LeftHandedGuitarist

[3.3/10] The rap on 2015’s The Force Awakens -- the first installment in the new Star Wars trilogy, was that it was too derivative of A New Hope, too much just following in its predecessor’s footsteps, too devoted to recreating that old blueprint rather than fashioning a new one.

God help any folks who felt that way who dared to watch Home Alone 2. This sequel is a carbon copy of the original, not merely content to offer the same basic story in a new setting, but almost impressively slavish in how it recreates the prior film, beat-for-beat, with only the faintest changes to make it feel like anything other than a cheap cash-in.

It’s a little tough to remember when middle installments like The Empire Strikes Back and The Dark Knight and Winter Soldier are considered the peaks of their respective franchises that sequels were once considered shameless money grabs. But after watching this dross, which barely qualifies as a pallete swap of its predecessors, it’s easy to understand why folks of the time were skeptical of any cinematic follow-ups.

Returning writer John Hughes and returning director Chris Columbus can, perhaps, be forgiven for replicating the same basic outline from the first installment. In Lost in New York, as in the original, Kevin has an incident that isn’t fully his fault but which leaves his entire family mad at him. He wishes to be apart from his family, gets separated from them, and after some misadventures, wishes he could be with them once more. In the midst of all this, someone who initially seems scary turns out not only be nice, and to provide an opportunity for a mutual exchange of wisdom, but also saves the day when Kevin is cornered. And, naturally, Kevin concocts any number of traps to fell his nigh-witless attackers in Looney Tunes fashion.

If the similarities stopped there, maybe Home Alone 2 could be forgiven as a film sticking to the general formula of its nascent franchise, even if it didn’t really advance the ball from the prior outing. But it doesn’t. Instead, Lost in New York finds every, lazy opportunity to simply copy what it did before with only the slightest hint of variation or evolution.

Does someone suspect that Kevin is without adult supervision? No matter, he’s back using marionette strings and a misleading silhouette to create the deception. Is a cadre of antagonists onto him? Not to worry. He’s able to make a great escape, and then scare them off with a selectively-played old movie replete with the trademark “filthy animals” line. There is the famous scream, the shock of realization from Mrs. McCallister, and even the same two burglars from the first movie.

That’s right, by some incredible coincidence, not only is Kevin once again separated from his family, but he runs into the same dopey team of Harry and Marv, who are on the lam and itching for revenge. It is, perhaps, a bit churlish to complain about the powers that be finding a way to bring Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern back into the fold, but as able as the pair are, it’s just another indication of the complete and total lack of imagination this film has relative to its forebear.

Indeed, there’s very few positive things in this film, but they tend to center on those scant few elements that are genuinely new for the franchise. Chief among them is Tim Curry as a malcontent hotel manager who has it out for Kevin from the moment he sees him. From a brilliant match cut between Curry and The Grinch sporting the same grin, to Curry’s ability to show the contempt behind the plastic smile, to his genteel but malevolent presence, he’s really the only major new aspect of this flick beyond its setting, and he stands out as the most enjoyable thing in it.

The rest of the film is not entirely without its charms. John Williams’s score is, as always, a boon to the picture, creating a sense of energy and emotion the film doesn’t otherwise earn. Rob Schneider, of all people, is a greater-making presence here, with his semi-smarmy, semi-clueless bellhop adding some flavor to the proceedings. And while often used in a cheesy fashion, Home Alone 2 does take advantage of its gothamite setting, with sweeping shots and montages across the city that provide pleasant snapshots, even if they also reveal the film as one big advertisement for specific hotels, sodas, and travel destinations.

The problem is that Hughes and Columbus think that shift in backdrop is all they needed to change in order to update the old script. Home Alone 2 feels like a madlibs version of the original Home Alone movie. Rather than resolving to defend his home; Kevin resolves to defend...his uncle’s home. Instead of teaching his faux-scary acquaintance about the power of family, he teaches them the value of opening their heart. Instead of wishing to be back with his mom, he wishes to be back...with his mom. There’s no beat too minute for Home Alone 2 not to photocopy with hardly an alteration.

That might work if the film could maintain even a hint of the earned sentiment of its precursor. The turtledove-accented lesson on friendship is bland pablum that doesn’t really connect to Kevin’s clumsy arc in Home Alone 2 the same way that the prior film’s message of maturity and family did. The resolution to help sick kids on X-mas feels like a cheap way to attempt to gin up some sentiment and sense of selflessness in Kevin that’s barely established. And the film leans into a mother and child connection that’s underfed and thus underwhelming in the final tally. The biggest problem in Home Alone 2 is how its “monkey see, monkey do” approach to making a movie makes its emotional points come off jumbled and miscalibrated, because they’re borrowed from another flick and don’t really fit the situation presented.

Throw in the fact that the already cartoony violence is longer and more over the top, the pacing of the film drags and drags, and you get a cheap, patience-testing, waste of a sequel. Each new bonk on the head and underwhelming slapstick setpiece just gives the viewer more time to contemplate the fact that if you lose your kid once, maybe it’s just a fluke, but if you manage to do it twice within a little more than a year, you’re probably not the best parent.

Home Alone 2 is little more than a watered down, less-effective version of the first Home Alone movie with a new coat of paint. Even the great fundamentals of the original script, the return of principal creatives like Hughes, Columbus, and Williams, and most of the cast of the last flick reprising their roles alongside great additions like Curry, cannot save this soulless rehash from needing to be dumped in the Hudson River and never brought to light again.

[8.0/10] I’m colder on Twin Peaks than most. The series never really clicked for me for a myriad of reasons, most of which stem from growing up in a time when television was awash in the series’ successors, making its innovations seem unremarkable. But the one thing that always worked for me is when the show went for the frightening or unnerving. Whether it be a forced perspective shot of Bob advancing toward the camera, or Leland’s manic grin, or the chilling tones of a predatory assault, the show could always scare me even when it couldn’t always impress me otherwise.

It makes sense, then, that Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me proves to be the franchise’s finest hour by discarding most of the quaint quirkiness of its world, the overwrought ponderous exchanges, and leans into the darkness that was always at the core of the series. Fire Walk with Me isn’t about a picturesque town with a seedy underbelly; it’s not about a twisty investigation; it’s not about the misadventures of the local misfits. It’s about one woman’s trauma, her descent, the “young timber” that would start this brushfire and burn up in the process. And in that, it becomes a more gripping and disturbing slice of Lynch’s world.

It’s too much to call Fire Walk with Me a deconstruction, but the film digs into what the television series only hinted at, and often sidestepped. In all its mysticism and whodunnitry, Twin Peaks often elided the central horror upon which the show was founded -- that a father raped and murdered his daughter. It’s understandable that Lynch and Frost could only delve so far into that founding, horrifying detail of their series on network television. But free from those constraints, the show’s creators don’t shy away from the ugliness and disturbing qualities the events that started their story in motion.

It’s a story centered on Laura Palmer. Laura was the black hole of Twin Peaks. She wasn’t present in the events of the show, but she took with her all the light that once been there and everything was still caught in her orbit. And yet, despite the presence of her identical twin cousin Maddy (don’t get me started) and appearances in dream sequences, she never really felt like a character on the show.

Instead, she felt like a device, an impossible, fantastical individual who somehow managed to touch all these lives so forcefully, without ever touching the ground. Part of that can be waved away with how we lionize people in death, particularly a tragic death, but still, in many ways, Laura was the piece of the Twin Peaks puzzle that never really fit, the character who was more a series of conveniences, of details for others to react to, than a real person.

Fire Walk with Me corrects for that. It not only makes Laura the central figure of its story, but it traces the last legs of her doomed path to turning up wrapped in plastic in agonizing, gut-wrenching detail. Gone is the almost mythic figure who everyone in the town waxes rhapsodic about but no one seems to really know, and in her place is a victim of abuse, trying everything she can to cope with and outrun the horrors she is party to on a daily basis, slowly succumbing to them in poignant, tragic fashion. In a franchise that ended every episode with Laura Palmer’s smiling visage, the movie succeeds by finally making her a vivid, haunting, and haunted character, and telling her story.

The film only really falters when it devotes too much of its run time to filling in the rest of the blanks from the television show instead of focusing on that big one. The film doesn’t gain much, if anything, from seeing Chris Isaak and Kiefer Sutherland investigate the Teresa Banks murder for half an hour. As much as I enjoy Twin Peaks going more explicitly weird (another flavor of the T.V. series I consistently appreciated despite my general lukewarm feelings), we don’t really need to see David Bowie strolling into the FBI and setting off Cooper’s premonitions about the forthcoming murders with the usual cast of otherworldly characters. To be frank, despite the fact that he was the best character in the show, Fire Walk with Me has too much of Agent Cooper.

Sure, it’s nice to see him once more and hear confirmation that the “Good Dale” is trapped in the lodge, or have glimpses of Harold the agoraphobic, or even to learn how the events set in Twin Peaks connect with those set in Dear Meadow. But Fire Walk with Me is at its best when it’s less focused on answering the questions of how the collage of preceding events connects to the later ones we know, and chooses instead to answer two simple questions that have been nagging at the corners of Twin Peaks from the beginning: what would drive Laura Palmer to be the sort of person mixed up in all the things Cooper and his cohort uncover, and what was it like for her to be trapped in that inescapable downward spiral.

