WES ANDERSON ROUNDTABLE: THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU

Every now and then at Screen Vistas I like to team up with Max O’Connell over at The Film Temple to tackle the work of one of our favorite directors. This time we’re looking at comedy stylist/master of whimsy Wes Anderson.
 
Loren Greenblatt: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is Wes Anderson’s fourth film, and not his best received. Some might view it as his One From the Heart or New York, New York. It’s heavily stylized and he had more creative freedom, but it wasn’t well liked on its initial release.

Max O’Connell: Well, people think the reviews were worse than they were. They were highly mixed with a lot of disappointment, but it wasn’t seen as a disaster by as many people as the story tends to go.

LG: I can see why this film turned some people off, though. I wasn’t crazy about it on my first viewing (a bad projection didn’t help) but it’s grown immensely for me on repeat viewings. My initial complaints do line up with what the some of the critics said at the time. The film feels very arch and removed, and as stylized as The Royal Tenenbaums was, this is so much more. I can see a lot of people viewing it as hipsterish or ironic: it starts off with a film-within-a-film of oceanographic explorer/filmmaker Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) brings his latest documentary to a festival, and the credits for the main film appear within the documentary in this 4:3 aspect ratio, with curtains on the side of the screen to emphasize that we’re in a movie. I can see how this turned some people off.

MO: Yes, but it turned off people who were previously fans, too, and of his archness. I wonder if it might be that he has a different screenwriter this time. For his first three films and his first short, Anderson co-wrote it with his longtime friend Owen Wilson. Wilson has the second biggest role in The Life Aquatic, but he was also becoming a more prominent comic actor at this point, and he didn’t have time to work as a co-screenwriter, or so I understand. Anderson instead brought aboard Noah Baumbach, a director who at that point hadn’t worked in seven years. He made a big splash with Kicking and Screaming, followed by a pair of indifferently received comedies (Highball, Mr. Jealousy), and Anderson is the one who brought him back out, first with this, then as producer for Baumbach’s best film, The Squid and the Whale. Baumbach is a much more abrasive collaborator than Wilson.

LG: It’s not like Anderson’s past characters were warm and cuddly, but Steve Zissou is by far his most prickly protagonist. In terms of archness, this is Anderson’s first big attempt at world building and on paper, the 60’s high seas adventure trappings make it look lighter and more rompish than his previous films. He’d get to making lighter films in the future, but here he actually doubles down and presents a world that under all the whimsy is darker and more bitter than anything he’d done until now. We meet Zissou, a washed up Jack Cousteau type who looses his best friend/right hand man Esteban (Seymour Cassel) when he’s eaten by a “Jaguar Shark” who Steve now hopes to track down and kill. Between the stop-motion sea creatures, rival ships and pirates, I don’t think any of us really expected to see this middle-age, hard to like control freak in the lead, even if that type of character is 100% in keeping with both Anderson’s AND Baumbach’s style.

MO: But oh, the wonderful things around him! How delighted are we by those?

LG: Pretty darn delighted! It’s telling that for Anderson, actual sea life isn’t sufficiently whimsical, so instead he invents sea life in stop motion creatures made by Henry Selick, the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline.

MO: The stop-motion is really wonderful. It helps accentuate the fantasy of this world, they remove us from reality, the handmade quality of the whole thing, right down to the sets. They’re very lived in, but they have a dollhouse feel.

LG: He turns Zissou’s boat, the Belafonte, into an actual diorama. There’s a wonderful scene that’s maybe the most Andersonian scene ever, in which Anderson cuts the boat in half on a set so we can see all of the characters walking through the various rooms and we can see all the gadgets they have.

MO: There’s also a scene later that shows that diorama view where Steve has a fight with Ned (Wilson), the man who’s possibly his son, and there’s a long shot following the two as they argue. As they’re doing it, Steve stops the argument to address whoever he passes, and he’ll either lash out at them or, when he runs into the one intern who didn’t quit, he’ll swing to overwhelming praise and say, “Awesome, you’re getting an ‘A’,” followed by a slap on his injured shoulder. It’s a long take that shows the intricacy of the set, but also how Steve’s moods can swing from one moment to another. And it’s a case where I can’t picture it being done better than the way it was done with those dioramas.

LG: There’s a key moment in the film for me where they’re in Italy, and Steve is completely dominating Ned, the son he never wanted but now needs to micromanage. He changes his name to “Kingsley,” he orders wine for him, and he pushes away any sense of individuality Ned might express. And that’s interesting because he has this sort of Bill Nye/Jacques Cousteau profession where he’s supposed to foster individuality and imagination, but he actually stifles it.

MO: Yes, and Ned is willing to go with it for a while because he’s found a new father figure after having lost a lot personally (his mother killed herself after she found out she had terminal ovarian cancer), but after a while Steve micromanages to the point where he pushes away the one man who’s still on his side. Whenever Ned ad libs on camera, Steve is annoyed. The first time, Steve pretends to like it, and the second time he chastises Ned and demands that next time he whisper his idea in Steve’s ear so he can say it in front of the reporter, Jane (Cate Blanchett). Ned goes with it until it gets to this great scene where they’re underwater in scuba gear, and Ned asks Steve if he can call him dad. Steve quickly suggests a different nickname, “Stevesie.”

LG: And I like that it’s in scuba gear that obscures their faces and lets Wilson express his pain through his voice, his eyes and body language, and then the camera drifts away in a very expressive shot.

MO:  You talked about how Steve’s supposed to promote individuality while collecting all of these weird and wonderful misfits on his crew.

LG: That’s right, he doesn’t just do this to Ned, he has an entire crew of people to bully around. The crew of the Belafonte is like this big, dysfunctional version of the Enterprise.

MO: They’re also like a surrogate family that could fall apart at any moment, because they’re working at the whims of a very inconsiderate man. There’s Anne-Marie (Robyn Cohen), the script girl who’s casually topless, which seems to get no attention from anyone.

LG: It is Europe! But what I love about that character is that she’s kind of like the bratty yet very responsible sister, the only one who will tell Steve that his plans are going to get them hurt. Something I noticed is a dichotomy between the old and young in the crew. The young include Anne-Marie and Pelé (Seu Jorge), but then there’s the old, who in the documentary-within-the-film, are given ages that are way off. No way that Klaus (Willem Dafoe), Steve’s eternally loyal German second-in-command, is 45. Nor is the sound guy in his 40s. This is another part of Steve’s control over his world: he’s is living in the past, and not acknowledging their ageing he gets to avoid acknowledging his own. There’s a sense that these guys were once big (this is a world where oceanography and documentaries are big). In the 80s and 90s, they were big enough to have merchandising in the form of Adidas endorsements, action figures and pinball machines. But that’s halted. Steve admits, “I haven’t been at my best this past decade.”

