Written at the film's engagement. Some thoughts follow after.
"I Dare You To Do Better"
I got a call from the Captain about 5 o'clock (that'd be 2000 hours for him) on Friday, and when I saw who it was, I called him back and said "I know what this is about."
The Captain is a life-long Trekker. He knows the arcana of "Star Trek" in its canon, that being the television series—both broadcast and syndicated—and film. Plus, he's a little "inside," having drinks with the late Majel Barrett Roddenberry, introducing Patrick Stewart to "Buzz" Aldrin, and calling up Jonathan Frakes the day show creator Gene Roddenberry died to talk about "what it all meant." The Captain knows from "Trek." So I was particularly interested in his take on "The New Version" of J.J. Abrams, or "Star Trek Begins" (a version of which producer Harve Bennett had proposed away back in the time-space continuum before Star Trek V—you know, the Shatner-directed one best forgotten). I'd watched the trailers warily, noting the emphasis on disrobing cadets and slam-bang action (not mutually exclusive), but noting a certain underlying devotion, not entirely slavish, to the original. They weren't trying to re-invent the warp-drive, which was a good thing.
"So..." I said, "what'd ya think?"
"This is the way they should have always done it.." he began.
Yeah. It is.
Star Trekis a rollicking world-and-expectations-shattering version of the Gene Roddenberry original, and most niftily, done in a way that fits within its science-fiction-y concepts. The whole movie is its plot-point and one watches in wonder how the deconstruction happens before one's eyes, while simultaneously nodding acquaintance with the tropes, concepts, and characterizations of the original. One gets the feeling of happy ebullience watching a favorite building imploded with the added delight of seeing it rise simultaneously from its own ashes to be sleeker, shinier and un-compromising.
The creatures have evolved differently* with nonhuman proportions, sometimes tossing out the human baggage entirely. It's a messy universe, but a full one with good ideas and concepts tossed amid the dialogue. It's a "Star Trek" Universe so full of potential, that there's no chance of coming across a creatively bankrupt parallel Earth, although the film manages to do exactly that in its own clever way.
Zoe Saldana is given much more to do as Lt. Uhura, and given that he had Leonard Nimoy on-set for inspiration, Zachary Quinto might have taken the easy way out with a direct imitation, but his Mr. Spock is far less serene, more volatile and haughty, betraying that human half far more subtly than Nimoy did—and I believe saying that might be a court-martial offense in my house.
Where the other "Trek" movies have fallen down have been the secondary characters, but here they're just as important—Ben Cross and Winona Ryder play the star-crossed parents of Spock, while Bruce Greenwood is a superb Captain Christopher Pike. And Eric Bana, who can be on or off depending on the movie, is terrific as the long-suffering, revenge-driven Romulan Nero.
There will be a lot of sniping from the "Trekkies" who want things their way, or no way—that's to be expected with any "Trek" movie. But in the words of the former Captain Kirk: "Get a life."
After-thought: My, my. I did a lot of dancing around on this one because it was imperative not to give too much away (although I was doing some "punning" references to it just to amuse myself). What was wonderful about Abrams' re-boot—far better than his "Star Wars" sequels (although they're entertaining)—was his and the writers pushing "Re-set" on the entire franchise and wiping out the whole old Star Trek Universe in an ingenious time-travel story where another alien goes back in time to kill his version of Hitler, who happens to be Leonard Nimoy's Mr. Spock.
That's just clever and daring and enough to put the fear of interfering with time into anybody. But, it also wiped the creative slate clean. The Vulcans, on whom the Star Trek Universe became so dependent, became a Universal diaspora. Time-lines could be cleaned up—like the "Eugenics War"—and a better Star Trek could be rebuilt without having to necessarily wipe out "Next Generation" and its successors. And if anybody gripes about it, it's just a parallel timeline; the other one still exists, Ramada-In hallways and all.
It was thrilling—in fact, I did a couple of "Sunday Scenes" around this movie—about aspects that just made me smile.
But, it didn't last. The next Abrams Trek (Into Darkness) did the "Khan" story-line a little too soon and a little too derivatively. As I said in that review, with a new Universe to play with, it was too soon to go back to the well. And the third "Kelvin Universe" story, Star Trek Beyond, attempted to do something a bit different, along the lines of the Original Series, but its dependence on a "movie-villain" and its subsequent disappointment (even Idris Elba couldn't do anything with it) was a let-down, and the film under-performed, perhaps because it was less an "event" film than an "episodic" one.