The answer to the first is that she was abused by her father from the age of twelve, and that whatever essential light remains within her, the kind of light that someone like James Hurley can still connect with, has been twisted by years of suffering, accelerated by realizations of who, if not what, is inflicting this sort of pain on her. And the answer to the second is that it would be a disorienting, dehumanizing experience, one that warps your sense of sexuality and leaves you reaching out for any sort of comfort or palliative to take away the pain that emanates from the very place you call home.

The most harrowing moments of the film, and there’s no shortage of them, are the ones that take place in the Palmer household. Independent of the supernatural elements that marked Twin Peaks as something different, Lynch paints a terrifying portrait of a home filled with abuse and denial, one of a piece with the likes of far more grounded films like Precious. You could edit away all the appearances of Bob and the Red Room in this film, and still come up an unnerving tale of what it’s like to cope with such abuses, to live in a house where your tormentor is inescapable.

And yet, as much as Fire Walk with Me is, thankfully, Laura’s story, it also adds shading to Leland. Ray Wise, who was a little shaky in the early going of the television series, gives a superlative performance as a man trapped inside a monster. There is a quiet menace to him, when Leland-qua-Bob is examining his daughter’s fingernails, or forcing his wife to drink a drugged glass of milk so she won’t hear what’s happening in the next room, or placing his hand over Teresa Banks’s face and asking if she knows who he is.

But there’s also a supreme pathos when the hints of the real man inside peek out. When Leland-qua-Leland breaks down crying and kisses his daughter on the forehead, it adds another layer of tragedy to this whole skin-crawling ordeal. When he looks off, not understanding why his daughter tells him to stay away from her despite his earnest inquiries as to what’s wrong, it’s heartbreaking. And when he yells out “please don’t make me do this” before the last, terrible moment, it makes him another of Bob’s victims, one violated in different but no less horrible ways.

It’s a tack that works on multiple levels. The unfathomable pains inflicted on Laura by her father, who periodically comes to and recognizes the devastating horror of his actions, deepens the awful, tragic qualities of these events. But it also works symbolically, for the way that real life abusers alternate cruelty and kindness with no demon possessions to account for their actions. In Fire Walk with Me, Lynch bridges the gap between the supernatural and the all too real, using the one to comment on the other, in a fashion that his televised efforts only grazed.

More than anything, Lynch proves himself almost preternaturally adept at painting moods and atmospheres in the film. I’d be lying if I claimed I could parse out the meaning of every shot or stray line of dialogue in the luridly-colored sequence where Laura and Donna party with Jacques Renault. But Lynch does a tremendous job at crafting this phantasmagoria, establishing a tone of this hedonistic, dreamy world that Laura would understandably try to escape to as a respite from the horrors of home, and yet just as strenuously act to keep Donna from being wrapped up in it.

It would be false for me to say I understood every piece of the scene where the one-armed man effectively corners the Palmers in their car and screeches warnings and admonitions at them. But the film creates a sense of terror in these moments, of deep existential dread to have the world circle up and offer such halting, ominous cautions.

I cannot pretend that I comprehended every bit of symbolism deployed in the final Red Room sequence. But I can report the palpable sense of relief, of catharsis, from Laura seeing the angel there. She spends much of the film feeling like the good guys never showed up in the elemental battle between good and evil at the roots of Twin Peaks, that something somewhere should have intervened to stop all this horror from being visited on her, and then when she learns that one is there, that there were, in some way, beings looking out for her, she smiles, and we smile with her.

Much of these scenes and sequences are more liminal than literal, better served to evoke a response than make clear rational sense. But that serves Lynch’s ends. The medium exists to create emotional responses in the audience, and in that, Lynch and his collaborators cut out the middleman and go straight for a feeling more than for a beat in the story. In the same vein, the ending of the film is impressionistic. The death of Laura Palmer is terrifying, yes, but it’s not just a mere spate of brutality. It is operatic, shown in flashes, made all the more chilling by the mere glimpses of it we see, the pleas against it, the lives dragged down amid this mystic-tinged cruelty.

Twin Peaks could always scare you when it wanted to. Sure, it could get mired in the muck of love quadrangles or lumpy conspiracies, but when it zeroed in on the core threat, lurking at the edges of the piece and only occasionally taking center stage, it had a vividness and effectiveness the rest of the show couldn’t quite match. Fire Walk with Me gives itself over to that darkness, to that chill, and is all the better for it.

It gives those elements form in the story of a man possessed and forced to do terrible things and, more importantly, of a young woman facing unimaginable horrors, abuses that drive her to seek solace in strange places, that have twisted her into a confused, wounded animal, and that finally make her a full-fledged, ruefully-drawn part of Twin Peaks. In that, Lynch finds something sadder, and scarier, than all the ghosts and demons that came before.

[9.4/10] Stop and consider the magnitude of this achievement. Avengers: Endgame is not just a film. It is not merely the “season finale” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is the culmination of eleven years of multifaceted storytelling that balances dozens of characters, ties off story threads that have stretched and weaved and intersected over the past decade, and crafts a final challenge worthy of being the capstone to this mega-franchise. That it happened at all, let alone that the series ends on a note so poignant, funny, and exhilarating, is an absolute miracle -- or at least, if you’ll pardon the expression, a marvel.

Rest assured, if you’ve never seen an MCU movie before and decide, for some inexplicable reason, to jump in here, you will be helplessly lost. Those hoping for standalone accessibility will be frustrated. But one of the best features of Endgame is how layered yet modular it is. If you’ve only watched the Avengers team-up flicks, you can still keep up with the film given its easy-to-follow structure and brief explanations of how we arrived here. (The latter are typically laden with wisecracks to help the medicine go down). If you’ve dipped into the other major MCU films here and there, you’re liable to appreciate the cameos and connections that make this installment feel as much like a reunion as it does a finale. And if, like yours truly, you’ve watched the whole series from beginning to end, you’ll love both the little callbacks to past moments and personalities, and the way the film expertly weaves twenty movies’ worth of relationships and personal developments into one final, unfathomably satisfying tapestry.

Endgame can be essentially divided into three parts: (1.) the hangover from Infinity War (2.) the “Time Heist” and (3.) the final confrontation and epilogue. For a film with as many characters and stories as this (presumably) last outing for the original Avengers team has, that structure helps keep the movie from feeling ungainly. There are clear goals and distinct changes in the objectives from hour to hour that keeps the film manageable, even nimble, as it ties so many stories and personalities together.

The first hour of Endgame is easily the most heartbreaking. The most commendable thing the film does is take time to show our heroes coping with that unimaginable loss. Endgame certainly takes a page from the first Avengers flick by spending its first act getting the band back together, but not before it deals with what split them apart. Having an opening twenty minutes where the good guys kill Thanos, but all hope of reversing his grim deeds has been lost, is a deft choice that immediately pumps the brakes on the audience’s expectations, and gives the Avengers reasons to make good on tensions that have been bubbling up for years. Before the film dives into making things right, it stops to process what went wrong.

That means taking stock of where the Avengers are five years after the events of Infinity War and feeling their pain and efforts to heal. There is something heartening in seeing Steve Rogers still leading support groups and trying to make lives easier for people. There’s something piercing about Natasha keeping the lights on for The Avengers but still feeling the loss of her wayward best friend. There’s something funny but sympathetic about Thor’s reaction to his belief that he’s failed being to wallow in distractions and simpler pleasures. There’s something touching about Ant-Man reuniting with his now-grown daughter who thought she’d lost him forever. There’s something bitter about Hawkeye turning into a murderous ronin after the devastating loss of his family. And there’s something oddly right about Tony only being able to accept the quiet life after his worst fears have come to fruition, with a wife and a daughter and a cabin on the lake. Savvy viewers know that the dusting at the end of Infinity War is destined to be undone, but Endgame doesn’t shy away from showing the effects it had on the survivors in the ensuing, difficult five years, which makes those losses matter and serve as meaningful motivation, even if we know they’re unlikely to be permanent.

But, of course, a blockbuster film can only permit itself to wallow for so long. After everyone is reunited and convinced that Scott Lang’s longshot effort to right what went wrong is worth a try given the magnitude of what was taken, the fun, and the “Time Heist”, begins.

It’s there that Endgame becomes, at least for long stretches, an enjoyable romp, finding a different, more diverting gear that most Marvel movies kick into sooner or later. The chance to have our heroes dip back into key moments of MCU history, playing around with old friends and enemies, using knowledge of the past and the future to bring humor and clever twists to the fore, is an utter delight. Whether it’s Captain America having to go toe-to-toe with himself like some live action Capcom game, or War Machine and Nebula reframing the opening to the original Guardians movie as idiocy, or Steve sidestepping another elevator fight with a well-placed “Hail Hydra”, this stretch is what lets the Avengers be those lovable, mischief-making scamps that we’ve enjoyed watching even apart from the world-moving stakes and personal struggles.