MO: To which his estranged wife Eleanor (Anjelica Huston) plainly says, “That’s true.” It’s interesting considering Bill Murray’s background: onetime comic megastar who, in the 90s, started appearing in low-rent movies before Wes Anderson revitalized his career.

LG: And it’s easy to be on Eleanor’s side, because as they say, she’s the brains of the outfit. There’s a montage where we see everyone doing their job, and Eleanor’s crossing off things that they have planned that are too impractical, like “Skydiving into a volcano.”

MO: One of the interesting things about this movie is that it’s only Wes Anderson’s fourth movie, when he was in his 30s, yet it’s about middle-aged failure. It’s almost like he’s making a movie about not only what he could turn into, but what he could turn into soon enough following these massive successes.

LG: I don’t know how much he intended it, but there is a very meta angle to that.

MO: Owen Wilson is still there in a major role, but it’s interesting that he’s gone as the co-screenwriter in a film in which a man loses his right-hand man in the beginning. The other interesting thing is that there’s a concern about losing your touch by fakery. Steve is clearly affected by Esteban’s death, but he didn’t capture it on camera, so he restages it. That’s become a regular part of his movies, fakery, but here’s a point where it reaches its most egregious. He knows he doesn’t have it anymore, so he’s just going to fake it. And this is a point in Anderson’s career where some felt that it was a lot of fakery and not enough heart (which is absurd, but whatever).

LG: And there’s a classic Wes Anderson thing of people using fantasy to insulate themselves from the real world. Steve is dealing with tough stuff, so he uses the fact that he’s in a film to shield himself. Any time he starts to feel something, he asks if it’s being caught on film. That, for me, is him pushing away something real. That might have turned people off, too. There is a sense of remove, and Bill Murray’s performance is very minimalistic. At first glance, it seems like he’s not doing much, but he’s actually doing a lot. There are little tonalities that are very important. There’s this one moment near the end where he’s reading a letter he wrote to Ned many years ago, and the way he emphasizes, “I remember your mother…” is very subtle, pointed, and effective.

MO: Not just in emotional ways, because this is one of Anderson’s saddest movies, but Murray is also really funny in this. His timing in this is great. I love in the opening scene where he’s being interviewed by the press about his latest film, and his pauses for every answer are priceless. “What would be the scientific purpose of killing the shark?” (long pause, then very matter of fact) “Revenge.”

LG: I also love the autograph scene, where an older fan has around 20 posters that he wants Steve to sign (based on a real event Anderson saw Murray go through). After so many signatures, he just says, “Just sign the rest yourself.”

MO: To be fair to Steve, at that point, I might lose my patience as well.

LG: Let’s talk about the music. Every Wes Anderson film is somewhat anchored by one particular musician or style: British Invasion in Rushmore, mainly varying kinds of folk for The Royal Tenenbaums, etc. Here, it’s anchored by David Bowie songs, but not just the originals. Seu Jorge’s crew member plays acoustic David Bowie covers in Portuguese, and they’re wonderful. Bowie even prefers some of them to the studio versions.

MO: It’s interesting how he uses Bowie for key emotional scenes. The use of “Life on Mars?” when Steve first meets Ned, and later on the use of Seu Jorge’s version when Ned first realizes how awful Steve can be, it’s a terrific emotional standpoint.

LG: I love the use of the “Space Oddity” countdown by Jorge as a group of pirates arrive on the Belafonte in a really interesting shot as they emerge from the fog. And Anderson does have a proper rock star doing his music. This is the last score Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo did for Anderson, and the best. I hope they’ll work together again today.

MO: Now, what do you think is the major difference between Steve and his rival, Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum)? It’s interesting how there’s a bit of an Indiana Jones/Belloq thing, where neither of them are necessarily great guys, but one of them is our guy.

LG: Hennessey is the more successful one. He’s just been made a knight in Portugal! I want to become a knight in Portugal!

MO: Hennessey is much more confident than Steve, but he’s also much slimier. Steve, at least, you know where you stand with him. Goldblum pretends he doesn’t hate you.

LG: He’s also a character who isn’t a complete villain, which is something about Wes Anderson films that I love. No matter what, there’s always a moment of empathy. Even with the Jaguar shark.

MO: Yeah. It’s funny when Hennessey is kidnapped and the pirates sink his ship, but it’s also moving when they do rescue him. He does seem genuinely a little touched that Steve took the time, because he knows Steve doesn’t like him.

LG: Yeah. The pirates killed his crew, and more hurtful to him, made soup out of his research turtles. I don’t know why but the way that line is delivered, it always registers to me like they might as well have been cannibals. The character relationships in this film are very interesting. Dafoe plays Klaus beautifully against type, more childish than scary. He’s competing with Ned to have Steve as his father figure, despite the fact that they’re clearly about the same age. And the reporter, Jane, has a difficult thing with Steve, who fancies himself as a bit of a stud and hits on her, but she’s not having it. But she develops a romance with Ned. So we gotta a a weird love triangle with a father figure/son fighting over the same woman.

MO: There’s a lot of stuff with father figures. Ned has a new father figure for the first time in his life, then finds out that he’s not a very nice man. Steve never wanted to be a father because he hates fathers, which implies something painful in his past. Jane finds a surrogate father for her child in Ned after the real father essentially abandons it. And Klaus sees Steve and Esteban as father figures.

LG: Wes Anderson maintains that he and his parents have wonderful relationships, but it’s much more interesting to write bad dads. There’s actually an ongoing art instillation at Spoke Art in San Francisco covering his work that was even titled “Bad Dads.” It’s a common trope in his work that also links him to Spielberg in a lot of ways.

MO: There’s a good dad in Rushmore in Seymour Cassel’s character, but they’re very rare.

LG: I’d like to believe that’s what his dad is really like. One of the things that still doesn’t 100% work for me is the implication that Steve has faked the death of Esteban, which I think the film plays with a little too long. There are a few moments that imply that Esteban is still alive somewhere.

MO: I didn’t think that. I thought it was more a thing where he’s taking advantage of his friend’s death.

LG: Eleanor says at one point that she doesn’t want be around because one is already dead, and it’s played as if he forgot or doesn't know what she’s talking about.

MO: Yeah, no, I didn’t get that at all. For me, Esteban is conclusively dead throughout, he just restaged it because he didn’t get it on camera and that’s kind of the person he’s become.

