TV And Films

The shows and movies I like (or don’t).

Spockstradamus

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So the Star Trek universe is now in an alternative timeline. Everything that we ‘know’ of Trek’s future history (save, of all things, the Enterprise series) has been wiped out, and our beloved crew (and all the writers tasked with coming up with new and interesting things to do) has a blank slate to work with. However, it’s still a pretty big universe, and there’s a lot of stuff out there that won’t have been affected by the timeline split. While I’d rather see new adventures from here on out, if writers ever need some inspiration, there’s a fair amount of stuff that we already know is going to be a problem down the line.

So, with a little digging around on Memory Alpha, I present a (very incomplete) list of things that Spock Prime could warn the Federation about, as they should still exist to pose future threats to the Federation. Obviously, one could just list every bad guy and alien encounter seen in all the series and films, but I just wanted to grab a few of the ‘biggies’ (that is, major potential death toll events) that came to mind.

Feel free to toss out more that might be interesting, this is just a few minutes of pondering.

  • 2267: Discovery of the S.S. Botany Bay, carrying Khan and his crew of supermen. Probably best to either just torpedo the ship, or aim it at a planet not likely to explode and dump Khan and crew off there as if they’d arrived normally.
  • 2267: The planet killer starts gobbling up Federation worlds.
  • 2268: Yonada is on a collision course with Daran V. Perhaps not a threat to the entire Federation, but the Yonadans have the cure for the disease xenopolycythemia which will kill McCoy in 2269 if not treated.
  • 2268: A giant toxic space amoeba which could multiply and ‘infect’ the galaxy appears.
  • 2273: V’ger returns in search of its creator.
  • 2365: First contact with the Borg. However, as this contact is instigated by Q, there’s no way to positively determine an exact date when the alternative universe Borg will discover the Federation.
  • 2387: A super-supernova destroys Romulus (remember, that was only stopped in the Prime timeline, not the new timeline).

Update: Pop Culture Zoo has taken a much more in-depth look at the ramifications of the new timeline that’s well worth reading. Touches on some of the things I mentioned in the list above, and brings up a few others.

Now that we know how the new Star Trek film handles the continuity issues, what exactly does it all mean and what are the greater implications to not just the original series, but the greater Trek mythos as a whole? I freely admit I may be the only one who really cares, but the more I started thinking about what this new timeline meant, the more it spiralled out of control. So, I decided to take a stroll through established Star Trek history and was surprised at all the events, large and small, that are affected as a result of two actions on Nero’s part. It all starts in the time of Mark Twain.

Thoughts on Star Trek

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As briefly mentioned earlier, Prairie and I went out to see Star Trek on Friday evening, and, long story short: given the unenviable and potentially disastrous goal of reinvigorating a much-beloved but floundering and stagnant franchise that most people had written off as long past its prime, J.J. Abrams and company managed to beat the odds and pull it off with style. In the many long months leading up to the release of the film, I’d wanted it to be good, I’d hoped it would be good, and as we got closer, the many outstanding reviews gave me hope — and for once, I wasn’t let down.

Non-spoilery Rambling

The biggest question, of course — beyond even the redesign of the Enterprise and her big nacelles, or how well the story would mesh with established canon — was whether recasting characters that we’ve known for so many decades would even work. Could they manage to be the characters without either slavishly aping the original actors, or fall into parody? Would Kirk be Kirk without Shatner’s (not quite) inimitable delivery?

Thankfully, the answer is yes. As I’ve been thinking back over the film over the past couple days, the biggest thing that stands out to me is just how incredibly well the cast did at inhabiting the essence of the characters and their personalities without falling into the trap of mimicking the original actors. Pine, Quinto and Urban as the “holy trinity” of Kirk, Spock and McCoy likely had the toughest jobs in making us believe in them as the characters, but all three of them (along with the rest of the primary cast) managed to make me a believer.

Given that much of what was done in this film was necessary to ‘reset’ the franchise so that they could move forward from here without being trapped by canon — really, I don’t quite understand how people can be upset about the device used to reset things, as without that, we’d know the future of the characters and there wouldn’t be much long-term suspense or real sense of danger — I am really looking forward to seeing where we go from here on out.

