaritch’s call to arms.

Now let’s start the love:

+Playful flying: my favorite scene is the sequence following Jake bonding with his banshee, particularly when him and Neytiri are diving full speed along the mountainside.

+Badass: the scene where Quaritch is escaping from the exploding Dragon, and when it crashes behind him when he lands. In the hands of a lesser director, the display of badassery would be Quaritch walking away tall from the explosion. Instead we get a cut to a close up of a cut up Quaritch, mad as fuck at Jake.

+Hometree collapse: very Titanic.

+The cut from the cremation of Jake’s brother to the shuttle diving through the clouds of Pandora.

+Concussive forces: the missiles that fire from the Scorpions, I love how the people and environment react. Bad special effects is when the only reaction from the actor is simply turning away. Explosions are not just fire. There is a violent rush of air. Not only do the Navi get thrown, debris gets blown outward also.

+The first time Jake runs in his Avatar. Awesome.

+The first time seeing Grace in her Avatar. Sexy.

+Neytiri has her hair loose in the mating scene. Awesome sexy.

+You’re like a child: and then those seedlings float towards Jake, who flicks one away. Neytiri grabs his hand. Jake then uses his free hand to smack another away. And later as he follows her, he smacks those bioluminescent petals.

+When Jake falls off the horse for the first time, his expression when Tsutey gallops in.

+When Wes Studi (forget his char’s name) has Jake and Grace bound. The scene ends with Jake closing his eyes, the Navi hollering because they are going to attack the sky people and show them how much damage a Navi war party can deal. And then it cuts to a squadron of Scorpions and Samsons led by the Dragon.

+Jake-Grace relationship: I like how she keeps having to force him to eat because all he wants to do is run around in his avatar. whoo whee hee.

+AMP design: the last movie I saw that got this concept right was Aliens.

+Hold your breath: during the final fight, Jake wakes up in the pod because the research base has a hull breach. He struggles to hold his breath. He finally closes his eyes, but before the camera cuts to Jake’s avatar, there is a quick cut to the tunnel of light that indicates transfer.

+The fact this movie doesn’t have a moment where the damsel is in distress. Sure you could say Jake saved Neytiri when the thanator is killed, but the moment is never drawn out long enough for it to matter. Actually, Jake is probably the one who could be labeled the damsel since Neytiri saves him more than he saves her.

+Zoe Saldana is fucking fantastic. Her expressions: when she meets up with Jake when he’s about to bond with a banshee; her wide-eyed relief after she and Jake escape from the Last Shadow; her mixture of anger and defeat when she decides to take on the chorus line of soldiers and AMPs; her petulant growl when her mother orders her to teach Jake the ways of her people.

ooh, just thought of a complaint: where’s Bill Paxton?

Twelve years I’ve been waiting for the next James Cameron movie. Two years I’ve been waiting for his vision of a scifi epic adventure in a time where, hell, I can’t name you the a recent example of its kind. Did Avatar live up to the hype? Is the technology behind the movie a game changer?

It sure is. And man do I fucking love this movie.

I’ve probably lost some of you already – sometimes a man with an erection for a director and his/her films is just not attractive. I’m passionate for only a few things, and when it comes to James Cameron movies, I don’t fuck around. So let me stroke one out for you because there are now four of his movies in my top five.

…Star Wars! There’s that scifi epic adventure example I was hunting for. Not really fair to compare Avatar and the original trilogy (because of their eras, not because geek culture says I should guard the pedestal), but the prequel trilogy is a recent example – and also one that went big for the computer-generated at the expense of everything else.

Both Avatar and the Star Wars prequels have excellent computer generated effects. Given enough time and money, the prequels could look as great as Avatar’s. What separates the two is the blending of what’s real and what’s post production. Computer effects that involve people, for the most part, looks awkward in the prequels; look at Episode 3’s opening space battle and then watch Count Dooku somersault off the balcony to fight the Jedi. The photorealism in Avatar is fantastic, but if people and objects don’t move like they should, then the whole presentation looks dooku.

And movement is where Avatar dances. What Avatar, what The Volume, have given us is a new kind of prosthetic – one that can be anything, one that imposes nothing on the actors so that they can do what they excel at without worrying about dress. We believe in Pandora because even though it’s a world created by designers on their machines, beneath the Navi are actors, their performances captured.

