Day 4227: The Morning After The Dark Knight Before aka A Tale of Two Kitties

Saturday:


Mr Christopher Nolan Sisters would like it made quite clear that his new movie "The Dark Knight Votes Palin" is IN NO WAY political, and any resemblance between Mr Bane the Baddie's OCCUPATION of NEW YORK and the, er, Occupy New York movement is entirely a DELUSION brought on by Obamacare.

Obviously, this makes Mr Nolan Sisters either FRIGHTENINGLY naive or the biggest FIBBER since, well, Mr Bane.

Nice to see that, in spite of the chaos caused by the Joker, the Dent Act hasn't made it any harder to get vast quantities of explosive anywhere in Gotham, though.

Spoilers follow...

As the third instalment in the "Dark Knight Trilogy", this has the distinct feel of a part FIVE and hang on haven't we missed a bit?

For starters, the end of "The Dark Knight" surely did NOT imply that Batman was going to vanish into the (k)night.

I remember writing at the time how this was win-win: Gotham's white knight (Harvey Two-Face) gets to keep his reputation intact; Batman gets to let everyone think he might actually kill people without Bruce breaking his "I'm not going to kill people" rule.

(The studio, apparently, wanted the third film to star the Riddler and carry on in a more traditional fashion.)

Instead what we get is "eight years later..." and – improbably – a Gotham that has cleaned up its act. The (implicitly draconian) "Dent Act" has succeeded in cleaning up the streets.

Not that we get to SEE any of that, as we "skip to the end" where the prisons are full of baddies and everyone is happy so long as Commissioner Gordon doesn't mind that his conscience is gnawing at him like an ulcer.

It turns out, in a twist on The Brothers Karamazov, that you CAN build a utopia on a LIE so long as the lie is "One good man sacrificed himself for this city".

Good job THIS movie doesn't end that way too, then! Oh...

I said that, in spite of its OBVIOUS sexism (and BIGGEST crime against comic: airbrushing Ms BARBARA GORDON out of the story!), "The Dark Knight" was like a SOCRATIC DIALOGUE between Mr Batman and Mr Joker about CHAOS and ORDER and who tells lies to which end.

In comparison, this is a RANT, student politics – commies are baad and fascists are baad and people are baad and all – delivered at a bellow and not entirely coherent.

It seems that, at times at least, what this film WANTS to be saying is that this utopia IS a lie and it DOESN'T work. Moments like young detective John Blake (Mr Nolan Sisters LURVES Joseph Gordon-Levitt) talking righteous anger to Commissioner Gordon or Ms Never-actually-named-as-Catwoman Selina Kyle whispering sweet nothings about an Oncoming Storm to Master Bruce on the dance floor. I don't THINK she means Dr Woo.

Thing is, the movie TOTALLY BOTTLES it.

When we get to see the inside of Blackgate Prison, we DON'T discover that it's full of POLITICAL PRISONERS in ORANGE JUMPSUITS who are there because they drove their taxi past the wrong cop one night. Even the "Arkham City" game managed THAT! We don't get to see that the consequences of unlimited police power are unlimited police brutality and corruption. No, we just get a sub-Silence of the Lambs scene where Selina gets to break a comedy bad guy's wrists. For laffs.

We're told that Bruce and Miranda spent billions on clean cheap energy and then abandoned the project – couldn't we see CONSEQUENCES of this?

We're also told that Bruce loses all his billions, but THAT doesn't seem to have consequences EITHER. I mean, given a chance to show Down and Out in Gotham we get... a taxi ride back to Wayne Manor.

Similarly, it is implied that Selina has a BACKSTORY that leads to her wanting the "Clean Slate" anti-Google software, but we're never TOLD what it is, or what has driven her to take to crime? So it comes across, largely, to be because she LIKES it. And how does a cat burglar get away with all this crime if the Gotham P.D. are so ice hot these days?

(Also, she drives the Batpod remarkably well for someone whose skillset is burglary with a little light acrobatics.)

We hardly get to see the "common" people of Gotham at all. Everyone is a cop, a billionaire or a baddie. So how can we tell if the Dent Act has left the everyday folk happy and prosperous or starving and oppressed?

Batman, when he arrives, acts to defend the STOCK MARKET, and to turn the police into an ARMY.

The problems of RICH PEOPLE and the ESTABLISHMENT are SO much more important, after all.





Once again Mr Bane is badly served by a Bat-movie. I don't mean by giving him the cod-Mittle-European accent of Dr Johann Krauss from Hellboy II and then filtering it through the wrong end of a bicycle pump, though obviously it doesn't help that he sounds like he's swallowed Batman's fist even before the punching starts.

No, it's the way the dialogue forced into his mouth has him saying things like: "I vil tvorture an intyre schity just so you don't git ze idea zat my stance against corrupt government and plutocracy haz ein point, ya!"

Bane here is characterised as an almost NINETEENTH CENTURY villain: the anarchist revolutionary, specifically a FRENCH revolutionary.

Daddy Alex points out, quite rightly, that there are plenty of RUSSIAN revolutionary clues too – not least the rivers of Gotham freezing over, like it's a St Petersburg winter, but I say just LOOK at all the references to "A Tale of Two Cities", even without the YES WE GET IT reading from the book at the end (if not the end of the book, as many have pointed out).

We get the storming of the Blackgate Bastille, and Mr Bane's declaration of "rights". We get a showcase "people's court" (yes, very Reign of Terror) presided over by everyone's favourite nutty professor, Dr Jonathan "Scarecrow" Crane, no less (nice "Death By Mau Mau" gag, by the way). With that thing on his face, it's only a surprise that we DON'T get a "shot in the jaw" moment for Mr Bane.

Of course, later it turns out that he's ACTUALLY a fascist PRETENDING to be a revolutionary, but by that point it's not even his plan any more.

Yes, there's the "The World is Not Enough" twist ending that reduces him (as per "Batman and Robin" and THERE'S a comparison you DON'T want) to female baddie's henchperson.

"Ah, I know zat you are really Bruce Wayne," is supposed to be a sign that Mr Bane is a GENIUS.

"I know your secret identity 'cos my girlfriend's dead dad told me," doesn't come across as quite so impressive.

Nor is there any sense that he has the same fighting skills as Batman. He's SUPPOSED to be the anti-Batman, trained by the League of Shadows and with a brain as smart if not smarter than the great detective. Yet he mostly just stands there and takes it as Mr Bats slaps him around the chops, going "Ha ha von ha; now I vil gobbledegook".

Not that Talia al Ghul (yes, the daughter we never knew he had) is much better served – nice to see Aslan Neeson doing the "materialising out of the Force" thing that he refused to do for George, to explain the plot to Master Bruce, though. I'm pretty sure that in the comics, however, Talia is MORE honourable that her father. Of course it helps that she's in love with Batman/Bruce Wayne, but I thought that she would stick to her code where her mad dad would happily toss it out the window if victory was an option.

The SUPPOSED purpose of the League is to sacrifice one city in order to drive the rest of the world back to "Order" (whatever "Order" is supposed to mean in these circumstances – i.e. "doing things the way WE say you should" probably).

Now, the first interesting question here is how, other than SCALE, is this different from Commissioner Gordon and Batman's plan to drive the people of Gotham back to Order through the sacrifice of one man (in this case Harvey Dent – or possibly Batman's reputation)?

The second question, though, is isn't the Dent Act supposed to have WORKED? Hasn't Gotham turned back to order and light and locked up all the baddies? In which case, why ARE the League going to destroy Gotham?

So it seems that petty vengeance is her only motivation. Basically: "You killed my dad so I'm going to nuke your city!"

And Bruce Wayne just hands over the keys to Wayne Enterprises to this person?! When exactly did he stop doing deep background checks on everyone he meets? This is the guy who had his own childhood sweetheart checked out, and now he's just letting "Miranda Tate" turn up and take over? Gee, he HAS gone slack.

For that matter, though, when are Bane and Miranda/evil Talia supposed to have trained with the League? If it's supposed to be AFTER "Batman Begins", then wasn't Ra's al Ghul supposed to be a little bit DEAD and the League disbanded? (Remember this is "REALISTIC" Batman, so Ra's al Ghul's "immortality" involves disguising his identity and faking his own death NOT get out of death free by mystical resurrection.) But if it's BEFORE "Batman Begins" then wasn't it really rather CARELESS of Ra's to train TWO successors in quick succession and have BOTH of them go off on him? Especially after two thousand years of the League's cleansing programme working fine (unless of course he just made that up on the spot to give himself a sense of history and grandeur, which admittedly monomaniacs often do). And it's he just a tiny bit too surprised that Bruce might turn down his offer of leading a genocidal pogrom when it appears that his own daughter must have done just that too?