LG: It’s one of the lingering things that doesn’t 100% work for me.

MO: There are a few things that don’t work 100% for me. It’s odd, because there aren’t too many scenes that feel like they’re not there for a reason, but this film feels a bit flabbier compared to Anderson’s previous work. It doesn't move quite as well.

LG: For me it moves very well, but I understand, it does stop for whimsy a lot.

MO: An example would be the scene where Steve points out the radios they have in their headsets. It’s a funny bit, but it’s like, “We’re gonna stop now for a joke.”

LG: For me, it’s a transition to another scene, but I understand how you might think that.

MO: It’s an awkward transition for me. There’s a handful of those. And I think Anderson has talked about this, but the shootout with the pirates is not terribly well staged. I feel like he’s trying to go for chaos and clumsiness, but accidentally makes it more trouble than it’s worth.

LG: “John Woo I ain’t,” I believe was his quote. I actually like that scene. There’s a very handmade aspect to it. Like it was made by a bunch of energetic kids who just went out and grabbed some shots. It’s a cute action scene. I also love the gag where Bill Murray uses the unpaid interns for cover.

MO: That is funny, it’s just the directing of that scene is a bit clumsier than it’s supposed to be for me.

LG: I kind of felt it was going for clumsy.

MO: It is, but the execution is off.

LG: The weird moment where they pause for the Northern Lights does bother me.

MO:…yeah, I don’t know what that’s there for.

LG: I feel it's a "tide has turned and nature is with us" thing, it's just awkwardly done.

MO: Hmm. Maybe.

LG: It’s also one of his most overtly New Wave films – oodles of jump cuts, bright, saturated colors denote this as a “movie-movie” in a very New Wave way and when Ned dies at the end, there’s flashes of red and white frames that feel straight out of a late 60s Godard film.

MO: Not just that, but it’s at a point where Steve has come to terms with being a bad father and is trying to rectify that. It comes through on the raid in the pirates’ compound, and he tells Klaus how much he means to him, and he apologizes to Ned. Ned has become a full member of Team Zissou, and he’s extended the olive branch to Klaus, effectively becoming a surrogate brother. So much of this film is about not taking for granted the things that really matter, because they could be gone at any point, and Steve connects with Ned just as he loses him. There’s this great montage of Ned’s life flashing before his eyes as he dies in the helicopter crash. And that scene is shocking, but it’s not out of nowhere, because they do mention how the helicopter wasn’t in great shape earlier.

LG: And there’s a running gag with Klaus where he’s supposed to be the guy who fixes things but never does, and just as Klaus becomes friends with Ned, he loses him because he didn’t fix the thing. There’s two things I thought about in that scene. First, there’s a moment where Jane sends him a letter to Ned’s bunk before he leaves, and for me, I feel like that’s a marriage proposal, or an invitation to be the father to her child.

MO: Oh, you know what, that sounds about right. And this is the death that Steve doesn’t exploit, and he puts it in his film respectably, and he’s changed at a terrible cost. It’s brought back emotional honesty in his work.

LG: And I love the ending, the happy 80s Buckaroo Banzai homage where, out of the ashes, a new crew has emerged to go on new, presumably happier adventures together.

MO: Here’s the thing: we talk about all of the great David Bowie songs in this, including “Queen Bitch” over the end credits with the Buckaroo Banzai homage, but my favorite use of music in this film isn’t a Bowie song. It’s the use of the Zombies’ “The Way I Feel Inside” during Ned’s funeral. That’s a moment that’s almost as moving as “The Fairest of the Seasons” for me.

LG: That one gets me every time. There’s a really interesting touch in that ending, though, where as they’re walking to “Queen Bitch,” as they finally board the ship, Ned, despite being dead, is on top of the ship as a spirit of Team Zissou. That’s a very unusual, borderline surrealistic touch. You might not notice it the first time.

MO: I didn’t notice it until this time. That’s stuck in right at the end there. I love how accepting this film is. Even Bud Cort, the prototypical Wes Anderson character in Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude, plays a bond company stooge who’s in Steve’s corner, not just a bond company stooge. “No bond company stooge would stick his neck out like that.” And everyone who’s still alive is accepted into this big family when they finally see the jaguar shark. It’s wonderful how he uses that great anamorphic framing in a small space there to get it more intimate, to use density to imply togetherness.

LG: I know when he was making the film, he wasn’t always very clear what that jaguar shark scene meant to him. I think, it is a very interesting scene. A lot of people put Moby Dick stuff on it, because of surface comparisons, but that never really held a lot of water for me.

MO: I think it is there, in that it’s a revenge story where our Ahab realizes, as Matt Zoller Seitz suggested, killing his friend was “nothing personal.” Death comes for us.

LG: I don’t think of it as “nothing personal,” I think of it as Steve staring death in the face and seeing it as something big and awe-inspiring, which is kind of what he probably got into this business for in the first place. The world is so big, and beautiful and strange and more fascinating than we think.

MO: And uncontrollable. He’s tried to control nature in his documentaries, and now he’s accepted that he can’t, and here comes the most moving moment he’ll ever be able to capture. He’s encountered this thing that’s responsible for the death of one friend and tangentially responsible for the death of his son, since they died while searching for it, and he’s able to just let it wash over him.

LG: He lost his spiritual brother and spiritual son.

MO: It’s maybe not the cleanest thing Anderson has ever done –

LG: I don’t think it needs to be. Sometimes it’s better to be messy.

MO: Sometimes it’s messy to a fault, but it’s also messy to wonderful degrees, and it’s one of his most thematically interesting and adventurous films, which is why I’m glad it has found a cult following in the years since. Its most passionate defenders stuck by it.

LG: It’s one that’s gotten better on repeat viewings. All the stuff that bothered me fell away, and all of the stuff I was missing popped up

MO: It’s struck me as much richer on each repeat viewing.

LOREN'S GRADE: A-
MAX'S GRADE: A-

That concludes our discussion of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, if you enjoyed it, feel free to leave a comment below. You can also follow Screen Vistas on Facebook by clicking here.

Roundtable Directory:  
Bottle Rocket (short and feature)
Rushmore
The Royal Tenenbaums
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissiou
Hotel Chevalier / Darjeeling Limited
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Moonrise Kingdom
Shorts and Commercials
The Grand Budapest Hotel

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG

At the end of the day, I'm not sure Peter Jackson understands how to adapt The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien's brisk children's book to which Lord of the Rings was a sequel. Jackson seems to feel that because both books are from the same author and are set in the same universe that they can simply be snapped together with some help from the Rings appendices. But the fact remains that The Hobbit is a fundamentally different work meant for a completely different audience and it's just not an epic, no matter how much Jackson wants it to be. So here we have the second in a trilogy of films based on a 120 page book. The first film visibly strained under the weight of serving both as an adaptation and a prequel to an existing, but dispirit franchise. The second film, The Desolation of Smaug, kinda gives up on the book and settles for just being the best Rings prequel it can be, which is for the best, even if as it continues to feel like the film is being upstaged by franchise obligations.

