Top Warp Speed: STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS

Undoubtedly the most breathless of all Star Trek pictures, Star Trek Into Darkness is a nonstop barrage of spectacle, movement, and noise. It’s manipulative, relentless and a fun time at the movies. It gets the job done. With 2009’s Star Trek, director J.J. Abrams got a great deal of entertainment value out of dropping a wormhole into Trek continuity, scattering the familiar pieces every which way and providing a shock of delight as the pieces snapped back into place. It’s about as clever as a combination sequel, prequel, reboot, and remake of a nearly 50-year-old franchise could be. While Into Darkness can’t have the same pleasurable jolts of fresh perspective, what it lacks in discovery it makes up for in chemistry. The cast crackles through energetic banter and terse exposition as they’re forever running up and down the gleaming corridors of the starship Enterprise, desperate to solve the latest crisis in which they’ve found themselves.

With a plot that’s in some ways an extended riff on a classic bit of Trek – to even say whether it’s a movie or a TV episode would probably be enough for Trekkers to spring the film’s secrets sight unseen – the screenplay by longtime Abrams collaborators Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof is packed with dramatic incidents and fan-friendly winking. It’s an expertly calibrated event picture that hurtles from one bit of action or humor into the next without any room to slow down. We start urgently in the middle of a high-energy action sequence with Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban) fleeing an angry alien tribe while Spock (Zachary Quinto) proceeds logically into a volcano to shut it down and save this foreign world. As the sequence plays out, all of the returning cast – Zoe Saldana’s Uhura, Simon Pegg’s Scotty, John Cho’s Sulu, and Anton Yelchin’s Chekov – get their little moments to shine. It’s like stumbling into the last few exciting minutes at the end of an episode and then sticking around for the next couple in the marathon. There’s recognizability and comfortability the cast has in the roles and with each other that provides an instant anchor and funny rapport amidst the chaos around them.

Chaos quickly comes in the form of a terrorist attack on Earth that blows up a Starfleet base in London. The man responsible is John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), one of their own who clearly has his secret motives for turning against them. The scheming scenes leading up to and including these surprise attacks have a scary edge. As the film progresses and Cumberbatch gets to put his sonorous voice into full intimidating villainy, the relationships his character develops take a few interesting twists and turns. Meanwhile, back at Starfleet, the good admiral (Bruce Greenwood) and crusty admiral (Peter Weller) agree to let Kirk take the Enterprise after the attacker in a rare show of force from this research and peacekeeping group that finds a new science officer (Alice Eve) escorting top secret missiles on board. They’re not out boldly going where no man has gone before. They’re on a manhunt.

This streamlined feature slams through its sequences of energetic intensity with sensational special effects and top-notch sound design expected from a Hollywood blockbuster in this budget range. Abrams, not particularly invested in the more cerebral, allegorical aspects of Trek lore, sees fit to deliver a slam-bang spectacle with phaser battles, whooshing warp drives, and brusque threats around every corner. This leaves plenty of time for the film’s politics to be a little muddled, if benign, with the exception of a weirdly misjudged bit of disaster overkill in the final stretch. It’s one thing for a movie like this to destroy a chunk of a metropolis, sending skyscrapers crumbling to the ground. It’s another thing entirely to do so almost off-handedly, skip the aftermath, and then put a strange title card in the end credits proclaiming tribute to post-9/11 workers. (Seriously, what’s going on there?) It’s a film that summons up War on Terror paranoia (potential drone strikes, brief pointed debates about killing terrorists without trial) and twisty conspiracy theories, but uses it only as set dressing for a plot that’s all present tense forward movement. Gone is the Cold War-era utopian optimism of Roddenberry’s original concept. This time it’s all about fear, dread, and explosions.

But it’s amazing how far momentum alone can take you. Abrams has made a film that’s a crackling roller coaster that’s all dips, dives, drops, and top-speed loops with an excellent, blaring score from the ever-reliable Michael Giacchino. The intensity never slows, even when the movie self-consciously incorporates a debate with itself about what kind of mission this Trek is following. “This is clearly a military operation,” Scotty disappointedly tells Kirk. “Is that what we are now? I thought we were explorers.” The fact of the matter is that Trek on TV had room to be as eggheaded as it wanted (at best, thrilling so), whereas the movies have always largely been about elaborate revenge schemes and potentially world-ending super-calamities. This just happens to be a particularly single-minded action adventure that’s constantly chasing the next thrill. And that works.

