I should start out by saying that in order to discuss the issues I want to discuss about JJ Abrams's STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS, I have to actually talk about the substance of the film. I'm going to discuss the characters, turns of the plot, and the specifics of the story. If you haven't seen movie, but you plan to, go see it and come back here.
Now that we've all seen the movie:
After using his first Star Trek film to reboot the franchise, Abrams has gone in a direction that I find pretty interesting. I assumed that after the first film, he'd stop referencing the fact of the reboot itself. Unless I'm mistaken, this new series of Trek films is the first big franchise to conciously acknowledge within the text of the films themselves that the thing is starting over--not from scratch but from the previous set of films. In Nolan's Batman films there's no reason to think that Burton's Batman ever existed. Here, though, we have a new universe spun out of an alternative reality from the universe that we already know. Abrams and his crew have made the choice to keep exploring this idea, and I think it gives the new film a lot of its interest.
After waiting months, Trekkers and part-time Trek fans (I'd put myself in this latter category) have found out that, yes indeed, Khan is back. The renegade Starfleet commander "Jim Harrison" turns out to be Khan with a new alternative-universe back story. Captain Kirk and crew must stop him from taking over the universe.
There's a lot more plot, of course, but much of it is rendered in exposition within the film that I'm loathe to repeat. (For what is essentially a sci-fi inspired action flick, there is a heap of explaining in this movie.) This points to one of the weaknesses of the film--the shift in the motivation for Khan's revenge. In STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN he's out to kill Captain Kirk because he blames Captain Kirk for the death of his wife. The simple genius of that plot line is that, at least on one level, we're sorta on Khan's side. He's motivated by a rage that in most dramatic contexts would be the motivation of the protagonist. In the new film, Khan's wrath is based on...what again? He's insulted by something the evil Admiral did back when he was frozen out and put to work developing weapons to battle Klingons in case there's a war with Klingons...I think. That explanation doesn't exactly have the cold fire of "You killed my wife" does it?
What makes this work at all (and at its best it works very well, indeed) is the fantastic performance of Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan. I have no idea if he studied Ricardo Montalban's fiery original performance, but Cumberbatch taps into an important element of Khan's character: the sense of a massive ego grievously insulted. For fans of Cumberbatch's title role performance on BBC's SHERLOCK, this should come as no surprise. He effortlessly projects both intelligence and grandiose self-absorption, and we find it easy to believe that he's the smartest person on the screen. (The best scene in the movie might well be his strategic showdown with Spock, in which he gives the Vulcan a lesson in cold logic.)
As for the rest of the film, it's a mixed bag. There's no one not to like in the new cast, though I'll admit that Karl Urban's McCoy is a long step down from the original--though at least part of this might be due to diminished role of the character in the drama. In the original series/movies, McCoy formed a triangle of personalities with Spock and Kirk. McCoy was the emotional hothead, Spock the cold tactician, and Kirk was the mediatator of those two poles.
The new series of films have changed that balance by making Kirk the emotional hothead. That worked fine in the first movie, with young James T. Kirk becoming a kind of early career Tom Cruise character--the Maverick of Starfleet, if you will. But here we are in the second movie and Kirk is still a screw up, still a hothead, and still the kind of a dumbass who needs to be reminded, yet again, that the rules apply to him. A movie story has to work within the logic that it constructs, and here it is really hard to buy that this guy is a commander of anything. If you're going to shoot a bazillion-dollar piece of technology into the farthest reaches of space with hundreds of human beings inside it, you don't put a horny frat boy in charge. (If this was a war movie, say, you would never believe this callow youngster would be placed in charge of a submarine.) Chris Pine is a charismatic actor, but his Kirk is in danger of becoming a dramatic redundancy. Maybe this time he's learned his lesson and finally gotten his shit together? Let's hope so.
(One final word on the Kirk makeover: I could have done without the three-way with the cat girls. Hey, we all know Captain Kirk loves the ladies. [Oh...cat girls...I get it...] But here's a study in contrast. The original Kirk was a James Bond-type ladies man. He was a charmer. He was smooth, damn it. This Kirk acts a little too much like a dude who just attended a Frank TJ Mackey seminar on how to pick up insecure sorority girls. I mean, this Kirk harasses random women on the street... Not too smooth.)