Actually, the timeline of "Batman Begins" is quite difficult to work out properly, what with all the flashbacks within flashbacks. It makes for a great movie, but in no way a straightforward one. (It's even more complicated than "The Empire Strikes Back", where Luke appears to have months of Jedi training intercut with Han and Leia spending an afternoon being chased round rocks by the Empire before the Falcon takes a few months without hyperdrive to fly to Bespin during which time Luke spends an evening in a Cave of Evil(TM).)

For example, it appears that the main action in Gotham takes place over JUST FOUR DAYS, and for two of those, Batman is unconscious!

Seriously: the first appearance of the Batman (taking down Boss Falconi at the docks – great image of the "first bat signal") is on a Thursday; next night (after Bruce Wayne does dinner and buys a hotel) he goes to the Narrows and gets gassed by Scarecrow. Two days later, he wakes up and it's Bruce Wayne's birthday. He has Alfred keep the guests entertained (tell them that joke you know) while he goes and rescues Rachel from Arkham Asylum, chases home in the Batmobile, gets Wayne Manor burnt down and stops Ra's and the League's plan to destroy Gotham ALL IN ONE NIGHT!

(It's more likely that several days pass between the first appearance and the trip to the Narrows, but the film REALLY doesn't play that way!)

It's even WEIRDER when you think that FOURTEEN YEARS pass between the earliest flashbacks (Bruce falls down the well, breaks his arm, has his arm set by Daddy Wayne, gets taken to the opera – "time to get up" ties this to the broken arm – and sees his parents murdered) and the day that Joe Chill gets shot and Bruce runs away to discover how to be Batman.

And then ANOTHER SEVEN years at least pass before he's trained and comes back! (Alfred having had him declared dead... and that's another thing, dontcha think that in comparison Bruce Wayne is declared dead extremely quickly at the end of "The Dark Twice Knightly"?)

Just how OLD is Bruce Wayne supposed to be, anyway?

With THIS movie taking place "eight years later", the trilogy spans THIRTY YEARS (if we throw in a year for the gap between "Batman Year One cough cough Begins" and "The Dark Knight"). Arguably this takes us from the Nineteen Forties to the Nineteen Seventies (since Bruce's parents were killed "in the Depression") or (somehow presciently and yet actually more likely) from the Twenty Teens to the Twenty Fourties.

I guess that means he starts off about TEN and finishes about FORTY.

Anyway, what we don't, actually, know is how long out of his seven years' exile he spends training with Ra's and the boys. If it's just the last six months then maybe, maybe, Ra's just about has time to train Talia and Bane in the NEXT six months while Bruce is back in Gotham making his Batty preparations. Maybe.

However, I'd have to say that judging by the age Miranda/Talia appears to be in Gotham and the age child Talia appears when she climbed out of the pit then we have to assume that Ra's gave them their training FIRST, probably YEARS before he found Bruce.

Which makes it rather an OVERSIGHT that he never mentioned this failure before, not to mention him being REALLY RUBBISH at picking successors.



So it's really not true to say this movie is apolitical. It is HIGHLY political, it's just DEEPLY confused about what its politics actually mean. The effect of Mr Nolan Sister's brand of "realism" on the series is to take the fundamental contradictions of the Batman character and ramp them up to a THOUSAND.

So, Bruce Wayne is a privileged PARASITE whose well-intentioned efforts as a vigilante and in the boardroom only make things worse for everyone except his own elite class, while Commissioner Gordon is the most corrupt cop of them all, securing his personal power with a lie and apparently locking up people at will because "he knows"! And the movie actively endorses the choices that these bad-words make as not only right but GOOD. The people who oppose them are in fact lying and acting from selfish or possibly insane motivation. The only person – Selina – who dares to whisper a word against them actually aspires to and in the end succeeds in joining their class.

Auntie Jennie, of course, makes all these point more succinctly.

Inspired by her, though, here are more thoughts on the Dark Knight...



Fusion reactors don't work like that...

Fusion is where you take atoms and force them to stick them together as bigger atoms, at the basic level taking two hydrogens and making one helium. One helium has slightly less mass than two hydrogens and because Einstein said E=mc2 this means you get energy out.

Of course it's not as easy as that. You're trying to take one atomic nucleus (made of protons and neutrons) and squish it into ANOTHER atomic nucleus (also made of protons and neutrons) and because BOTH nucleuses are POSITIVELY charged they repel each other quite strongly until you can get them close enough that they suddenly snap together like LEGO.

So you need a lot of energy to start with to force those nuclei to collide.

The traditional fusion model is the magnetic torus or "STAR IN A BOTTLE" version that involves putting hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium into a metal doughnut using magnets to stop them touching the sides and then whizzing them round and round very fast so that they turn into a plasma and start fusing. Once they are going fast enough, they start to collide with enough oomph that the repulsion from the positive v positive charges is no longer enough to make them bounce off each other so they smash together instead.

The NEW-FANGLED way of achieving fusion is to use office-block-sized lasers to zap your target atoms with enough energy for them to reach the fusion point (so not REALLY like what Doc Oc does in Spider-Man 2).

Neither of these, you will have spotted, has anything remotely resembling a "core" in the form of a huge dangling cat toy that can be removed for Bane to play ball with.

Hypothetically, Bruce might have come up with a shiny NEW way of initiating the fusion reaction that DOES involve a "core" that looks something very like a BOMB – some sort of "starter motor" that will set the reactor in motion. But in that case, surely his best hope for making it SAFE is to turn the wretched thing ON!

Nuclear Bombs don't work like that...

Because even given all that, the script still seems dizzyingly confused about how THIS core actually works. The Russian scientist warms MR Bane that the core will DECAY, and that after five months he might not get any bang at all. But then Mr Lucius Fox warns that ACTUALLY the core will become UNSTABLE after five months and rather than not explode at all, definitely WILL. Now forgive me if I read too much in here, but I would have thought that UNSTABLE means it is more and more likely to go off AT RANDOM. Except everyone seems able to time to the MINUTE the moment it's going to detonate. Even Mr Batman, even though he was already dragged off to prison in darkest African Middle-East when it was unplugged and can't know precisely when the countdown was started.

Also, it starts off with a whole load of green and red LEDs which start going out to indicate growing doom, but by the end of the movie someone has kindly wired in a digital clock displaying the minutes and seconds as they count down. I guess Mr Bane needed a hobby.

And even if your batcopter CAN get you six miles in sixty seconds, there's still going to be a blast wave and a tsunami hitting the city.

Helicopters don't work like that...

Helicopters gain lift because the air above the rotors has to move faster than the air below; this makes it less dense and therefore the air below pushes the helicopter upwards. Covering the upper surface of your rotors with armour plate seems to me more likely to compress the air above the rotors, making it heavier and pushing your batwing DOWN rather than UP.

Also, from what I could see of it, the rotors on the engine were steeply sloped like a jet engine, rather than a helicopter. More precisely like the FRONT end of a jet engine (which is indeed designed to compress the air, before it's injected into the ignition chamber and shot out the back to create thrust). This suggests that (a) there ought to be an outlet at the top somewhere and (b) it's upside down.

Breaking your back doesn't work like that...

Although Daddy points out that they're quite careful NOT to say that that loud snapping noise as Mr Bane brings Mr Batman down across his knee in a faithful rendition of the "I'll break you" scene from the "Knightfall" comic is Mr Bruce BREAKING his back, it's probably worth pointing out that Mr Tom Conti saying "one of your vertebrae is sticking out," would suggest that not all is entirely well. Mind you: "let me just punch it back into your spine," is probably not best medical practice either.


Incidentally, I'D thought that the way a CHILD might get out of that prison where a GROWN UP couldn't would be because they were small enough and light enough to use the thin cracks in the wall to climb rather than leaping between platforms like it's Tomb Raider or, er, Lego Batman. But that would have been CLEVER rather than MACHO. Also, might have stopped broke-back Brucey getting out just in the nick.

People don't work like that...

Cut all the bridges to New York and rely on emergency food packages? H-Bomb or no H-Bomb you'll have FOOD RIOTS in forty-eight hours tops.

The Ending of Inception doesn't work like that...

There's more than UN HINT of a suggestion that Mr Nolan Sisters is trying to recapture the is it real/is it all a dream AMBIGUITY of the ending to his previous mega-movie "Inception" in the final moments where – all shot in dreamy sunlit Paris – Mr Alfred sees Bruce and Selina alive and well and living happily ever after. Is this for real or all in his fluffy old head, just a recurrence of his fantasy from the years when Bruce was away training (as confessed earlier in the movie)?

Only there are really just too many other P.O.V.s pointing to REALITY – Mr Lucius discovering that Batty Bruce HAD fixed the autopilot after all; Mr "Robin" being given directions to the Batcave.

(And incidentally – again – it is COMPLETELY wise to give stately Wayne Manor over to an orphanage – even to escape the Wayne estate's debts – when all it takes to get into the Batcave is plinking on the piano a couple of times? Like the kids aren't going to find THAT by about the second afternoon.)