That was four years ago and everybody's getting older. A new Trek movie was stalled when Chris Pine—and Chris Hemsworth (who played "Daddy" Kirk in the first one, indicating it was another time-travel story and a dull one at that)—had contract demands (money or credit) and it stalled. There's talk of two Treks in the works: one a new production and Quentin Tarantino production of a "Star Trek" movie, which—because QT can't keep himself from talking—was revealed to be merely be his version of a Trek story about the Eugenics War. More time-travel? Tarantino seems to be no longer interested (and I never was).
Whatever the future of "Star Trek" in the movies, one hopes that it will "go boldly"...which means that a bolder studio should take control of it as Paramount seems to be fresh out of ideas.
* There is a wickedly funny bar scene where Kirk tries to pick up the comely Lt. Uhura, while between them sits an alien seemingly modeled on the "Spitting Image" version of Leonard Nimoy, when it suddenly dawned on me what it was doing there: "Why the long face?"
This is Where the Frontier Pushes Back or "Let's Hope This Doesn't Get Messy" Simon Pegg's character Tim Bisely in "Spaced" once stated: "... as sure as day follows night, sure as eggs is eggs, sure as every odd-numbered Star Trek is shit." Irony time.Star Trek Beyondis an odd-numbered "Star Trek" film...and he wrote it (along with Doug Jung).
Of course, J.J. Abrams busted that track record with the odd-(un-)numbered Star Trek reboot (2009), recast the entire original crew and managed to survive the potential solar shit-storm from some of the most vocal of pop-culture's fan-maniacs. The reason was that movie did everything differently while still reminding you of what was so damn good about the original series. There was a bit of a let-down with the second (at least for me) because the first one warped Star Trek-space so ingeniously that one was expecting something more than mere future history-re-writing, by cribbing the plots of two of the original cast's movies so soon into this new, re-booted series.
Which is why it's so damn funny when Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), 966 days into the Enterprise's five year mission, and after a diplomatic first contact that does not go very well, saws into his Captain's Log that things are beginning "to feel...episodic." Even exploring new worlds gets to be a drag (ask Lewis and Clark) and the crew is definitely feeling the lethargy. A stop back to Earth's new orbiting city in space, Yorktown (nobody's thought of this before? Just the field-offices in space?) and the crew can't wait to get away from each other—even the Enterprise's "power-coupling" is fraying: Uhura (Zoe Saldana) is wanting to break up with Spock (Zachary Quinto). Kirk is being pulled other directions, so is his Science Officer.
It's almost Kirk's birthday and over a drink he and Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban) hash out Kirk's issues—he's lived longer than his Dad (who died on his birthday) and Kirk's motivations were not the same as his. Now, the job just isn't fun anymore. It's routine and Kirk is thinking of applying for a Vice-Admiralty position with Starfleet (Lord knows he has enough vices to qualify for the job).
But, a distress signal from an uncharted nebula pulls him back into the chair—he and the crew warp out together, maybe for the last time for a rescue mission. They're given coordinates by a returning Starfleet officer Kalara (Lydia Wilson) and find the nebula is not that tough a commute—sure, it's blocking signals from Starfleet, but...hey, what's that on the view-screen? And before Star Wars' Admiral Ackbar can make a cameo saying "it's a trap!" they're being bombarded by so many projectiles, they don't have the weaponry capable of taking out everything and they get boarded, the warp-nacelles of the Enterprise cut off from the ship (no one has thought of this before?) and the ship goes powerless. Time for Scotty (Pegg) to do a little re-routing to the impulse engines and the ship is underway, albeit slowly, with the crew together, but being picked off one by one.
Then, things really go down. In the same type of swarm attack that took out the nacelles, the ship starts to get eviscerated to knock out all power to the ship. Kirk orders the crew to evacuate and their capsules start jettisoning into space. But, they're soon hi-jacked and taken to a planet in the nearby system. With the Enterprise crippled and heading to the planet's surface, Kirk has no choice but to abandon ship and take his chances on the planet.
With no ship, the crew scattered, the mission becomes one of survival and making do the best they can. It's a great way to find out out just what your crew-mates mean to you and cure that contempt that too much familiarity breeds.
The film-makers do shake things up a bit and despite throwing in as much action as they can possibly muster, they manage to give to this Star Trek what has been skimped on a bit in the past films—interaction. What works in the Star Trek movies is what worked on the television show, which is the characters and Pegg, Jung and director Justin Lin take pains to pair off the crew-members unusually—Kirk with Chekhov, Spock with McCoy (well, naturally), Uhura with Sulu and Scott with a denizen of the planet named Jaylah (Sofia Boutella, who played the lethal kick-master Gazelle in Kingsmen) that manages to play to everybody's strengths.
One is drawn in because it's a situation that one has seen before on the original series, but never like this, and one's attention is focused because you're not exactly sure what will happen next—something Into Darkness, retreading tried and true territory, never accomplished. The story seems fresh and full of surprises, except that sometimes things are a bit too convenient in resolution, but that may be that things are withheld in back-story that might be telling.
