Up in the air: J.J. Abrams juggles balls aplenty in a dynamic, overstuffed ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Aug. 28, 2014

Star Trek Into Darkness, director J.J. Abrams’s second entry in the rebooted Star Trek series, is packed to the gills with characters, plot threads and action. Unfortunately, the 2013 film is guilty of trying to do a bit too much.

Into Darkness is fun, no doubt. It recapitulates one of the most popular narratives in the Star Trek oeuvre: The story of Khan Noonien Singh, a genetically engineered warlord who was frozen in a cryogenic tube and exiled from Earth after the bloody Eugenics Wars of the late 20th century. Gene Roddenberry’s pioneering 1966 television show featured Khan as the villain of the week in “Space Seed,” a first-season Star Trek episode; 16 years later, the character formed the dark heart of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which many still consider to be the best of the franchise’s dozen movies.

Abrams’s movie combines elements of both outings while adding plenty of new twists. Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch, charismatic but far paler than any man playing a character named Khan should be) and his frozen coterie of superhumans are discovered by a Starfleet commander other than the Enterprise’s James T. Kirk, and Khan’s 23rd-century machinations take quite a bit of unraveling as our heroes seek to learn just who he is and what he’s about. (As superfans already know, the movie is chockablock with dangerous newfangled torpedoes, and there are a pair of characters named Marcus, but there are no signs of the U.S.S. Reliant or the planet-shattering Genesis project.)

The film begins with an action sequence on the planet Nibiru, where Kirk (Chris Pine) breaks all the rules to preserve a primitive civilization and the life of his first officer, Spock (Zachary Quinto). The opening act sets up several character arcs by displaying Kirk’s immaturity and Spock’s refusal to engage with the emotional needs of his friend (Kirk) and lover (communications officer Uhura, played by Zoe Saldana).

A few minutes later, a Starfleet facility in London is destroyed and a gunship kills several officers at fleet headquarters in San Francisco. This prompts a furious Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) to dispatch Kirk to the Klingon home world, Qo’noS (pronounced Kronos), with orders to kill the fugitive responsible for both attacks. But it turns out that the fugitive is not who he seems, and neither are some of the other characters who are either crewing or focusing their attention on the Enterprise.

Spider-Man in love (and war): ‘Amazing 2’ offers a fun romp, despite being stuffed to the gills with plot points

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
May 19, 2014

Your favorite urban web-slinger is back, and yes, the tales are true: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is indeed an entertaining romp.

This time, young Peter Parker, a.k.a. Spidey (Andrew Garfield), finds himself trying to balance his love for the brilliant young Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone) with the promise he made to her late father (Denis Leary, in an uncredited cameo) that he would avoid her so that she would never be targeted by his enemies. The main bad guy, played by Jamie Foxx, is Electro, who starts off as a lowly, nerdy, Spider-Man-loving Oscorp engineer; an unfortunate encounter with bioengineered electric eels prompts Max Dillon’s transformation into a glowing blue special effect with godlike powers.

Complicating matters is 20-year-old Harry Osborn’s ascension to the helm of Oscorp following the death of his father, Norman (the excellent Chris Cooper, also uncredited). Both Osborns suffer from a rare, fatal degenerative disease, and Harry (Cole DeHaan) becomes convinced that the regenerative properties of Spider-Man’s blood could save him from a horrific fate.

An increasingly desperate Harry recruits Parker, his boyhood friend, to locate the superhero and ask him for help. (Parker, natch, is the rare photographer to have snapped clear pictures of the Big Apple’s red-and-blue-costumed superhero.) When Spider-Man balks at sharing his plasma, fearful of the potential harm a transfusion might do Harry, Electro and the future Green Goblin form a deadly alliance. The duo proceeds to plunge New York City into a chaotic and potentially deadly blackout.

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By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com Jan. 17,
2014 Let me start off with this: Right from the start, I’ve had
mixed feelings about the rebooted Star
Trek enterprise. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist the
pun.) One reason for this, of course, involves the cast: William
Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, the late DeForest Kelley, George
Takei, Nichelle Nichols and all the rest of the cast of the
original Star Trek portrayed their
characters throughout three TV seasons and six feature films. The
thought of seeing different people play Captain James T. Kirk,
Spock, Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, Hikaru Sulu, Nyota Uhura and the
others is just — well, it’s
frankly weird. I first became aware of
the original Star Trek when I was a
child, and I still vividly remember the excitement that surrounded
the release of the first several Star
Trek movies. It’s a stretch to say I grew up with
these characters, whose adventures I also followed throughout a
number of original novels — but not a huge one. When
producer-director J.J. Abrams assembled his cast for the 2009
reboot, titled simply Star Trek, he came
up with an interesting group. As Kirk, Chris Pine has something of
the charisma of the young Shatner. Zachary Quinto seems to be a
fine actor, but I frequently think that he has the wrong voice (too
high-pitched) and nose (not angular enough) for Spock. Karl Urban
(a New Zealander,
natch) and Zoe Saldana capture some of the essence of McCoy and
Uhura, respectively, even though I find Urban’s gruff intonation
cartoonish and grating.