Still, it all LOOKS absolutely gorgeous, and if you like guns and cops and REALLY tight rubber then I'm sure you'll find LOTS to appeal to you in Mitt Romney's electoral address, er...

For me, somehow I find myself preferring the Sixties Batman Movie, and the nobility of the almost human porpoise. We didn’t even get the nobility of the almost human humans here, last seen in the bad man's orange jumpsuit throwing a detonator out the window at the end of "The Dark Knight".

Last thought: "The Dark Knight" is not just a good title, but a PUN. And so is "Knightfall". "The Dark Knight Rises" is neither.

Although it might be taking the Rise.

Day 4171: Ridley Scott v Gynaecology, part deux*

Saturday:

(*Sorry, Mr Simon got the better title first!)


Bit put out!

We got caught sneaking in to the cinema and they just let me in! Seems someone thought I was one of the SPECIAL EFFECTS!

Baby Plush

Face Hugger

As for the movie... It's not so much "Prometheus" as "Pandora". As in "Take the money or open the box"!

What's clear is that "Prometheus" struggles to find its STORY, because PLOT keeps getting in the way.

Which is a shame because "At the Mountains of Madness" HAS a decent story, or at least it did when Lovecraft wrote it.

(Seriously: small expedition travel beyond the limits of human knowledge to discover unexpected alien citadel wherein lies the shocking secret from before the dawn of human history in the form of a race of ancient aliens and their revolting shape-shifting servitor-creations. And one of the Shoggoths has survived! It's a pity 'cos we'd probably have preferred Guillermo del Toro's version.)

Oops, I've just SPOILERED the entire film. Still, if you don't want any MORE spoilers, I'd look away now!

If you remember, "PLOT" (at least in my definition) is the sequence of events that happen in a narrative while "STORY" is the reason we should care that those events happen in that order.

In this case we actually have TWO plots: "Chariots of the Gods" and the original "Alien". It's not ENTIRELY impossible that it's supposed to be a clever pun by the filmmaker about alien DNA combining and corrupting the human "story". Or it might just be a horrible car crash.

Channel Four were kind enough – or UNKIND enough – to put on the original ALIEN later that same night for comparison.

The first thing that is obvious is how much of a debt "Prometheus" owes to "Alien", from the way the one-word-title builds up out of lines during the opening sequence to the closing monologue delivered as "the final log of the...".

We get the same little data plaque about the starship Prometheus (crew of seventeen) that we got about the Nostromo (crew of seven). And the Prometheus visually resembles the Nostromo, both inside and out. Actually, the exterior also looks a lot like the Firefly Class "Serenity" of, er, "Firefly" and, um, "Serenity". Although the advances in CGI mean that we are able to see the ship much more clearly, and in sunlight rather than the shadows of space or a storm-wracked LV 426. And, like much of the movie, Prometheus is made to look beautiful, in a way that was never entirely possible or clear for Nostromo.

But these deliberate similarities soon start to hurt the film.

When we penetrate an alien complex (part-terraformer, part-research lab, part-tomb) to discover a roomful of mysterious knee-high objects (vases rather than eggs this time) we know that they're going to open up to release something icky. (In this case – as Simon says – it turns out to be the black oil from The X-Files, which seems to be Ridley ambitiously trying to sort out someone else's confused backstory as well as his own.)

When Rafe Spall and Sean Harris are trapped in the tomb, you know just know they're going to wind up with some alien willy-analogue trying to melt their space helmets and force its way down their throats. Wouldn't it have been more interesting to have them survive their enforced night in the tomb and get back to Prometheus only to find it had been the site of a massacre? As it is, THEIR story goes nowhere. AND the story of the infected scientist/boyfriend goes nowhere.

When we find "that spaceship" we know it's only a matter of time before we end up with the Space Jockey in his chair. (Even though it makes no sense at all for the end of this film to recreate the situation we discovered at the start of "Alien" – namely crashed ship full of potential Aliens waiting to be discovered – what with it being set on a completely different planet, with a completely different weaponised Alien in the hold. The only possible conclusion is that the Makers/Space Jockeys routinely crash their horseshoe-shaped spacecraft while carrying bio-weapons of mass destruction. That's probably why they're extinct.)

Basically, repeating the "beats" from "Alien" keeps getting in the way of telling the story that "Prometheus" is trying to tell. But is that the only problem?

"Alien" is, it almost goes without saying, a much BETTER movie than "Prometheus", not just much more tightly focused and of course a damn sight more scary, but also even if you ignore all the (not-so-very) subtext about fear of penetration and vagina dentata, it's still profoundly insightful (even if it's borrowed from the MILLENNIUM Falcon!) about how the future of space won't be all gleaming starships and boldly going, but actually dirty and working class and driven by ugly, mundane concerns about the money, where the crew are expendable if it turns a profit and the face of the big corporation is literally an android. Think about how profoundly DANGEROUS space really is: fire, decompression, asphyxiation, hull failure... the tag-line "In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream" is (again) literally true – you don't actually NEED a xenomorph for space to kill you very dead in any or all of these ways. The crew's lack of respect for space, for nature (except of course for Ripley who is the only one who bothers with the rules and does the checks) is what kills them as much as the big shiny penis-with-teeth. In that sense "Alien" isn't just the monster; it's everything about throwing vulnerable human bodies into this situation.

Even if you take away the deliberate use of notes from "Alien", "Prometheus" isn't saying anything nearly so interesting.

Like a teenage GOTH, the movie thinks that it is being really DEEP and asking MEANINGFUL questions like "where are we from?" and "why are we here?". These are hardly ORIGINAL questions, though. And the sub-von Däniken pseudo-answers provided are hardly less so, either.

(Seriously, again: the "god does not build in straight lines" line is straight out of his "aboriginal peoples couldn't have constructed the Nazca lines" playbook. Von Dänikenism was already laugh-and-point material by the time Doctor Who was ripping him off in the early Seventies. Which, frankly, is pre the original "Alien".)

In the story, the alien "Makers" (and taking the elephant-headed Space Jockey of "Alien" and retooling his species as just "really big humans in a Faction Paradox hats" is definitely taking something weird and awesome and making it less interesting) came to Earth and either did the Scaroth Last of the Jagaroth thing of starting life on Earth or possibly just added their own DNA to the existing mix so that humans would evolve.

At least the movie has enough sense of shame to let someone say: "but evolution doesn't work that way" (unless you're Terry Nation – so look on, Master Ridley). But then it makes nothing further of that.

Likewise, at least is it raises the ontological regress: even if WE were made by the Makers, who made THEM? But then it drops that idea too.

The entire premise of the film, of course, is that the Makers left invitations all over the Earth asking us to pop over and visit. So why do the maps not lead to their homeworld? Or at least the Space Jockey embassy on Centauri Prime? Why, of all places, a covert bioweapons development base that they'd want to keep secret? One, furthermore, where the weapons, apparently, got out of control before the Makers even had time to finish terraforming the place.

(Unfortunately, the overlooked possibility that our heroes are wrong and that the star maps are in truth a warning of the "here be monsters" doesn't make a lot of sense in this context either. It's only a place of monsters AFTER the Makers cocked up, and by that point there was no one left alive to go round posting obscure warnings in cave paintings.)

I suppose it's just about possible that (in another genre-jump to "The Matrix") "Prometheus" is trying to say that HUMANS are a BIOWEAPON developed on this planet too (and, what, that the Alien is a later model?) allowing the Makers to conquer planets by proxy. (Which reminds me, "Quatermass and the Pit" is coming soon to our local cinema. Or if you prefer one of the Doctor Who versions, "The Dæmons", then notice that the existence of the star maps – widely separated in time and geography – implies that the Makers must have kept on coming back to "check up" on Earth's progress. And while that doesn't exactly contradict anything we see, it does seem to go against the "and we'll leave you to it" spirit of what seemed to be happening in the opening disintegrating-Maker sequence.)

And how exactly does Idris Elba's captain Janek suddenly figure all this out given that (a) he's spent least time of anybody actually IN the alien complex and (b) demonstrated exactly zero interest in the archaeological mission up to this point?

There are moments when Ridley appears to be reaching for a crossover with his (other) masterpiece, "Blade Runner" – in particular the way that Mr Wayland the supposedly-dead-but-to-the-surprise-of-no-one-actually-on-board-in-a-packing-crate boss of Wayland (not-yet-Yutani) corporation clearly wants to have a word with his creator about getting some more life. This is further reflected in the way that the android David, played by Michael Fassbender, has been created by humans (like the replicants) but without a proper skill set of emotions (like the replicants). And of course, the android created by humans is a symmetry for the humans created by the Makers. Probably.

David is right: "why did you create us" deserves a better answer than "because we could", or at least that answer deserves some proper exploration. But frustratingly, once again, it is raised only to be immediately set aside.

It's almost as though the big philosophy questions are as much stumbling blocks as the plot points lifted from "Alien". Rather than linking together to drive the story, they serve to trip it up, pull it up short with an "and now think about this" moment, before returning you to your scheduled space opera.

