star trek

Wars Trek: Eight Thoughts on JJ Abrams directing ‘Star Wars: Episode VII’

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JJ Abrams Star Wars Episode VII
1: I’m surprised that it’s actually happening. My first reaction to the rumours that JJ Abrams might be directing Star Wars: Episode VII was “That’s weird.” My second was “Didn’t he say he’d turned it down?” My third, eventually, was “I bet this is one of those rumours that turns out to be false.” Just occasionally, it seems the Internet can prove me wrong.

2: It’s a choice that’s simultaneously understandable, a little odd, and almost a little too obvious. Alongside Joss Whedon, Abrams was one of the first directors touted by fans for Star Wars, simply because of his 2009 Trek reboot, which almost immediately seemed to make him unlikely to do it. He’s proved himself able to handle a big, technically complex blockbuster with heavy levels of special effects. He’s also able to handle character well, something not every candidate could manage (Hello, Zack Snyder). The fact that the 2009 Star Trek reboot shared so much storytelling DNA with Star Wars makes this all feel like one of those fandom wish-fulfilment “Oh, wouldn’t it be great if ****** got to direct it?” dreams that’s somehow spilled out into reality. But he’s signed. It’s official.

3: The countdown begins now to the point where Disney announce a release date shift from 2015 to 2016. Abrams is still in post-production on Star Trek: Into Darkness, and then he’ll have major press commitments around the release. If the 2015 release is stuck to, that gives him just over two years for all the pre-production, shooting the film, and the post-production – for a blockbuster, that’s a pretty tight turnaround, and while they can be made to a tight schedule, the end results often aren’t pretty. Many blockbusters have been ruined by sticking to a release date over everything (often meaning that shooting starts without a script in place), but with so much riding on this, I’m pretty sure Disney aren’t going to force Abrams to rush what’s likely to be an epic production schedule (especially in terms of post-production and CGI effects work). I’d also lay bets on that being part of the deal – I doubt Abrams would have signed to do something like this if he didn’t also get the power to do it *right*.

4: He’s a fan. It’s one of the resons he quoted for originally turning it down, but Abrams is a dyed-in-the-wool Star Wars fan, which means anyone worrying about Episode VII being slathered in lens-flare can probably relax. I’m sure it’ll look slick as hell, but I also suspect he’s going to stick a lot closer to the visual style of the original movies. Not being a fan of Trek before he hopped onboard the reboot meant he went about reviving the franchise in a very deliberate way (admittedly, one I didn’t always agree with), giving it a very new and fresh identity, with aspects of the classic version of Trek woven in. I suspect Abrams’s Star Wars will be a lot more faithful to what’s come before.

5: He’s capable of being an amazing director, but Abrams has yet to make a film I’ve wholeheartedly loved. Mission: Impossible III is great fun, but light as a feather and essentially plays as a feature-length episode of Alias (Abrams’s hilariously convoluted female-led TV spy-saga) with Tom Cruise as a lead, a blockbuster budget, and fewer over-the-top costumes and wigs. Star Trek is great fun, but has a plot that shatters into pieces if you so much as breathe on it, and also sacrifices a bit *too* much of Trek’s sense of intellectual SF adventure in favour of wham-bam action and STUFF! BLOWING! UP! Super 8 is frustratingly close to being an outstanding movie – when it’s being a homage to the Amblin movies that Abrams grew up with, it’s heartfelt, beautifully played and genuinely moving. However, when it veers left into Stephen King territory, it ends up drowning out the quieter (and stronger) emotional content in favour of horror-movie shocks, an alien that’s both an evil chomp-monster and a misunderstood tragic figure, and even more STUFF! BLOWING! UP! It’s especially frustrating when Abrams’s television work has almost always been stunning – especially the pilot episode of ‘Lost’, which still stands up as an awesome and adventurous piece of television. I’m hoping that maybe taking on Star Wars will make Abrams push that little bit further, and produce something that really does pay off the talent and storytelling I saw in all those jaw-dropping early episodes of Alias.