I’ve ranted about the motion-emotion capture in previous posts, and what we saw in the trailer aren’t even the highlights. Despite Cameron’s need to push technology (and not just on the computer side, because remember, for Aliens Stan Winston’s company built the fourteen foot tall Alien Queen; and even though Digital Domain and ILM generated the effects, an actual full-scale Titanic was built albeit a functioning interior) he knows movies are not just about extravagant sets and explosions, that if you don’t give the audience a believable story and characters, then what’s the point? Every other director says character drives their movies, and most of the time we either don’t care for the performances or the story or both. With Avatar, performances are even more important because while the actor’s movements and expressions have been captured, for the most part they look nothing like their character. For us to care about them we need something familiar to hold on to. We see movies to be entertained; to see people act.

And nothing looks like Avatar because no other movie has had The Volume to work with; in short, The Volume allows Cameron to view a rough rendered world the actors perform in, meaning he has complete freedom to adjust shots instead of unnaturally shifting actors or effects in post. Another way of looking at The Volume – think what Peter Jackson did with Gollum, but on a larger scale. Nothing looks like Avatar because the shots Cameron sets up doesn’t have to conform to what will be added later; a scene’s environment is already created on the computer, so while in production he already knows what the actors will look in relation to what is actually not there on the set. Everything looks uniform. If there is one thing I desperately want to get across, this is it. Know the reasons for Avatar looking the way it does and the reasons for Cameron pushing this technology.

Cameron has always been a clean director in terms of speed and camera angle. His action tends to run at normal speed, and the rare slow motion is used to heighten tension or a mood instead of allowing us a frame-by-frame as though the projectionist was working the machine like Quicktime. Look at how he uses slow motion in T2, when both Terminators have found John at the Galleria; look at how nothing slows down in the Operations scene in Aliens. As for the camera, Cameron doesn’t go for the artsy or gimmicky angles, which pleases me to no end, and he also doesn’t go documentary – for the most part I’m not a fan of this style because I like to see action framed clean and clear.

Put aside the technical. Avatar is just a goddamn fun movie.

So what if the story is space Dances With Wolves. So what if it has action movie tropes, particularly the kind where a gunpowder civilization abuses the tree-hut warrior culture. Sure it’s reductive to say all action movies are the good guys versus the bad. Broad strokes does not equal blah story. What makes Avatar exciting is the way it’s executed; the way it looks; the way the actors emote despite their appearance. The writing might not be as sharp as The Dark Knight’s, but Avatar doesn’t fall apart in the third act because of a convoluted plot and characters whose motivations flip flop in the absence of a rationale collision. Telling is more important than story.

Cameron described Avatar as a scifi fantasy adventure. And what a fun ride it is. There are no complicated setups or mythologies you have to know beforehand. Even though this is a big budget studio movie, it doesn’t have to please all demographics to make its money back; there are no kids to save-the-day; there are no funny sidekicks to entertain morons. Characters live in the moment, are not troubled by their past or at least there are no dedicated scenes a monologue for sympathy.

So for now let’s stop this essay, and in the next post I’ll talk as though we’re dining after having watched the movie.

Thank you, James Cameron and the cast and crew of Avatar.

sometimes you're unskippable

Over at the Guardian, Cory Doctorow wrote an article about how the movie and TV industry believe streaming is the new and safe way to give us content; safe because there is the transaction between provider and custom, and zero sharing.

It’s this last part that has the technologically naive excited. They assume that because a downloading client can be designed in such a way that it doesn’t save the file, no “copy” is being made. They assume that this is the technical equivalent of ‘showing’ someone a movie instead of “giving them a copy” of it.

Doctorow continues by saying streaming will not decrease downloading, or that when people listen to something on the radio, they will most likely go out and purchase for their personal collection.

I recently Netflix-streamed The Office, a series for some reason I never bothered to torrent – I can’t even remember the last time I watched network TV on a TV. After watching its fifth season and consuming the first half of the fourth, I ordered the DVDs on Amazon – partly because they were a Black Friday item, mostly because I wanted a physical copy. Sure streaming is insta-convenient, but it’s not necessarily the best quality.