And yet, the film also uses those hops through time to underscore those internal struggles as much as it revels in the fun of being a cameo-coated heist flick. Iron Man and Captain America both go back in time to the 1970s, where Tony resolves the daddy issues that have been at the fore of his personal issues since Iron Man 2, and Steve is haunted by being both unimaginably close and unimaginably far from his greatest love. Thor has an unexpectedly touching reunion with his mother circa Thor 2, that helps him recover from the debilitating sense of being a failure. And last, but anything but least, Black Widow and Hawkeye realize what it takes to obtain the soul stone, and struggle with one another to pay its price themselves.

It is one of the more affecting sequences in the film, as two heroes essentially compete to save the other and sacrifice themselves. It’s one of the tensest fights in the film, given the obvious stakes, and shows the pair of “badass normal” in the Avengers at their best, in ways both personal and pugilistic. Natasha wins, and firmly and finally erases the red from her ledger, giving her life to save the world and doing so for the family and feeling she never thought she’d fine. It is a noble, satisfying, and hard but heartening death, that gives Black Widow the high point of the act before the massive, final rumble begin.

That’s one of Endgame’s canniest choices. It shows our heroes succeeding in their wildly improbable (if somewhat inevitable) mission, but that being only half the battle. The time-skipping reassembly of the Infinity Stones, and a painful but fruitful snap from The Hulk brings all of the old dust mites back, but that’s when the final bout of trouble begins. In a clever twist, 2014 Thanos used 2014 Nebula’s connection to her 2019 predecessor against her and, with knowledge of the Avengers’ plan, travels to the future to stop hit. Surveying the aftermath of his original plan, he decides that it did not go far enough. He resolves to gather the stones once more to remake the universe in his image from the ground up, one without a memory of what was taken from them, and calls in his army to see that it happens.

It’s there that the rousing fanservice of the film erupts in earnest. Every fight-worthy MCU character of note (save those poor unloved T.V.-based heroes) bounds onto the screen at once to tear through Thanos’s goons together and stop the Mad Titan from completing his plan. The outcome of the skirmish is never in doubt, but its beats are as fistpump-worthy as anything you’re likely to see in cinema. Captain America calls Thor’s hammer as he, Iron Man, and the God of Thunder himself take on Thanos in three-on-one close-quarters combat. Black Panther saunters in triumphantly with his usual infectious resolve and Spider-Man swings back into action to ease Tony’s conscience. Captain Marvel gets the “Big Damn Hero” moment, and the utter thrill of seeing every warrior, fighter, and ally The Avengers ever crossed paths with assembled in one place take on Thanos’s equal and opposite army is a brand of high mark no other film can claim.

It is, in a word, uproarious, in the best possible sense. That final rumble is pure crowd-pleasing, with moments that verge on the pandering, but which never stop flooding the audience’s pleasure centers with superheroic dopamine. While the results are inevitable, the chills and spills to get there are too enjoyable to care, as Endgame makes good on its ultimate crossover promises to give anyone and everyone a moment to shine.

That closing salvo feeds three themes that have been with the Marvel Cinematic Universe almost since the very beginning. Time and again, the Avengers flicks have focused on the idea that these heroes are vulnerable when trapped in discord, but nigh-unstoppable when working together. For Tony Stark in particular, Endgame works as the final confirmation idea that, however much he may want to put the world on his back and go it alone, it takes trusting his teammates, and seeing the fruits of so much affection and connection from so many people, to save the world.

That effort, however, costs Tony his life. When all other options are exhausted, Tony himself nabs the Infinity Stones from Thanos’s gauntlet and, at the cost of his own life, snaps his enemy’s forces out of existence. It is a mirror image of the end of Infinity War, with all of the alien aggressors fading to flakes of ash, and Thanos himself crumbling under the weight of his crestfallen disappointment rather than looking with satisfaction upon a grateful world.

But those events mirror Infinity War in another, more spiritual way. Time and again in that film, Thanos was able to win because The Avengers were not willing to sacrifice one another to stop him. They were not willing to let others die, let alone put them in harm’s way, even to secure a victory. Here, on the other hand, we see the opposite side of that nobility. All of these heroes put their lives on the line to stop Thanos, but only Natasha and Tony know and accept the specific costs of their actions. Thanos loses not only because of the friendships and alliances forged in the name of defending what’s right, but because he underestimated the magnitude of the sacrifices that Earth’s Mightiest Heroes would make in order to protect the people they love.

That’s been Tony’s goal since the prospect of an unstoppable alien threat first emerged in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2012’s The Avengers. From his endless array of alternate suits meant to account for any possible threat in Iron Man 3, to his efforts to put an iron shield around the world in Age of Ultron, to his desire to save his compatriots from themselves with Sokovia Accords, Tony has arguably been obsessed with defending the world from the worst it can offer. In his final moments, Pepper tells him that he’s succeeded, that they’re safe now, that his long labor is finally over and he can rest.

The predictability of that end weakens the moment a little, but it’s buoyed by the reactions of those closest to Tony, and the ballast that comes from paying off eleven years of personal struggles, trials, and travails from the signature character of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
It’s only in the film’s closing segments, where it tries to grieve quickly and pass multiple torches that its fumbles the ball a bit. Whereas most of the Endgame’s events have a surprising amount of focus given the scope of the film, it’s that last little stretch where the movie’s supports start to buckle under so much weight, and the moments start to feel more scattershot. And yet it all ends on a high note, with Steve Rogers finally getting the happy ending – the long, joyful life with the woman he loves – that he had lost for so long. The move requires a little movie magic, and some timeline-shredding consequences, but rides on the total joy of him finally getting that long-awaited dance with Peggy Carter, and the beautiful future it implies.

That scene epitomizes Avengers: Endgame, a film that by all accounts, shouldn’t work, and shouldn’t even have happened. If you think about the details of Steve and Peggy’s reunion for too long, the whole thing is at risk of falling apart. And yet it’s the end product of so many great emotional moments, so many clever twists, so many pieces of plot and character and feeling that have been sewn together over the past decade of storytelling, that it cannot help but feel earned. Endgame is an unprecedented achievement, one that marries the lighter thrills of comic moments and superpowered fisticuffs, with committed, long term character work and emotional depth. The Marvel Cinematic Universe will continue, but we still never have a cinematic event as big, as momentous, and as multifaceted as Endgame ever again. Thank goodness for all of the assembly that was required, undertaken, and finished with this capstone.

[8.2/10] I remember reading about the “extended editions” of the Lord of the Rings films – which add scads of new footage to the point that runtimes balloon to the four-hour mark – and thinking to myself, “who would want that?” Even for films and characters and settings I love, the prospect of turning it into a nonstop four-hour experience just sounds exhausting. Even the best creative teams struggle to sustain stories and command the audience’s attention for that long.

But revisiting The Fellowship of the Ring, I get it now, for good and for bad.

I get it because right off the bat, what Peter Jackson accomplishes in this film, which sets the tone for his Oscar-winning trilogy, is incredible. The production design, the worlds created, the sheer level of craft at play in every scene is just staggering. Jackson and company summon up the earthy tones and idealized pastoral English past of The Shire. They create the rocky remnants of decaying worlds from another time, the frightening jagged edges and horrible machines of the enemy forces, the ethereal homes of angelic peoples. Who wouldn’t want to spend more time in those cinematic environs?

What’s remarkable is how real all of it feels, despite the fantasy setting. That’s not to say that Fellowship lacks in imagination or whimsy. There are impressionistic moments of lore retold, memories shared, and temptations renewed. But through the famed forced perspective shots, the budding but well-executed CGI effects, and the outstanding framing cinematography choices, the film realizes Middle Earth as a living, breathing, place beyond any other fantasy setting.

The texture of the film is just so damn good. But Jackson and company use the lighting and mise en scène and other more purely aesthetic elements to help tell the tale and give it a sense of a place. There is a golden, bucolic hue to the early scenes in the Shire, a gauzy, semi-divine light that surrounds the elves’ communities, and mordant blackness that surrounds Sauron’s emissaries and minions. The wide shots of our heroes traversing snowy mountains, or rocky cliffs, or treacherous forests give the tale its epic scope and bridge the gap between the real and the fantastical. It’s natural that the outstanding tangible details, the feel of this place, would leave fans wanting to spend as much time there as they can.

And I also get it because, despite the theatrical cut clocking in at more than three hours on its own, Fellowship feels as much like a series of character introductions, a bout of table-setting for the grand events to come, as it feels like a full story in its own right. That’s not true for the entire film. The early portions of Fellowship work as a standard-but-sterling entrée into the world of the film and its characters, and in truth, I’m not sure it ever really tops that opening frame. The milling of the hobbits, the arrival of their wizard friend, the hint that there is something sinister and wearying beneath this celebration of joy and the adventure of the wider world of that first act is near-unmatched in the rest of the film.

It is, as is often the case for genre films, the beginning of the hero’s journey. We meet Frodo and learn what kind of person he is. We see the essential quest that lies ahead of him and learn about his connection to his friend and allies. We meet his mentor, who is our guide to the mysteries of the world that are just as nebulous and foreboding to the audience (even those who know the source material) as they are to the hobbit he’s imparting these warnings to. The terrible power of the ring, the forces for good and for evil working to attain or destroy it, its humble courier and his band of allies simple and strong, all welcome the audience into the story. They establish the stakes, the major figures, and the contours of the quest, while reveling in enough of the unknown and portentous and merely teased to leave plenty more to be discovered and enjoyed.