Because a lot of this IS soap opera in space. "I can't have children" / "I'm pregnant... but how!" / "It's a squid!" This sort of thing is barely above "Dr Milburn, I thought you were dead" / "I was!" No, wait, they do that one too! Not to mention "Gasp! You're my father!"

(As subtle foreshadowing goes, "This robot is the nearest thing I'll have to a son" followed by "Oh hello Ms Vickers, do you have issues or what?" barely troubles the scorers.)

The clue to the soapyness ought to be the increased ensemble cast, but even this they do wrong. In "Alien", a crew of seven is just about right so that each character has room to BE a character, and each gets a memorably distinct death (or not in the case of Captain Dallas since his cocooning was edited out).

Seventeen is both too many faces for us to recognise and care about them as they get picked off and at the same time ridiculously too few for a mission of first contact. As an archaeological mission, playing essentially a hunch to see if there's anything out here you might, just might, send out a bunch of oddballs like this, particularly if – as it is depicted in "Alien" – spaceflight is become routine, even humdrum, so that a crew of seven "space truckers" can haul a refinery back to Earth from the deeps of space.

But "Prometheus" also wants us to believe that space is NOT humdrum, that the Prometheus mission is a big deal, that Wayland (not-yet-Yutani) have invested a lot of money and effort into this. In which case, why only one ship? You'd send two ships at least if not half a dozen, so there's always someone in orbit to rescue your ass; even the Apollo moon landings left backup in Lunar orbit! And why the loose cannon captain, brain-fried geologist and dropout botanist, why not a hundred security guards. Especially given there is not only a very senior company board member on board but, as it turns out, the CEO too. Wayland quite literally have all their (alien) eggs in one basket case.

(Actually, maybe it's the sudden loss of a trillion-dollar space mission plus two of their most senior executives that precipitates Wayland being merged/taken over by Yutani in the first place!)

But you can bet that even if such a mission went out looking for Dr Shaw's aliens, their protocols would very strictly say at the first sign of first contact you pull out and leave it to the government(s) of Earth. First contact is NOT something that the world is going to permit to happen freelance.

(Whether an obsessive like Dr Liz Shaw would then follow those protocols, or a monomaniac like Wayland would obey the government(s) of Earth is another matter, and might have contributed a plot point or two.)

That's not to say that the characters who HAVE characters aren't interesting, fun and well-acted.

Noomi Rapace's soulful Dr Elizabeth Shaw (probably not the Doctor Who companion played by Caroline John in the early Seventies, but you never know) is a credible (if occasionally credulous) replacement heroine for Warrant Office Ellen Ripley without being a retread of Sigourny Weaver's career-defining character. Idris Elba (if we overlook his sudden moment of Captain Basil Space-Exposition, described above) is terrifically laconic throughout. Charlize Theron underplays in just the right way, playing the emotionally shut-down Ms Vickers so that we just might believe she's another robot. She deserved a better exit than the perfunctory squished-by-falling-spaceship that she got. Guy Pearce... wears an awful lot of latex. (Seriously, were there supposed to be flashbacks? Did he beg to be in the movie? Was John Hurt not available this time round?)

Of all of them, Fassbender's David is the most interesting. And a movie that was much more about him and much less about whatever it was "Prometheus" was supposed to be about would have been a better watch.

(Alex noticed, incidentally, that the androids are, in sequence, Ash, Bishop, Call and now David. We look forward to Eugene in the next instalment.)

It's never entirely clear what's motivating him. Obviously, the superimposed plot of "Alien" requires him to have a secret agenda, orders from Wayland (not-Yutani) that compromise his loyalty to the crew.

And there is a sense that, like HAL from "2001", his homicidal and seemingly irrational behaviour is caused by a programming conflict.

But then at other times, he definitely appears to demonstrate self-awareness.

In what probably ought to be the most important moment of the film, he almost admits it to Dr Shaw when he asks: "Don't we all want to kill our parents?" That's a very disturbing thing to think, but also very profound when looked at on an evolutionary timescale. From a certain point of view, every successful new species must supplant its forefathers.

(Actually, that's not quite true – what happens is you inherit an evolutionary niche if your predecessor species is out-evolved by its PREDATORS. But that's a different crossover franchise.)

This then should be the engine that drives the movie's story – humans threaten to supplant Makers, androids threaten to supplant humans.

Unlike other ideas, this one isn't just touched on and dropped. It remains underdeveloped, but – like a will-o-the-wisp – pops up again in different guises throughout. Dr Shaw's inability to have children – and the implied personal failure connected with that – is then inverted when her unexpected pregnancy is a literal monster (and there's some kind of perverse maternal bond going on there when, at the end, the squid-thing saves her). Ms Vickers confronts Wayland with the bitter accusation: "The king has his reign and it ends."

(Wayland, of course, does not want to be a king. He wants to be a god.)

It all comes down to the two questions at the end, Wayland and Shaw each trying to persuade David to ask one thing of the awakened Maker they've found: "Who are you?" and "What do you want?" Oh no, hang on, that's "Babylon 5".

The questions are (I paraphrase) "How do I live forever?" and "Why do you want to kill us?"

In probably the film's most fatal flaw, Ridley choose not to let god get to answer.

It's very reminiscent of the let-down at the end of Doctor Who's "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit" story (yes, "Quatermass and the Pit" AGAIN!) where the audience deserved a confrontation between the Doctor and the Devil and instead what we got was David Tennant pulling faces because the Devil had already scarpered.

Of course, the fact that only David (the android, not Tennant) speaks the Maker's language (and we the audience get no help from omnipotent subtitling either) means that we do not know which question he chooses to put. Or if he puts either question. For all we know, what he actually says is, "These people are here to kill you and by the way your mother smells of elderberries."

Perhaps reducing the Maker to a dumb beast IS some kind of "blind watchmaker" statement about "creators". Nevertheless, leaving god without a voice leaves the film without a punch-line. When it's ALL been about the WHY, you can't just miss that out, or worse declare it as "wait for the sequel". It means that even the Alien has better motivation than these gods, and all IT wants to do is eat you or mate with you. Or possibly both at once.

In the end, "Prometheus" is a "Modern Prometheus", a Frankenstein's Monster bolted together from bits of dead philosophers and the leftovers from a thirty-five-year-old better movie. And no stolen fire to animate it.

And whoever thought that finishing with a shot of the most rubbish version of the Alien yet would be a surprise "twist" wants shooting.

Day 3640: The Two TRONies

Sunday:


For my latest impenetrable disguise, I have slipped into a LYCRA BODY-STOCKING with matching NEON ACCOUTREMENTS – hmm, surprisingly comfortable, actually – in order to download myself into the local cinema's Internet-based ticket-booking system and obtain a seat for the movie TRON: LEGACY.

The ORIGINAL Tron movie is almost certainly the MOST Nineteen-Eighties movie ever made. Seriously, it is! Essentially, or at least superficially, it's about a young man in a MULLET engineering a corporate takeover. It's got lasers and computers and wacky electronica; what could be MORE eighties than that?

Except, of course, it's really all about GOD.

We were able to watch BOTH "Tron" movies over the weekend. We were able to do this because we bought the DVD of "Tron" back when it came out for the Twentieth Anniversary of the movie in 2002 and before Disney went MAD and DELETED all remaining copies so that no one can buy the old one and compare it to the new one. Like wot we're about to do.

The usual total disclaimer of responsibility for spoilers for either movie applies, but I WILL keep spoilers for the NEW one to the separate review below.

TRON

Tron depicts two worlds: the "real" world of Human Beans – it even throws up the cheesy caption "meanwhile, in the real world" – which looks very like a cheap TV movie of the week inhabited by people with bad and, frankly, really BIG hair; and a second world "inside" the computers where people-shaped "programs" dressed in florescent baby-grows/over-optimistic fetishwear are oppressed by the local fascist regime, headed up by villainous muscle SARK working for the Big Brother/Emperor/Devil figure of the Master Control Program (or MCP).

There's this whole "The Wizard of Oz" thing going on so that the program-people in the computer world are doppelgangers of the people in TV movie world who programmed them – who are called "users" (with all the hilarious cannabis-based overtones you can imagine).