And with all DVDs I buy, I ripped the fuck out of The Office so that I can toss the discs aside and never touch them again.

Sure I can torrent, but among other things, this leaves me in the hands of the file’s creator/uploader. My compression standards might be different than theirs; maybe I don’t want their area’s network station to vomit its logo or whatever seasonal announcement after every commercial break. All I ask for is a clean viewing, and ripping the files from the dvd myself is satisfaction. I dictate the resolution; whether or not I want an episode’s commentary as a separate audio track. And more importantly, ripping is convenience.

Name me the last dvd you saw that, after loading the disc, you were taken straight to the dvd’s main menu. Name me a time when you sat and watched those “Also Available on DVD” previews.

Maybe I’m an idiot, but sometimes I just want to pop in a DVD and watch a movie without having to go through a dozen goddamn button presses.

Ripping puts all the files on my hdd, where I can access whatever movie or TV show without the junk. The only “loading time” is the time it takes my computer to open the file. Double-clicking – goes straight to the movie.

So choke on that, studios. I ripped your DVDs so that I never have to be inundated with your bullshit previews and unskippable warnings. I got you, you fucks.

…

Then again, I did buy the DVDs, so they already have my money. A winner is them.

Ever since the theatrical trailer I’ve said I’m on an Avatar blackout. I’ve snuck in a few videos here and there; I’m incredibly picky, limiting myself to the occasional TV spot and not touching any character/creature/vehicle profiles or even listening to the James Horner score cuz I read somewhere that the music titles are spoiler-tastic. Jake’s Avatar Kills Quaritch By Punching Him in the Chest (Piano version).

Yet there is one video I watched that further reinforces my erection for all things James Cameron. It’s a video I watched carefully – which pretty much means that I skipped the first few minutes when the actors started talking (not that they automatically have nothing interesting to say, I’m just wary they might give away story/character bits I’d rather see for myself) and then praying to Christ I don’t see anything that spoils. It talks about the technology behind the movie; the Volume where the actors perform and the director chooses his shots from wherever angles. And even though Cameron, as usual, praises the technology he had to create to make the film, he always says something that proves why he is more than just a technical director.

“What we were most worried about was this [Cameron frames his face from the eyes to the mouth] because this is where movies live and breathe, in the tight close-up.”

Performances are usually what excite me about a movie, but I never realized how much I’m enamored with close-ups. Quickly going through my favorite movie scenes/shots, the majority are close-ups; Hicks shining the light across the crawl space; Ripley tilting her head and having enough when she meets the Queen; Eli’s final shot in Let The Right One In; Murray and Johansson hugging at the end of Lost in Translation; the T-1000 reshaping its head after the Pescadero elevator doors close.

Only 17 more days till opening day.

I’m having trouble embedding, so here’s the link.

Let The Right One In (2008)
Kare Hedebrant
Lina Leandersson
written by John Ajvide Lindqvist
directed by Tomas Alfredson

A story about a twelve year old boy who becomes friends with a same-aged girl, who is also a vampire. I’ve probably lost some of you already. This isn’t Romeo and Juliet with fangs. There is no scare factor or a light-heartedness of the familiar and currently overused monster theme. Instead of shock value the movie goes for a more subtle frightening idea of a bullied twelve year old boy living in a violent world where the adults are helpless, perhaps even unwilling. When the boy tells the girl how some of his classmates cut his cheek, she tells him to “hit harder than you dare, and they’ll stop.”

Of course, brutal is easy. It’s much more interesting to see believable intimacy that precedes the brutality. If you don’t care for the characters and the actors’ performances then nothing really matters and the movie fails.

If you saw the movie before its home release, then you probably know that Magnet fucked up the DVD and Blu-ray versions by not using the theatrical subtitles and instead going with an inferior translation.  A stellar look, that contains screenshot comparisons, can be found at Icons of Fright.

So up until last week I’ve been waiting for a rerelease, and while it has been out, the only way to distinguish the new from the old is the “theatrical subtitles” on the back.  Unwilling to hunt this down in stores – since Magnet doesn’t have an exchange program for people they assfucked with the inferior subtitles – I ordered the UK’s blu-ray version which has the theatrical subs and is region-free.  If you need to own a version, the UK is the way to go – though I’m not sure if the UK DVD is region-free.