But from there, the film is a never-ending parade of the genre-film equivalent of a series of meetcutes. Jackson and company have to put all of these big players in place for the need of the future films, and so rather than a plot squarely focused on cause and effect, where choices or unseen forces command the direction of the narrative, Fellowship barrels through what amount to a pack of character introduction scenes. Those are necessary in any story to some extent, but at some point, the film starts to feel weighed down by them, with the plot not really allowed to advance organically since we need to spend so much time trying to get the audience to grok the expansive cast.

So meet Gimli! Meet Legolas! Meet Arwen! Meet Galadriel! Meet Saruman! Meet Elrond! Most of them don’t have much to do yet, beyond hop along for the ride or give our heroes some counsel or set things up for future installment. But the actors are all great and the texture is all great and the feel of it’s all great so you don’t really notice until afterward that hey, nothing really happened there for a while. I can see wanting the extended edition to have there be more connective tissue between these scenes, to have the introductions feel less drive-by in some instances, so the story can stop and breathe and, you know, have more incident than just jumping from introduction to introduction.

That’s especially true for the conflict between Aragorn, Boromir, and to a lesser extent Frodo. Boromir’s death is the climax of the film, the noble sacrifice and redemption for a character overcome by the dark influence of the one ring. It also conveniently paves the way for Aragorn, the conventional fantasy hero, to have a clearer path toward the throne his hallowed, name-checked ancestor once sat in amid the kingdom of men.

The catch is that we get only the barest, exposition-delivered details about this setup (which, in fairness, is explored more in the next movie.) We get only a couple of scenes that highlight the implicit, underlying tension between the two human members of the Fellowship. There’s an inherent gingerness between them, a continuing contrast that’s creditably left to subtext, between the noble man denied his birthright, and the weaker individual next in line. But given the brevity of the scenes that evince that sense of inherent conflict and comparison, the slight introduction for Boromir in particular, the crowding of that storyline with the description of The Quest and the carousel of new faces and other action set pieces that must happen, that noble end feels less earned and less impactful, than it would if it had more time to be fleshed out.

And yet, even where the introductions are brief, or the characters moments feel rushed, the movie soars on the back of its three central character. The first is The Ring itself, and by extension Sauron. And while it may be a little silly to consider this object a character, but drives the action of the film, it interacts with and has an effect on everyone it comes across and has more personality than some of the people that Fellowship otherwise glosses over. If there’s one thing that this movie succeeds at, it’s the texture, but if there’s a second thing, it’s at conveying the sheer power and force and danger of this seemingly simple object, that movies the hearts of men, elves, and even the most powerful magic-wielders of the age.

It doesn’t move Frodo though. That’s the other thing Fellowship sells so well – why our hero is so suited to this task. The ring represents power, and with it, the idea that even good people lose themselves in the shadow of the freedom and ability to remake and dominate the world as they see fit. But Frodo doesn’t want power. He is innocence incarnate, realized in Elijah Wood’s stellar wide-eyed performance. Time and again, he expresses the vulnerability necessary for a character stepping into a new world while being totally out of his depth. But he also evinces the quiet strength that can only come from someone whose same unspoiled innocence gives him a protection against the thing that otherwise bends and breaks figures much more worldly and powerful and him.

None is more worldly and powerful than Gandalf himself. Ian McKellen gives a tour de force performance in the role, turning on a dime from the avuncular, figure of mirth when he exalts among his hobbit friends, to the stern voice of knowing authority when those good or bad start to stray from the path, to the vulnerable sorcerer having to stand up against forces that supersede even his own, selling the gravity of this challenge at every turn. McKellen does it all and delivers the sometimes-thudding fantasy-speak with a conviction and gravitas that makes the grand tones of the movie work.

His utterance of “You shall not pass” has become memetic and iconic in the years since the Fellowship’s release, but for good reason. It is not only Gandalf’s greatest moment in the film, and perhaps the series, but the high point of the entire film. It is the fellowship assembled, the film’s best character making his stand, Jackson’s skills as an action director and crafted of tension coming to the fore, the effects and texture of the world brought to bear, the tension and heroism and loss that makes all good stories. It is, in short, the combination of all the film’s best features at once.

Who wouldn’t want more of that? The Fellowship of the Ring strings some of its character debuts together in lieu of plot, offers as much setup as it does immediate incident, and can get bogged down in its lore and details and table-setting for the climactic events to come. But it also establishes Middle Earth, introduces its major quest and most important character with aplomb, and gives the viewer a reason to care, to invest, in them and their success or failure. That’s more than enough to have fans salivating for another chunk of Middle Earth, and to leave even doubters understanding how more real estate could help, rather than exacerbate, the film’s flaws. But whether at three hours or four, Fellowship is still a sterling introduction to this world, to our heroes, and to the impossible mission that will define both for ages to come.

Compared to the first Star Trek feature film—a first effort that almost felt like watching grass grow—The Wrath of Khan delivers a real Star Trek experience in movie format. Traces of some of the original's flaws remain, but they are appropriately contained in sequences that make heavy (re)use of footage from the first, very sedately paced film.

It was probably inevitable that this second film would make a bigger splash. After all, its very title invokes one of the Trek fandom's favorite villains, and promises to bring him back. And back he comes, Ricardo Montalban performing splendidly—perhaps even better than he did in the TV series episode that introduced Khan.

There's also just more meat to this plot than the first film. It has character development, it establishes additional backstory, and even introduces a new technology (the "defense field") never seen again in a Trek production. Joking aside, Kirk and Spock get to explore real emotion, and we see just how far Spock will go for logic. (Stopping just short of a spoiler here so I don't have to flag this.)

Keep an eye out for an egregiously bad cut near the end—it's notable because it's the only truly bad edit in the film (that I've noticed). I'll say only to keep an eye on Kirk when he's in Engineering—anything more would be a spoiler.

[7.4/10] There’s usually something to recommend, or at least salvage, from even the worst Star Trek outings. A slog of an episode may still have a handful of funny lines, or a poorly-done installment may still have an interesting concept to parse out. For much of The Original Series, the redeeming element of even the shoddiest of episodes was frequently the relationship between Kirk, Spock, and Bones, the triumvirate that made up the core of the show. Even when the scenario was implausible or the situation contrived, the connection between those three almost always rang true, heightening the series’ strongest hours and buoying its weakest ones.

By dint of the famed odd-even distinction, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is considered one of the weaker Star Trek films, a reputation it earns. After a strong start, the movie falls apart with absurdities in its final act, and features heavy-handed interludes that border on the hokey before then. But it’s great strength comes in treating the show’s three man band -- the adventurous Kirk, the reserved Spock, the cantankerous Bones -- as something not only sacrosanct, but legitimately sacred.

In its way, Star Trek V is the franchise’s strongest embrace of secular humanism, the philosophy that permeated The Next Generation and other parts of the world spun off from the original crew’s adventures. It presents a dichotomy. On the one hand there is Sybock, the soothsaying cult leader who aims to meet the Almighty himself and lead his followers to paradise. On the other is Star Trek’s own holy trinity, who reject this messianic figure and his lofty promises, and even the godlike being they confront in favor of the strength and loyalty they have for one another.

What’s frustrating is that half of this approach is done subtly and charmingly, and half of it is loud and goofy. The best choice The Final Frontier makes is to lean into the rapport between its three lead characters. Despite the various issues behind-the-scenes, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley developed an on-screen rapport after two decades of playing these characters. The film plays the rock-paper-scissors nature of their relationship broadly at times, but it’s a combination that works. It’s time-tested, and the shared history of the characters and the shorthand of the performers carries much of the film.

But when the film drifts off toward strange interludes about formative, painful moments in the characters’ lives, or has them spouting shopworn banalities in the shadow of Sybock’s sermons, or features them, you know, staring down the literal face of God, Wizard of Oz style, Star Trek V loses the power of that central connection in ways that serve the plot but not really the point.

The plot sees our heroes’ shore leave interrupted by a hostage situation on Nimbus III, a Tatooine-like planet meant to be a shared, peaceful community for humans, Romulans, and Klingons that quickly devolved into infighting and squalor. After some character-reestablishing moments out and about, the Enterprise crew return to their malfunctioning new ship and ventures out to investigate. They find Sybock, the charismatic, Orson Wells-esque religious leader who aims to commandeer the Enterprise to take it past the galactic barrier at the center of the galaxy to find the divine, and Klaa the Klingon commander who wants the glory of defeating Kirk in battle.

The presence of two antagonists initially adds intrigue to the movie. Even before the reveal that Sybock is Spock’s half brother (which took some of the sting out of Star Trek Discovery’s strained familial connection for me), he makes for an intriguing enemy for the good guys. He exists as the yin to Spock’s yang, a Vulcan who is as brilliant as Spock, but who embraces emotion and salvation and, most notably, freedom from pain in a way that our favorite Vulcan eschews. His ability to nigh-magically persuade people to his side using some variation on Vulcan mind melding techniques gives him a unique ability to match his mythic presence here, even if the nature of that power gets jumbled in the finally tally.