It works not just because Abrams and crew are skilled technicians, but because of the people on screen as well, with characters filled wonderfully by the talented cast working from borrowed cultural awareness without much original characterization in this particular script. (There’s an assumption, rightly or wrongly, that the audience will know who these characters are and what they mean to each other, so that all emotional development can be left to shorthand.) These characters have lived long and prospered in the cultural imagination for a good reason. The core of the film is the crew, the group of professionals thrown together by duty, bound together by the friendships that developed. Even at their prickliest, when Kirk and Spock speak sharply to each other, engaging in their expected debate between reason and emotion, there’s a core of respect and love that’s a comfort and a constant, even when everything is constantly blowing up around them.

A Bumpy FLIGHT

Howard Hawks once said a good movie has three good scenes and no bad scenes. Flight, director Robert Zemeckis’s first live-action movie in twelve years, tweaks the formula by giving us three great scenes and a few bad ones. Two of the great scenes are right up front. The opening puts us in a hotel room with airline pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) and the flight attendant (Nadine Velazquez) he spent the night with. The camera’s nonchalant capture of skin, sheets, and bottles of booze reveals a director who, after making (mostly great) animated movies over the past decade, is reveling in his return to live action, to flesh and blood and earthly pleasures. The pilot, slow to wake up, does a line of cocaine, snorting it up as classic rock on the soundtrack blares to life and the camera flings back with his newly energized head. He’s ready to go, and so is the movie.

Right away, the script by John Gatins puts the audience in the unusual position of not knowing how to take the main character. There’s an instinctive cringing dread to seeing a pilot drunkenly inhale coke before a flight, but the smart casting balances this out. Denzel Washington, confident and cool, has intense audience affection. (He’s one of the few true Movie Stars left). The audience wants to root for Denzel the wise, Denzel the tough-but-fair, but the movie gives us a different kind of Washington role. Here his bravado is empty. He’s good at his job, very good as we’ll soon find out, but his addictions have gotten the best of him. His overconfident suaveness covers up all manner of lies and deceptions that are barely hidden from sight. In a small gesture Zemeckis catches in the corner of a frame, Whitaker slips, only just catching his footing, while climbing aboard the plane.

In the movie’s next great scene, the ordinary flight goes horribly wrong, but not because of its impaired pilot. Suffering devastating mechanical failure, the plane enters a terrifying nosedive. The shot that looks through the cockpit window as the clouds part to reveal the rapidly approaching ground is a gripping moment of stomach-flipping suspense. With convincing special effects and precise blocking, the plane crashes. With miraculous quick thinking, Captain Whitaker brings the plane down relatively safely, through a scary, effective extended scene in which the plane, falling out of the sky, ends up flying upside down before slicing through a church steeple and slamming into a field. Somehow, out of 102 people aboard the flight, 96 survive.

The film follows the aftermath of this accident. The media calls the pilot a hero. The pilots’ union rep (Bruce Greenwood) tells Whitaker to keep a low profile, to not speak to the press. The union calls in a lawyer (Don Cheadle) to handle the criminal side of the accident investigation. It’s clear that the plane suffered mechanical difficulties. It’s also clear that the pilot was inebriated. He is hero; he is a criminal. The film creates a convincing scenario from which there can be no easy answers, from which there’s no easy way out. It’s perhaps somewhat inevitable that, in pursuit of some sort of resolution, the film can’t bring this conflict to a convincing resolution. That it tries is its biggest miscalculation.

Until that point, however, the film is an intermittently gripping character study in the body of a procedural. As the accident investigation moves forward, step by methodical step, Whitaker struggles with his addictions to drugs and alcohol. He calls his dealer (John Goodman), but refuses to take more drugs. He befriends an addict (Kelly Reilly) and encourages her to get help, all the while refusing to admit he has problems of his own. In a quick-cut montage, he dumps all his booze down the drain, but days later buys a case and can’t even get out of the parking lot before he takes a swig.