I want to see this movie in the theater again, I want to have it at home to watch again, and I already can’t wait to see what this team can do with the sequel, when they’re free to move forward.

More thoughts under the cut, as they’re going to be more than a little spoileriffic…

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Ranking the Star Trek Films

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After having spent much of the past few weeks working my way through the Star Trek film series, this is how I rank them, best to worst. Obviously, this is my personal ranking. Feel free to disagree.

  1. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
  2. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
  3. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
  4. Star Trek: First Contact
  5. Star Trek: The Motion Picture
  6. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
  7. Star Trek: Generations
  8. Star Trek: Nemesis
  9. Star Trek: Insurrection
  10. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

The #1 and #2 spots are tough, very nearly a tie — and probably where I’ll get the most disagreement — but for me, that’s how they stack up. As good as TWoK is, the combination of the underlying theme of recognizing and overcoming racism and prejudice, and Christopher Plummer’s gleeful scenery chewing, Shakespeare-quoting, bolted-in-eyepatch General Chang (“Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war!”) make TUD work for me. Some of this may be that I saw TUD in theaters, which I was too young to do with TWoK, and I have very fond memories of the theater erupting in cheers watching the Enterprise and Excelsior hammer Chang’s Bird of Prey into oblivion — that scene still gets my blood pumping when I watch it.

(Plus, while I know he’s done something like six million other things, I love that General Chang and Captain Von Trapp from The Sound of Music are the same actor.)

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CSI Gets Geeky

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I don’t often talk much about my TV watching — in some small part because after spending something over a decade as as anti-TV zealot, I’m in some ways still coming to terms with actually finding some TV worth gritting my teeth through the commercials — but one of the shows that Prairie’s managed to get me into is CSI, and last night’s episode, “A Space Oddity,” was so worth it.

I was pretty sure that I’d be getting a few laughs out of the episode from the previews, which made it clear that the murder of the week was going to be at a Star Trek convention. I didn’t expect just how entertained I ended up being, though. The writers obviously knew their stuff (not surprising, as it turns out the episode was written by David Weddle and Bradley Thompson, two former writers for Battlestar Galactica, and directed by fellow BSG alumnus Michael Nankin), and the show was crammed with funny and knowing tributes to fandom — specifically, Star Trek and BSG.

Hodges surrounded by Astro Quest fen

The show opens with Hodges running around Whatifitcon, a Star Trek Astro Quest convention, surrounded by various alien-costumed fen. Soon he runs into fellow CSI labrat Wendy, all dressed up in an AQ uniform. They don’t have long to bond over their shared love of “the greatest science-fiction show ever” before there’s a commotion nearby — a murder (imagine that)! Hodges calls in to CSI headquarters to let them know that, yes…”He’s dead, Jim.”

The victim turns out to be Jonathan Danson, a producer who’d been working on a modern “reimagining” of the classic Astro Quest show. The night before, he’d shown off the first glimpses of Astro Quest: Redux, and the response was…well, it was pretty much what happened when Ron Moore first started showing off his “reimagined” version of the classic Battlestar Galactica. In short, the fans were not impressed.

And here was where an already enjoyably silly episode really took off for me. I’d already been grinning from the various Star Trek gags, then even more when it became obvious that they were riffing off the recent BSG reworking. But then, as the camera pans across the shocked and horrified fans…

BSG's Grace Park isn't a fan of the new Astro Quest

…waitasec, that was Grace Park — Sharon Valerii/Boomer/Athena/and lots of other cylons in BSG! But after just a quick glimpse of her, just long enough for me to register the cameo, another offended fan jumps out of his chair, yelling “You SUCK!” at Danson.

BSG creator Ron Moore _really_ isn't a fan!

And, of course, that’s none other than Ron Moore himself, responsible for “reimagining” BSG. And the cameos don’t stop there, as an academic researching the cultural impact of the Astro Quest television show is played by none other than Kate Vernon, BSG’s Ellen Tigh.

The episode goes on from there, with Hodges and Wendy dancing around their newfound connection, complete with fantasy scenarios giving nods to ST:TOS episodes “The Menagerie” and “The Gamesters of Triskelion”, über-geeks a little too involved in the AQ world living with their mother in a room entirely remodeled to match the AQ set, and so on.