Klaa is much more straightforward -- a traditional Klingon warrior who’s after Kirk for the thrill of the hunt. In truth, he and his crew seem like more of a throw-in, a standard adversary to heighten the stakes in a conflict with a mostly non-violent cult leader, but it presents two very different sorts of challenges for the Enterprise crew to have to handle at once.

The problem becomes that once these threats grow and bloom, they begin to lose focus and force. While the thrill of the unknown has always fueled Star Trek to some extent, seeing a floating head in the sky, claiming to be the creator, demanding starships and blasting people with laser vision is just too big and too silly to match the high-minded tone the film is going for. The way Klaa is talked down by a washed up Klingon General dovetails well enough with the film’s “power of people > power of deities” message, it’s underwhelming fix to the cheesy problem of a renegade god who can apparently be defeated with laser blasts.

Throw in a bewildering and demeaning “fan dance” and the heavy-handed symbolism of a ship’s wheel with “To Boldly Go” inscribed on it, and you have the makings of a ridiculous, almost nonsensical ending to a film that sets up interesting things for both its characters and stories, and yet has trouble paying them off.

What’s striking, however, is that however many problems exist with the film’s script and story, it’s a surprisingly well-shot and directed film with William Shatner himself calling the shots. Perhaps the credit belongs to cinematographer Andrew Laszlo instead, but this is the most visually impressive Star Trek has been since The Motion Picture.

Laszlo’s camera finds interesting angles in which to frame Sybock and his soon-to-be convert in the film’s Lawrence of Arabia-inspired opening. He captures the scenic beauty of Yosemite in the sweeping shots of Kirk’s ascent. He frames our heroes symmetrically as they march down a corridor, or all in a row as they step onto the paradise planet. The swirl of cloud-like vista, or the pink hue of the planet itself, all help create an atmosphere visually than the story has trouble trying to evoke with words and plot alone. Whatever qualms I may have had about Shatner as a director, he oversaw some of the best-shot and captured images in the whole of the franchise.

And for someone who had a notoriously contentious relationship with his co-stars, he presides over a film that values those found families and the kind of meaning found through long-held interpersonal connections, above the supernatural and divine. It would be too much and too far to call Star Trek V a rejection of religion, but it’s certainly an affirmation of the power, comfort, and perhaps even providence that stems from the people we surround ourselves with. It rejects promises and attempts to take away pain, Inside Out-style, resting instead on the idea that these experiences make us who we are, and bring us to the people who make our existence worthwhile.

The Final Frontier gives us that in the budding romance between Uhura and Scotty, in the funny friendship between Sulu and Chekov, and in the indelible camaraderie shared among Kirk, Spock, and Dr. McCoy. The film loses the plot sometime between when the latter trio break out of the brig and when the credits roll, but even at its worst, it gains strength from the humor, heart, and hallowed place that those three individuals scratch out in the backdrop of silly, space-bound, and supernatural.

[7.0/10] In one of his excellent write-ups of The Original Series, Zack Handlen wondered what it must have been like for Star Trek fans to write and plead and cajole the network for more of their favorite show on the cusp of cancellation, and be rewarded for their enthusiasm with the thud of “Spock’s Brain.” It’s hard not to wonder about the same thing for Trek fans who watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture after having not seen their space-bound heroes in the flesh for a decade, and found this cinematic revival that is, to put it kindly, a very deliberately-paced two hours of entertainment.

It’s easy to imagine devout Trekkies sitting in the theater and thinking, “Wow, look at the detail on those Klingon battlecruisers! And the splendor of that massive fluorescent cloud!” Then they might say, “Oh man, the new Enterprise looks great. We’re spending a lot of time showing it off from every angle, but hey, it’s a big moment! It’s okay to indulge a little!” And then they might go, “Look, the massive V’Ger apparatus is pretty cool and all but, uh, could we maybe get on with it already?”

That’s the heaven and hell of a film the fans have lovingly dubbed “The Slow Motion Picture.” After three years of shoestring television budgets and one more of a stiffly-animated Saturday morning cartoon, Star Trek suddenly had the funds to be done up in cinematic splendor. That means the world of The Federation seems more expansive and fully-realized than ever before, that the distant space creatures and galactic phenomena seem more awe-inspiring than ever before, that the settings of this universe, whether they be the alien sands of the Vulcan homeworld or the V’Ger interior that calls to mind Alien, are more vivid and detailed than ever before.

But it also means that creator Gene Roddenberry and director Robert Wise knew that too, and weren’t afraid to show off, without regard for the progression of character or momentum of the picture. If there’s a recurring motif to ST:TMP, it’s a visually that initially awes you, and then prompts you to ask the movie to get to the point already when it’s luxuriating on its sixth alternate angle of the same event, or cutting to the eleventh reaction shot of it.

In the same way, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is the ur-example of the “What if we did an episode of the TV show, but bigger?” criticism leveled at any series that makes the jump to the big screen. While ST:TMP borrows heavily from its own prior episode “The Changeling” in terms of premise, that has less of an effect on the film than the scant amount of incident it packs into a two-hour movie. The lesser episodes of The Original Series felt like twenty minutes worth of plot stretched out to fill an entire episode, and The Motion Picture feels like the same idea expanded to cinematic length.

The story is a familiar one for Star Trek. There’s a massive mysterious cloud on the edge of the galaxy, destroying everything in its path and slowly but surely making its way toward earth. The crew of the Enterprise has to go solve the mystery of its existence and figure out how to save the day. It’s the kind of problem TOS, could and often did solve within forty-five minutes. And even adding in the heartening, “we’re getting the band back together” material only justifies so much more time spent.

But damn if the reunion portion of the episode isn’t affecting, even for someone who didn’t have to wait ten years between outings for Kirk and company. The Captain himself gazes in wonder at the refurbished Enterprise. Spock is more stoic and to the point than ever. Bones is his usual irascible, lovably grumpy self (now with more hair everywhere and a sexy seventies neck medallion!) And the rest of the crew -- Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, Doctor(!) Chapel, and even Yeoman Rand(!) -- are back along for the ride. It’s a thrill to see the crew back together in silver screen glory.

The only catch is that, true to the series that spawned it, The Motion Picture only has arcs of meaningful things to do for a handful of cast members. Spock returns from the Vulcan homeworld having come this close to purging himself of emotion entirely. He neither offers nor responds to any warm welcomes from his old crewmates, and there’s a mild, frankly underdeveloped suspicion that he might put the ship in harm’s way to better understand V’Ger. It leads to him embarking on a 2001-esque escapade through V’Ger’s impressive gaping maw, but also to one of the film’s stand out moments.

Spock, having been through this interstellar vision quest, laughs and refers to his once and future captain as Jim. The version of Spock we first meet is one who seems colder and more distant than the character from The Original Series. But that just lends power to the moment when he grasps Kirk’s hand and lionizes the power of human connection, the purpose and camaraderie that imbue life with a vitality and meaning that, V’Ger lacks and which Spock realizes once more, logic alone cannot confer.

That is, true to the spirit of its predecessor, the major theme of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It posits that there is something illogical, emotional, and unknowable about the human condition. Call it the soul; call it the core of a person’s being; hell, call it the force. Whatever it is, Roddenberry has long since presented the notion that whatever humanity lacks in logic or pure capacity, it makes up for in curiosity, in creativity, in yearning that allows us to transcend the empirical nature of even the universe itself and reach new planes of understanding.

To the same end, it reaffirms Kirk as a risk-taker, and argues that it’s his very desire to push that makes him worth more than the average regulation-abiding captain. The Kirk we meet in The Motion Picture is one who’s been behind a desk for two-and-a-half years and clearly misses the thrill of adventure on the Enterprise. He squeezes out Captain Decker (7th Heaven’s Stephen Collins) out of the captain’s chair, using the mysterious cloud as an excuse to rush the ship out of the spaceport, impress his old friends into service, and relive his glory days.

The great and frustrating thing about this tack is that it starts out seeming like a deconstruction of all the Kirk as Great Man™ themes and plots The Original Series went back to again and again. Rather than the infallible, undefeatable leader of men of TOS, Star Trek: The Motion Picture gives us an individual who’s pushed out a worthy captain and gets an earful from it, who hears from Bones about how he’s pushing things too much too fast after being out of the saddle for so long.

His rush to get the Enterprise out to sea results in a transporter malfunction that takes two lives. His desire to get to warp speed results in a dangerous wormhole that nearly tears the ship apart. His effort to confront V’Ger costs him the life of his Deltan helmswoman Ilia. There is the sense in the film’s early going that Kirk’s courage and attendant recklessness has a cost and maybe this isn’t such a good idea.

But then, the movie sort of forgets about it, or at least wraps up his story in that same notion that it takes a little unorthodox action, a little raw humanity, to do what needs to be done out there. There’s not really a price to any of it, just an affirmation that the Nomad-like robotic cloud machine needs a touch of humanity to truly fulfill its mission, with a finish that calls to mind “Metamorphosis” from The Original Series. There’s a nice sci-fi bent to the reveal and the resolution, with a typically pat summary of the meaning of it all from Kirk on the other end that signifies this really is just an episode of the show on steroids.