6: Screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (Transformers, Cowboys and Aliens, Star Trek) are not writing this film, and I can’t begin to describe how happy this makes me – especially as they seemed joined at the hip with Abrams. Other people are worried at the idea that Damon Lindelof may get involved thanks to his Abrams connection, a worry mainly rooted in him getting lots of the blame for people’s disappointment with Prometheus – but (a) most of the blame for Prometheus’s undeniable flaws have to be piled at Ridley Scott’s door, and (b) screenwriter Michael Arndt is already at work, and if whatever he’s done is presumably good enough to play into changing Abrams’s mind, I’m hopeful that we may be in good hands. (And whatever happens, any of the screenwriters will have to work very hard to best some of the insanely creaky writing in the prequels).

7: Thanks to a rumour that directorial contender Matthew Vaughan would have cast Chloe Moretz in a pivotal role, it’s very possible that there’s a significant role for a young female lead. If Abrams isn’t on the phone to his Super 8 star Elle Fanning right now, then the man’s a fool…

8: Ultimately, I can live with JJ Abrams directing Star Wars, but it doesn’t fill me with an immense surge of excitement either. We’ll get a damn efficient crowd-pleasing SF blockbuster, and I can almost guarantee there’ll be a sense of character and life back in the celluloid Star Wars universe that hasn’t been there for a while, but there’s still no guarantees that it’s going to be anything other than a pretty SF blockbuster with kick-ass setpieces. Abrams is unlikely to serve up a turkey, but he isn’t the bold and interesting or left-field choice they could have gone for, and he isn’t a director with an approach I would absolutely love to see tackle a Star Wars movie. (I know it’s a foolish dream and it’s ultra-unlikely to happen, but a Star Wars film directed by David Fincher would send my inner geek into meltdown). But I do think Abrams is a solid choice, and there’s potential for greatness there (as well as the potential for it all to go a bit wrong, as well). Whatever happens, despite previous disappointments, the prospect of new Star Wars movies still has me intrigued. For now, there’s life in the old Saga yet…

The Friday Linkfest (25/03/11): In Links We Trust

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Wonder Woman TV Costume Adrianne Palicki

Wonder Woman costume revealled, half of internet goes into apopleptic shock. Apparently the boots are the wrong colour. And the whole thing just looks a bit too halloween costume for some people. I looked at it and thought “Well, it’s not ideal, but it does look a hell of a lot more like Wonder Woman than I expected”. The amount of negative bitching online about this project is kind of amazing in certain places – I’m not even a WW fan, I’m not expecting it to be superb, but at the current rate, I’m hoping this ends up a smash hit simply for the looks on the fans’ faces. Does that make me a bad person?

Genre for Japan – a brilliant auction set up by a group of fantastic people (including book blogger Amanda Rutter) to raise money for the Japanese Tsunami Relief appeal being run by the Red Cross. There’s a genuinely spectacular selection of items up for auction, donated by a wide variety of people from across the SF, Fantasy and Horror scene – go look, and go bid!

A gorgeous selection of graphic novel covers, reinterpreted as Seventies pulp paperbacks (with the kind of minimal designs that I would kill to own in real life). .

Least shocking news of the week: Joseph-Gordon Levitt is definitely in The Dark Knight Rises. Plus, he’s playing Alberto Falcone (son of Tom Wilkinson’s character from Batman Begins), a character from the Batman series The Long Halloween, already loosely plundered for The Dark Knight. Only maybe he isn’t – another source has since said the Falcone rumour is incorrect, and Gordon Levitt’s part is another character. Once again, it’s wait and see time…

Doctor Who fan claims he created Davros, sues the BBC. Okay, this is just weird – a fan called Steven Clark says that he entered a drawing competition for the comic TV Action in 1972, and that the BBC then went and hi-jacked his idea, turning it into Dalek creator Davros, who’s since appeared multiple times in the show. The reason he’s suing now? Apparently he lost his original entry, but they turned up “in the pages of a set of family encyclopaedias”, which sounds deeply suspect. This sounds like the kind of nutty copyright case that comes up every so often, usually generated by chancers out for a quick buck via a settlement – because apparently not only did Clark come up with the name, his loose pencil sketch is actually a pretty exact blueprint for Davros, and he wrote an essay with the drawing entitled “The Genesis of the Daleks: The Creation of Davros”. So, either 1975 classic Genesis of the Daleks was the creation of a sinister conspiracy to steal an idea from a young fan, or someone is talking utter bollocks. We’ll see how this nonsense progresses…

Ultimate Spider-Man team Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley reunite on a creator-owned comic for Marvel’s Icon imprint, entitled ‘Brilliant’. Ultimate Spider-Man is pretty much the most brilliant and consistent version of Spider-Man I’ve ever seen – the idea of them taking on a tale that’s sounding like a superhero version of The Social Network is definitely something I’m onboard for.