I think this all probably reads as if I liked the movie less than I did. It's got good performances, exciting action sequences, good effects, and I had a lot of fun watching it. If I'm disappointed, it's because the film doesn't quite live up to its own ambitions. Abrams set out to reinterpret the best Star Trek storyline ever--and not just that, but a truly great movie in its own right (STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN is about the best sci-fi popcorn movie ever made). Now that he's moved on to STAR WARS, I guess someone new will be, ah, taking the helm. Hopefully, that person will build on all the good work here and take us into something fresh, something that is truly inventing new Trek material, rather than reheating the old.
PS. To briefly add to that last idea, I hope the new Trek team is done directly quoting the first film. Take for instance the death of Kirk, which of course is a reworking of the death of Spock in WRATH OF KHAN. Did we need a direct quote from the earlier film? Not really, but I guess it's supposed to show us some kind of growth in Kirk's character--though, since his bravery was never in doubt, I'm not sure how it actually does this. But, still, the scene is well done. Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto are good actors. The dialog at the end, where Kirk admits to be being afraid to die, is moving. But then he dies...and Spock screams "Khan!!!" as a direct quote from Shatner's screamed "Khan!!!" in the earlier film, and the whole thing stops working as a dramatic scene and just becomes about the reference. At least it did for me--though, I suppose it might not work this way for someone who hasn't seen WRATH OF KHAN. But it you haven't, then you should. It's great. Just ask the people who made this movie. They clearly can't get enough of it.
I got the urge to watch SILVERADO a few nights ago. Although I own Lawrence Kasdan's 1985 Western, it's been a while since I've sat down to view it.
I don't know how many times I've seen this movie. Dozens, I guess. As it began, though, I realized something for the first time. SILVERADO came out in 1985, when I was ten years old, which means that this movie might well be the first full length Western that I can remember seeing. I was a TV-Western obsessive as a kid. THE LONE RANGER, THE RIFLEMAN, and THE BIG VALLEY were favorites. I'm certain my parents took me to see the notorious flop THE LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER in 1981, but I don't really remember it.
I remember SILVERADO well, though. The first time I saw it, I was pretty sure it was perfect. As I've gotten older, of course, that original opinion has been tempered by nearly thirty years of seeing other Westerns. Watching it today, I can't help but notice that the film is essentially a grab bag of cliches. Just about every element from the genre is represented here: homesteaders versus evil ranchers, heroes who never miss, villains who can't hit the broadside of a barn, dance hall girls, sleazy gamblers, hangings at dawn, Henry rifles, six-shooters, jumps onto moving horses, wagon trains, community dances. The thing even ends with a showdown on a dirt street in the middle of town. SILVERADO is like an album of standards--it's performed with skill, if not with a great deal of originality.
If this renders the film as something of an exercise rather than its own artistic statement, I hasten to add that it's an overwhelmingly successful exercise. The cast--Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Kevin Costner, Danny Glover, Brian Dennehey, Linda Hunt--all seem seized by the same contagious sense of fun. From scene to scene, it feels like everyone is on the verge of breaking out in silly grins and yelling, "We're making a Western!" At the end of the day, maybe a movie doesn't need to make any deeper statement than that. The movie is a celebration of tropes and signifiers--gun belts and horses and rocky peaks and saddles and boots and saloons. And here's the thing: when I was a kid, that was really all I wanted. That was the stuff I loved. Hell, that is the stuff that people love when they love Westerns.
One final word on this. I've also come to realize that this was my first exposure to Kevin Costner. At ten, I didn't know who he was, I just knew he was my favorite character in the film. But of course he was. He plays the goofy kid brother, Jake. I was a goofy kid brother, and my name was Jake, and I loved that he carries twin six-shooters and rides his horse bareback and kisses the pretty dance hall girl at the end. In his big scene in the film, he rides into town, jumps off his horse, and then shoots two guys at the same time as he's backing out of a saloon. I'm pretty sure I reenacted those moves in my living room. It's interesting to note, then, that Costner began forming the archetype of the Western hero in my imagination before I was old enough to know who he was.