The film picks up with Hobbit pseudo-protagonist Bilbo (Martin Freeman), exiled dwarf king Thorin (Richard Armitage) and his extended entourage as they race to reclaim their homeland from a usurping dragon.  The echoes from the Rings films start to pile up, particularly with Thorin, whom the film carefully paints as our new Aragorn, introduced here at the same inn where we first meet Aragorn in the previous film. The scene stresses that he too is a roguish heir to a lost kingdom who only needs the courage to take charge of his larger destiny. But whereas Aragorn was noble because he never wanted power, it feels like Thorin and co are, at least in part, in it for the money. Indeed there's an assertion that Thorin has a relationship to the Arkenstone (a McGuffin needed for part 3) that Jackson hopes we'll find analogous to and as compelling as the one between Frodo and The Ring. Further mining the Rings films is material from the books appendices designed to give the main quest more urgency by suggesting that the dwarves must defeat Smaug quickly because Sauron is gaining power and might try and recruit him.

The resulting film feels more like a chase movie with ticking clocks and the kind of easily surmountable impossible obstacles we expect in a proper adventure: dark forests, ancient riddles, Ray Harryhousen spiders, politically ambivalent elves, orcs, goblins, shifty rogues and they even manage to squeeze in the titular dragon. On a superficial level, the action is all well directed, and as long as he sticks to action, Jackson has a great skill in extrapolation. He looks at small scenes in the book, like the one where Bilbo helps the dwarves escape from some elves by hiding them in barrels being sent down river and asks with boyish abandon: "what if there was a lock blocking their way and the elves caught them rasing the gate but then orcs attack everyone and it turns into a great three-way chase down river and one guy gets catapulted into the air, lands and rolls over a bunch or orcs in his barrel," and so on and so forth.

These extended scenes are fun without ever feeling as vital as they should, but as soon as he shifts to narrative, the film starts to dull. For instance, that barrel scene is a lot of fun, particularly with the addition of Rings favorite Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and his sidekick Girl Legolas (Evangeline Lilly) opening up a can of whoop-ass on wave after wave of faceless goons, but when they stick around to have a pointless love triangle with one of the dwarves that's all forbidden and junk, it starts to feel just a tad calculated.

If you're wondering where all these additions leave Bilbo and Smaug, the two title characters of the film, the answer is nowhere, the two seem strangely diminished here. Bilbo exists primarily to get the dwarves out of trouble while Gandalf (Ian McKellen) is off doing stuff (with thankfully little assistance from Radagast). As much fun as it is to watch Martin Freeman do stuff, this is sort of preferable to his treatment in the last film, which labored endlessly over his potential importance. That said, it's hardly ideal for him to just blend in with the group of 13, mostly undeveloped, dwarves.

Then there's the eventual encounter with Smaug. All the build up with Sauron kind of turns Smaug into a second-teir villain. Important not for his own villainy so much as his potential usefulness as a future henchman of the real bad guy who belongs to a different trilogy. Furthermore, while Smaug is played with gleeful menace by Benedict Cumberbatch and is given a magnificent entrance, he comes in at a point where the film desperately needs to start thinking about its cliffhanger but instead reaches greedily for just one more action sequence that every audience member knows wont resolve anything, alter the narrative or our perceptions of the characters. It's just another example of what this series needs less of: padding.

It's sad that Jackson feels so adrift. His Lord of the Rings trilogy should have been the beginning of a bold, new chapter of his career as a more manic successor to David Lean, but instead of finding big stories to tell, he seems to think he can take smaller stories and stretch them to epic lengths, first came his gargantuan King Kong remake, now this. He want's length, but he doesn't understand that length requires density. If he wants to continue in this direction, there are other great sci-fi/fantasy books to adapt and fantastic historical epics he could be doing (Napoleon, Musashi Miyamoto), or he could going back to his horror roots or do something completely new. Instead he's stuck in a rut of faux-epics, trying to stuff his past triumphs into ill-fitting forms.

Grade: B-

TREKKIN' IT: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK

The problem with franchise film making is that it seems to require a certain amount of status-quo. No matter how dramatic it would be, you can't kill Iron Man because the studio has a five picture deal. But when freed from these restraints really interesting things can happen. As it entered production, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan looked like it might be the last Trek film. Certainly, the last with Leonard Nimoy who had grown tired of his role in a franchise that frankly hadn't been serving him well. But then two things happened. Firstly, he started to enjoy making Wrath which gave him a fantastic death scene that was the whole thematic crux of the film, and secondly Wrath of Khan ended up making more money then expected. A third film was now in the cards, but Spock was dead. The franchise could have moved forward and dealt with the consequences of this major dramatic event in a thoughtful manner, but it would also mean risk losing part of what made the franchise profitable. The laws of status-quo demand Spock’s return.

As a result, we got Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Talk about putting a spoiler in the title. No money will be awarded to anyone who guesses whether or not they find him. Any film that starts from this premise is bound to disappoint. It's not a cynical film by any means, but it exists as a rote rebuke of everything the previous film was about.  Spock's self sacrifice was meant to teach Kirk that he couldn’t cheat death...except now he can, kinda sorta.

Just Kidding: The Movie starts by rewinding back to the end of Wrath, and reminding us that just before Spock died, he mind melded with Dr. McCoy (Deforest Kelley). After the Enterprise returns to Earth, Admiral Kirk (William Shatner) is informed by Spock's father (the wonderful Mark Leonard) that the mind meld transferred Spock's soul into McCoy's body. If Kirk can just bring McCoy and Spock's body to Vulcan, then Spock could be revived with an ancient ritual. The Vulcan's have always had some psychic powers, but it's a bit silly when they go from being studious logicians to bringing people back from the dead with magic.

Having McCoy, all Kirk needs is Spock's body which is on the Genesis Planet created at the end of the last film. It's far too simple a goal for this film so we get a couple perfunctory roadblocks such as Starfleet brass decommissioning the Enterprise and a group of Klingon's extremist's, lead by Christopher Lloyd for some reason, who are trying to get their hands on the Genesis Device which no longer exists.