Why the new Star Trek movie doesn’t need a villain, via Tor. The author (Ryan Britt) is right – that it should be about an interesting SF premise, not about who Kirk and co get to punch this time (Klingons! Khan! Harry Mudd!) but it doesn’t change the fact that it will not happen. The 2009 Star Trek film briefly dazzled me with its action and nostalgia (there’s a slightly embarrassing gush of a blog post about it that I should get around to deleting), but I rewatched it earlier this year and it’s one of the most disappointingly empty SF blockbusters in years – a great cast doing fantastic work in service of a script that says nothing, and even bollocks up Spock’s character in the end (when he’s all for blowing up Nero’s ship). I’d love for the next film to be slightly more thoughtful or at least have more substance – in today’s film climate, that’s ridiculously unlikely.

An open letter to Twilight fans.

The reviews for Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch are starting to appear – and they’re not looking good. In fact, some of them are hilariously bad. The first review I’ve linked to (from IGN) basically hints that the film is exactly what the trailers have made it look like – an overproduced, overstylised mess – and my favourite quote has to be: “For a movie that’s superficially about female empowerment, it’s ironically one of the most ridiculously misogynistic movies in recent memory.” And Warner Bros have just handed Snyder the directorial chair for Superman. It’ll be interesting to see whether it sinks or swims at the Box Office….

AKIRA casting rumours are once again circling – and it’s still not looking good. Robert Pattinson? James McCavoy? Michael Fassbender? Look, I think it’s about time all anime fans make peace with the fact that if this remake does happen, it’s going to be a cynical mess that’ll desperately try to sand down most of those awkward, harsh or confrontational edges that made Akira interesting in the first place. There are accusations of Last Airbender-style ‘white-washing’ of the cast, given the original source material – but M. Night Shyamalan was (however incompetently) trying to make a film that was true to the original Avatar: The Last Airbender series, which made the casting even more of a problem – whereas by dumping the Japanese setting, the extreme violence (given it’s a PG-13) and that troublesome ‘punky teenage rebellion’ subtext (given that virtually all the actors offered the renamed versions of Kaneda and Tetsuo are in their late twenties or early thirties), the producers of the Akira remake have made it clear they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the original source material. They’re out to make a big sci-fi blockbuster and trade on the relatively well-known name of a cult movie (as all movies have to be ‘properties’ now) – the chances of this bearing any more than a passing resemblance to the manga or anime (aside from the design) is small. And accusing this of ‘whitewashing’ is a little like accusing Sergio Leone of whitewashing Kurosawa’s samurai classic Yojimbo to turn it into A Fistful of Dollars – ultimately, a bit silly and pointless, especially with a film that’s being helmed by Albert Hughes, and is likely to end up like From Hell – a pretty-looking, visually strong film that’s empty beyond belief and simply misses the point.

And finally – a teaser for the new season of Doctor Who. To be honest, it’s so short as to be borderline subliminal (15 seconds long, for heaven’s sake) – more interesting is the teaser for the online prequel, which will be appearing on Friday the 25th of March. Colour me intrigued…

Trek Talk

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Okay – the new Star Trek movie has been seen (It’s one of the few films I simply didn’t want to wait around for) – and there’ll be some non-spoilerific words, followed by some more in-depth stuff behind the cut.

The short version? They’ve done what seemed like an impossibility. They’ve actually made Star Trek matter.