So, Mr Jeff Bridges is BOTH the mulletted programmer, arcade-gamer and hacker Kevin Flynn AND the intruder program CLU whom he sends into the company mainframe to obtain the proof that their valuable copyrights ought to belong to him in the first place; Mr "President" Bruce Boxleitner is both the "square" Alan Bradley, the last "honest" guy still working for the megacorp, AND the heroic titular security programme TRON tasked with policing the MCP (much to the former chess computer's annoyance); Ms Cindy Morgan is both the bimbo scientist Lora who's positioned her own desk right in front of the gigawatt laser disintegrator AND smart cookie lady-program YORI who seems to be a system control program (or possibly a solar-sailor pilot); and the transcendentally awesome Mr David Warner is nasty-suited corporate sneak-thief and senior exec Ed Dillinger AND Darth Vader… er I mean red-meanie SARK. Oh and he's also the voice of Evil Genius, er, I mean the Master Control Program. Look, he's a REASONABLE MAN…

Anyway the PLOT – as opposed to the STORY, important difference – sees Mr Kevin's intruder program CLU get caught and killed, sorry "de-rezzed" by SARK while trying to get into the company's core memory. This prompts the MCP to have his human patsy, Dillinger, order a security lockdown. This, in turn, cuts off Mr Alan's access to his new TRON program and forces Mr Alan together with the rebellious Mr Kevin. With Ms Lora's help they break in so that Mr Kevin can use her computer in the laser lab to break open the system and let Mr Alan communicate with TRON.

So far so SIMPLE!

Except… remember what I said about where Ms Lora had stupidly put her desk?

So twenty minutes in, the Master Control Program gets to use its experimental teleporter to send Mr Kevin over the rainbow or, if you don't mind me suddenly shifting metaphors, down the rabbit hole into computerland.

It's a more appropriate metaphor because there are plenty more ways that computer world resembles Wonderland than Oz, from the weird physics to the mysterious pool of liquid (probably not tears, but certainly worth a "drink me") to a guardian caterpillar.

And of course "down the rabbit hole" links us to that other movie about reality and computer simulation, because "Tron" is, obviously, "The Matrix" seen from the other point of view: the hyper-real, sci-fi world in "Tron" is the SIMULATION inside the computer inside the "real" world; "The Matrix" reverses this by having our "real" world be the simulation inside the sci-fi world of spaceships and robots. In both cases, though, a person from the more-real world aware that they are in the simulation-world gains SUPER POWERS.

Once despatched into computerland, Mr Flynn finds himself one of a band of prisoners. At this point SARK arrives. I say arrives: he is travelling in a gigantic flying battleship called his command carrier; it's one hell of an entrance. The command carrier itself is a stunningly iconic piece of design, hanging in the computerland sky in what Mr Dougie Adams would describe as exactly the way that bricks don't. Watching again, Daddy Richard recognised that this carrier is an enduring image that has stayed with him from childhood, particularly the physics-defying way that it glides over the landscape.

Mind you, you don't need a degree in RADICAL FEMINISM to spot this enormous flying Freudian symbol as a huge archetype of the patriarchal authority going on around here.

Anyway, SARK gives the prisoners a lecture – deliciously undercut by Mr Warner's almost bored, perfunctory, done-it-so-many-times-before delivery – that sets out the movie's metaphysical stall: belief in the "users" is a decadent superstition. Persist in it and we'll send you off to be killed in the CGI Gladiatorial Games. Do I NEED to say Christians versus Cat-monsters?

Of course, it's awfully easy to see SARK and his crew as a bunch of Godless Commies™, not least because they all glow RED where the goodies glow BLUE (except where they're the other way around because the makers changed their minds halfway through – check out the goodies' Light Cycles and some of the baddie tank commanders!).

And this is reinforced by the image of the MCP as Big Brother, planning on instigating a takeover by stealth; we've already heard him discussing his plans to hack into the Pentagon, in a scene which also implies that he's in charge of the Kremlin (and when we see him at the climax he IS one great big face, too!)

Remember, the "goodie" programs have "faith" in their "users" (they have to have "faith" because they cannot "hear" the voice of their "users" since the MCP has cut off all communications to the "real world" except for his own line to Dillinger); but WE know that this "faith" in the users is COMPLETELY CORRECT. But keep thinking about it because it's more complicated than it seems: for starters, as a metaphor for GOD, it's a cheerfully PANTHEISTIC model, isn't it.

Anyway, SARK dismisses the prisoners and sends Mr Flynn off for a bout of death-by-Frisbee against Mr Boxleitner's future Babylon 5 co-star Mr Peter Jurasik unless you meant it.

As an aside, Mr Jurassic plays his character in a very interesting way, slightly pathetic and slightly nasty. Not merely willing to kill to save his own life, he's actively keen to take advantage of Flynn's naivety and ignorance as to the fatal consequences of losing. It's an interesting study in how oppression makes the oppressed turn on each other, even though it means actually serving the agenda of their oppressors. (And it's a lot more subtle than the big gay double-cross in "Tron: Legacy"… **cough cough spoilers** but more of that later).

Mr Flynn DOESN'T kill Mr Peter; he refuses. But nasty SARK deletes Mr Peter's platform anyway, with the obvious nasty-plunge-into-oblivion consequences.

After this, Mr Flynn and his cell-mate, a program called RAM, get transferred to a new game: the famous LIGHT CYCLES. There they meet up with TRON at last. The light-cycle game is famously stunning – at least from the computerland perspective; up in the "real" world, it appears to be just a "worm" game with only the cycle's "lightwall" trails visible. So you build your own maze and when one of the baddies somehow smashes a "hole" in the "wall" of the game, Flynn and TRON and RAM are able to escape into the computer network.

SARK sends his forces in pursuit: rolling tank programs and the iconic flying alien/spaceship thingies called Recognisers (looking suspiciously like a less anthropomorphic EVIL-ROBOT Maximilian from Disney's previous sci-fi epic "The Black Hole", a poster for which can be spotted in "Tron: Legacy"). Earlier, in the "real world" sequence, we saw Mr Flynn playing (and winning at) the original "Space Paranoids" game which was nicked from him by Mr Dillinger and is the basis of the company's fortunes. We see that both tanks and Recognisers come from this game.

Our heroes get separated and RAM gets de-rezzed. While TRON makes his way to a communication tower, Mr Flynn discovers that, as one of the fabled "users", he has SPECIAL POWERS: he is able to reassemble a smashed Recogniser, basically by using the FORCE.

One thing that is rather terrific is the way that, as it pulls itself together, we see that the Recogniser is made up of discrete geometric shapes that just hang together unconnected. Later on, Mr Flynn's BAD DRIVING results in a crash which sees the Recognisers disassembled block by block in a similar manner.

Speaking of the FORCE, by the way, I was reading some of Mr Lawrence Miles the other day and it set me thinking about how Mr George Lucas really, really, fundamentally misunderstood his own mythology. The Force, as it was SUPPOSED to work in Star Wars, was a power that derived from the CONNECTIONS between people. Strength in the Force should therefore NOT be some innate, INNER quality – that, if anything, should be the power of the SITH – but the Jedi strength ought to be determined by their connectedness to others. Master Anakin's powerful connection to just a FEW (or ONE) people – his MUM and then his GIRLFRIEND – ought to make him WEAK in Jedi powers; conversely the selfless Princess Leia, working tirelessly for others throughout the galaxy ought to be staggeringly powerful. The exchange between Master Luke and the Emperor in "Return of the Jedi": "Your overconfidence is your weakness"/"Your faith in your friends is yours" ought to be THE central argument between Jedi and Sith, not just a bit of tacked on bitching.

Anyway, Mr Flynn escapes from the crashed Recogniser and is able to hide himself among SARK's guards – he discovers that he is able to change colour from blue to red by touching one of the red guards, and later changes back when he touches TRON, though nothing seems to be made of this point. Though if the colour of your neon's DOES indicate something about the status of your SOUL – as the blue for goodies, red for baddies divide implies – then at the very least it ought to be a BIT significant that Mr Flynn appears to have the ability to be EITHER.

This – possibly – becomes even more significant in the sequel, see below.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. TRON has met up with YORI and the two of them have managed to get into the last free IO (Input Output) Tower. The guardian there is DUMONT – who is also the avatar of Walter (Mr Barnard Hughes who made a habit of playing crumbly old men from "Mr Merlin" to grandpa in "The Lost Boys" during the Eighties) who long ago founded the company in his garage but who nowadays is treated as an indulged older uncle, playing with his laser project while Dillinger takes the company to greater things.

For all that Daddy Alex thinks he looks like the Caterpillar from Alice – and he DOES – it's also clear that DUMONT is an OLD TESTAMENT PROPHET: in the olden days, programs came to his temple, er tower to pray to, er, communicate with the users. But in these godless times no one comes here any more, and he's sour about it (like most of the prophets, who never came down from the top floor to say 'you've all done very well'). TRON and YORI promise him a revival of that old-time religion in return for him letting them use the tower. And then SARK demonstrates what a real BADDIE he is by violating the SANCTUARY of the IO Tower with, er, another huge Freudian symbol.

DUMONT gets dragged off but TRON and YORI escape on the – extremely beautiful – solar-sailor, travelling along a communication beam from the games back to the central computer. This is where they meet up with Mr Flynn again, as he is among the group of guards who jump aboard to try and stop the escape, only to be tossed overboard by TRON.

Pursued along the beam by Recognisers, Mr Flynn is able to use the FORCE again to shift them onto a different track, thus proving to them that he is one of the "users".

