Damn Facebook!

2009.05.25 - Monday

Don't get me wrong, I love Facebook, but ever since I started using it regularly, I've been paying less and less attention to my regular email and to this website. It's almost like those first few times a person surfs the internet; a quick check of the news or link from an email, and all of a sudden an hour's gone by. I don't even have that many "friends" in my network. I can't imagine what it must be like for people out there with hundreds of them, though I suppose it could explain the stories of entire days lost to the site at a time.

It doesn't help that don't spend much time at home these days between martial arts training, hockey, workouts, and work. The last thing I want to do when I get home is spend my 30 minutes or hour of downtime religiously replying to every email or message. I do get to them eventually, after all.

Star Trek

2009.05.16 - Saturday

I've been waiting for this film, anxiously, ever since the green light was given. J.J. Abrams is a talented director and visionary, but I'll admit the entire concept of a prequel story with young versions of the original series characters was hard to swallow. The track record for films attempting such things wasn't exactly inspiring. As the cast was announced and the trailers began to surface, I think most Trek fans breathed a sigh of relief, since it was obvious we were in for a good ride on cool spaceships at the very least. While "Star Trek" as a film may not be a home run for Abrams, what he has managed to do, quite brilliantly, is make Star Trek cool again. Not just cool compared to previous Trek projects, either, as the franchise should now be able to stand toe-to-toe with Hollywood heavyweights like Star Wars, Terminator, Transformers, Batman, and Spiderman. A fantastic, action packed adventure story, Star Trek has finally become a spectacle.

"Star Trek", however, is far from perfect. First, the good. The cast is amazing. Every single actor takes the characters to heart and expands on them, updating them for the times and making them their own, all while maintaining the essence of the originals. Zachary Quinto seems to have been born to play Spock, and Chris Pine nails Kirk with just enough of Shatner's mannerisms to connect them without being silly. I find myself wishing the film were longer, just so I could see more of Bones, Chekov, Sulu, Uhura, and Scotty. I don't see how anyone could have asked for more out of the cast.

The art direction and visual effects are fantastic. Personally, I didn't see a single weak shot anywhere in the movie. Everything holds up and maintains your belief in what's happening on screen. I was especially happy to see a few scenes where the typical Star Trek visuals are maintained, with stark lighting and barren space environments, including one fantastic shot which features a completely accurate Saturn. No puffy clouds in the atmosphere, no fractal dust rings. It looks like the VFX team simply downloaded some telescope photos and mapped them on their geometry. Fantastic!

The bad, well, sort of. Most of the film's sets are great. The bridge looks amazing, although the viewscreen is still too small. The corridors, the transporter room, and sickbay are all superb. The villain's ship looks cool, Starfleet Academy looks completely believable. Vulcan too. The one rather large complaint I have has to do with the engineering sections. The lower decks and engineering sections of a starship should not look like the inside of an oil refinery. They should not be confused with a bottling plant, a slaughterhouse, or a foundry. The warp core, of which there appear to be five or six in this version, shouldn't be giant steel containers like the ones I see in the Molson brewery every time I drive over the Burrard St bridge. The Star Trek engineering section and warp core was perfected in TNG. It looked good in "The Motion Picture", it looked good in "Wrath of Khan", but it was perfected in "The Next Generation" and there's simply no reason to change it. If anything, make it look bigger and more powerful. I'm positive that Abrams had little choice with "Star Trek" due to its recession budget, but it's still a shame. As the film is, the engineering sections simply look like they have nothing to do with the Enterprise at all. They don't match the rest of the sets and they don't match the external shape of the ship. I don't want to see a maze of iron pipes on the starship Enterprise, and I certainly don't want to see those pipes with manual hand crank valves which vent steam for no reason. The inside of this ship looks less advanced than one of today's aircraft carriers, and in the few quick scenes he has, Scotty looks absolutely lost in the set, with no visual cues of anything that makes any sense at all. Fix it next time, J.J.

The transporters. I like the new effect, it looks cool. It's how they work in the story that bothers me. The crew should not be able to beam to Earth from Saturn, and they should not be able to beam from a planet to a ship that's been heading away at warp speed for several hours. You can come up with any sort of technobabble explanation you want to justify it, and never mind for a second that that sort of thing is exactly why people started to hate Star Trek during "Voyager", but it simply becomes too powerful a tool for the writers. It's pure deus ex machina, which sci-fi fans have been railing against for decades, and having physical rules is something Star Trek used to do well and it's something I'd like it to get back to. After all, if we can transport people that far, why have ships at all? Just beam between planets, or even star systems. Why not just beam everyone off Vulcan onto Delta Vega, instead of evacuating them on ships seen in the backgrounds of shots? All of that brings me to the story.