And yet, as much as is so familiar in The Motion Picture, what’s striking about the film is how much feels so different. Gone are the Seussian colors of The Original Series and in their place are washed out whites and grays with occasional pastels. As stultifying as it becomes when the film repeatedly lingers too long on effects and set pieces, the visuals of the film are breathtaking and a far cry from the models and foam rocks of the 1960s T.V. show. ST:TMP clearly borrows from Star Wars with the used future look and intricate exteriors of its ships and from 2001 with its extended sequences through galactic psychedelia and small men cast in front of hulking aparati. And the production design -- from the ship itself which feels like a working vessel and no longer just like a series of hallways, to the interior of the cloud which evoke a sense of a Frankenstein of technological superiority -- is outstanding.

In that way, Star Trek: The Motion Picture expands and advances and beautifies the world established by its television forebear. As much as it drags the film to a screeching halt at times, it’s understandable how Roddenberry & Co. wanted to show off the aesthetic chops to match the character and storytelling creativity of the series that had struck such a chord with fans worldwide. The movie becomes tedious at points, but the heart of Star Trek is there, in the friendly banter and disagreement between the crew, in the out there sci-fi problem threatening the Enterprise this week, and in the philosophical and sentimental bent to the solution.

Oddly enough, the theme the film tries to impart works best when applied to itself. Amid all the technical wizardry and aesthetic virtuosity that starts to dull and feel mechanical with overexposure, the animating spirit of the franchise, the more human side of this distant adventures in the vacuum of space, are what makes Star Trek’s first cinematic outing feel like a worthy one, even as it becomes lost in its own special effects wonders. Whether Trekkies in 1979 were wowed by those visuals, or bored by their omnipresence, it’s hard to imagine them seeing their space-faring heroes on the screen once more, fighting the same fight, once again boldly going where no one has gone before, and not been heartened by the knowledge that the core of the series -- its tropes and traditions, for good and for ill -- were still alive and well.

[8.0/10] When I wrote about Star Trek: The Motion Picture, I talked about how it captured the spirit of Star Trek, with its devotion to ideas of strange new life and new civilization, to heady science fiction rooted in personal reactions to these grand, nigh incomprehensible events. But if ST:TMP captures the spirit of Star Trek, then The Wrath of Khan captures its character, the way these friends and allies bounced off one another, the Wagon Train to the Stars adventurism of the franchise, and the larger-than-life personalities that gave color to this futuristic world.

And better still, it explores the ripples and consequences of the actions of those personalities in a way that both embraces and reflects on The Original Series. The 1960s T.V. show, half by fiat and half by the necessities of the medium at the time, was never heavy on continuity. Sure, it brought back Harry Mudd and might reuse The Corbomite Maneuver, but by and large the show was reset to the status quo by the time the next episode started.

The Wrath of Khan, then, does what The Original Series never could. More than its predecessor, it is firmly rooted in the televised events that preceded this latest crisis in deep space. That comes most clearly in the film’s choice of antagonist, with Ricardo Montalban reprising his role as Khan Noonien Singh from “Space Seed.” The movie deftly delivers the details as backstory for the uninitiated, but TWoK carries particular weight when Khan’s attempt at revenge feels like Kirk’s chickens coming home to roost after years of adventures since their last encounter.

But the film also, ever so slightly, deconstructs those sometimes weighty, sometimes weightless past adventures at the edge of the galaxy. Despite Kirk’s oft-professed love for his ship, he often quietly harbored dreams of a more typical life, imagining the road less traveled. The Wrath of Khan reveals that he has a son, had an old flame who effectively banished him, and only now sees the ghosts of the family he might have had.

And, more than that, it examines the anesthetizing effect of that constant status quo reset. The James T. Kirk of the 1960s T.V. show is one with nerves of steel, who spent plenty of time recording commendations with what he thought was his dying breath or trying to sacrifice himself for the greater good before some technological wizardry rescued him at the last minute. The Wrath of Khan uses that erstwhile plot armor to explore how Kirk has managed to avoid loss, to sidestep a fair amount of hardship and difficulty, that only know, when he’s thrown back into the adventure that he’s been hungry, is he forced to experience.

Of course, this is still Star Trek so those issues are explored in bombastic tones rather than quiet ruminations. But it works! The characters in The Wrath of Khan are vivid, full of life, and feel like the natural extrapolations of the characters from The Original Series fifteen years later. There was a muted quality to these same personalities in The Motion Picture, and it fit that film, not just for its somewhat colder tone, but for the sense that these were men and women who’d been apart for so long (some of them going so far as to purge emotions) and feeling out their old shorthand with one another without warning.

But by the time of The Wrath of Khan, the impression conveyed is one of a bunch of old buddies who still see one another for drinks every other weekend, even if they’re getting a bit long in the tooth. Bones and his Vulcan counterpart joust and jibe as always. Scotty’s receiving treatment for space syphilis. And heck, if anything, Spock (and in the same way, Saavik) seem a little too unreserved and emotional compared to prior appearances, surely an aftereffect of spending so long among humans.

Naturally, Kirk (and by extension, William Shatner) is just as colorful and expressive as when he at the beginning of The Enterprise’s five year mission. One of the ways that The Wrath of Khan succeeds is by framing itself as a tete-a-tete between two outsized personalities. The chess match between Kirk and Khan works as a nice spine for the film, allowing each to gain the upper hand and be bested in turn.

For Khan, that means not giving up, and seeking revenge, even when he has all the tools to go on conquering. If there’s one thing Star Trek loves, its Moby Dick homages, and TWoK makes James T. Kirk into Khan’s white whale. While never making him tragic exactly, the film gives Khan understandable motivations, underscoring the harsh conditions he and his cohort have lived under since Kirk marooned him, the loss of his wife (presumably Marla McGivers) that embittered him, and the slight of being bested and buried that fuels his fury. Montalban quivers and preens and holds focus on the screen in a fashion that makes him a fine match for Shatner’s “turn it up to eleven” screen presence.

But Khan is not a mere disposable antagonist. He extracts his pounds of flesh from Kirk in the way he feels Kirk did to him, and it highlights the deepest theme of TWoK -- that there is a cost to all this space adventuring, a cost that Kirk managed to avoid or ignore for too long, and one that he forgets about in his desire to sit in command like a younger man once more.

The Wrath of Khan contrasts age and youth. It sets our old heroes, a little more weathered and worn than before, on a ship full of trainees not expecting to actual go on duty. It puts Kirk himself, reflecting on his lost days of command, next to his son, still full of piss and vinegar. It has Khan, who’s hair is now a wispy white rather than jet black, and Carol Marcus as a lost love, to remind the commander of The Enterprise how long it’s been since these major events in his life started coming back to haunt him.

That makes it all the more meaningful and affecting when those costs start rolling in. The film briefly introduces Scotty’s nephew, a devoted and proud young cadet following in his uncle’s footsteps. James Doohan delivers the best one-scene wonder performance in the film when he mourns the loss of his young kin after Khan’s attack. The message is clear -- that not only is Khan dangerous, but that in all Kirk’s adventuring, he’d remembered the triumphs and forgotten the risks.

The greater testament to that is, of course, Spock’s sacrifice in the emotional climax of the film. While The Wrath of Khan moves along at a good clip, interspersing Kirk’s reluctant return to the captain’s chair with Khan’s ascendance before the two collide, the film reaches its greatest height after that conflict is over. When the genesis device’s shockwave is escaped and our heroes are in relatively safety, Spock shows his true colors, trying out his own version of the Kobayashi Maru test that both he and Kirk had managed to avoid until now.

Spock, despite his Vulcan stoicism, has often been the emotional center of Star Trek. His reserved demeanor makes those moments when his armor falls and he shows true affection or sentiment that much more powerful. So his sacrifice here, his willingness to let the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one, to tell Kirk that he is, and always shall be, his friend, is given all the more meaning. This skirmish, this backlash from the acts of a younger Kirk, hasn’t just cost him his ship or his honor; it’s cost him his best friend.

And yet, there’s a sense of renewal and hope at the end of The Wrath of Khan. It may simply be the Genesis Device and the paradise it creates, the embrace of a lost child who says he’s proud to be Kirk’s son, or the fact that, you know, there’s four more movies and Spock’s on the cover of many of them, so presumably he’ll be okay. But even if it’s erased, the film once again does something the television show never could in the same way -- build on the years of character development and relationship the two men shared to deliver a blow to Kirk that rattles him, reminds him of how much they accomplished and how much they escape in that five year mission.

Because that’s the spirit of Star Trek too. While limited by its medium in some ways, it was about the friendship of the men and women who served aboard The Enterprise, particularly Kirk, Spock, and Bones, and it was about that appetite for adventure. “Risk is our business,” Kirk once said. It’s an easy business to be in when the requirements of a weekly television series mean you almost always come out unscathed, that foes are defeated for good by the end of the hour, and your friends will still be there when the next adventure starts.

The Wrath of Khan embraces that sense of camaraderie, the colorfulness, the slick spaceman taming the wild frontier as the journey among the stars. In that, it encapsulates so much of what Star Trek was and is. But it also goes where Star Trek had never gone before, in exploring what happens when those foes reappear to take from you what you took from them, when the seemingly disposable weekly love interests come back with your child at their side, and the man who stood beside you through so many close calls finally meets his noble end. It’s enough to make you feel young, and old, and thrilled and saddened and heartened, when the famed captain of The Enterprise still finds ways to grow up, and to remember.