This is in some ways the most CRUCIAL moment in the movie, as TRON and YORI are, from their point of view rather unexpectedly, presented with proof of the existence of GOD. And it turns out that god is more of a SCREW-UP than THEY are! It's telling that TRON, the perfect little religious warrior, immediately believes that Flynn must have a grand Master Plan, because after all he IS a user. But Flynn confesses that he's just muddling through (at which point Tron is so shocked that he blasphemously CORRECTS him that that is only how it is for us on the Grid).

It has to be said, this is at least moderately PROFOUND.

However, there's no time for an EXISTENTIAL CRISIS, because SARK's command carrier is stalking them though the digital canyons, sneaking up on them, moving rather like the tiptoeing BLUE MEANIES from "The Yellow Submarine" (not the ONLY way in which these movies resemble each other, either).

The command carrier smashes the solar-sailor and SARK captures Mr Flynn and YORI while TRON is left clinging to the outside. SARK himself is taking prisoners to the MCP and leaves Flynn and YORI on the carrier as he debarks, casually ordering the whole thing to de-rez with them still aboard – which Daddy Richard says he's always thought was a tremendously powerful gesture. Imagine if Darth Vader had just as casually waved a hand and had his Star Destroyer disassemble; it shows a casual self-confidence that has no NEED of whale-sized Freudian symbolism. Plus "I'll destroy my entire carrier just to kill you".

SARK carries his prisoners, including DUMONT, to the MCP's plateau where they will essentially be fed to the master computer – it's going to absorb their functions, taking on their abilities and growing further in power. TRON makes it to the plateau too, having snuck aboard SARK's shuttle, until the Emperor, er, the MCP feels his presence and sics SARK on him. TRON beats SARK and tries to deactivate the MCP, but finds the Master Computer too well protected by a spinning shield.

However, everyone has forgotten about Mr Flynn. Using the FORCE, er, his power as a user, Flynn is able to hold enough of the command carrier together to fly over the MCP and fling himself into its core. The MCP is distracted and TRON is able to send the shutdown code, freeing the Grid at last. And as a consequence, Mr Flynn is lasered back into the real world along with the evidence he needs to live happily ever after (subject to sequels).

So, taken SUPERFICIALLY, "Tron" is a pretty ordinary action quest movie, distinguished by unprecedented computer generated visual effects that meant it stuck in the mind far longer than similar post Star Wars screen-fodder.

And yet it's actually rather DEEPER than that: scratch beneath the surface and it's a story about the power of FAITH and the reality of GOD. And, and this is the radical bit, that god's an IDIOT who's making it up as he goes along.

There's a blatant clue (yes, a reference to Red Dwarf's virtual reality episode "Back to Reality") to look deeper in the significant double meanings of NAMES. TRON itself, for example, is, apparently, genuine programming language for a security program, meaning "TRace ON"; YORI is a Japanese name meaning "reliable" (which might be a bit patronising for the only girl character, but might be a reference to Japanese domination of consumer electronics and their reputation for reliability); DUMONT is a common French name, but MIGHT be a reference to the long-since-defunct DuMont Television Network (well, he DOES control a Broadcast Tower)

Turning to the sequel movie: QUORRA used to be the name for the lower reaches of the Niger River, before it was realised they were the SAME river (so that's something that turns out to be a part of something bigger), though MAY be a reference to a DIAMOND company; particularly taken in connection with the OTHER lady character's name being GEM. And RINZLER sounds so like RIZLER and we're back to overtones of "wacky-backy" and "users" again, but unfortunately and somewhat prosaically is actually named after the author of the Making of Star Wars because that book happened to be on the producer's desk at the time. Oh well.

What is almost extraordinary is that with hindsight, you can see "Tron" as a metaphor for the whole personal computing revolution, where the power was shifted suddenly and irrevocably from big corporate mainframes like the MCP to the open-access, free-for-all carnival of a grid or "net" of users that is the Internet.

And in many ways, in spite of – or perhaps as a very function of – its immense Eighties-ness, "Tron" is a terrifically OPTIMISTIC movie. It finishes with the selfish cheat getting his comeuppance and the company in the hands of the young hippy. Freedom has won, and we are all going to share in the bright new future of opportunity. All the previous "real world" scenes were filmed in darkness, but now the long night is over and the last scene sees them all in glorious sunlight.

Of course, things in the REAL "real world" didn't ENTIRELY deliver on that promise.

TRON: LEGACY

At least in part, "Tron: Legacy" seeks to address the fact that the 'Eighties never lived up to the optimism that the first film promised, to apologise for that. It's a film that is about broken promises rather a lot.

Daddy Richard went into the cinema with the BIGGEST worry that "Tron: Legacy" was going to be yet another American film about Daddies and Sons. As sooooo many of them are. And you can't blame him, with the whole set up being about Mr Jeff Bridges as now OLD Mr Flynn and Mr Garrett Hedlund as his son Sam. So it was a GREAT RELIEF to find that it wasn't like that at all, and instead was a TRUE sequel and BUILT on the original. Yes, it's all about god AGAIN.

Or, if you like: "Tron" is "Where God Went Wrong"; "Tron: Legacy" is "Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes".

The failure of the promise of the Eighties is addressed directly straight away by the simplest method of having successful hero Mr Flynn DISAPPEAR. I mean WE can all guess that he's taken another zapping from the laser into computerland, but the initial focus is on the way this tears apart his company and his family, leaving his young son, seven-year-old Sam, betrayed and broken.

Twenty years later…

His Dad's company is being run by the evil execs again; Mr Alan is STILL the last honest guy in the megacorp; and now Ed Dillinger JUNIOR is in charge of program development. And Sam is hacking the new software launch, jumping off the roof and getting booked for speeding on his Dad's motorbike.

Until…

Mr Alan shares a MYSTERIOUS pager message he has received, purportedly from Mr Kevin, and this draws Sam to his Dad's old arcade where, behind the Tron machine – obviously – he finds a secret office with a computer and a laser.

Uh oh…

Yes, before you can say, "don't call up the last command file!" Mr Sam has zapped himself over the rainbow in his father's footsteps.

And that's where we go into Technicolor… or rather being nowadays, we go into 3-D. Or more precisely lots of slices of 2-D in exciting layers.

Look, let's be honest, the 3-D AIN'T ALL THAT. Actually, it worked best for the "Pirates of the Caribbean 4" trailer, which is to say in lots of long, sweeping panoramas with lots of nicely composed layers sweeping past slowly and majestically so you can take it all in. Also, pretty good for things suddenly thrusting out of the screen at you, like a big SWORD (same trailer) or a splash of water (the ONLY good thing from the – shudders – CGI Yogi Bear). High speed action sequences, though, really don't seem to cut it. I suspect your brain is just too busy trying to figure out what's occurring to bother resolving the 3-D optical illusion. Which is fine because personally I think it’s a silly, pointless gimmick that adds very little, pardon my pun, DEPTH to the story telling.

Daddy Alex, on the other fluffy foot, who hasn't seen a new-generation 3-D movie before, agrees that it didn't look brilliant, but enjoyed it for its personal sense of 'See "Tron" at the cinema and you see something you've never seen before, again,' and for its carefully designed idea that, after "The Wizard of Oz", the new TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT makes the 'other world' look both MORE and LESS real at the same time. But, he adds, this ARTIFICIAL process may be less successful in depicting worlds that are, well, NOT artificial.

And someone needs to point out that such a very DARK palette for your movie is a serious handicap when the audience are going to be stuck in POLARISING SUNGLASSES.

Daddy Alex wasn't keen on the sunglasses either, as they're a real pain to wear over ACTUAL glasses, too, as the two pairs literally rub up against each other the wrong way.

Almost all the reviews of "Tron: Legacy" that we've seen say basically the same thing: the effects are spectacular and the story is a bit meh. This is, of course, COMPLETELY the wrong way around.

A lot of the effects ARE glorious, from the shiny black-glass effect of the Recogniser to the ghostly washes of the Light Cycles's lightwalls, not to mention the spectacular way the cycles assemble themselves, to the butterfly wings of the perverted solar-sailor to the sinister black shark of the Rectifier (a new command carrier for a new villain).

But the thing is, nowadays ANYONE can have a shiny black glass aircraft or super hi-tech motorbike. Computer imaging is so ubiquitous that Tron's unique selling point visuals are gone. As Lawrence Miles would say: have you SEEN advertising? It's very beautifully crafted architecture, which helps, but it's not GROUNDBREAKING in the way the original was, and in many ways still is.

One of the GLORIES of the original "Tron", as detailed above, was the way that computerland had its own PHYSICS. The Light Cycles, in particular, could do the impossible: they could make perfectly right-angled turns. And that's impossible, gloriously impossible. Even taking into account that it's the way that computer games have developed, the truth is that when the Light Cycles in the new movie behave in a physics-normal way it brings them down to Earth. Instead of being something REAL behaving in a magical way to simulate a computer game, we have a computer simulation of a computer game trying to be more and more like the real world. It makes them… mundane.