And now I’m going to babble so SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE REST OF THIS POST.

-the scene that follows Eli bleeding out.  Oskar says “who are you”, and she replies with a camera cut to her saying “I’m like you”, her face still all bloody and holy shit that’s goddamn creepy.

-or that scene where Oskar’s father’s friend comes over.  Jesus, the hell was that scene about?  Cuz that dude looked all sorts of wrong.

-or that scene where Eli rings the doorbell.  She’s all cleaned up and then Oskar – at this point overly self-confident – starts taunting her.  The expression on her face when he taps on the imaginary wall; her looking down at his finger and then up at his eyes.  Kills me every time.

”But there’s three of them.”
“Then hit back harder.”

-or the scene where Eli is twisting the Rubik’s cube.  You can hear her hissing and mumbling to herself.  Even when Oskar says bye, she’s still preoccupied with the puzzle.

-or that same scene, Oskar says “you smell funny”; her expression – she arches her brow and gives a slight smile before going back to the puzzle.

-one day soon I’m gonna tell the moon about the crying game

-or how about that tracking shot when Conny and the other bullies enter the swimming pool area

-or that shot of Eli after pulling Oskar from underwater.  We only see her eyes and part of her nose, but it’s a perfect shot because the last time we saw her, the lower half of her face was covered in blood.  If we saw her entire face – and most likely bloody face – in the swimming pool scene, it would’ve been repetitive.  Besides, the image of a relatively clean face as her final shot ends on an intimate note as opposed to ending hers with a bloodied image. Sure the pool scene closes with the massacre, but the close-up shot of the girl’s eyes and smile is much more powerful than the gore. It’s the person responsible for the horror and her reason for the violence that turns the movie into something intimate instead of a movie going for shock value.

-or the deliberate shot of Martin’s sneakers (the kid who tricks Oskar into coming back to the school).  What’s so special about those sneakers?  And then later in the scene we see those same sneaks kicking in the pool as Eli murders the heck out of him.

-or how about that scene…oh hell, at this point I might as well start from the beginning.  Ok, so how about that scene right after the opening credits where….

There are a couple shots where it’s clear that the actress on the screen is not Lina Leandersson (her slurping up Oskar’s blood, her sitting on the tree, “be me for a little while”).  In the book, there is a bit where Oskar says something like “and for a second she looked like an older girl.”

What a fantastic movie.

The more I hear, the more I read about people dismissing Avatar’s CG and expressing disappointment in the Navi – how they look like cartoons – makes me wonder if people know what makes a special effect stellar.

The designs of the Navi are subjective, so whatever on that point; although I do have strong, positive opinions about their designs, but at the moment, they’re not germane to my argument.

But their special effects – c’mon. If people want them to be a physical presence in front of the camera, then they’re most likely going to get stuff that looks like Tim Curry in Legend or everything larger than a midget but smaller than a house in the Hellboy movies. Curry and Perlman had less latex on their faces for expressions – which is always the mark of excellent make-up effects, because it’s easier to showcase empathy – but the rest of their appearance, they looked like giant action figures.

The Navi don’t suffer from a uniform plastic sheen. Look at the shot in the teaser where Jake wiggles his toes. His skin has pigmentation. It has a porous quality, that if you were to place a flashlight flush against their fingers, some light would reflect and some light would pass through as physics orders.

Or how about the shot where Neytiri darts her eyes at those luminescent critters that flutter around Jake? Facial expressions, people.

And in a less seen scene – Avatar Day footage – Jake wrestles with a banshee so they can bond, and shuffling along the sidelines is Neytiri. The way she flexes and squats, but just as important, how her facial muscles twist that’s not out of alignment with the rest of her body maneuvers – you’re not gonna see that kind of lithe stretching if the actor is buried under latex and prosthetics. And even though everything you see onscreen is computer-generated – inhuman flesh and blood – the skeleton of the Navi, of Jake and Neytiri, is all human. Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana; motion and emotion captured.

