It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible

Category Archives: film review


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Park Your Brain At The Door

I went to see the new Star Trek film last night. Most reviews I’ve read have said it’s very good. But not all of them – see here, here and here.

I thought it was complete nonsense.

It looks good – mostly. The special effects are state-of-the-art. The cast all do a good job with their parts, although Karl Urban probably nails the essence of Bones McCoy from the original cast better than the others do with their roles. And yes, Simon Pegg’s Scottish accent is a bit suspect.

I’ll forgive the “sounds in space” thing. It’s scientifically impossible, but it’s become a convention of science fiction cinema. And I’ll willingly suspend my disbelief for the black hole which allows Spock and the Romulan Nero to travel back in time. Likewise for the “red matter”. It’s a daft idea, but it’s a maguffin in a science fiction film so it doesn’t really matter.

But.

There are many things I didn’t like in Star Trek – not just in the science, but in the plotting, the characterisation…. They played Chekov as a joke, which was not entirely fair. And quite a bit of the humour in the film appeared at strangely inappropriate moments. I’m all for livening up scenes with a bit of wit, but some of the jokes in Star Trek just seemed to fall flat.

And then there are the outright stupidities. The following comments will necessarily include spoilers.

If you stick a spaceship on top of a chemical planet, it doesn’t look like a spaceship dock. It looks like a chemical plant with a spaceship stuck on top of it. Far too much of Star Trek was filmed inside a chemical plant. Those scenes looked like they belonged in some cheap straight-to-DVD sf movie.

James T Kirk is about to be drummed out of Starfleet Academy for cheating on the Kobayashi Maru test. But then evil Romulan Nero appears, and he gets smuggled aboard Starfleet’s new flagship, the Enterprise, and – sigh – goes on to win the day. So at the end of the film, they pin a medal on Kirk’s chest and make him captain of the Enterprise. Hang on. He’s a cadet. He didn’t even graduate. And they make him the captain of their best ship?

And speaking of cadets being unfeasibly promoted to high rank: Dr Bones McCoy is also a Starfleet cadet, but when the trouble caused by Nero kicks off, he is assigned to the Enterprise as Senior Medical Officer. A cadet as a Senior Medical Officer? Where do they get the junior ones from? Kindergarten?

And then there’s Scotty. He’s no longer an engineer but an engineer and a genius theoretical physicist. But Starfleet still exile him to some out of the way planet – Delta Vega, in fact (see later) – because of an experiment/prank that went a bit wrong. But then they give command of their flagship to a cadet, so why not exile their best brains?

Oh, and did I mention that Kirk is also described as “genius-level”? He had me fooled.

The planet Romulus is destroyed by a supernova which “threatens the galaxy”. Must have been a pretty big star which exploded, then. The Milky Way contains approximately 200 billion stars. And some of them are huge. But not big enough to destroy all the other 199,999,999,9999 or so stars should they turn supernova. But the silliness doesn’t end there. Earth’s nearest star – other than the Sun – is Alpha Centauri, which is 4.24 light years away. If Alpha Centauri went supernova, and its wavefront were powerful enough to destroy the Earth over that great a distance, it would still take four years and three months to reach here. That’s plenty of time to find a solution if you’re as advanced as the Romulan Empire or the Federation.

It’s fortunate Romulan mining ships are as well armed as battleships. Otherwise Nero would have had trouble exacting his revenge. It’s also fortunate they’re absolutely enormous and very spiky – even though their “mining” seems to consist of dangling a platform in the planet’s atmosphere. Which is, well, illogical. Since they need to keep the platform’s giant laser firing at the same spot on the planet’s surface, the ship would need to be in geosynchronous orbit. For Earth, that’s 35,786 km above mean sea level. Space effectively begins 100 km above sea level (travel higher than that and you can officially call yourself an astronaut). So at the very least the Romulan ship needs a cable that is 37,686 km long. In the film, you can see the ship from the platform. It’s a big ship but not that big.

When Kirk and Sulu fall from the mining platform dangling in Vulcan’s atmosphere, and Kirk’s parachute is ripped from his back – I think they should make them a bit sturdier like, well, like present day parachutes – Chekov manages to transport them as they fall… So, they’d hit the transporter pad with the same velocity at which they were falling. Which would make for a nice splat and a somewhat abrupt end to the film. Or perhaps – and this is probably what earlier Trek films would have done – they’d have mentioned something about converting their velocity into energy in the transporter buffer or something. You know, completely bogus science. But at least they’d have made an effort to explain why the conservation of momentum didn’t apply. Whatever they did, Kirk and Sulu wouldn’t have hit the transporter pad as if they’d just dropped a metre.