One gets the feeling that quite a bit has been chopped out of Star Trek Beyond, as some transitions are rough, at times confusing, and for a scrupulous refusal to not go into too much detail about the film's chief villain Krall (Idris Elba). It's a bit refreshing, that, actually, because ultimately who cares what the guy's backstory is—his motivations are a bit confused and his actions way too extreme to make any sense whatsoever. Basically, who cares? He's a bad guy. Stop him. The same goes for the McGuffin in the movie. Everybody says it's dangerous, but not too willing to explain how. Without that, you're not sure what the rules are or what the stakes might be, and that undercuts the suspense factor somewhat. But suspense is not what the director is after. What he wants is visceral.
Director Lin is an action-movie guy and he does a lot of story-length swoops and camera tilts to keep you disoriented through those sequences...too much so, actually. He's less concerned with the build-up to something as long as he gets the "money-shot" in. That grows tiresome after awhile, and the final action furor seems like one too many (and relies on what you think the gravity issues on a globe-shaped city in space would be like). A space-battle would be just as familiar, I guess, and maybe Pine thought he was robbed of a big climax last movie (Spock had to do all the running and punching), but with all the hand-to-hand combat, one wonders what they have phasers for.
Still, bumps in the warp-drive not withstanding, Star Trek Beyond is a good use of material and a reminder of why the thing has lasted 50 years...almost. It premiered in September, 1966.
And they keep making ships.
Bob Peak's poster for the original Star Trek: the Motion Picture
next to "The Director's Edition" which featured the original key photographs.
Please Continue, Teacher or The Man in the Glass Booth I think, by now, just about everyone has seen, in one form or another, the film Stanley Milgram made about his controversial 1962 "Obedience Study" at Yale (if not, it is provided below), even if they don't remember the name, the implications are embedded in people's consciousnesses. In it, Milgram, a clinical psychologist and the son of immigrants who'd escaped the Nazis, wanted to see just how far someone would go in following orders—at the time of the studies, Adolph Eichmann had been on trial and executed for war-crimes and the phrase "I was only following orders" was at the top of everyone's mind and conscience. He was teaching at Yale (Milgram, not Eichmann) which played a part in the experiment as the college was prestigious enough for people to take it seriously and even be intimidated by it a bit. Two men are brought into a room with the clinician in a gray lab coat (Milgram chose gray, so "the face" of the experiment wouldn't be associated with medicine). By lot, one of the subjects is chosen as "the teacher" and the other, "the learner" and they're told that it's an experiment for learning under pressure. "Mr. Learner" is led into a sound-proof room and briefly given a list to memorize and is then attached to electrodes.
"The Teacher" is then led into the larger test-room, with a large machine with a bank of switches. He's informed that he must ask the learner over two-way radio to choose the correct answer of the word-pairs from a choice of four possibilities and must administer an electric shock for every wrong answer, and, just to demonstrate, he is given a mild electric shock as an example. Each wrong answer the "learner" gives is met with a higher value of electric shock from mild to extremely strong. If the learner continues to give wrong answers, the highest value of electric shock is repeated until the man in the room gets them all right.
All right. Of course, the experiment has nothing to do with learning, it has everything to do with if "the teacher" will go on with the experiment, delivering higher and more painful shocks to the man in the room. "That" man is a plant—an actor who plays the part, even questioning whether the shocks will affect his heart condition. He never receives any shocks. He has a tape recorder which will play designated reactions to the shocks from annoyed "Ow's" to screams of pain and howls of protest. "The learner" is not being tested. "The teacher" is.
And what Milgram and his researchers want to know from their subjects is: how far will they go? The subjects are made extremely uncomfortable by the job they have to do, and the reactions from the next room create a conflict—do the job or not? If they protest (and they inevitably do) Dr. Gray-Coat has a script that merely says "Please continue, Teacher." The more protests from the "teacher," the more insistent the clinician becomes, telling the "teacher" "once the experiment's begun, you must continue to the end" or "you have no choice, teacher." What Milgram wanted to see was—at what point will the "teacher" stop administering shocks? And why? At what point will the REAL test subject stop following orders for Man, for Science, for Yale?