None of this works as well as it should. Having Leonard Nimoy direct the film may have been a good way to keep him around but it serves the film poorly. He would go on to direct a much better Star Trek film in the future, but his direction here aims for somber but misses the mark and becomes flat and ordinary. Ultimately he’s serving too many masters. Nimoy wants to give Spock’s death the proper weight but is also caught up in the idea of bringing him back and too distracted by exploring the further implications of the Genesis Device. Though some of the blame should fall on screenwriter/producer Harve Bennett, Nimoy’s inability to connect all these ideas coherently only exacerbates the thinness of the film.

The Genesis angle does provide the film with its best stuff. We get Savvak (recast with Robin Curtis for money reasons) and Kirk's son David (Merrit Butrick) exploring the Genesis planet. We learn that David took some unethical shortcuts in creating the device that are now causing the planet to rapidly destabilize. They also find Spock, his body reanimated by the planet's radiation or something. Not only has his body been reanimated, he's also been rejuvenated into a rapidly aging young boy who's consciousness is tied to the planet. It doesn't make a lick of sense, but at least it’s engaging.

This idea of Spock’s body being torn up by the planet mirrors the idea of McCoy's mind being overloaded by the added burden of Spock's consciousness, but neither idea really develops. The McCoy angle is particularly neglected and inconstant, basically boiling down to Kelley slipping into a spotty impression of Nimoy. It scores some laughs to be sure, but as a device, it essentially robs the film of both Spock and McCoy, making the film feeling somewhat under populated.

But we still have Kirk and the rest of the crew who do an admirable job filling in for some fluffy heist sequences where the crew plot to steal the Enterprise back. These sequences play heavily on the star power of the actors and is the first time in the franchise where all the supporting characters have something to do (except Checkov, poor guy). With these scenes we also get some of the aging theme that's been present in the previous films. We learn that the reason that reason the Enterprise has been decommissioned is to make room for a younger crew on a new, experimental ship, The Excelsior. None of this ever rises above escapist fantasy about how these borderline senior citizens are willing to sacrifice their carriers to save their friend and go on one, last adventure. It’s heartwarming but it's also tremendously easy.

The film tries to darken itself up towards the end when those pesky, shoehorned Klingons show up for one of those forgettable, climactic fist fights avoided by films with better sense. (Spoilers) As Kirk kicks the Klingon captain off a cliff he shouts out, in classic Shatner-esque fashion: "I have had enough of you," a sentiment which unfortunately sums up the entire scene. In the lead up, David sacrifices himself so the franchise can avoid dealing with Kirk having a son, and in the film's most effective moment, Kirk destroys the Enterprise. Perhaps it's personal bias, but seeing serious harm done to any incarnation of the Enterprise always seems to work dramatically, it's the only "character" in this franchise that can be killed and replaced without dedicating an entire film to it. (End Spoilers)

Search for Spock is a mixed bag of a film, but it is enjoyable. It exists primarily to retcon large parts of what is arguably the franchises best film. It’s also wafer thin, and full of easy, downright lazy choices, but it still holds together, largely due to the charisma of the cast. As cynical as it looks on paper, it does have some genuine heart to it. It’s a lesser Trek, but it’s the best of the lesser Trek’s.

Grade: C+

Trekkin' It directory:
The Motion Picture
Space Seed / The Wrath of Khan
The Search for Spock
The Voyage Home
The Final Frontier
The Undiscovered Country

Generations
First Contact
Insurrection
Nemesis

Star Trek '09
Into Darkness (spoiler analysis) 

DEL TORO ROUNDTABLE: PACIFIC RIM

Pacific Rim is the new film by avid monster geek, Guillermo Del Toro. This is his first film in five years and followed a series of projects fell apart before production could begin. I'm Loren Greenblatt, and joining me is Max O'Connell of The Film Temple.

Max O’Connell: We've been eagerly awaiting Pacific Rim, not in small part because we’re big fans of Del Toro. I have a personal connection because I’ve been a Godzilla fan since I was about 3. It was my first movie love, so seeing Del Toro effectively do a Godzilla movie just made me happy.

Loren Greenblatt: When I was 4, I saw Jurassic Park, and during the showing, I stood up on my chair and said, “I wanna do that!” I decided I wanted to make movies. I feel that there are kids walking out of a theatre showing Pacific Rim who are making the same decision. This movie is an absolute joy.

MO: Basic plot: in the near future a bunch of giant monsters, called Kaiju (named for the Japanese film genre that gave us Godzilla) from another dimension come through a crack in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and start attacking. After trying more traditional methods, humanity builds a bunch of giant, human piloted robots called Jaegers, which is German for “hunter,” to fight the Kaiju. But twenty years into the program, the war is taking a turn for the worse and the Jaeger program is being shut down in favor of building a wall. This turns out to be a bad idea, and the leader of the program, the awesomely-named Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba of Luther fame) brings in a former Jaeger pilot Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) to be a final member of the human resistance.

LG: This isn't the kind of film we normally get in America, certainly not in live-action and at this budget level. The closest equivalent we have in recent cinema are Micheal Bay's awful Transformers movies. All these films are primarily concerned with giant monsters smashing up cities. The difference between Bay's films and Pacific Rim is that Guillermo Del Toro understands that an action movie’s success doesn’t depend on explosions, but on us caring about the people in those explosions. It’s not enough that we have a person piloting the Jaeger- we have two, because according to the film’s pseudoscience, one pilot isn’t enough to handle the neural load that comes with having your mind and movements connected to a giant robot. A jaeger requires two pilots liked through their memories. It's not one chosen person against the world, suddenly it becomes about teamwork, can these people overcome tension between them to work together. It's probably no coincidence that these Jaeger pilots tend to be family members, it makes thematic sense and it ups the stakes. Like we see In the film’s prologue, where Raleigh and his brother take Gipsy Danger, an American Jaeger, on an ill fated mission that end's the brother's death.

MO: He quits, and five years later, Pentecost brings him back. Raleigh gets to pick whichever co-pilot he wants, but the only one he really forms a connection with is Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi of Babel), who has her own past trauma with the Kaiju.

LG: After the first couple of giant monster battles, which really are quite wonderful, the film settles down and goes to the Jaeger complex in Hong Kong, dubbed The Shatterdome, and it turns into a bit of a drama about human cooperation in the face of outrageous adversity. I like that this is a reasonably multicultural group saving the world- we get a Russian team, a Chinese team, an Australian team, a British black guy running the program, and a final team made up of one American and one Japanese woman. It’s not just a bunch of Americans saving the world (but mostly New York) from certain doom. It’s a very universal-minded movie.