Spock is marooned on the world of Delta Vega, and from there he sees the destruction of Vulcan. The two planets are not celestial neighbours, like the Earth and Moon. Which means Spock must have amazing eyesight in order to magnify a view of a planet located at least several light years away. And time-travelling eyes too, in order to see the destruction in real time rather than many years later when the light actually reaches him.

So, not so much a reboot as a lobotomy. It has been said – by John Scalzi among others – that it’s a bit silly to expect correct science in a Star Trek film. But I disagree. There’s no reason why Abrams had to get it so wrong. The sfnal devices – time travel through black holes, red matter – are maguffins to make the plot work. Giving command of the flagship to a cadet is rank stupidity. Suggesting that you can see a planet implode from another planet in an entirely different system is rank stupidity. Imagining that a mining ship will have sufficient armament to defeat the whole of Starfleet is rank stupidity. It is, when you think about it, insulting. The makers of Star Trek clearly have nothing but contempt for their audience.

As if all that weren’t bad enough… I saw in the foyer of the cinema something which persuades me Hollywood holds people in even greater disdain than I could have possibly imagined…. G-Force. “Gizmos, Gadgets and Guinea Pigs”. Yes, Disney have made a film about anthropomorphised guinea pig secret agents. And one of them is supposed to be a femme fatale spy. Yes, that’s a sexy female guinea pig. Voiced by Penélope Cruz.

Western civilisation is well and truly doomed.


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Words on Fire

A couple of nights ago, I sat down to watch François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. I was fairly sure I’d seen it before – I may even have read the book. Knowing the story is no guarantee I had done either, however. The central conceit – firemen who burn books rather than put out fires – is pretty much known by everyone. In the event, it turned out I hadn’t seen the film before – whatever images I knew from it must have come from stills or clips I’d seen. Nor had I read the book – a featurette on the DVD mentions the novel’s Mechanical Hounds, which I have no memory of at all.

I’m not a fan of Ray Bradbury’s fiction, and when I watched Truffaut’s Jules et Jim I couldn’t see why it was considered a classic – so my expectations for the film of Fahrenheit 451 weren’t exactly high. It was released in 1966 (a good year, for many reasons), so I fully expected it to look somewhat dated. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why I’d bought the DVD – even if it had been in the sale…

But then I only had to remember Divine Intervention – a film I took several months to get around to watching since I didn’t expect to enjoy it. And I was so impressed, the film became a favourite. So no matter what my expectations, there was always the chance that Fahrenheit 451 would confound them.

There was only one way to find out…

Fahrenheit 451‘s opening credits were… interesting. No text appears on the screen – the film’s title, cast and crew are spoken, while the camera zooms in and focuses on one television aerial after another. A bright red fire engine then appears, speeding along a country road. It’s not a serious-looking fire engine, but more like one patterned on a child’s toy from the 1930s. Its destination proves to be one of those horrible 1960s concrete housing blocks – although the building looks disconcertingly new. Later, we see the fire station, a bright red building on a street that looks vaguely futuristic and yet still manages to seem somewhat grim and British and 1960s.

Something curious began to happen as I watched Fahrenheit 451. Yes, it does look dated. It makes no real effort to present a future world with any conviction, but instead seems to take place in a 1960s of the imagination. The central premise doesn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny. The satire is so slight, it’s no more than a gentle poke in the ribs (although the cheap and nasty “interactive” television is amusing). Cyril Cusack’s avuncular Captain is disconcertingly, well, avuncular. And yet… I found myself drawn into the film. The mise-en-scène began to work for the film, rather than against it. Casting Julie Christie as Montag’s wife and as rebel Clarisse was a stroke of genius. The story seemed to forget its origins as a commentary on censorship (or apparently not), and instead turned into a paean to books and literature. By the time it had finished, I was a fan, and I’d decided that Fahrenheit 451 was a greatly under-rated film.

According to a documentary on the DVD, Fahrenheit 451 was a difficult project. It was Truffaut’s first English-language film, and he spoke the language poorly. It was filmed in colour and in England. The relationship between Truffaut and male star Oskar Werner also deteriorated as filming progressed – so much so that in the last few minutes of the film, Werner sports an entirely different haircut, which he’d had done to spite the director.