The tidal wave of positive reviews the film has been getting is rather overwhelming, and it is best to approach the new Trek movie with expectations at a healthy level. Go in expecting a mind-blowing work of cinematic genius and you’re going to be disappointed – but what we do have is a lively, energetic and downright fun blockbuster that taps back into the dynamic that powered the original series and shows that it still works. And it also proves that the success of Trek was a combination of the upbeat, positive worldview, and the characters themselves – particularly the Brawn/Brain relationship between Kirk and Spock. After so many years of Trek being mainly defined by the Next Generation’s beige world of “Hey- something dramatic’s happenned! Let’s go to the Captain’s ready room and talk about it for ten minutes!”, it’s a gigantic relief to get a movie that understands what was so fun about the original series – that there may have been something terribly ridiculous about William Shatner tearing his shirt and snogging the women, but that underneath it all the character worked. And the film manages to do this with almost all the regular characters, to greater or lesser degrees, while making a film that’s fun and action-packed enough that you don’t have to be tapped into forty years of continuity in order to enjoy it.

It’s ended up a similar situation to The Wrath of Khan, where a filmmaker who wasn’t that familiar with the Trek universe is brought in to give it an adrenaline shot, and here it’s exactly what the whole Trek universe needed. While the whole idea of a prequel sounded alarm bells in my head, the fact that J.J. Abrams was helming it did give me enough confidence to think that it had a chance of being good – and the end result is a hell of a lot better than I initially expected, featuring the kind of strengths that Abrams is good at, particularly with the casting. I was actually a bit worried about Zachary Quinto as Spock – he’s only rarely completely blown me away in Heroes (although I think that’s just as much to do with that show’s over-dependence on the Sylar-as-unstoppable-bad-guy factor), and while the resemblence was obvious, Leonard Nimoy’s work as Spock is one of those performances that looks a lot easier than it actually is. And I’m happy to say that Quinto is really, really good – capturing exactly the right tone and making every single scene work. And then, of course, there’s Chris Pine, who arguably has just as major shoes to fill, and he carries it off even better than Quinto – Pine somehow manages to channel all of Kirk’s cocksure arrogance, swagger and confidence and even carries off the occasional moment of ridiculousness without ever feeling like he’s impersonating Shatner. He owns the role, and one of the best things I can say about the film is that it makes you want to see the next adventure of this crew right now, this instant. There are wildly different approaches in the rest of the cast – Karl Urban is as brilliantly close to Deforest Kelley as you could ever want, while Zoe Saldana as Uhura is very different to the original (although considering how thin Uhura’s character was, it’s no surprise…) and the only cast member I really had a problem with was Anton Yelchin as Chekov, whose Russian accent really just needed to get dialed back a couple of notches.

The scale works. The action (mostly) works. And, above everything else, the ethos they’ve applied to the approach to Trek works. There’s plenty of edge, and there’s even a few hints of Battlestar Galactica in the hand-held approach to the space battle sequences, but they’ve gone big, bold and positive and it works. They’ve created a world where the primary colours of the uniforms and having all the female starfleet members in the Sixties-style short skirts and go-go boots feels completely normal, and where the characters feel like living, breathing people and not just epithet-spouting stuffed shirts. In fact, there’s something decidedly New Who about this re-invention/reboot/remix – the way that this is updating a classic show in a way which will probably annoy the hell out of the purists, but which is – underneath it all – still the show it always was. Because yes, if you have a love of the original series or particularly the ‘Classic Crew’ movies (I have a serious fondness for Star Treks II-IV, and VI), there may be moments that don’t quite sit right. It’s certainly the fastest Trek movie ever, and arguably could have done with slowing down to give the story time to breathe (a flaw it shares with Abrams’ Mission Impossible III). It’s also worth remembering that this is written by the same men responsible for Transformers – and there are moments where the humour could have done with being a little less goofy, and where the storytelling could have been a lot clearer. But ultimately, none of these problems make a gigantic amount of difference because you care about the characters. For me, Star Trek isn’t at the top of my favourite Trek film list (some of which, admittedly, is coloured by fondness and nostalgia), but it’s riding extremely high. There may be moments of cheesiness and a handful of points that don’t quite work, but they’re over in a flash, and the overall experience is a big, bold and brassy pulp SF blockbuster that drags you along in its wake.

Rating: * * * *

And now, having avoided any major spoilers, I shall now add a few spoilerific thoughts…

‘I’m a doctor, not a physicist!’