The one criticism I might have with the episode would be that it falls victim to the same trap that so many other shows do when involving the geek community, in that they rely so heavily on comedy at the expense of the fringe members of fandom (the geeks in their remodeled room in mom’s house, for example). However, given that they also spent time letting Vernon’s academic and the bartender espouse some of the less cringeworthy sides of science-fiction shows and fandom, and “outed” two regular cast members as fans (and it wasn’t even the less socially adept character who got all dressed up in costume for the convention), I’m willing to cut them some slack.

Bottom line: great episode, and worth watching (you can even see the whole episode online at CBS’s CSI site) if you’re a fan of CSI, Trek, BSG, or any combination of the above.

The Norwescon Outfit I Didn’t Make

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…because I have been short on time, money, initiative, know-how, or various combinations of all of the above.

What I wanted to do: prove that Starfleet’s more advanced mindset extended to sexual discrimination and choices in clothing. Just because all we’ve seen so far is slacks for men and women and (mini)skirts on women, I’m sure that doesn’t mean that that’s all there is.

(Note: actually, in first season TNG, there were a few men in unbifurcated uniforms, as evidenced by this Wikipedia mention and this slightly confused fan. However, these ‘skant‘ uniforms pretty much disappeared by the second season.)

The USS Utilikilt
The USS Utilikilt
The plan: customize a TOS Starfleet tunic and an Original Utilikilt (or even Workman’s or Survival, but those were even further out of my theoretical budget) with the logo you see to the right.

In order to find a way to work in the Utilikilts logo, I figured the uniform would have to be TOS style, when the insignia within the delta shield changed depending on the ship the crewmember was assigned to and before the standardization on the Enterprise’s ‘starburst’ central insignia. I wanted to use this design to create a custom patch in color (with the traditional gold background) for the tunic, plus one in black and white to go on the rear pocket of the Utilikilt.

Unfortunately, a number of things got in the way of completing (or even starting on) this project, from simply not having the money to drop on the tunic, a new Utilikilt, or having the custom patches made (and this was before I got laid off), to the Utilikilts people being swamped with work and unable to work on a custom kilt request at that time.

Still, this is what I wanted to do for this year’s Norwescon…and, to be honest, I still think it’d be fun to do it at some point in the future. I don’t know (and, to be honest, kind of doubt) if I’ll ever get around to it, but it’s fun to have it rattling around in my head.

International Talk Like William Shatner Day

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In honor of William Shatner’s 78th birthday tomorrow today, 3/22/09, I am declaring March 22nd to be “International Talk Like William Shatner Day!” Hey, we have “International Talk Like a Pirate Day”, and Shatner inspired a helluva lot more kids to be like Captain James T. Kirk than any who wanted to be some smelly, toothless, “arrr”-spouting frickin’ pirate.

Now, since talking like our hero is a bit more challenging than walking around going, “Arrr”, I’ve included the following video tutorial for your edification, filmed by producer Bill Biggar, on a loooong drive to the airport on L.A.’s fabulous 405 freeway. Enjoy, and remember, it’s pronounced “sabotaaj”, not, “sabotahj”.

Watchmen Credits

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While “Watchmen” didn’t end up as my favorite movie ever, I do want to join a number of people in recognizing the excellence of the opening credit sequence. In fact, this was probably my favorite part of the movie itself (seeing the newest “Star Trek” trailer was my favorite part of the entire movie-going experience).

The credits are a five-minute montage over Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changin'” that brings the audience up to date with the alternate history of the world in the film, through the heyday of costumed adventurers fighting crime in the 40s, their fall from grace in the 50’s, and several key moments where the Comedian and Dr. Manhattan influence the course of history to far different results than those that we are familiar with.

UPDATE: At the request of Noah Kaufman of yU+Co, the video file has been removed.

There are an incredible number of tiny little details and moments buried in this sequence, some that readers of the Watchmen comics will note, others being nice little nods to history. Sci-Fi blog io9 has a great rundown of some of the many (not-so) hidden moments in the credit sequence, and I was happy to note that I’d noticed most of what they’d mentioned. The two on their list that I didn’t catch on to are the Batman references in the first shot, and that Mick Jagger is standing next to David Bowie outside of Studio 54 (though I did see both Bowie and the Village People).