MO: There was a piece in The Dissolve this week by Tasha Robinson that argued that the film’s success was partly based in the fact that it doesn’t invoke 9/11, and that it tries to make it more universal.

LG: Not that it can't be done in a film like this. The original Godzilla very liberally quotes WWII imagery, like the destruction of Hiroshima and the firebombing of Tokyo, that would have been very fresh in the minds of Japanese audiences and arguably more traumatic. But we've been getting a lot of 9/11 imagery this Summer and I'm glad that Del Toro didn't resort to it here, and Robinson is right, the lack of that imagery with its coddled, American context fits in to Del Toro's universalist mindset. It's one of the key things this film gets from being directed by a non-American. Unlike similar films, we don't have a jingoistic military fighting against a dehumanized group of “others,” this is a film about humanity saving humanity.

MO: I also love that while the main appeal of the film is the brawny “giant robots fight sea monsters” angle, two of the most compelling and helpful people in the group are a pair of scientists.

LG: Charlie Day from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is sort of their version of Jeff Goldblum. He’s an excitable, he has Kaiju tattoos and fancies himself a rock-star scientist but he’s very nerdy and silly.

MO: He’s kind of the Guillermo Del Toro stand-in. He’s made entirely of boyish enthusiasm, and Day is very good in this role, credibly spitting out the pseudoscientific dialogue in a rapid-fire pace while still serving as a pretty great source of comic relief. And on the other hand, we have Burn Gorman as the other scientist, Herman, who’s much more button-down. It’s kind of a battle between an intuitive, experimental scientist and one who believes almost solely in testing numbers. So we’ve talked a little bit about how we actually care about the characters in the explosions…but what about those explosions?

LG: Oh my god, those explosions are wonderful! Shooting and framing these kinds of battles is very difficult. It’s difficult when you have these large things fighting each other to capture everything and still convey a sense of scale. If you’re too close, you can’t see anything. If you’re too far away, we don’t get the size. Michael Bay showed us how not to do it. Del Toro finds a very nice middle-ground where it feels almost like these are giant sporting events. And the creatures are a lot of fun- every Kaiju is a little different, they come in different sizes and have different abilities. The Jaegers themselves are full of these wonderful gadgets, some have three arms, some have swords, etc. All this keeps the fights from being repetitive There’s always something else going on, and we feel like the stakes are being raised with each battle, which is essential.

MO: There’s a sense of levels to everything, which was a problem with, say, the Chicago sequence in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which is just an hour of carnage. We don’t feel exhausted at the end here because there is a gradual build. Part of that is the size of the machines and monsters, part is Del Toro’s natural gifts with pacing. I’ve heard some people complain that the fights are all staged in the rain at night, which I guess I can understand, but they all look great. He’s able to use some frenetic editing when it’s called for, but we have a sense of where everything is, we can tell what’s going on…for almost every fight, I know exactly where every character is in relation to each other, whether it’s established through photography or through cross-cutting. That sounds simple, but so many blockbusters forget basics of spatial dynamics. And that’s what makes everything so exciting, not just the robots with swords. Though, come on, my inner 9-year-old was about to have a joyful heart attack at that sword. But then there’s the look of this: the way it’s composed, the way colors blend together in an impressionistic blur. It’s a beautiful film.

LG: And there’s a sense of humor in the fights when there needs to be. Del Toro is great with those cartoonish moments in the middle of his fights, like the Wile E. Coyote shot in Blade II. Not to spoil anything, but there's a wonderful moment involving a Newton’s Cradle (the clicking metallic balls that go back and forth when you hit one) and another involving a football stadium. I almost feel like we’re underselling it by saying that the fights are staged competently. It's almost a commentary on how badly many action scenes are shot that we are too often impressed with 'competently shot, ' but this goes beyond that. There’s a lot going on in these fights to make them work. There's a lot things going on with the mismatching of the abilities of the different Kaiju and Jaegers and then on the inside of the machines- Raleigh and Mako need to link their memories in order to pilot them. And Mako has a similar past trauma, so there’s a lot of tension in whether or not she’ll be able to hack it. It’s a little bit of a Top Gun set-up.

MO: It sort of is, though that’s subverted. This is kind of a regular thing with fighter-pilot movies, where the cocky fighter-pilot gets someone killed, but by the end he saves the day, so it’s no big deal. Del Toro’s not interested in celebrating the macho hero. It’s actually though shared experiences and understanding each other that these people can fight together.

LG: I also love how detailed this film is. This isn’t a film bound by realism, it isn’t trying to be a realistic Godzilla movie. But it does imagine what it might be like if a society had to deal with these attacks for twenty plus years. In the beginning of the film, we see the government deciding to abandon the Jaeger program and build a giant wall. Now I’m not going to read into it too much, but I do think there’s some sly humor here. We have a Mexican director making a thing about a wall to keeps aliens out. It’s a cute, clever little jab at how ineffectual that strategy is and at how alien invasion movies tend to use their aliens as stand-ins for “foreigners”.

MO: Oh, that’s clever. I didn’t notice that.

LG: And the biggest scene dealing with it is set in Alaska, a very Republican state. Again, don’t read into it, it’s just a joke. But it is the kind of detail that sets this film apart. Any other movie would probably not even think of something like this, let alone would it find the time to show the wall being built or give a sense of what it’s like building it. But Del Toro does. We see how dangerous it is and it does a wonderful job of showing the cost of living under this kind of a constant threat. In one short scene, we get the sense that economies have tumbled, and that society has had to rebuild itself in new and strange ways. But it isn’t a movie that wallows in despair. Instead, it finds new questions to answer and new details to dazzle us. I don’t know that too many people wondered what happens to giant monsters after they die, but we get a pretty good answer here. We get cites built around their skeletons, which is awesome, and we get to learn what the government does with the Kaiju organs and brains for experiments, not to mention what a black market dealer like Hannibal Chau (played wonderfully by Ron Perlman) does with them. They explain, at least in a very general way, how the new Jaegers work differently from old ones, and how some are analog where others are digital and some are nuclear powered. It’s all gobbledygook, but it’s done with such care that we believe it. It’s real gobbledygook. The same thing goes for the Kaiju who have a well thought out biology.There’s no detail of this world that Del Toro and screenwriter Travis Beacham didn’t think of.

MO: I like that we get a sense of how the Kaijus do work. Del Toro believes that monsters are beautiful creatures, and they are here. But we also get a complicated view of monsters. (Spoilers) Where past Del Toro films viewed monsters as animals rather than evil creatures, here they’re perhaps evil, but they’re not just dumb animals. There’s a method to their destruction that’s perhaps not too complicated, but there’s an intelligence there. It’s something that could have been explored more, but we get enough here. If we got a sequel, we’d probably see more. There’s a little bit more to the monsters than usual.