[7.2/10] There’s an animation “ghetto” in the United States. For a long time, almost anything featuring a cartoon character was considered something for children. And while shows like The Simpsons have proven that the greatest television show of all time could be one composed with pen and ink, and Pixar has shown that animated films can make a dent at the Oscars, there’s still a baseline assumption that if you see an animated character, and they don’t start cursing or doing something ribald within a couple of minutes, what you’re watching must be for kids.

Watership Down, then, is an odd duck. On the one hand, it’s seemingly aimed at children, with its story about rabbits leaving their warren and facing trials and tribulations once they do. (My first reference point was Once Upon a Forest. It has some cute characters, its own little world, and the call to adventure that emerges in so much kiddie fare.

And yet, it’s also a very adult film. On a surface level, there’s a fair amount of blood and death in this one. This isn’t a sanitized Disney ecosystem. Hawks snatch their prey off the ground, bulky rabbits get into bloody duels, and snares and shotguns leave more than a couple of rabbits on death’s door.

It’s those things that would make me reluctant to show this 1978 film to any actual children. It’s not that kids can’t handle a little intensity -- lord knows the classics from my childhood like The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast have their fare share of high tension moments -- but there’s a realism to it, a rawness to it despite certain impressionistic flourishes, that makes these moments scarier and liable to linger in the bedtime worries of younger viewers.

But that’s also part of what makes Watership Down unique. The general visual quality of the film is half-nature documentary, and half-pop up book. While drawn distinctively, the rabbits here look and move more like the real thing than, for example, Bugs Bunny, or even Thumper from Bambi. There’s some of what looks like rotoscoping that gives the viewer a bit of the uncanny valley effect, but for the most part, these bunnies feel real in a way that many of their cartoon brethren don’t.

At the same time, the backgrounds they play on are sumptuous. The image of distant hills, or flowing rivers, or gnarled rabbit holes all create settings that grab the viewer before our heroes really interact with them. That’s a good thing, because the framing and layering of the images stands out, with the rabbits seemingly more superimposed on many of their environments than genuinely interacting with them. Still, the look is unique and captivating, and lends to the storybook quality of the film.

That’s especially true in the brief scenes where the film departs from that realism and instead embraces a more symbolic art style. The image of the black rabbit, the montage set over Art Garfunkel singing “Bright Eyes”, and especially the initial scene telling the fable of the rabbit, allow for more flourish and ornate elements, that contrast from the main style of the movie and give a nice otherworldly quality.

That helps when juxtaposed with the realistic bent, which extends beyond just the imagery used. One of the most unique things about Watership Down is the way that it creates a genuine and distinctive culture for the rabbits, one that feels appropriately foreign and in some ways, inscrutable, as opposed to the “it’s mankind, except using animals” that some furry friend movies opt for.

There’s a complex society at play, with hierarchies, terminology, and specific concerns. The rabbits we follow encounter any number of different societies, from their own staid warren, to the seeming equivalent of a death cult, to farm rabbits in captivity, to a military government, each with its own character and vibe. There are unique terms, with religious or cultural significance. And there’s even a creation myth, the one we’re introduced to at the beginning, which seems to pervade the thoughts of the protagonist whether cool-headed or prophetic.

Which provides the other reason that Watership Down feels more adult than its critter-featuring competitors. The film is, at a broad level, a meditation on death. The overarching narrative, laid out by that opening segment, is of rabbits constantly running, constantly moving, to escape all the myriad dangers and predators in their way, until they can run no longer and must face the black rabbit, the spectre of death. It’s there in the moments when the rabbits prematurely mourn their bulky protector; it’s there when Garfunkel asks how the light that burned so brightly suddenly burns so pale, and it’s there when Hazel, the main rabbit, greets the black rabbit as a friend.

It’s heavy stuff for a kids’ film, often foregrounded even if done with a fairly light touch. There is weight to the events and incidents that populate the film, if for no other reason than the fact that death is not simply some abstract and uncontenanced phantom, like so many Disney villains who fall from a great height with nominally ambiguous but clear fates. At every level, Watership Down is engaging with the notion of how we live, how we go on and scratch out lives for ourselves, when death’s shadow is always lurking around the edges of the frame, a sense that our lepus cousins share.

There’s also the sense of a specific political or social allegory that I was not immediately able to grasp. The nature of these societies gave the sense of a particular kind of commentary not readily identifiable to viewers in the distant year of 2017. But that just adds to the sense that while the movie may be accessible to children, there’s much more going on under the hood than a child could understand.

That’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s easy to imagine young viewers being scared and scarred by the more gruesome or harrowing scenes in Watership Down, and missing the broader observations and thematic material at play. But there’s also the sense in the film of pushing the boundaries of that “ghetto,” using the medium to express something profound, something mature, at a time when people still believed that cartoons belonged solely in the funny papers. It’s film like Watership Down that helped pave the way for Inside Out, and Rick and Morty, and Don Hertzfeldt, and anyone else who’s used the endless possibilities of this medium to not just entertain, but graze the sublime and poignant.

Well... that was perfect. The last 45 minutes of this movie made me SO happy. Freaking epic. Everything I wanted it to be and so much more.

[6.2/10] Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a fairy tale. It may not seem that way. Most fairytales don’t center on racist cops, rampant physical violence, and grisly crimes. But it’s a story of entrenched problems, that are effectively solved by fiat via the movie’s fairy godmother, and it renders all the good work the film does up to that point, and the commendable efforts it makes afterward, unsatisfying and unearned.

It tells the story of Mildred, a woman who puts up the eponymous three billboards asking why the local police have not solved her daughter’s murder in confrontational tones, Willoughby, the terminally ill sheriff who’s called out in them, and Dixon, the bigoted, asshole cop in his employ who’s terrorized any number of citizens while abusing his authority.

Writer-director Martin McDonagh uses that premise and those figures to tell a story about trauma, anger, powerlessness, policing, guilt, and our increasingly fractured definition of community. True to his past work, he does so in a way that is often unflinching, but also apt to find the dark comedy in terrible-yet-absurd events. There is a messiness to the film, one that feels frank, if colorful, in its depiction about the rougher-edged parts of small town life and the problems therein, where who and what are good and bad are not such simple questions.

That’s what makes me willing to tolerate the ways in which this isn’t necessarily the right moment for a film like Three Billboards, apt to forgive openly antagonistic members of law enforcement and willing to lionize or at least excuse the authority figures who allow them to operate. There’s a realness to much of what the film depicts that buys McDonagh some leeway before his film devolves in Heartland Cop Cinderella.

We live in a world where there are, at a minimum, bad apples likes Dixon. We live in a world where there are head honchos like Willoughby who tolerate them in the name of getting the job done and putting warm bodies on the streets. We live in a world where there are women like Mildred, who face domestic abuse and experience horrible events and have little recourse and few places to turn.

The world of The Billboards is outsized, in the way most of McDonagh’s work is, but what it’s heightening is reality, alongside the messy, unpleasant truths of how people and institutions interact in the real world that can be as sad, repugnant, or darkly comic as they are quotidian. McDonagh gets away with crossing lines for much of the picture because it reflects the real life way that lines are crossed everyday in places like Ebbing, Missouri and in far more gentrified environs.

That’s all well and good until the film turns into a fantasy. Admittedly, few fantasies start with a self-euthanization, but Willoughby’s loving letter to his wife, and posthumous encouragements for Mildred and Dixon turn both their lives around, give each a form of closure and catharsis from the horrors the film countenance, and closes with the sort of mutual understanding and finding of common ground that doesn’t work if you try to get there mainly via voiceover and soft music and other cinematic tricks.
The impact of those letter feels like a cheat. Willoughby practically becomes a god, orchestrating events from beyond the grave and changing people’s hearts almost in an instant. His words are full of purple prose of the “can’t we all just get along” variety, with a few choice local expressions, and not only help bring Mildred some comfort, but nigh-magically turn Dixon into a better man.

Suddenly Dixon, a man who, as far as we’ve seen, has done nothing but abuse his position and take out his wavering wants on anyone in his way, is a good guy who’s willing to put himself on the line to save a woman he would practically spit on before. Suddenly he’s determined enough to go to his new sheriff with DNA to try ID the perp who killed her daughter. Suddenly he’s dedicated enough to the ideas of justice to go on a road trip with her to take out the bad guy who hurt someone, even if he didn’t hurt her child.

Good stories are about change and growth. They’re about people having realizations and changing their behavior, about the way events can shape us and change who they are. But Rockwell’s character never really goes through that. He just reads a letter and wakes up a different person. Yes, he loses his job, but the movie never really presents that as the source of his change of heart. Instead, there’s the wise, old, tragically doomed authority figure to posthumously push him in the right direction, a push that apparently gives Rockwell’s character an overnight transformation into a crusader for justice who’s nigh-instantly remorseful for all the bad deeds he’s committed, ready to make up for them.