Probably the main reason for the underwhelming response to the Avatar teaser is the hype; that special effects anything but perfection are a failure. I think we’re at the point where texture detail is now only limited by the artists’ proficiencies. That isn’t going to make a difference if the lighting on the set doesn’t match with what will be digitally inserted later, or vice versa. This is the other important aspect of good special effects: lighting.

Let’s take for example the Pescadero escape scene in T2: when the T-1000 passes through the bars; when the T-1000 re-molds its head after taking a shotgun blast pointblank. Even after nearly two decades those effects still look amazing partly – or mainly – because of the lighting. The cold silver and blue lighting of the hospital matches the cool silver and blue on the T-1000.

And another reason why those frames are a stellar example of CG: while his split head melds back into a whole, Robert Patrick’s eyes move.

Facial expressions, people.

Spoilers ahead…

Terminator Salvation enjoys showing off its eye candy, and this is why the movie is needlessly fat. This is apparent from the start. The opening title sequence with its colossal block letters sliding across the background is a variation of the first movie’s sequence. Yet whereas its end is the title reveal, Salvation indulges in two grand openings – one in the same size and font as the credits and the other a pull-back of the block letters. Why do something twice when once will do?

Is this being picky? Of course. But sloppy is sloppy, and the movie never stops to clean itself up.

Let’s start with a sampling of inconsistencies before getting to the meat of the review. Little girl Star – or as I’m sure what the writers called her in the first draft, Early Warning Detection System – is able to hear or feel the vibrations of Machines. When the camera cuts to her stunned expression, get ready for some action. She is able to hear that spy Machine which is the size of a frisbee, but absolutely nobody can hear the Harvester stomp up to the gas station until it punches through the roof?

Or what about the lazy editing? The scene where John gets on the radio to convince the Resistance to delay bombing Skynet; it steadily gains momentum and then all of a sudden cuts off as quickly as John ends transmission. And the subsequent scene of Christian Bale delivering THE line that defines the Terminator franchise feels like a rehearsal take. AND the following scene begins with another nod to a previous Terminator movie. This is an excessive and poorly paced sequence. It feels like there were either extended or extra scenes removed for the theatrical release, and I’m not sure if I care enough to rent the DVD to find out because even if a director’s cut puts back the scenes, they won’t save the movie.

So why does this movie fail to entertain? Some of the credit goes to the character of Blair, played by Moon Bloodgood. She is a cliche: the survivalist that has to be rescued from horny savages, the heroine who falls for her rescuer – in a scene where she intimately embraces him so that they can keep warm through shared body heat. Good lord.

The relationship she forms with Marcus Wright is the passionate part of the movie – Connor is already married to Kate, who has about as much purpose as the movie’s title appearing twice, and Connor doesn’t meet Reese until the end. Perhaps Blair would have served better as the character who simply detours Marcus to the Resistance base instead of being the love interest. Blair is an artificial sweetener.

Salvation could have been a popcorn flick (like Die Hard or Taken) yet it takes itself seriously, making its characters announce to the audience the theme through idiotic dialogue and laughable scenes.

And for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why Skynet had to use Reese as bait. To kill John Connor? But if Reese dies, doesn’t that prevent John from sending him back? Wouldn’t killing Reese kill John? And how exactly would John die? Slumps to the floor? Fades away? What happens to Kate and her baby? Do they cease to exist also?

And this here is my problem with the Terminator franchise. The story falls apart when you start to show and analyze what happens during Judgment Day. And at the same time this is the beauty of Cameron’s Terminators, especially the second one. Yes, the movie is scifi action-adventure, but the genre is only the setting for a story about the value of human life. And even with the scifi and time travel elements, Cameron focused on one aspect so that he could tell the most interesting story. Not a story about a post-apocalyptic or temporal war but a story about how a boy has to become a great military leader and how he teaches his Machine to be human. “If a Terminator can learn the value of a human life, maybe we can too.”

T2 isn’t a great movie just because of its message and how it’s framed. Cameron’s sequel is a fantastic action movie because it is lean, because every bullet, explosion, and collision has a purpose. There is no excess, there are no twists. Look at the structure of T2. The first half hour sets up the major characters and their agendas: the T-800 has to find and protect John; the T-1000 has to find and kill John; John wants to rescue his mother; and Sarah wants to prevent Judgment Day. We get all this upfront so that the rest of the movie can focus on the trio of good guys and deliver a third act composed entirely of one action scene. Since there are no mysteries – like Marcus Wright – there doesn’t need to be coy and convoluted setups that as a consequence will make the audience analyze the film and find details to tear apart.

