Everything
Old is New Again in ‘Trek’
By
Bruce Collier
May
14, 2009 Issue
William Shatner is negotiating cheap hotel rates. James Doohan
and DeForest Kelly have passed on. George Takei is gaily married
in California, and Patrick Stewart just doesn’t seem to
want to play spaceman anymore. What’s a Trekker to do? Answer:
see J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, and watch your old
iconic favorites in the making. It’s the ultimate genius
move for a moribund franchise—stop creaking forward, and
go back to the youthful “origins.” Fortunately, this
is a film even the casual Trek fan (that would be me) can enjoy.
In case you’ve
missed the trailers, this is the story of how a group of disparate
youngsters—Kirk, Spock, Uhura, “Bones” McCoy,
Sulu, Scotty and Chekhov—all arrived on the bridge of the
redoubtable Federation starship Enterprise. There’s a story
involving black holes, time travel, alternate destinies, and a
vengeance-crazed Romulan terrorist (played by a near-unrecognizable
Eric Bana), but that’s just a framework. This is about laying
the foundations.
It’s
good, sequel-breeding stuff. The actors—Chris Pine as Kirk,
Zachary Quinto as Spock, and Karl Urban as McCoy—do a great
job giving just the slightest whiff of “impressions”
while respecting their characters. My only real complaint would
be the relentless, crash-bang-boom pace. What always made Star
Trek superior to the can-we-top-this special effects extravaganzas
of Star Wars was creator Gene Roddenberry’s emphasis on
human relationships. The film is about those relationships, but
it could have taken more quiet time to accomplish the mission.
I saw Star
Trek the day after it opened and was surprised there wasn’t
a bigger crowd, until I realized that young people probably know
next to nothing about the 1960s TV series that inspired this film.
I sat in front of a woman near my age who laughed with self-satisfied
delight at every bit of trivia and in-joke (there are plenty),
explaining it to the kid with her. I think the kid got more out
of the Transformers preview trailer. At least he was
quieter.
WE’RE JUST NOT THAT INTO HIM
With the exception of his portrayal of the preacher in Contact,
Mathew McConaughey usually plays a lovable rogue in his movies.
McConaughey’s characters are often reminiscent of those
immature boys who went to your high school. You know the ones.
They reduced all the girls to one thing—potential conquests.
But the combination of McConaughey’s charm—and his
tendency to keep his shirt off through most of his movies—tends
to make females in the audience tolerate these shallow characters.
However, when
Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (Mean Girls, Freaky Friday)
wrote the screenplay for Ghosts of Girlfriends Past,
they failed to include the “lovable” in this stereotypical
womanizing character…and he never even bares that famous
upper torso! McConaughey’s character, Connor Mead, is a
NYC photographer whose main goal in life seems to be to get every
woman he meets into bed as quickly as possible. And he’s
quite efficient at dumping his conquests ASAP. At one point, he
uses a four-way video conference call to rid himself of three
at once. The word sleazy seems insufficient.
The plot revolves
around the wedding of Connor’s younger brother Paul (Breckin
Meyer). Connor returns for the wedding, spending most of his time
trying to talk Paul out of getting married. Complicating matters
is the delightful Jennifer Garner as Jenny, Connor’s childhood
friend/maid of honor and the only female in his life who hasn’t
joined his nonexclusive club.
After Connor
turns the couple’s rehearsal dinner into a disaster, it
looks as though the wedding will not take place. But that night
three ghosts visit Connor (Charles Dickens, anyone?), forcing
him to review his life and probable future if he continues his
life of meaningless, casual sex. His dearly departed horndog mentor
Uncle Wayne (played with effective smarminess by Michael Douglas)
appears at the beginning of this journey, encouraging Connor to
learn from his own mistakes. Connor’s ultimate if unbelievable
transformation and subsequent reunion with Jenny is way too predictable
to be interesting or satisfying.
Director Mark
Waters seems to have phoned this one in. As a romantic comedy,
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past has a little of both, just
not enough of either. - Lisa Worsham
AND
THE HEALING HAS BEGUN
In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Hugh Jackman reprises his
role as the metal-clawed mutant, this time with a stroll down
memory lane to peek at the events that changed Logan into the
Wolverine. The film marks the fourth in the franchise for Wolverine
and also stars Liev Schreiber as Wolverine's sadistic brother
Victor, Ryan Reynolds as fanboy favorite Deadpool, and Danny Huston
as William Stryker, the military man responsible for giving Wolverine
his claws.
The film opens with a montage that depicts the scope of Wolverine's
long life (lengthened by his mutant healing factor) by showing
scenes from every American war, and Logan being shot in each of
them. Eventually Logan and Victor end up in the Weapon X program
developed by the military to make use of mutants in wartime situations.
The work done by Weapon X is far from humane, and Logan soon goes
AWOL to seek a life as a Canadian lumberjack. When the appearance
of Victor takes someone out of his new life, Logan swears revenge
and allows Stryker to bond metal to his skeleton making him a
perfect killing machine.
Wolverine has brief moments of brilliance.Unfortunately,
these moments are completely eclipsed by a storyline that is muddled
and dialogue that would be too cheesy for comic books. Jackman
and Schreiber deserve credit for doing so much with so little—both
actors deliver shining performances with characters who have been
written to do little more than glower and brood. The rivalry between
Wolverine and Sabretooth (as Victor comes to be known) is by far
the most complex and engaging in the film, completely dwarfing
the painfully cliched love story. There are enough claws, crashes,
and kabooms to justify the ticket price, but audiences looking
for character development or plot progression might end up wishing
their wallets had a healing factor. - Adam Pope
More
movie reviews