LG: It’s kind of ridiculous to assume that creatures this large, with equally large brains, are stupid. Yes, I know that brain's don't necessarily work that way, but this is sci-fi logic.

MO: We also get a sense of being in the Jaeger experience. When Mako and Raleigh first mind-link (it’s called drifting here), there’s a wonderful blur of colors as we see some of their past experiences in a blue light that reminded me of Minority Report. It highlights how important it is to share past experiences with each other, and it’s beautiful just to behold. And I also love what happens when Mako can’t handle her past trauma, which her first mind-link makes her re-experience. It turns out that her family was killed in a Kaiju attack when she was a little girl, and we her get lost in that memory. It’s a little bit like Del Toro’s recreation of a past experience in Hellboy, and it’s a lot like how Christopher Walken sees the past in David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone, which Del Toro is a huge fan of. We’re placed inside a memory, and Raleigh can observe, but he can’t change it, and he can’t convince Mako that it isn’t real. This is problematic because she’s connected to the Jaeger, and when she gets scared, the giant killer machine responds to her emotions. This was my favorite scene in the film- I was genuinely terrified not only by what she might do, but by the memory itself, which is like the “raptors in the kitchen” scene in Jurassic Park blown up to gigantic scale. And there’s a beautiful image of her carrying a little red shoe that’s wonderful. (End spoilers)

LG: The thing about this film is that it does outdo at least one aspect of the Godzilla series. You’ve seen more of those movies than I have, but I've never cared about the humans in those movies except for in the original. Especially if it’s the 1998 version. I don’t go to these movies for humans doing human things. I go for monsters smashing things. And it’s very interesting that in this, I do care about the human people doing human things. It really makes the movie. Some of the human drama is a bit clichéd, which is often true of Del Toro’s American films, but he does it so earnestly that it doesn’t really matter.

MO: Yeah, the fact that we get an Independence Day speech from Idris Elba or a hoary father-son story from the Australian characters might be clichéd, but it’s a fun cliché, damn it! It’s handled rather well. I was initially a little let down that the actual emotional arc with our protagonist, Raleigh, and our other lead, Mako, is solved about halfway or two-thirds of the way through when they are able to establish a mind-link. It’s a bit messy, structurally, I’ll admit. But at the same time, it kind of seems like they’re leads in name only. It’s more of an ensemble piece, because the other characters’ arcs take over after that. We get to see the Australian father-son duo (Max Martini and Robert Kazinsky, both great) work out their relationship.

LG: He’s a cocky alpha-male shithead, and the father admits that he loves him but doesn’t know whether he needs “a hug or a kick in the ass”. Them learning to work with others and admit their love for each other is a cliché, but it’s rather effective.

MO: I was even more involved in the relationship between Charlie Day and Burn Gorman as the diametrically-opposed scientists who find a way to blend their approaches- hard science with intuition- which ends up playing a major part in saving the day. I love where Idris Elba’s character winds up going, which ends up playing to Del Toro’s pet theme of self-sacrifice. There is more going on in terms of character than people gave it credit. It’s kind of like Jurassic Park: not as rich with character as some of its creators’ past blockbusters, but it’s more complicated than it looks on the surface.

LG: The characters in Jurassic Park weren’t incredibly deep, but there is more going on intellectually than people gave it credit.

MO: Del Toro did cut out about an hour of character material. He said that we can’t pretend this is Ibsen with monsters and giant robots. We get sketches, and that’s all we really need.

LG: I think it's kind of amazing that the movie finds time to do as much as it does and does it in only 2 hours. That’s short for most blockbusters these days, which are bloated all the way to 2 ½ hours. It’s OK to have a long one when it’s deserved, but it’s getting automatic. This doesn’t stick around too long. It gets in, does what it’s doing, and gets out. It’s very lean, and it moves well.

MO: It moved so well, and it’s made with such boyish enthusiasm that it made me not care about the few problems I did have with it, whether it’s the structural problems with the protagonists, or the quasi-romance between Raleigh and Mako. It’s cute in the beginning, especially in a fight scene they have that determines how perfect they are for each other for a mind-link. It’s adorable.

LG: And (spoilers) the movie doesn’t force a romance on these characters. It could go there at some point, but at this point at the end of the world, it’s about them working together, not learning to fall in bed together.

MO: That helps Mako stand out as more than just a guy-accessory, which is what Del Toro wanted to do. And it does serve the film’s central theme of teamwork by not having them fall in bed together. But my issue is that the romance is built up, and at the end, it looks like they’re going to have that moment to admit their love and kiss, but it doesn’t really go there. It felt to me like Del Toro was a little too afraid of making her a guy accessory that he kind of defeated what was left of their emotional arc.

LG: But their relationship at that point has transcended “will they or won’t they”. They’re co-combatants, they’re siblings in arms, and they’re literally in each other’s minds. Remember that this film associates the co-pilot relationship with family roles. I'm not saying that they can't go there in a future movie, but not going there in this film is a very deliberate statement on Del Toro's part.

MO: I agree that it works intellectually and thematically. It serves the film’s key theme of learning to work together and trust each other. But by the end it sacrifices a bit of an emotional peak. (end spoilers)

LG: But we squeeze a lot more emotion out of this movie than I thought was possible.

MO: Yeah, this is really just a minor qualm. The film did make me forget most of my complaints. All but one really. There’s one teeny-tiny one that we can’t overlook. Almost every performance in this film is wonderful- Perlman is fun, Day and Gorman make a great comic-relief/heart of the film, Elba gives the gravitas, Kikuchi is great. Charlie Hunnam…

LG:…he’s…not the worst actor in the world. I haven’t seen him in anything else before, but he's not great here. He’s particularly deadly when asked to narrate.

MO: The exposition in the beginning of the film works rather well, considering that they have to get a lot of information out at once, because it’s played with a bunch of monsters attacking the world. The only problem is his narration, which is deadening. And it’s not just because he’s a British actor doing a terrible, terrible American accent. That’s not the issue. He has no charm or charisma in this thing. The best thing I can say about this performance is that he’s not Sam Worthington. He’s boring, but he doesn’t look sleepy the whole time.

LG: He’s much better than Sam Worthington, but we all are.

MO: We needed a light up in the smile kind of guy. Chris Pine was busy with Star Trek Into Darkness, but if we could just get a guy with that kind of charm we’d be fine. Some of my friends complained that it’s not the most interesting character anyway, which is true. Almost by default, he’s the least interesting character.