Not only is the action in T2 clearly defined, they are also framed in a specific way. Again, look at the structure of T2, only this time focus on the choreography of the action. How many melee scenes are there between human and Machine? Two – versus the bikers, versus the Pescadero employees. But more importantly, none were between the major cast of characters, and the reason is that in such an exchange, the Machine will always win. Arnold breaks the biker’s hand without so much as twitching. Arnold breaks open doors by pushing them. Young John is able to call his foster parents because Arnold uses his hand to smash quarters out of the pay phone. So why does the T-800 in Salvation have such a difficult time killing John? Why does it resort to tossing him around? Why doesn’t it simply grab John and cave his face in? Going hand-to-hand against a Machine is the equivalent of letting go of the dryer while taking a bath. James Cameron knows this, and it’s why he never wrote a situation where the human will out-punch a Machine (look at what happened to Reese at the end of the first Terminator).

And putting aside logic, the Terminator throwing John around the factory is just not exciting. Neither is the way he gets the scar on his face.

There is a reason Sam Worthington shares space with Bale above the title. The story of Salvation is more his than Bale’s, and Worthington is the best part of the movie. His performance is strong; he is charismatic, able to convey the right amount of emotion through dialogue and facial expressions. He can be a powerful presence (scene where he is chained up and talking to Bale), and he can display desperation – when Bale growls “what are you,” Worthington responds with a convincing helplessness: “I don’t know.”

I didn’t have a problem with Marcus as the main character, but I felt Connor’s story was underwhelming. I had been under the impression (as in I vaguely remember reading this in an interview) that John’s purpose in this movie is to prove that he has the knowledge and skills to lead the Resistance. And I guess to a point they do get into this territory, but the way it’s executed with the cliched military leader (General Ashdown played by Michael Ironside) unwilling to listen to the advice of his officer, it’s more like the writers got us here by sleepwalking.

And while I never cared for Kate’s character in Terminator 3, there was an opportunity in Salvation for her to be the welcome constant in John’s life, for her to be his last thought at the end of the day.

But instead the intimacy is placed between Marcus and Blair. Because as a plot device to help him escape the Resistance base? Yes, unfortunately. And because at the end of the movie Marcus finds redemption, and the best way to milk the scene is to have Marcus and Blair stare lovingly into each others eyes and cry tragedy while the rest of the cast watch so they too can have their eye-fucking moment with the hero. It’s so goddamn cheesy. Not only that, the message of that scene is a giant curd; whereas in T2 “the Tin Man gets his heart,” Salvation’s gives up his to save John Connor.

_
*the quotations in the last line is James Cameron’s, from the book Four Screenplays (Syd Field, 1994). the full quote: “Essentially you’ve got a character associated with being the quintessential killing machine; that is his purpose in life. Devoid of any emotion, remorse, or any kind of human social code, he suddenly finds himself in the strangest dilemma of his career. He can’t kill anybody, and he doesn’t even know why. He’s got to figure it out. He’s got to, because he’s half human. And he figures it out at the end. The Tin Man gets his heart.”

The Star Trek reboot opened on Friday. Did I like it? Do you care?

Spoilers ahead…

As a JJ Abrams movie, Star Trek is eyeball sound effects entertaining. As a movie written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, it’s an absolute groan-fest.

The movie starts out with phasers on stunning. The USS Kelvin feels like a submarine in space; the bridge is tight quarters, the crew look busy, terrified when under attack yet still in control at their consoles. We get a sampling of the reboot’s visual and sound effects when Nero’s ship multi-torpedoes the Kelvin to surrender. When the computer announces Captain Robau has been terminated, we are then given a full serving of torpedoes and phasers, which are more spit out than surgical like Wrath of Khan or The Undiscovered Country’s.

And then for the rest of the movie the pie gets thrown in our face.