A little sad, perhaps, that the opening credits are my favorite part of the film, but they were very nicely done. All credit here (no pun intended) goes to director Zack Snyder and the crew at yU+Co[4]. Nice job, guys.

Watching the Watchmen

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Since I can only spend so many hours a day tossing resumes out across the ‘net before I start to go buggy, I decided to take a few hours out of the day and head out to catch the matinee of “Watchmen“. I got home a bit ago, and I’m going to see what I can do as far as getting my thoughts down. Perhaps a little jumbled, but so it goes.

First off, a few thoughts on what came before the movie. Remember when you would go to a movie, find your seat in a relatively hushed theater, and have a nice few quiet moments before the movie? Heck, at this point, I’m nostalgic for the stupid advertising slideshow we got for a few years, rather than the constant, loud bombardment of noise and flashing lights we get from the moment we step in the theater these days. Of the many reasons why I don’t go see movies in the theater these days, the advertising barrage is a big one.

This time, I scribbled little notes on my iTouch as the drivel went by…

“Last House on the Left“: Ugh. So not interested.
Worst thing about going to the movies these days: the stupid Kid Rock/National Guard music video.
E*Trade’s freaky talking babies don’t benefit at all from the big-screen treatment. Oh, and I get _two_ of those ads. Yay.
“Knowing” still looks interesting.
The Kia Soul hamster wheel commercial was cute, but will probably get old fast if it goes into wide release on TV.
Hmm…the “no calls during the movie” blurb has been updated to “no calls or texts.”
Previews:

  • “Wolverine“: Okay, so this one could be fun. Still likely a rental for me.
  • “Angels and Demons“: Another rental.
  • “Star Trek“: So, so, so nice on the big screen! This one, I’m there on opening weekend, if not opening night.
  • “Public Enemies“: Looks intriguing. Good cast, good director, could be worth seeing. Again, though, I put it on the rental pile.
  • “Terminator Salvation“: I just can’t get excited about this. Much like how (in my universe) nothing exists of Highlander beyond the first film, nothing exists of Terminator beyond T2.
  • “Observe and Report“: Oh, dear god, another mind-numbingly stupid mall cop movie? And to make it worse, it’s the last trailer we get, so after a lot of geektastic goodness, we’re left with a bad taste in our mouth (almost literally, any movie that features vomiting in the trailer is guaranteed not to get my money) before the main event. Nice job of programming, dolts.

And now, Watchmen.

First off, the good: it’s an incredibly faithful screen translation of the comic book, even with the changes made to the ending (no big spoiler there — that changes were made has been well-known, it’s what those changes are that have been kept more-or-less secret). From an artistic and technical standpoint, the film is astounding. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see someone make an attempt at a mashup between the comic book’s boxes and text and the movie’s images once the DVD comes out and they can get good screengrabs. You’d be able to stay incredibly close to the original work, save for the last issue. Very, very nicely done.

The casting was also incredible. Most of the cast were actors I didn’t know very well, if at all, but who fit their characters beautifully. I also got a kick out of seeing some old favorites pop up, including Max Headroom himself, Matt Frewer, as Moloch. Spot-on perfect.

That said, the movie ended up leaving me cold. It’s not at all that it’s a bad movie — as I just said, on a technical and artistic level, it’s amazing — it’s just that it completely failed to engage me, and in quite a few scenes actively repulsed me. I’ve been trying to work out why, and I think it boils down to two main points: first, that while I enjoy the original graphic novel and recognize it’s importance to the geek world, it was never the “event” for me that it was for many other geeks my age; second, I find that as I get older, I’m getting less and less desensitized to overly realistic depictions of violence.

To the first point: I’ve never been a huge comic geek. I don’t have anything against comics at all, I’ve enjoyed reading many, have a few collections and graphic novels in my library (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Dark Knight Returns, Marvel 1602, and the entire Sandman series being the standouts), but I was never hugely into either reading or collecting them (with the sole exception of The Tick, of which I still have the first ten issues — first prints of 2-10, and the second printing of issue one — carefully preserved). While I’d heard about Watchmen many times, I didn’t ever read it until I picked it up a few years ago, and even now, I’ve only read it twice: once when I first bought it, and once again last week. Because of that, while I find it a good read, and have read enough about it over the years to recognize it’s importance to the comic world, it doesn’t hold any particular personal importance for me. Good book, worth reading, that’s it.