The story certainly didn't bother me, but it is fairly simple and it does make use of a few pretty old fashioned science fiction cliches. The bottom line, however, is that the production of the story makes up for any weak points. Once this honeymoon period with the fans and critics ends, however, and the next Star Trek film comes out, I'm not sure people will be as forgiving. Right now it all feels new and fresh, and that feeling is glossing over some classic Star Trek issues which used to be the death knell of the franchise among critics and fans alike. I'm still sort of disappointed that the film doesn't have a message, or at the very least a theme, which has always been a staple of the Trek universe. This is a straight up adventure film, and while you can tell it has a positive vibe and an optimistic attitude, nothing in the story ever goes beyond that. It's fairly obvious that Abrams focused his energy on revitalizing the style of Star Trek, and he has accomplished it spectacularly. Next time, however, if he wants Trek fans to continue cheering his name, he's going to need a little more substance.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

2009.05.03 - Sunday

I rented this one knowing it was going to be bad. I feel it's important that in order to complain about current trends in science fiction films and television, I should actually watch some of it. First of all, I was convinced this was going to be a bad film from the moment I read it was being made. I honestly didn't have a problem with the casting of Keanu Reeves as Klatuu, either, since his fairly unique ability to always seem like he's somewhere else works as well for this character as it does for Neo in the Matrix series. With that being said, the character is horrible in this new incarnation because of what the script has him do, and not because of the performance.

Here's the bottom line for me: this film is stupid. From a scientific point of view, from an emotional point of view, it's illogical and stupid. It's exactly what you get when a bunch of people who don't like or even understand sci-fi write, produce, and direct a science fiction story. You can tell they don't really like it, and you can certainly tell they don't understand it. Their indifference, if not downright contempt, oozes through the frame. This film makes use of some of the worst cliches of sci-fi, some of the worst examples of "magic" alien technology, and I still can't honestly decide if it does so because the production team was ignorant and honestly thought they were cool, or because they thought that's what nerdy sci-fi geeks like to see. The film is short, too, by today's standards. Well under two hours, even with an absolutely pointless, five minute introductory scene. I'm serious, there is no reason whatsoever for it to be there...at all.

We're meant to believe that the alien visitors have spent a great deal of time studying Humanity, but their reasons for threatening to wipe us out show only a rudimentary, essentially infantile understanding of us and our culture. The whole gag about the alien civilization wanting to protect life-giving planets, they being so rare and precious in the Universe, doesn't even come close to adding up scientifically. Would they also protect the Earth from asteroid impacts, or massive volcanic eruptions? Those things have infinitely more power than our entire civilization does, or ever has, and yet the Earth has repeatedly survived them to produce life once again. The Human race, as it exists today, does not have the ability, even if we wanted to, to destroy or permanently harm the Earth in any way. The film's entire premise makes no logical sense.

"The Day the Earth Stood Still" also completely ignores the most famous, most spine tingling scenes of the original 1951 version. Scenes which still hold up today. Instead of the alien ship landing in the middle of the day with no consideration for subtlety or secrecy, it lands at night, with the government having time to shut down highways and roads. They try to play it up as mysterious, but it just feels like false suspense. Klatuu's biosuit is cool, but the famous gunshot comes out of nowhere for no reason, instead of from visibly agitated soldiers responding to a possibly hostile movement. The robot Gort, Jesus, what a mess. First of all, it looks bad, visually. In fact, most of the film's visual effects are poor. It moves as if it should be in a cartoon. I did like the auditory and EMP weapons, but it also never uses the trademark laser more that once or twice. It's way too big. It just looks silly on screen, completely silly. Later in the film Gort disassembles into the notoriously tired "nanobot cloud", and the microscopic machines actually look like tiny little insects. It's actually embarassing.

Klatuu himself has ridiculous magic powers, where he can seemingly control any electrical device from any distance, and revive dead people by shocking them using nearby power sources. Yet he's not written to posses any kind of superior intellect or disposition. He arrives on the planet prejudiced. He abandons his mission to speak with the UN almost immediately, and instead of seeking out alternative leaders or wanting to learn more about Humanity himself as in the original, he immediately jumps to the conclusion that we deserve to be exterminated because the Secretary of Defense is a bitch. Even when one of his own people, who's been living on Earth for 70 years, tells Klatuu that he wishes to stay despite the coming doom, Klatuu doesn't seem to give any thought to the notion that there might be more to us than simple environmentally irresponsible warmongering.

The final scene is the absolute worst. As Klatuu eventually changes his mind for some reason I've yet to figure out, and fights to stop the nanocloud from disassembling our entire civilization molecule by molecule, he releases a pulse from his ship that stops them. Unfortunately, after saying there would be a "price" for his help, the pulse permanently disables all electrical power over the entire planet. Hence the "Day the Earth Stood Still", except in the original it was a demonstration of their technological power, and temporary. Here, he's arrived on our planet and convicted us after speaking to essentially one person, and then saved our species by turning us into the Amish planet. Well, obviously the Earth will be fine if we're all hunters and gatherers again, asshole. The entire film plays it like it's a good thing too. We're finally free of our corrupting technology and can live in peace and harmony with Gaia again. It's the whole "Humanity is a disease" angle that just absolutely infuriates me. No thought is given to the billions who will die of disease, starvation, and panic without our technological infrastructure. No thought is given to his essentially imprisoning us not just on our own planet, but in our own minds, as our technological ability to learn about the Universe and explore our curiosity is permanently crippled. We're "saved" by being forcefully reverted to an animal state, which to me is a disgusting message of self-loathing defeatism.

Easily the worst science fiction film I think I've ever seen.