Star Trek has way too many comedy moments that serve no purpose other than to make you chuckle or clap howl – just like Orci and Kurtzman’s Transformers. Kirk running around the Enterprise hands swollen the size of pillows and then tongue swelling up – unnecessary, not at all funny. Other gags weaken the movie: Anton Yelchin’s accent and his inability to authorize his command codes because of said accent; all of Simon Pegg’s scenes, especially the scene where he gets transported in the water pipe, such a goddamn waste of time.

The worst scene in the entire movie is young Kirk driving the car off the cliff. When I saw the first trailer I thought – and hoped – it was just a scene filmed for the trailer, but as soon as I saw that car accelerate down the road, I wanted to toss my popcorn at the screen. I won’t go as far as saying this scene makes no fucking sense whatsoever – because it does set up the symmetry with young Spock and how he spent his childhood. Putting aside the execution of the scene, there is no need for the kid to scream out his full name because the previous scene already announced his name – yes, only as Jim and only as a newborn, but the idea is still the same when he’s a kid. It’s like they couldn’t make up their minds on which introduction of the iconic character was better so they simply used both.

The introduction of Hikaru Sulu – played on John Cho – is another comedic moment, but whereas the ones mentioned above are over-the-top and eye-rolling, this scene succeeds in every way possible. As the rest of the fleet warps to Vulcan, Sulu throttles but the starship crackles out an unwillingness to engage. After reassuring Captain Pike that he is the helmsman and Spock asking if he disengaged the magnetic field (or something to that effect), Cho delivers a subtle expression of disbelief for such an oversight on his part. And that’s the thing; for us the oversight isn’t obvious but Quinto’s inflection and Cho’s response tells us it is something he should have caught. Not only is the reaction chuckle-worthy it also serves a purpose because later on the Enterprise warps into the debris field comprised of the fleet that had warped on ahead.

Like Cho, solid performances come from Chris Pine and Zoe Saldana. Eric Bana – always terrific.

The one performance that is perfection: Karl Urban. Not only does he have the best lines (“space is a disease wrapped in darkness and silence”), he is never quirky, and the mannerisms he takes from the original McCoy (played by Deforest Kelley) never feel forced like a fanboy service; when he first meets Kirk and explains the consequences of a compromised hull plate, he projects the rhythms of Kelley right down tot he eye bulge. And when Urban has to deliver the famous line “are you out of your Vulcan mind?” he says it with a realistic urgency as opposed to a wink nod to the audience.

Unfortunately, like other Star Trek movies, the Enterprise does little in the way of showing off its armaments; and with this aside, I’d say this Enterprise has the least screen time. There are very few flyby or impulse-speed shots of the starship which is a shame since even though it’s not as sexy as the Undiscovered Country Enterprise, it is still a slick design.

Despite my many complaints, Star Trek is entertaining and worth repeat viewings because it begins and ends strong. The ending, specifically the moment Nero’s mining ship is caught in the Red Matter, is a showcase for the Enterprise to fire everything. But more importantly, the strength of the ending is what doesn’t get elaborated through melodramatic edits and effects. After all, if the person who killed your father was dying, would you sit back and watch without inflicting your own damage?

Aliens is a great sequel. It takes the core elements of the first and expands it without trivializing it. You have action scenes where every explosion has a purpose, and you have characters with trajectories – at that level the movie is the relationship between a mother and a child. Ripley starts by going to LV-426 to make sure the aliens are destroyed; she has no intention of killing them herself because her fear overshadows her hate and because she isn’t trained like the colonial marines. She finds a survivor, and from this point on, Newt is her mission. Yes, killing the aliens is still a part of it, but again, she is still relying on the marines. The moment Gorman stutters is the moment Ripley steps up to become one of the greatest action heroes in movie history, the mother of all mothers willing to run into the worst situation imaginable to rescue a child.

And Ripley’s head-tilt when that egg opens, it’s an attitude more badass than the rage that follows. Explosions can be cool, but a well-placed well-expressed character action, that’s what blows me away.

Terminator 2 is the perfect sequel.

Role reversal is the weapon of choice. Sarah Connor becomes protector to John like Kyle Reese was to her, and when she goes after Miles Dyson, she becomes for a moment the killer who “can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with.”

The villain of the first becomes the hero in the second. The Terminator protects John, who teaches it to act more human, and the unforeseen result is it becomes his father-figure.