A remake of Fahrenheit 451 is apparently in production. According to IMDB, Frank Darabont (of The Green Mile) is directing and Tom Hanks is rumoured to have been cast as Montag. I think I’ll stick with the original…


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It’s Versatile not Video…

I like to think of myself as a film buff – a cineaste, even. I subscribe to Sight & Sound; I own the Criterion Collection 5-disc edition of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny & Alexander ; I have most of Aki Kaurismäki’s films on DVD (although I still don’t know how to pronounce Matti Pellonpää); and I’ve sat all the way through L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (and I agree with those who say it’s “pretentious twaddle”, rather than “genius cinema”).

I’m not a complete film snob, however. Recently, I’ve been working my way through the first, and only, season of Space: Above & Beyond, a military sf television series from 1995. It’s not actually that good – but it could have been so much better. It’s one of those programmes where the writers try to tackle important issues, and do so with some intelligence. But they ultimately fail because the show’s set-up is such rubbish science fiction. In Space: Above & Beyond, Earth is at war with an implacable alien enemy, the Chigs. The show focuses on the members of USMC 58th Squadron. Who are all lieutenants. And not only do they fly fighters, but they also spend half their time fighting as ground troops, or on special behind-enemy-lines missions. It’s no wonder Earth is losing the war – its armed forces are made up entirely of officers. The physics is the usual television sf bollocks – the plot of one episode depends on the fact that the 58th hear an enemy fighter go past their space transport… The astrography is also hopelessly confused, with all the planets in the galaxy seemingly only thousands of kilometres apart.

Oh well. Maybe I am a film snob, after all.

Anyway. I’ve been renting DVDs from Amazon for a number of years now, and my rental list is a mix of classic films, critically-acclaimed world cinema, and the latest blockbusters. Plus whatever else takes my fancy. Back in December, I rented Divine Intervention, a Palestinian film directed by Elia Suleiman. But I was never quite in the mood to watch it. I’ve seen a few Arabic films before – when I lived in the Middle East, I had 25 television channels, but the only English-language ones were BBC News and CNN (Baywatch in Hindi is actually better, by the way). Those Arabic films I did see were badly-acted slapstick comedies stuck in the 1970s. And judging by the trailers I often saw at the cinema for the latest movies from the Egyptian film industry, nothing much appeared to have changed. However, Divine Intervention was released on DVD by Artificial Eye, and I thought it unlikely they would release some dated piece of cinematic tosh. The film, I guessed, was most likely some worthy-but-dull piece of well-meaning world cinema.

So it sat there. Waiting for me to watch it.

Eventually, I did. Last week. And… I’ve been telling my friends about it ever since. Hence this blog post.

The film opens with a group of youths chasing Santa Claus. They catch him, and stab him in the chest. Then it’s a shot of a street in Nazareth from a relatively high vantage point. We watch an old man climb onto the flat roof of his house. He’s carrying a bucket. It contains empty bottles. He stacks these with the hundreds of empty bottles he has already carried up to the roof. For several minutes, we watch him carry bottles up to the roof. A police car, lights flashing, suddenly drives up to the house. The man climbs onto the roof, and pulls the ladder up after him. He starts throwing the bottles at the policemen…

Divine Intervention is a surreal black comedy set in Palestine. Its plot, what little of it there is, centres around an affair between a man from Jerusalem (played by Suleiman himself) and a woman from Ramallah (Manal Khader), who can only meet at the Israeli army checkpoint between the two towns. They do not speak. The film is mostly made up of set-pieces peripherally connected to the two lovers (such as the two described above). Some are inspired; some are less successful. The part in which a man repeatedly throws rubbish on his next-door neighbour’s garden, but is horrified when she throws it all back on his drive, is just so perfectly… Arabic. However, a scene near the end, in which Khader turns wu xia ninja-on-wires and kills half a dozen Israeli militia at weapons practice, seems somewhat too fantastical to be an effective parody.

In an interview on the DVD, Suleiman (who looks disconcertingly like Robert Downey Jr) mentions that he had been told his films resemble those of Jacques Tati or Buster Keaton. There is, I think, some Kaurismäki in there too – in fact, the scene in the welding-shop is almost pure Kaurismäki.

An excellent film. Rent the DVD now. Even better, buy it. I did.