Finally got around to seeing the highly-rated new Star Trek movie in IMAX.
Terrible movie. Spoilers, if such a thing is possible, to follow:
The movie is perhaps best understood as an Oscars-style montage of science-fiction movies. Rather than try to have an original thought, JJ Abrams seems to have decided things would go best if he just threw a bunch of other movies into a food processor and handed the sauce to Industrial Light and Magic to make beautiful (the cinematography is a bright point, both literally and figuratively – the whole thing is shot in bubblegum colors that jump off the screen).
You have seen the overall plot before in a little movie called Starship Troopers. Handsome, athletic guy wants to pick up pretty girl, but she is in the military. He enlists at the advice of a gruff father figure and has to work his way up to be reunited with her. An academy exercise results in his demotion/banishment from front line duty, but before the expulsion can be finalized, news comes that there has been an attack and Earth, although capable of deploying an interplanetary if not intergalactic armada, is so flat-footed that trainees are immediately pressed into service. They travel by refrigerator-shaped shuttle, with much nervousness, to the main battle craft. Intelligence failures cause the first wave to blunder into a trap. The crew of the main vessel – conveniently all of the motely assortment of students from peacetime – is reunited in the combat situation under the command of the gruff father figure. One of the main characters loses his family to an attack on his home planet; he feels guilty he wasn’t able to save them, and we have a heart-rending scene of the parents watching the inbound weapon of doom. There is combat with an extraterrestrial spider/crab that emerges from the soil (holding said creature off with a torch is from Alien). A rival in the service emerges who wins the heart of the pretty girl the protagonist enlisted to woo. He is initially jealous, but later comes to accept that it’s the right outcome. A young intelligence officer who is seen as cold and nerdy turns out to be sensitive.
And at least Starship Troopers had Richard Heinlein’s critique of fascism and Dina Meyer nudity running throughout the film.
Of course, that leaves some scenes behind. So let’s see – the Iowa car chase is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade merged with Thelma & Louise. The brooding new recruit driving his motorcycle through a deserted landscape to the air base? Top Gun. Farming landscape punctuated by small, oh, let’s just call them moisture evaporators? Tatooine in Star Wars. The bar filled with alien species and the ever-present threat of a brawl? The most wretched hive of scum and villany, Mos Eisley Spaceport in the very same Star Wars. Foreign school where young chosen nerds study in a ridiculous version of a university? Attack of the Clones. Pointy-eared half-human, half-not-human who ultimately casts his/her lot with humans for love? Lord of the Rings (the emotional response test is from Blade Runner). Decrepit alien mothership, a former mining vehicle that is damp and bizarrely arranged? Step forward, Alien; you also contribute the alien life form that can attach itself to an internal organ. An ice planet with, I shit you not, a polar bear prepared to eat our hero? Yeah, the opening scene of Empire Strikes Back. Stealing a curiously undefended space vehicle from the inside of the enemy space vehicle with much greater firepower? Why not ask where the remorseless space villan wearing a black cape and looking for the ambassador comes from? Stealing the codes to Earth’s defenses? Spaceballs – they ripped off a spoff. Chasing your comic sidekick through the pumps and valves of a large production facility? Attack of the Clones again; ever since Pirates of the Caribbean, all big budget movies are required to have one scene that is completely pointless but appeals to eight year-olds and lends itself well to an amusement park ride. Time travel through accidentally generated warp, causes debate about whether current actions can be influenced by news from the future if they actually determine the future, and ends with young and old of the same person meeting up with each other while disembarking from the principal craft – no, it’s not Back to the Future or even Terminator, it’s The Final Countdown.
Would it have killed them to have one original shot? I thought George Lucas ripped off Blade Runner for Clones, but by comparison it’s The Godfather.
Some of the referenced movies, not that you haven’t seen them all already:
Challenge that the university scene is taken from Attack of the Clones: its obviously the Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Cant Read Good.
If the movie were half as funny as Zoolander – or if any character had been remotely as compelling as one man, five syllables – it would have been an entirely different story.