5 x 5 Movie Review: Star Trek: Into Darkness

So, Wonder Wife and I actually saw a movie in the theater, and despite my prior disavowal of interest, it was the new Star Trek flick. Here's the five by five:

1. Is there such a thing as too much fanservice? The window, Carol, the shout, "I'm a doctor," and the cameo all say yes.

2. Without going through the whole crew-as-D&D-party schtick, Uhura is definitely the bard.

3. Wonder Wife reports that watching four seasons of Enterprise actually helped her understand the technobabble and track the events more closely.

4. So, if the killing of Gromek in Torn Curtain was a -1- on the movie-conflict scale, I think -10- used to be the ending of the Wild Bunch or Bonnie and Clyde. So we're up to, what, eleventy-seven now? Or we've switched to a logarithmic scale like earthquakes and warp drive. In any case, there sure was a lot of stuff blowing up and bodies flying and all that. It was loud, too. Or maybe I just don't go to enough movies.

5. Overall: engaging, if predictable.

Oh yes - and I don't know about where y'all are, but a movie-popcorn-soda date in Seattle now costs about forty bucks. And when did theaters start serving Mini Pancakes?

They were out, anyway.

Spoilt

So, I guess the big movie news right now is Star Trek: Into Darkness. A friend saw it and was so surprised to have liked it so much he texted me to tell right after it was over. I have seen some reports that it didn't make enough money in the opening weekend, and I have read some reviews, mostly from web-pals. Many of these reviews have "spoiler alert" warnings or visual landmarks to tag where you should stop reading if you don't want to know major plot points before you see the movie. I guess there is a pretty big deal to spoil in  ST:ID; it might even be a "reveal" a la Crying Game. That I know it exists at all, much less what it is, even though I haven't seen the movie, is not the result of my ignoring or missing spoiler alerts: it is the result of an article showing up on one of my aggregators that had PUT THE SPOILER RIGHT IN THE TITLE.

Now, I'm not a stickler for spoilers, and there is something a little tenuous about 'spoiling' the second movie in the reboot of a twenty-three-year-long film franchise based on a TV series that premiered forty-seven years ago. But I think that this particular plot point, if prematurely disclosed, might ruin some genuine delight on the part of some fans; since geek culture accepts spoiler-alerting as S.O.P. these days, I can't imagine why someone would PUT THE SPOILER RIGHT IN THE TITLE.

Personally, it's no skin off my back. I am not that invested in the Star Trek reboot, maybe because it seems like just another example of Hollywood youngifying everything. So I'm not racing to see it, although I probably will eventually, and I think knowing this bit of information won't affect my enjoyment much, if at all. It just seems really odd that someone would... do that.

In the looking glass, clearly

So, I have mentioned already that Wonder Wife and I are working our way through Star Trek: Enterprise on Netflix streaming. We are in the fourth (and last) season and tonight watched both parts of "In a Mirror, Darkly," the prequel series' take on elements of the original series' episodes "The Tholian Web" and "Mirror, Mirror"; the episodes revisit the alternate universe populated by Evil® versions of all the Star Trek characters.

It was pure, unalloyed fanservice. The story opens with a reworking of a scene from First Contact (which I have not seen but recognized from James Cromwell's Zephram Cochran). Then we get the Enterprise credit sequence, but modified with more Evil combat and less noble exploring. When the episode proper begins, we have Evil Archer and Evil Phlox and Evil Reed and even Evil Admiral Forrest (demoted to captain), all acting just as cheesy and glorious as the Evil Original Crew. It's all dark and Evil and a grand hommage to the original  and I explain some bits to Wonder Wife, who has a vague awareness of what it's all about and is happy to play along.

Until we meet Evil T'Pol:

When the action shifts to the bridge and we see Jolene Blalock lounging on the command chair in her belly-shirt, hip-hugger Starfleet uniform, Wonder Wife loses it and cracks up laughing hysterically, as mean and nasty and Evil as the story has all been up until then.

"What is she wearing?" she blurts between gasps.

I try to explain something about the Evil Universe and its revealing clothes that, y'now, show that they're Evil and all.

She actually laughs harder. "She's barely wearing pants!"

I'm about to explain more when I realize: she's absolutely right. It's ridiculous.

I think that many men among us in the geek world can develop a calibration problem. There are so many egregious examples of the objectification and sexualization of women in comic book, science fiction, and other genre imagery, that our perception may get skewed. After being subjected to so many Escher-girls and boobs-bigger-than-heads, so many Leifeld waists and Miller's butt-shots, so many Star Sapphire costumes and Catwoman covers, when we see a presentation of a woman that is just merely sexy, our thoughts are "Well, that's not so bad."

But, actually it is. As Evil as it was, the Empire's Starfleet in the alternate universe had the same uniforms as the Federation's Starfleet in the "real" universe, just with jewelry and patches that were a little more badass. Except for Evil T'Pol and later Evil Hoshi, whose uniforms were the only ones to feature bare midriffs. I might be able to get behind the use of revealing costumes to signify cultural attitudes, but as arbitrary as this was, it was clearly just fanservice of a different kind. It was unnecessary and pointless, and if my responsometer wasn't out of alignment from the flood of similar images (and worse) that come with the territory today, I would have noticed.

Luckily, I had an external sensor to help me out, since every time one of these uniforms was shown, I heard more guffaws and an occasional "I'm sorry, but it's just so silly!" between laughs.

In the original, Evil Kirk covers less than Real Kirk, too.

Scott Bakula Should Have Played The Spirit

So, Wonder Wife and I don't have any cable TV or satellite dish - all we get is what comes over the aerial (as my family always called it), and we don't watch much of that at all. We do have Netflix Streaming, and our usual wont is to watch one cancelled show from beginning to end. It usually winds up being science fiction or fantasy - we have watched Stargate: Atlantis, Farscape, and Legend of the Seeker, for example. Our current show is Star Trek: Enterprise.

Now I know this will possibly diminish my credibility as much as liking John Carter does, but we've enjoyed the show. I don't find it any cheesier than any incarnation of the ST franchise machine, and I have to say that it has displayed the tightest continuity I have ever seen on episodic television. Many have found Scott Bakula's Captain Archer wanting, but I find him the ST captain closest in affect and behavior (within the contraints of the genre) to real astronauts; he projects a bit of the same verisimilitude that Tom Hanks brought to Jim Lovell in Apollo 13.

Anyway, I have noticed that during the two-fisted space-opera action that is the hallmark of ST, Archer often gets the stuffing knocked out of him, sometimes for several minutes or more, before prevailing against his adversaries. Because of this, and the aforementioned tight continuity, he spends much of many episodes bloody and bruised from being smacked around or thrown across cargo bays.

The last time I noticed this, my mind connected it to a passage I recalled from Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes, in his section on The Spirit. I looked it up to make sure I got it right: "Much of The Spirit's charm lay in his response to intense physical punishment. Hoodlums could slug him, shoot him, bend pipes over his head. The Spirit merely stuck his tongue in his cheek and beat the crap out of them."

Given his performance across four seasons of Enterprise, I think Bakula could have captured that charm. He may not have been a typical action hero, but neither was The Spirit. Bakula's a little long in the tooth for the role now, a few years older than me, but I think it might have been a fine thing.

A battered Archer just before he beats the crap out of a Nazi.