What Milgram discovered was (no pun intended) shocking: in the baseline experiment—the one everybody uses as the example, although Milgram's results altered as he altered the conditions of the experiment—66% of the test subjects took the experiment all the way to the end. Despite the recorded pleas for help and screams of pain. Despite the real subjects' misgivings and protests, fully two-thirds of the them continued right to the "extremely dangerous" shocks, even after the protests stopped, and the only thing coming from the booth was deathly silence. 66%. So much for our "better angels." So much for "free will." The study showed a fragile weakness in human-kind—we, singularly, are more than susceptible to a mob mentality. In our self-preservation, or selfishness, we will give up any morality, any higher teaching, any nobility or philosophy and just "go with the crowd" when confronted with greater numbers or authority. The "little voice in our head" can be shouted down by volume or magnitude. Given that, "what's a Heaven for?"
It's depressing and alarming. And significant. The study has been controversial (as the film points out) because it is, after all, based on a lie. No one's getting shocked. No one's getting hurt. The study is not about what the subjects of the study are being told it is. And they are the ones being tested, not the man in the booth. Also, the authority of the clinician is fabricated—he merely states that the test must go on and that once started, it cannot be interrupted, the most specious of lies. And the subject—the real subject—gets caught in an ethical quandary of doing the right thing: do I stop for the man in the booth, or do I keep going because I'm being told to? None of us have to pull a switch on a guy, but how often does your boss say to you: "do it or you get canned?" For the sake of self-preservation—maybe getting ahead—you do it, and file the misgivings in the back of the junk-drawer. You put away the conflict with a drink after work or a weekend on the boat that conflict bought you. As they say in Spotlight: "I was just doing my job!" To which the bitter reply is: "Yeah, you and everybody else."
The podcast "Radiolab" (highly recommended, by the way) did a segment called "Who's Bad?" about the nature of evil and the Milgram study figures significantly in the last half of it. In that, Alex Halgram makes the case that maybe these people aren't "evil" but they continue because they think they're doing something significant for science. They see it as a good thing. So, that proves they're not "bad people." Right? Great. The SS thought they were doing something significant for Germany and the "White Race." So, they rounded up the folks who didn't meet that criteria, segregating them from the rest of Society, all the better to surreptitiously put them on trains where they could be summarily eliminated. 6 million of them. But, their intentions were good, thinking of the country, right? So, that doesn't make them "bad people," does it?
OF COURSE, IT DOES! The test subjects for the Milgram study might bot be evil. They might not be bad. But their better natures are certainly over-ridden by an expedient concern that replaces their instinct to not harm a fellow human being. There's a big difference between Yale and Auschwitz, and the conflicts of the subjects are certainly part and parcel of the results, but still 66% took it all the way to the end.
So, 66%. Something to think about while you're in rush-hour traffic, or dealing with any sort of bureaucracy, or when considering giving someone your social security number. This would all be dry, dry stuff (as in the video below) if not for the telling of the tale. Writer-director Michael Almereyda focuses on the man who came up with the experiment, the implications of it and the effect the results and the criticism of the study had on him. Held together by a low-key bravura (if there can be such a thing) performance by Peter Sarsgaard, who is on-screen for most of the film, and spends a good percentage of it breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to the audience, describing his experiment and its ramifications, his motivations, and inner thoughts on the journey.
That running commentary to us is just a part of the unusual (and frequently amusing) approach Almereyda takes to the material, as he plays with the film form, letting go of reality, or, if you will, going against the dictates of traditional film-making techniques demanding recreations that are realistic. For instance, frequently, he'll stage a scene in front of a deliberately phony backdrop that isn't even in color (really, why should it be?) and might be a deliberate statement about going against convention. It's surprising, but Almereyda does other clever things, as well.
For instance, there's a couple scenes where Milgram is ambling down a Yale corridor and there is the usual mattering of extras passing through the shot, ignoring that Milgram is talking directly to us (already a break against picturing reality) when an elephant comes walking down the corridor behind him, impossible to ignore, an obvious "elephant in the room."
Or, in a post-study interview with some subjects, three women who participated start talking about their reactions to the test, sipping coffee out of styrofoam cups. Their reactions differ slightly, but when one strongly objects that she was duped, the others fall in line and begin to sip simultaneously. Duped, maybe, but the point about influence lingers.
There's a less obvious one. Once Milgram and his wife Sasha (played by Winona Ryder) start to have kids, their son appears in a couple scenes—in green make-up. Odd. But, if that's perplexing, check out what he's wearing: a black turtle-neck and suit—he's dressed as Frankenstein, indicating (once the controversy over the experiment settles in) that Milgram has created a monster. Now, that's funny. And the point is made without words.
This is not only good film-making, it is fun film-making that livens up a film about a serious subject, while keeping on parallel tracks about the significance of the man and his work while keeping it entertaining. Experimenter is getting a limited release—it will blaze no trails at the box-office (in fact, it only played for one night at a local art-house here) and, actually, is available online already. It is, itself, experimental, but is considerable food for thought, whether one is concerned with good ethics or good film-making.