I could say the same thing about the entire movie. In giddily reshashing a million old Westerns, it actually established the genre template that would guide me through another thirty years of watching cowboy movies. Looking back on it now, I guess I can say that for me SILVERADO was THE original Western.
Happy Birthday, Orson, you magnificent bastard. 98 years young.
Here is a link to my series on "Welles And Noir."
And here is a link to the centennial celebration that's in the works.
This week I profile a new hard luck lady of noir, the lovely Cleo Moore. Though she was widely dismissed as just another Monroe clone, Moore had her own charms and is is well worth rediscovering. Check out my piece on her over at Criminal Element.
George Jones is dead. Those words have been a long time coming. The country singer himself titled his 1996 autobiography I LIVED TO TELL IT ALL. In his book--which is excellent, by the way--Jones expresses surprise that he managed to hang on long after people had given him up for dead. If he'd died in a blaze of cocaine and booze in 1974 exactly no one would have been surprised.
But Jones didn't perish, he prospered. In the seventies, moreover, he solidified his standing as perhaps the greatest of all country singers. Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn were arguably greater artists, and Merle Haggard probably had more sheer talent than anyone else.
But Jones was the purest soul singer. Maybe because he lacked all theory and pretension toward art he was free to focus on his obsessions: heartache and drinking . Oh, he did the occasional hymn ("Cup Of Loneliness") or message song ("Whose Gonna Fill Their Shoes?"), but he was always his truest self singing about the disappointments of love and the empty solace of alcohol.
He was charting hits in the fifties, was already a legend by the sixties, but in the seventies--in the midst of personal turmoil brought on by his drug addiction and his tortured marriage to and divorce from Tammy Wynette--he created his finest work. It was as if the man had been worn down to one hot nerve--"A Good Year For The Roses," "We Can Make It," "A Day In The Life Of A Fool," "A Picture Of Me (Without You)," "The Grand Tour," "These Days I Barely Get By," "Memories Of Us"--the music flowed out of him.
Like most great artists, he needed a lot of help. He rarely wrote songs--indeed, in his autobiography he says he rarely ever even choose the songs he recorded. This put him at the mercy of half-assed ideas (see his career nadir "High-Tech Redneck" or, better still, don't), but working with producer Billy Sherrill he achieved a kind of perfection. This partnership reached its high point in the early eighties. "He Stopped Loving Her Today" was released in 1980 and for years afterwards was considered Jones's best song (and, some would argue, country music's finest single). It's a fine song, and Jones is in beautiful form on it--though one must admit that the production seems a little self-conciously grandiose. For my money, Jones actually nailed his best moment in front of the microphone a year later with "If Drinking Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will)." There's no distance here between the singer and the lyrics, which was always the case when Jones was at his best. He doesn't belt it out, he crawls inside of it. The story of a drunk man who's driven himself home from the bars at "four in the mornin'" it builds to perhaps the keystone lyric for the entire Jones canon:
If drinking don't kill me
her memory will
I can't hold out much longer
the way that I feel
There was always humor in Jones ("With the blood from my body/I could start my own still") because no matter how low he sunk he always seemed to regard his pain as something absurd. And I'm not talking about irony here, the kind you might find in Haggard or Roger Miller. Jones was too literal to ever give an ironic wink. No, it was more fatalistic than that. In "If Drinking Don't Kill Me" the drunk man stumbling into his home is bitterly amused at the absurdity of being left alone. The built-in brutality of existence, after all, is that all life ends in death. And this is mirrored in the way that love transmogrifies into pain in one way or another.
The ultimate irony, of course, is that by using his art to turn that pain into music, Jones ended up giving comfort to the rest of us. He helped us through breakups and disappointments and betrayals of one kind or another because he understood that the meaning of life is loss.
The king is dead. Long live the king.