To the second point: Yes, Watchmen is a violent book. I know this, and I wasn’t expecting there to be a strange lack of violence in the movie. However, I was more than a little put off by just how much, and how graphic, violent imagery there was. In some instances, it was simply the director being faithful to his source material. In other instances, though, the movie actually ended up being quite a bit more graphic than the original work did, and not simply because of the transition from drawn artwork to live action.

The rest is going beyond a cut, as I’m quite likely going to be more than a little spoileriffic here. If you’re reading via RSS or on Facebook, stop now or don’t whine. ;)

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Dollhouse

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As evidenced by my recent tweet, I’ve now given Joss two chances to win me over to Dollhouse, and he’s 0 for 2. It just doesn’t work for me, and there’s a number of smaller reasons that add up to one big fail.

There’s a lot of elements to why it’s not working — from the creepy premise (normally I’m all about creepy, but when the basic idea for a show is essentially repeated, technologically-enabled date rape, that’s a kind of creepy that doesn’t do it for me) to the predictable “twists” (there wasn’t a single situation in episode two that was a real surprise) — but I think one of the biggest reasons that I can’t get into it is simply that I don’t care about the characters…and, more importantly, I can’t see why I ever would.

Echo is, by definition, a “tabula rasa,” or blank slate, even to the point of being described as such by the head of the Dollhouse. How can I even begin to care about who she is when the whole point of the show is that she isn’t? She has no personality of her own. The only time she exists as a person is when she’s been imprinted for an assignment, but that person disappears as soon as she returns to the Dollhouse. I can’t invest myself emotionally in a character that’s nothing but an empty shell.

When we look back at early episodes of long-running shows, it’s often funny to see how “unformed” the characters were at that point. The actors were still discovering their roles, taking the rough character sketches given to them and beginning to flesh them out into fully developed people that we can care about. With Dollhouse, that doesn’t seem to be an option — perhaps for some of the secondary and tertiary cast — but certainly not for the lead.

At least, not if they play by the rules that they’ve set up. And this is where the Whedon acolytes cry out, telling me to wait! Hold on! Because — as was widely reported before Dollhouse first aired — part of the compromise Whedon had to make with FOX was to set up the first seven episodes as primarily standalone episodes, without major ties into the planned arc of the show. So, you see, these first seven are like “seven pilots,” and if we just keep watching, we’ll get to the really good stuff! Where Echo starts breaking through her programming, and the mysteries start to unravel, and then, and then, and then….

Sorry, no. That doesn’t work for me — no show should need seven pilots just to get people interested. No, I don’t expect every TV show to have some huge story arc to follow — some of my favorite shows (Star Trek TOS and TNG) were entirely or almost entirely standalone episodes, and I enjoyed the “monster of the week” X-Files episodes as much as I did the “conspiracy” episodes. Guilty pleasure shows like CSI and NCIS do a great job of being entertaining and interesting, allowing you to get to know the characters as they grow over time, while still generally staying within the bounds of standalone shows. There does need to be some amount of advancement possible, however, otherwise you might as well just be “rebooting” every week.

On top of all that, though, the characters and situations need to be interesting, and that’s a major failure of Dollhouse. To date, the most interesting characters I’ve seen have been the FBI agent and the doctor (and I’m not even sure if that’s because the character is that interesting or because I loved Amy Acker’s character “Fred” on Angel). Echo, her handler, the geeky guy who does the programming, the boss? None of them interest me as much as one secondary and one tertiary character do, and that’s a bad sign. The situations have only been slightly better — the first week’s hostage situation and negotiation was a little interesting, but was only the latter half of the episode, and last week’s “hunting the human” schtick has been done so many times that it completely failed to grab my interest. Really, how much suspense could there be when the main character is in mortal peril in the second episode of the series? Spoiler alert, folks…she ain’t gonna die.

So no, no Dollhouse for me. Maybe Joss still has some good stuff rattling around in his brain, and maybe all he needs to do is to get away from FOX to do it. However, I have my doubts.