(There IS a SMALL amount of physics-bending in the early disc fight, but frankly it's nothing compared to the zero-gravity corridor fight in "Inception".)

In "Tron", when programs "die" their de-resolution is into a blaze of light, as though the electrical energy that was maintaining their representation in the computer has been released. In "Tron: Legacy", when programs de-rez they shatter like glass. Which looks beautiful but rather misses the POINT.

And on a small point, the – MASSIVE Star Wars reference – dogfight between Light Jets at the end turns on the fighters climbing high into the air and stalling… WHAT air? This is a computer simulation: there isn't any NEED for real air or there ought to be air all the way up! Daddy Alex thinks that this might be a JOKE about the fight in IRON MAN which ALSO hinges on Jeff Bridges stalling at altitude.

So the EFFECTS are pretty well done but – shrug – so what?

The STORY, on the other fluffy foot, is possibly the most BREATHTAKINGLY AUDACIOUS for a Hollywood motion picture it is possible to imagine.

No, really.

Initially continuing along his father's path from the first movie, Mr Sam gets sent to the games and has a go at disc fighting until champion gladiator RINZLER recognises him as a user – and it IS significant that RINZLER knows a user when he nearly kills one. Sam gets taken to see someone he initially thinks is his long lost father, but of course it's REALLY the program CLU gone rogue. CLU puts Sam back in the arena for a Light Cycle fight – so far so didn't we do this last time – until SAM is rescued by a (yay!) JAMES BOND-ish buggy that can travel off the Grid, leaving CLU and the other Light Cycles behind.

There's a BIT of a tease that the buggy-driver might be TRON, but it turns out to be a girl-program called QUORRA and she takes Sam to the REAL Kevin Flynn.

But time is a bit Narnia-like in computerland (and if you prefer your Christian metaphysics in more dilute form, then you CAN always check out "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" before it sinks without trace at the box-office) so a lot longer has passed for Daddy than son and he is now OLD. And a bit ZEN.

In fact, this aged Mr Jeff Bridges is WAY COOL. If you thought he was using the FORCE in the first movie, that is NOTHING compared to the JEDI MASTER he plays here.

In so many ways, from the many, many little visual references – lovely moment where Sam holds the Light Cycle stick like it's a Light Sabre; and there's RINZLER'S double disc Darth Maul moment (and there's RINZLER'S NAME for goodness sake) – through to the underlying use of MYTHOLOGY, this is the Star Wars movie we never quite got from Mr Lucas.

True, it doesn't have the BREADTH either in terms of galactic scope and ever-changing landscapes, nor in terms of wide cast of characters nor the DEPTH in terms of backstory and character arcs, but the HEART of it, the heart of is gets Star Wars absolutes so right in a way that hollow prequel movies and unsatisfying Ewok climaxes somehow missed. It's an Irvin Kershner thing, probably.

And I have to admit, Mr Bridges is really rather GOOD at this. In "Tron" he was clearly having a freewheeling charismatic laugh, fun to be with but also somehow flimsy. But now he knows how to seize the camera and dominate it as solid as a statue. He's clearly got the MOJO and he knows when to put it on and when to turn it off, giving his elder Flynn a flair and charisma when he's sure he's taking the right path but also a tremulous uncertainty when he's balanced between two opposite exigencies: the needs of the Grid and the needs of his son. As the Jedi Master we never had, he can BE that philosopher, warrior and old-time fire-and-brimstone prophet. And yet he can also tip the odd genre-aware wink to the audience, as in my favourite line:

"You're really messing with my Zen thing, dude."

Jedi Master Flynn explains that CLU believes that if he can get to the "portal" and upload himself via the laser then he can enter the "real" world. The key to this is Mr Flynn's own identity disc (presumably because in technobabble terms it contains all the information needed for the laser to de-teleport a Flynn-shaped person, though this is rather glossed over – but who cares, it's a magic key to the door to another world). Flynn won't let CLU get out, so he refuses to return to the Grid to even try and reach the portal.

Sam, however, has no such Zen wisdom and reckons he can get to the portal and then just delete CLU from the system from the outside. Quorra is convinced by his passion and suggests that he ask a long-lost ally program called Zuse for help, and sends him to Zuse's gatekeeper Castor played by the ever malleable Mr Michael Sheen in a white Marty Hopkirk suit and matching fright wig.

"Why is Tony Blair playing David Bowie?" asked Daddy Alex. "Because he can?" suggested Daddy Richard.

Anyway, stop me from spoiling it if you haven't worked out where THIS obvious plot development is going, but the GREAT BIG EVIL GAYER and GREAT BIG EVIL BRIT turns out to have betrayed our boy Sam to the villain.

"Ooh, Tony Blair turned out to be in bed with the religious fascist with the invasion plan… who'd have thought?" said Daddy Alex.

Remember what we were saying about NAMES? Well, CASTOR was of course one of the Gemini twins (along with Pollox; make your own jokes) which I suppose is a bit more subtle than JANUS but still points to DUALISM and DUPLICITY.

ZUSE however is the most interesting: almost certainly a PUN, being a homonym for Zeus, it is also a reference to Konrad Zuse the German computer scientist who developed the first commercial computer, the Z4, in 1942 (though IBM don't like to talk about that). Oh, and his 1967 book "Calculating Space" suggested that the universe itself is a simulation running on a "grid" of computers. Which means he invented "Tron".

Still, at least Mr Sheen is having an absolutely SCREAMINGLY amusing time as totally camp-as-tits traitor, even if both text and sub-text and make-over at this point are all even more back to the 'Seventies than the rest of the film is back to the 'Eighties.

Looks like CURTAINS for Mr Sam, until the JEDI MASTER enters, white dude robes swapped for black billowy cloak with glowing neon accessories, slowing down time through the general power of AWESOME. This isn't a camera effect; Jeff Bridges can actually do this. Oh and Quorra drops in through the roof and kicks a little butt too, adding more "The Matrix" to the "Star Wars" cantina scene. Of course, since it IS the cantina scene, someone gets an arm chopped off. Unfortunately it's Quorra getting her arm de-rezzed. Careless there.

Returning to the echoes of the first movie, our heroes escape aboard a solar-sailor, now being used to pull freight trains. That's a metaphor right there: butterflies being used as carthorses; it tells you all about how this regime THINKS.

Mr Flynn uses the time to fix Quorra (slightly underpaying the miraculous healing of a lost arm, I feel) and explains a bit more of the plot. It turns out that she is the last of a whole new species of program: a group of self-aware programs that appeared on the grid out of nowhere, with no need to be programmed by a creating user. This is the miracle that changed Flynn's mind about creating his own perfect system, awoke him to the truth that evolved systems are better, but in turn led to CLU's rebellion and indeed genocide of the others like Quorra.

Meanwhile the train unexpectedly arrives at a station.

It turns out that the freight trains have been doing a big Auschwitz metaphor, carrying thousands of programs to be repurposed as CLU's personal Massive Fascist Army™ ready to carry out a mass restaging of Queen's "Radio Gaga" video… no? …oh, all right, staging to invade "real" world via the portal.

Before they can act, CLU's hitman RINZLER, who has been tracking them, strikes. And Flynn recognises his attack: RINZLER is TRON, the first victim of CLU's reprogramming programme.

It's a shame that they could only afford to digitally de-age ONE star from the first movie, as a reveal of a snarling Bruce Boxleitner under RINZLER's dark helmet was surely called for and deserved. Maybe that famous million-watt grin would have been too hard on the CGI processors.

Later, in fighting Sam, RINZLER comes to remember his true identity, and ends up turning on his false master, CLU. We last see him falling Jason Bourne-like into the Sea of Simulation as his neons turn from red back to blue and TRON is redeemed. And the lights are ON when we last see him. He's not de-rezzing. Jason Bourne-like, as I said.

Of course, at this point I return to the significance of the colour change that I remarked upon in "Tron": is the ABILITY to change the colour of your neons, blatantly to change sides from baddies to goodies, or vice-versa, indicative of FREE WILL, i.e. the ability to make MORAL CHOICE. This WOULD appear to be the thing that sets Mr Flynn apart from the programs in "Tron" and possibly the ISO programs from the created ones in "Tron: Legacy". Is what we are seeing at the end, that TRON achieves free will and so breaks CLU's mental conditioning?

But I'm ahead of myself again. CLU's throne ship arrives and, using Flynn's identity disc, rezzes-up a new command carrier around the station and the massed army. It's a quite nice reversal of the scene in "Tron", where SARK's command carrier is de-rezzed at the end.

Reflections and reversals like this are well used throughout the movie to make points both gross and subtle.

When CLU addresses his brainwashed battalions in a Nuremburg-style rally – the Communist overtones of "Tron" reflected as Fascist colouring in "Tron: Legacy" – he promises that they will make our world into a perfect system, telling them that their destiny is "out there". Earlier, at the start of the movie when the story of Flynn's disappearance was being done in TV news montage style, we saw him addressing a rally of his own, and asserting that "our destiny is IN there".