The premise is outlandish, but the characters’ purposes and emotions respectfully bring it down to our level of understanding and appreciation.

Why can’t video game sequels do the same?

I marathon-watched season one of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. From the start TV John is uncomfortable and more importantly not confident about his future role – one scene in the pilot has him pleading to his mother that he can’t keep this up (“this” being running), that “I don’t believe what people think I am, some messiah.” His introductory scene has him angry at Sarah because they have to relocate again. John gives her more attitude when they start fresh in a hick town, where he further complains about not having “the right clothes” and having to deal with school computers “from the 50′s,” which Sarah berates him for because he might get caught hacking. His response: “jeez, I know the rules, they are like written on the inside of my eyeballs.”

Let’s look at Movie John. We know Sarah was aggressive with him. In the parking lot scene, John tells his Terminator that she kept reminding him that he is going to be “this great military leader;” also, that they spent a lot of time in “Nicaragua and places like that” with “crazy ex-Green Beret” guys. The assumption is that he was scared and scarred, but later on in the scene where he is in the underground weapons depot, he says “I grew up in places like this so I figured this is how people lived,” which he conveys with excitement. Back to the parking lot, John continues his monologue: his mother being busted and him being told “your mother is a psycho, kid, didn’t you know” which he then confides “it’s like everything I was brought up to believe was bullshit. I hated her for that!”

There is no reason for TV John to be whiny and snappy to his mother since he no longer has any reason to doubt her. He shouldn’t feel uncomfortable because he grew up in the gunrunner’s world – and of course, T2 wasn’t a corset period piece. An argument can be made that just because he was around these adrenaline-fuled situations doesn’t mean he accepted them while wearing sunglasses at night. Thing is, in the movie there hardly any scenes where he is helpless in the fetal position; he never has anyone step in front of him to do something he could do himself – again, Sarah raising him to be a great military leader. Though there are things he figures out for himself:

“You can’t just go around killing people!”
“Why?”
“You can’t, ok.”
“Why?”
“Because you just can’t.”

And then:

“This is tactically dangerous. It might anticipate this move.”
“I don’t care, we got to stop her.”
“Killing Dyson might actually prevent the war.”
“I don’t care! Haven’t you learned anything yet, haven’t you figured out why you can’t kill people?”

John Connor is not perfect. He knows from watching his mother what consequences a hothead brings and at the same time he is willing to compromise his cool if his mother is in danger.

A hero with flaws is not enough. Some can argue that after T2, John can take comfort in trying to live a normal life which in turn would give him reasons to be unsure of his messiahness.

But think about it: John can never have a normal life. Yes, torching Cyberdyne could have prevented the war, but nobody knows that. All people know is they are wanted criminals. The Connors won’t know if they were successful until Aug. 29, 1997 so if he is a leader he should fully accept that he is on-call until that date, and even if the date comes and goes without explosions, he should be prepared for the life on the run.

This is his sacrifice.

Sequels for video games haven’t affected me like T2 has. Doesn’t help they are more about refinement of the original’s gameplay instead of continuation of the story. Characterization is important to me, and that is my failing when it comes to gaming. I don’t cross my arms and huff when a game tries to be nothing more than its gameplay, but I will be critical of games that tout its story. The Zelda games never intended to tell anything grander than a simple tale about a boy trying to save the world. Gears of War 2, though, injected itself with a variety of steroids, and while the characters are still insanely thick, their actions and emotions are still limp dick.

My ideal would be to play a game that had T2 values and sensibilities. Thing is, what’s the point of a story where the gameplay contradicts or belittles it? What’s the point in having your hero believe in the value of human life if your hero goes around killing people to advance to the next part of the map?

Does this mean you can’t create a game with this message? Of course not. You just have to be wary of player actions poking holes into your story. Nor am I saying this particular theme is the pedestal. There are other heights games should look to besides the villain crossing the horizontal line to save the world their way. The relationship between two best friends, the relationship between parent and child. The willingness to sacrifice tangible parts for intangible gains. The need to prove a point even if it means you become a pariah.

Because who knows. If games start toying around with mature ideas and infatuations, maybe we can create new gameplay ideas.