Movies

A couple weeks ago, I watched The Conversation, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman. Really, with just that information, you should be on your way to the video store if you've not already seen this movie. Even if you have, you may want to see it again.

Gene Hackman is a professional eavesdropper, who for obvious reasons is paranoid about his own privacy. If you spent all your time prying into other people's business, you'd be worried too. He is incapable of achieving any intimacy with anyone. Protecting his privacy is his main concern.

Not far behind, is the concern that whatever information he finds will lead to harm for those upon whom he spies. Just as he detaches himself from his private life, he detaches himself from the responsibilities of his work life. He just delivers the tapes; he doesn't care what's on them. Only, he's not as detached as he'd like to be. A job in his past ended poorly, and he tortures himself with the thought that something like that could happen again.

Hackman is brilliant, which is to be expected. His performance makes us wonder if he might not be losing his grip. The conversation in question is pieced together through the film, as he works on the tapes. Gaps are filled in over the course of the film, until we understand with Hackman the context. He tortures himself with the question of whether or not he should fulfill his contract. His state of mind is an uncomfortable place to inhabit, and the audience feels his creeping madness.

Look for Harrison Ford in one of his earlier roles.

A fantastic movie. Four stars out of five.

Star Trek was a well-received movie, rebooting a tired franchise. Some feel that for the monumental task of reviving Star Trek, J.J. Abrams and his movie deserve a bit more praise than they in reality merit. Actually, this new incarnation of the movie is both unnecessary (a point outside the scope of this post) and nonsensical. In short, the movie is bad, though at times enjoyable. Snappy dialogue and special effects serve only to distract the audience from what is a terrible movie.

Now some will say that I am only one of those pedantic Star Trek fans who expects some ponderous, pseudo-intellectual movie and is opposed to having a good time. And to some degree they would be right. I do object to this movie as a Star Trek movie (and find having a good time a particularly over-rated experience). However, I also criticize this movie on some non-Trekkian terms, which I shall address here.

Many have commented on how Nero is a flat villain, basically uninteresting, and this is true. But he is also an inexplicably silly villain. He is, by profession, a miner, and his vessel is a mining vessel. So, why is this mining vessel so well armed that it easily eliminates a Klingon fleet? Someone will say that it’s a future mining ship, so it’s weapons are more sophisticated. But it’s still only going to be so well-armed, and the technologies are not so different as all that. It’s still only a mining vessel designed, I’m sure, to defend itself but not as a war-vessel. Better question: who designed the ship to look so scary? (It doesn’t look Romulan in design, for that matter.) The thing is massive with all these jutting protrusions, for no discernible reason than to look scary. But, and I can’t iterate this enough: it’s a mining vessel! Wouldn’t it be more likely to be designed in a more utilitarian fashion rather than to inspire fear?

Back to Shinzon himself, er—oops, what’s his name? Ah yes, Nero, the terrifying miner. Now he and his crew are semi-brilliant and massively patient. These miners are able to determine when Spock (who only tried to help them save their planet) is going to show up in time so they may destroy Vulcan in front of him. One might think these advanced calculations would give many scientists some problems. (Spock might’ve had to make his “best guess” ala The Voyage Home. Yes, the one with the whales.) Miners, though, being exceptionally well-versed in time travel theory, calculate the moment of Spock’s arrival, some twenty years in the future, and apparently having nothing better to do, wait around for him. That is some massive obsession.

And yet, we don’t really care. Shinzonero is really just a plot point. Calling him a character would be a gross exaggeration. If one wants a real antagonist, one is better off watching The Wrath of Khan. Khan is a character with a lot of pathos, insanity and man-cleavage. Every line of dialogue toward Kirk is spit out with venomous hate. We, the audience care about everything taking place on screen because the characters care. With Shinzonero, we never feel his pain; he doesn’t seem to either. He is just there to provide us a reason for action.

And this movie has plenty of (and by plenty of, I mean far too much) action. The rapid cuts, flashy special effects and inserted action shots turn action into distraction. Within ten minutes of the movie, I was already bored. Spectacle is fine, but two hours of spectacle is headache inducing. This movie never gets a chance to breathe. Kirk can’t run to the bridge without being injected a half-a-dozen times, presumably because that would be boring. But it also ruins the tension of the film. The Enterprise is flying into a death trap, but any of the tension is removed by the comedy of Kirk and Bones.

In fact, much of the drama that should be evoked by the film is missing. After seeing an entire planet destroyed, the crew hardly reacts at all. We see neither fear nor horror. Uhura’s only reaction is concern for Spock, but she herself feels nothing for the millions (billions?) of dead, nor terror at the absolutely devastating weapon she just witnessed. Where is the reaction?

All of this action strips the movie of suspense. The audience is too busy being swept along from action sequence to action sequence without any time to process what has happened. Bigger explosions do not make for bigger stakes. In the first season episode Balance of Terror the Romulans are introduced as a crafty opponent with the ability to cloak themselves. The Romulan commander, played by Mark Lenard, and Captain Kirk are fighting a much more subtle battle, testing each other. The atmosphere is tense, even claustrophobic. The Romulan vessel is akin to a submarine, lying in wait, but needing to employ caution due to the vulnerability of being unable to raise shields while cloaked. The lack of flashy explosions takes nothing away from the episode. Suspense does not rely on CGI.

The same goes for Wrath of Khan where the battles are slower, but every torpedo seems to count. The battle is slower than in Star Trek but the audience is much more afraid for the crew. The actors are given a chance to respond to the destruction they’ve witnessed. They convey the direness of the situation. When the Enterprise and the Reliant enter a nebula, where neither can see the other, things grow very still. Suspense is mounting. And then, victory! This sort of quiet moment cannot happen in Star Trek. Things just move from one scene to the next, all the time. The actual exposition of the story has to be downloaded from the older Spock’s brain in five minutes so we can get back to the action. As if to affirm that the director feels that ten minutes of no action is too long, Scotty is beamed into a tube of water, a wholly unnecessary bit of business that only takes the viewer out of the film again and removes any tension whatsoever.

Further points could be made. One could talk about the ethics of Spock and Uhura’s relationship, which seems to have begun while he was a teacher and she a student. One could mention that putting catch phrases in a character’s mouth doesn’t make a character but a caricature and is a cheap play for unearned goodwill. And a host of other things besides should make us think twice about this movie. But I shall leave those aside, at least for now, for your sake gentle reader, and rely upon your own powers of observation and contemplation to determine the value of the movie for yourselves. I suspect that once the mind is no longer distracted by endless action, one will see that the movie is neither thoughtful nor thought-provoking, ludicrous and nonsensical. But of course, some will still find Star Trek to be a good film. They would be wrong.