It stinks because the performances are superb. Frances McDormand plays Mildred with all the quiet fury and hollowed-out sadness that befits a parent who's lost their child and never found justice. Sam Rockwell shows Dixon’s most odious, reprehensible qualities when he’s a cop on his worst behavior, but finds the vulnerability and essential impotence in the character once he’s been defrocked that almost manages to make that rushed transition work. Woody Harrelson plays the same rough-edged Southerner with a heart of gold he’s performed as plenty in recent years (and between his turn of True Detective and appearances from Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage, The Wire’s Clarke Peters, and Deadwood’s John Hawkes, clearly McDonagh or his casting director has been watching HBO), but the supporting cast is strong and make good impressions in brief amounts of time.

But all that good work is in service of a story that operates in a fantasyland at the same time it’s trying to evoke truth. I’m as apt to applaud films for showing that people contain multitudes as anyone. I’m not averse to showing that grieving mothers can have sharp elbows or that racist cops can have souls.

The problem is that if you want to show them changing for the better, reaching breakthroughs and coming together from opposite sides of the same tragedy, you have to do the work to get the characters and the audience there. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is chock full of great performances, dark humor, and withering truths, but it throws them all away when it anchors the film on a series of mystically powerful letters from a wizened, practically deified man, whose words fix everything, or at least enough, in what can only feel like a shortcut through the fraught territory McDonagh had the initial courage to set foot in.

It's very rare and, consequently, quite impressive, that a sequel is able to recreate the same feeling as the original movie, 35 years later, under a different direction. That's exactly what "Blade Runner 2049" did. Excluding the obviously better special effects, this movie is so in tune with the first one that it felt like it was released just a couple of years later; visually and sound-wise, Blade Runner 2049 is that close to its predecessor.

It's slow paced, just like the first one but, unlike many other comments I've read about it, criticising that particular aspect of the original movie, I've always felt that the slow pacing suited very well with the tone of the first movie, and it still works wonders for 2049. This is not a slap in the face, Blade Runner is something that crawls under your skin, slowly makes its way to your brain and then melts with it. It may require some patience from the most restless out there, but if you're willing to invest it in this sci-fi wonder, you'll end up with a very satisfying movie experience.

A special mention goes to the soundtrack, which was one of my favourite parts of "Blade Runner". I've always been a fan of Vangelis' music for the original Blade Runner, it took the whole thing to another level, undoubtedly giving the movie a larger than life feeling. I was very impressed that Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch managed to mimic Vangelis' soundtrack perfectly for 2049, again recreating the very same larger than life atmosphere. Sometimes, the right music is what distinguishes a mere movie from a whole experience.

I have to add that the pre-sex scene was one of the most emotionally disturbing pre-sex scenes I've ever seen in a movie. It was such a powerful scene that I felt i should write a whole sentence about it (without actually saying much, but still).

As it so often happens with sequels to old classics (unfortunately), I was afraid the Hollywood money making machine would make this thing bomb. But I am very pleased (and relieved!) to say that fans of the original movie will surely enjoy 2049, whereas all those people who thought "Blade Runner" was a slow paced borefest might want to look elsewhere, because both movies are clearly not for them.

Please, go watch it in IMAX, if you can, it truly deserves that. That was my only regret.
"Blade Runner 2049" is a modern sci-fi classic, just like the original was, 35 years ago.

[5.8/10] In television criticism these days, there’s a great deal of talk about “table setting” episodes -- those installments that don’t move the ball forward all that much, but get the major players in place and set things up for something bigger. These episodes aren’t bad necessarily -- sometimes they can even be rich with character development that a show can make time for apart from the major fireworks -- but they always feel a little more in service to prior or upcoming events and less like their own worthwhile stories.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock seems like it shouldn’t feel that way. Plenty of major things happen in it: the Enterprise is destroyed, Kirk’s son dies, and Spock himself comes back from the dead. And yet, something about the film makes it feel interstitial, an in-betweener, more of a beefed up hangover from Wrath of Khan than a tale that can stand on its own.

One big problem is that the outing feels inevitable and low stakes. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that here in the distant future (or past, depending on your perspective) of 2017, we know that Spock lives to make appearances in several subsequent Star Trek movies, so it’s harder to wring any surprise or risk over whether he’ll be fully revived. But that same knowledge doesn’t hinder the ending of Wrath of Khan because the performances, the meaning imbued into the sacrifice is so good that it doesn’t matter that the whole thing will be wiped away.

The Search for Spock coasts on the power of that closing scene as much as it can. Partly that may be to simply remind the audience of what happened in Star Trek II since the consequences were going to be such a focal point of Star Trek III. But The Search for Spock doesn’t just replay the end of the the prior film, it has multiple characters recount what happened, throws in some security footage, and liberally repeats the magic words about needs of the many and always being friends and all that good stuff.

That repetition isn’t a problem but for the fact that The Search for Spock doesn’t really accomplish much with it. It tries. Spock’s sacrifice is Kirk’s key motivator here. In a nice change of pace, Star Trek III offers the opposite of a revenge tale like the one in Star Trek II, serving up a main character motivated by love rather than by hate. That’s a laudable tack, but in the end it just contributes to the feeling that this film is more of a postscript to Wrath of Khan than something that can work on its own.

Still, the best thing to say about the film is that it’s founded on the love, affection, and community shared by the Enterprise crew. Sure it lays that on a little thick in places, but the fulcrum of the film is that Kirk, Spock, Bones, Uhura, Scotty, Chekov, and Sulu would go to the ends of the galaxy for one another (and have). So little of this film feels like it matters despite the usual explosions and deaths and hand-to-hand combat. But its final scene, with the crew reunited once more, embracing and making up one of those found families that modern storytelling is fascinated with, it’s affecting, even if the path to get there is less than inspiring.

That less than inspiring bulk stems from the fact that the movie basically has two settings: bombast and doldrums. With Spock out of action for most of the picture (presumably making it easier for Leonard Nimoy to direct) and Bones dealing with the Vulcan lodger in his brain, Kirk is more of a focus than ever here. That means Shatner goes full Shatner here, with his soap opera-style deliveries and theatrical style that goes big even where the emotions are subtle. By the same token, Christopher Lloyd does a yeoman’s job of matching Shatner in scenery-chewing as Kruge, the film’s half-baked antagonist.

Lloyd is entertaining enough in his deliberately over-the-top performance, but Kruge is such a generic antagonist. His only motivation is wanting the super weapon so that he can do evil with it. His reasons for crossing paths with the Enterprise crew are coincidental, and he acts like any run-of-the-mill baddie our heroes ran into on a weekly basis on the original television show. He, like most of the challenges in the film, feels like an arbitrary road block along the way to bringing Spock back.

That’s a major contributor to the lack of stakes. Sure, Starfleet forbids Kirk to go (which is so foolish it should count as reverse psychology), and Kruge is on the loose, and what do you know, David Marcus made genesis with the wrong macguffin sauce and so IT’S GOING TO EXPLODE but none of it feels like it matters beyond adding a perfunctory chance for rebellion and antagonism and a ticking clock for what’s basically a delivery mission.

That’s where the mutedness comes in. I actually watched the back half of this movie twice, since the first go around, I was a bit tired and worried the next day that I’d forgotten something. But no, it’s just that the back half of the movie is pretty damn dull despite the theoretically momentous things that happen. There’s long, almost agonizing stretches where the characters are supposed to be reacting to some major event, but the emotional investment just isn’t there, so you find yourself waiting for the next scene to hit as beat after emotional beat falls flat.

The Enterprise blows up! David dies! These should be major developments, and despite Kirk’s corny recrimination of “you Klingon bastards” something about the subdued, going-through-the-motions tone of the film renders them non-events.

The best thing you can say is that even if the main plot feels like a side story suddenly brought front and center, there’s plenty of great character moments. Uhura gets the chance to hoodwink a young, braggadocious officer. Sulu gets to best an imposing guard who calls him “tiny.” Scotty short circuits the new Excelsior vessel so Kirk’s ragtag band of allies can get out. There’s a lot of “the old dogs aren’t out of new tricks” just yet material here, and while it’s more window dressing than anything, it’s still the most enjoyable part of the film.

The best work, however, centers around the relationship the show’s major characters had with Spock. DeForest Kelley does a great job at channeling Nimoy’s performance as Dr. McCoy deals with Spock’s presence in his mind, and his quiet confession to his comatose comrade that he misses him and couldn’t stand to lose him again is the most touching part of the film. Sarek’s presence ties a knot on the strained relationship between father and son that was explored in both The Original Series and The Animated Series. And as much as Shatner nearly sinks it with all his Shatnering and writer-producer Harve Bennett’s overwritten dialogue nearly does the same, the foundation of Star Trek III is the abiding love between Kirk and Spock, that motivates the captain to risk and lose a great deal to get his friend back. That’s a lovely thing to anchor a movie around, even if the execution leaves a lot to be desire.

Still, that’s the benefit of those installments that feel like in-betweeners and bridges from one story to another, whether on television or the silver screen. While they can feel superfluous or low-stakes at times, that also means there tends to be little harm done by them either. Sure, The Search for Spock is an underwhelming entry in the Star Trek pantheon, but it’s fine, and sometimes “fine” is good enough to get a story from one place to another.

[8/10] Great comic chemistry between Tony Hale as the oddball spork and Jon Ratzenberger as his straight man here. There’s some good information mixed with hyperactive ridiculousness, and it makes for a winning little short.