He’s a man given a big wake-up call, a near-death experience that might result in his going to prison, and yet he still refuses to let himself admit that he has a problem. One night, confronted about his drinking, he bellows that he “chooses to drink.” Advised by his lawyer to stop drinking, Whitaker calmly says that he will. He thinks he can stop cold turkey by simply choosing to do so, through his sheer force of will. The last great scene in the film involves the soft hum of a refrigerator generating suspense in the middle of the night. It calls to Whitaker. Will he open it? Will he break his sobriety once more?

Gatins script could have been directed as nothing more than a standard Hollywood substance abuse parable and, though it occasionally is just that, especially in the painfully obvious music cues, it’s often energized by Zemeckis’s confident, composed studio dramaturgy and Washington’s seemingly effortlessly complicated performance. The only problem with creating such a high-flying drama is the high probability that it’ll be brought in for a crash landing. In a funny structural echo of the doomed flight at the center of it all, the film starts strong, soars high, but then loses altitude before crash landing into the end credits. By choosing to focus on a situation that’s intriguingly irreconcilable, I can’t exactly blame the filmmakers for finding a way to reconcile the film’s various strands that seems too easy and even has one particular scene that’s so bad it appears to be counter to their thematic intent. I’m just disappointed that they couldn’t find the film a landing to match the sensational takeoff. 

Quick Look: MAO'S LAST DANCER

Mao’s Last Dancer is one of those based-on-a-true-story films that take the complexities and drama of real life incidents and proceeds to whittle them down into a manageable middling middlebrow lump. Bruce Beresford directs from a script by Jan Sardi that turns the interesting story of a Chinese ballet dancer who defects while on a 1981 trip to America into a thoroughly bland movie. Chi Cao, a dancer in his film debut, is quite good as Li Cunxin, the dancer in question, but he’s stuck in a movie that doesn’t know how to help modulate performance or engage in any form of subtlety. The supporting cast that includes the likes of Bruce Greenwood and Kyle MacLachlan is similarly mishandled by the filmmaking. This is a movie that’s out to hammer home every emotion with capital letters and copious clunky dialogue. The true story is interesting enough to shock the movie to life for a few moments at a time, but I would recommend Cunxin’s memoir if that’s what you’re interested in. Beresford has made good movies before, with Tender Mercies and Driving Miss Daisy, among others, on his résumé, but this particular film is never anything more than watchable, and is too often just simple and sedate.

Quick Look: DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS

With a fun high concept and, with Paul Rudd and Steve Carell, two of the most consistently funny comedic actors working today, it would be easy to assume Jay Roach’s Dinner for Schmucks (based on The Dinner Game, a 1998 French film) would be at the very least a serviceable comedy. That assumption would be wrong. This is a flat movie with no flow. It proceeds in awkward, ill-fitting chunks of plot. There are funny lines sprinkled here and there, but none achieve any real lift in the movie’s overall atmosphere. This is dismal, unfunny stuff: awkwardly placed broad shtick mingling freely with uncomfortable sentimentality. Rudd is asked by his boss (Bruce Greenwood), as part of a vetting process for a promotion, to find an idiot to bring to the company’s regular secret dinner where the execs make fun of the goofier side of the populace. Naturally, Rudd decides to bring Carell, a dim, amiable amateur taxidermist, after they meet in a traffic incident. The movie never goes too mean in its humor; neither the schmucks nor the ones planning on mocking them come under much withering comedic fire. The movie is watchable and pleasant, in an inoffensive way that would play best on TV late at night while everyone watching is half-asleep or passed out. That way the small smiles it sometimes inspires would feel a smidge more welcome, especially if you woke up in time to see one of the small, slightly funny moments given to someone like Zach Galifianakis, Kristen Schaal or Jemaine Clement. The movie bumbles along for far too long (nearly two hours!), coasting all the way on the talents of its leads while giving them very little chance to excel. There’s a sense of genuine camaraderie and chemistry between the two men that the movie never really gets around to exploiting, instead choosing to focus on funny voices and stupid misunderstandings. It could have been an updated Odd Couple, but is really just another one of those movies with the funniest bits in the commercials.