LG: I love Pine, but I don't think his brand of cockiness would fit here. The film almost needs a quieter character to contrast all the loudness of everything else. We need stoic and haunted isn’t up to the task. It’s very unusual for Del Toro to cast someone so bland in the lead. I know he’s wanted to work with Hunnam for a while, but it doesn’t work.

MO: I’ve seen him in a few other things. I only saw the pilot of Sons of Anarchy, which I thought he was fine in, but again, not the most interesting character in the show. And I remember liking him in Cold Mountain, but it’s been years since I’ve seen it. I don’t know what happened. He didn’t work here.

LG: But that’s about the worst thing I can say about this movie. Hopefully, maybe, by the skin of their teeth, we’ll get enough to see a sequel.

MO: I think this thing is going to be a success, I think there will be a word-of-mouth for it that might make it stick around. A lot of people are walking out of this thing thrilled.

LG: Kids are going to love this.

MO: They will, and I think there is more to chew on than people are giving it credit. It’s not as rich as, say, Hellboy II or obviously Pan’s Labyrinth, but it’s not intellectually bankrupt. Most of all, though, it’s an absolute blast. I had a reaction of pure childlike joy.

LG: In a summer of heavy blockbusters trying to be dark and serious, this is a movie that really wants to entertain to the fullest extent possible. It's a mega-budget film without cynicism or pretension and that’s becoming increasingly rare. 

Loren's Grade: Now, I’m of two minds when grading this film. If I were reviewing this on its own without the context of the Roundtable, I’d give it an A because it’s a top-notch summer blockbuster, easily the best tentpole I'm likely to see this year.  But in the context of his other films, I’d give it a B. I’ll split the difference and give it a high B+.

Max's Grade: I’m giving it a pretty unreserved A-. It’s the most joyful experience I’ve had in a theater in I don’t know how long. Go see this fucking thing!
Roundtable Directory:
Geometria
Cronos
Mimic (director's cut)
The Devil's Backbone
Blade II
Hellboy (director's cut)
Pan's Labyrinth
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Unmade Del Toro
Pacific Rim

STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS

J.J. Abrams's first Star Trek film was one of the more ingenious reboots ever pulled off.  A splendid, efficient blockbuster that somehow found a way to give all seven principal cast members something important to do. Sure it lacked some of the philosophy and allegory the franchise is known for, but it had a surprising amount of emotional resonance and the same blinding optimism that has always set Trek apart from more dour visions of the future.

Four years later we have the blandly titled sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness, a good film that escapes the "Every Other Trek" curse, but is still lesser than the previous outing. It does manage to inject some of the allegory and philosophizing that the original missed out on, but has traded some of that efficiency and emotional resonance.

By the end of J.J. Abrams's first Star Trek film we saw James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) go from disgraced cadet to captain of the Enterprise in about a day. As Into Darkness opens we realize that perhaps he was promoted too quickly. A survey mission goes awry when Kirk saves Spock (Zachary Quinto) by violating the Prime Directive, that "unbreakable" Trek law that prevents interference with primitive space-cultures. Kirks cocky recklessness results in him being demoted and losing command of the Enterprise.

That is until Starfleet is attacked by former officer turned terrorist John Harrison (Bennidict Comberbach). After the ruble clears, Starfleet gives Kirk back the Enterprise and sends him off on a secret revenge mission to hunt down and kill Harrison, who's hiding out in Klingon space. The "kill" part irks Spock, who feels that Harrison should stand trial, and by simply killing him, Starfleet is throwing out its principles of justice because it's inconvenient to them.

After a series of major twists, the film turns into something of a political thriller, slightly reminiscent of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Just as that film was ostensibly about the political paranoia surrounding the end of the Cold War, Into Darkness is a lot to do with the moral sacrifices America has made during the War on Terror. There are callbacks to other Trek films as well, for a while, it's of interesting how Abrams is remixes bits and bites of the cannon to suit his own needs. Iconic Trek scenes are restaged with some really inventive reversals. This strategy isn't as bold as the reboot, but it never goes for simple rehashing either. It goes a bit too far at times, but it's clear that Abrams is having a lot of fun playing in his decidedly and increasingly alternate Nu-Trek universe.

All this is interspersed with big, loud action scenes that perhaps didn't need to be so big, loud or long. There are some good ones, I was particularly fascinated by the production design of the opening chase which seems to have been inspired by infrared photography, and seeing the Enterprise take a pounding is still good for a few tugs on the heart strings. But there are also a few set pieces that felt a bit airless and give us way too much time to think about those thriller aspects. I am notorious among my friends for never seeing plot-twists coming, but by the end of a big fight scene on the Klingon home world (the name of which, astute Trekkies will note, the film misspelled) I had deduced 75% of what was going to happen. The thriller works as allegory, but less so as a plot in a movie that hangs together.

Abrams's tries to cover this with the films fast pace and the strong chemistry of the cast, and it mostly works. Everyone is as charismatic as they should be and most of the jokes land, even if some cast members feel a bit more shoehorned than last time (no one ever knows what to do with Chekov). Simon Pegg's Scotty is still very likeable, Karl Urban gets more to do as Dr. McCoy. If the film has an emotional heart, it's the tense, but clearly loving relationship between Quinto and Zoë Saldaña's Uhura. This provides the film with a dynamite subplot about the way we choose to deal with our emotions, particularly where tragedy is concerned. It's in these scenes that Into Darkness almost rebottles the magic of the reboot.

In the villain department, Comberbach provides an excellent foil for Kirk, even if his character seems at the mercy of a third act trying very hard to pull off one too many twists. There's a moment near the end, when everything is barreling along at top-speed in typical Abrams fashion, where the film could have slowed down and given us an iconic show-stopper of an ending that would have had us all talking for years. But instead, it just keeps going and going until all the most interesting stuff has either been minimized or undone. Must every blockbuster end with two people hitting each other on top of a green screen set? I know the last film ended like this too, but there it felt like a primal culmination, here it feels forced.

I enjoyed Into Darkness, but notably less so than its predecessor. Good, instead of outstanding. The machine is less well oiled, and is starting to clunk, still more than enough of it works. It feels more like classic Trek, it just needs more finesse and maybe more boldness.

Grade: B

Note: I saw the film in IMAX 3D. About a quarter of the film was shot in the IMAX format which is great, but none of it was shot in 3D which isn't. The quality of the conversion was actually pretty good, but it does lessen the natural majesty that IMAX tends to convey and neither format does anything to enhance the political allegory one bit.