This conflict of INWARDS and OUTWARDS is itself very ZEN. Inwards is ascetic, self-abnegating, preserving, defensive, knowing your place, accepting, unquestioning… Outwards is ecstatic, self-aggrandising, aggressive, exploratory, inventive… Too much or not enough of either is DESTRUCTIVE. The young Flynn was too inward and lost everything; CLU is too outward, and threatens everything. This is the Zen lesson that the older Flynn has learned: the need for BALANCE.

So this is the story that we piece together from what Mr Flynn eventually tells us.

In the aftermath of the first movie, Flynn senior returned over and over to the computer world to try and rebuild the Grid. TRON helped him, as his guardian, and he created a new version of his CLU program, created in his own image (another beautifully realised effect with an imperfect mirror – that would be a clue about CLU), and told him to build a perfect system.

Let me spell it out: Flynn the Elder is THE CREATOR. CLU is his greatest creation, his chief ANGEL. And the angel discovers that god is flawed, fallible. So the angel overthrows god. CLU is Lucifer. "Clucifer" both Daddy Alex and Daddy Richard said at the same time.

This is the central mytharc of Christianity with one MASSIVE heretical twist: IT'S ALL GOD'S FAULT.

The Grid is a near-perfect (nothing's COMPLETELY perfect) disaster and CLU is a GRADE ONE FASCIST because the creator fluffed up in the beginning. The sin of PRIDE was not Lucifer's but GOD'S, in thinking he could create a perfect system, for his arrogance in thinking perfection could BE created. Lucifer's rebellion comes because he was made FLAWED and he just can't understand why god would change his mind. And god is too casual and too arrogant to explain it to him.

In this scheme, Mr Flynn's son Sam is NOT there as Mr Jesus; he doesn't save the world, he just leaves. If ANYONE is Mr Jesus, it's Mr Kevin again, with his white robes, wild beard and bare feet, living out in the WILDERNESS. He came down to the Grid from above – all the imagery is of DESCENDING to the Grid – from their idea of heaven (ironically to HIS idea of heaven). In the beginning was his Word. Or at least, his Numbers. He is very much the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost in the Machine all in one.

So Sam is not the SON of GOD; he's the INHERITOR, he is mankind. To CLU, to Lucifer, Sam is an insult, a rebuke, a flawed thing and how can the creator possibly think that this "son", this mankind is BETTER than his perfect angel? How bloody DARE he.

And yet, CLU has no power to create on his own. Like Tolkien's Morgoth, he can only twist the existing programs, repurposed them into his army of, well let's call them orcs.

Sam has made his own life, something CLU can never do. And the real "miracles" are the self-aware programs arising without intervention from Flynn; life created with NO creator.

In a Jungian sense, CLU is Mr Flynn's SHADOW, and see also the Ursula Le Guin "Wizard of Earthsea" stories, where the wizard Sparrowhawk empowers his own shadow creature and only by accepting it can in the end undo his sin of pride.

So in the final moments Flynn reabsorbs CLU into himself and, in a very Manichean way, god and the devil cancel each other out and both cease to be, leaving a Grid without creator or adversary, free at last.

And Sam saves the world… to a portable drive. Before showing Quorra another uncreated miracle: her first sunrise.


This was a GREAT movie. It's a long way from perfect, but it's brave and clever and thoughtful and deep. And a worthy legacy for "Tron".
.

Day 3050: Start Wreck

Saturday:


ooo EEEE ooo!

Open hailing frequencies and set phasers to POPCORN! We've been to see Star Trek, the latest big screen adaptation of the adventures of Captain Quirk and his crew. This movie is EASY to sneak into, so long as you have TRANSPORTER TECHNOLOGY to BEAM you into the FRONT ROW!

We even got me a STAR FLEET UNIFORM for the occasion!

Red Shirt! That's GOOD isn't it?

Anyway, this film had produced universal happiness and positive responses everywhere, so I shall let Daddy Richard write a review.

What could POSSIBLY go wrong…?

(spoilers follow)

Why did I come out of JJ Abrams' cartoon space romp with a sense of dissatisfaction? I tried talking it over with Alex.

Was it the direction? No.

Reviewers of Star Trek seem to have a penchant for referencing Abrams' previous big-screen adaptation of a cult Sixties series, namely Mission Impossible III. There's a tendency to describe MI-III as "underrated". It isn't underrated; it's just bad. It starts off like a rocket (and the opening gags, both in the German wind-farm and the Vatican, are good and original) but it rapidly runs out of fizz, as Tom Cruise jumps off yet another tall building and the ending trails away like an afterthought, or a task on The Apprentice where they've left no time to complete the final reel.

Thankfully, Star Trek is nothing like that. It was pacey, interesting if occasionally a touch ADD frenetic, but more importantly it started with a bang, before grounding us in the relationships of these people and building to a satisfying conclusion.

Was it the acting? Certainly not.

Karl Urban is uncanny in the role of DeForest Kelly, capturing his spirit perfectly: brilliant, irascible, capable of great acts of friendship and human enough to make mistakes. Zachary Quinto is always a delight to watch, even if his Spock couldn't quite escape the shadow of his Sylar (the Vulcan should never, ever have a "hint of a smile" expression, particularly not when it's a superhuman serial killer's trademark). Leonard Nimoy, however, is perfect, almost Zen-like in his portrayal of the old Spock, who has been though it all and achieved a balance and inner peace between his human and Vulcan heritages. Zoe Saldana, while completely different to the incomparable Nichelle Nichols (Alex says he saw something of a similarity in the eyes, occasionally), brought a beautiful fresh strength to the character, and was granted substantial sub-plots around her relationships with both Kirk and Spock. Like Mat, I was pleasantly surprised to come out without wanting to kill Simon Pegg, although it's irresistible to imagine David Tennant's Doctor saying to him: "No, no, don't do that!" (And just when did Scotty become the comic relief, anyway?) Anton Yelchin does not have the charm of Walter Koenig. He has his own charm, and should be allowed to play more of that, and not get lumbered with the "Wictor Wictor" jokes. Likewise, John Cho does not have the charm of George Takai. In the absence of character, they gave him a sword fight. (A clue: that is not fencing.) And Chris Pine did perfectly well in the role of Ethan Hunt.

Did the recasting itself matter? Alex said that he had long since come to terms with the idea that this was Star Fleet Muppet Babies. I can understand that people might find this tricky. For years Star Trek has prospered by finding new crews to fill its starships, finding new combinations to explore. But that in itself becomes formulaic: the emotional one, the logical one, the captain in the middle – they've rung different changes on these through The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and the rest. Another crew would just be Kirk, Spock and all in drag again.

And of course the idea of going back to the beginning is to reach out beyond the core audience. It's to tell a story for those with a vague memory that goes Star Trek/Kirk/Spock space stuff. That's what means that doing a Star Trek movie with another new crew, even one that had – say – George Takei as Captain of the Excelsior or Jonathan Franks commanding the Titan, wouldn't work. It wouldn't be in the sense of folk memory Star Trek.

Was it the visual effects, then? No, on the whole they were spiffy.

The shape of the Enterprise, allegedly more curvaceous than is seemly, didn't bother me in the slightest.

Having said that, all those different shaped starships, with wings and multiple nacelles and the rest, bugged me out enormously. There's no sense that this Star Fleet of ships have evolved with a history. The USS Kelvin, from 25 years earlier, looks right it looks like a less advanced design from which the Enterprise will later emerge. But the fleet that leaves for Vulcan with the Enterprise, they're just a mish-mash of designs as though someone took a look at the design board and said, "Let's do EVERYTHING!"

And it wasn't exactly a problem, but boy did the fleet going to warp look just like something out of Star Wars. With Ambassador Spock's flyer looking suspiciously like the Gungan Bongo Submarine from the Phantom Menace, of course.

The big spiky Romulan ship is a very nice big spiky Romulan ship, much nicer than the one in Nemesis and one that might vaguely have come from the same culture as the Romulan Warbirds of the Next Generation era. Vaguely. Its interior was rather "mysterious vast alien space", somewhat after V'ger, but it worked well enough for running and jumping around.

The transporter effect has a very nice feel to it, like little particles flying into place as they build you up from a giant jigsaw. Sulu's retractable sword was rather silly but the effect worked, in fact the whole diving onto the mining platform sequence was brilliantly done.

And Saturn was lovely. Even if ploughing into it (or possibly Titan) at warp speed ought to have made more of a "bang!"

Perhaps it was the plot? Hmmmm, that depends…

Back in the Twentieth Century, as radiation-powered super-turkey "Godzilla" (US abomination version) was hitting cinemas under the slogan "Size Matters", Lucasfilm, then putting the finishing touches to "Star Wars, Episode I, will this title never end, the Phantom Menace", briefly put up on their website the vainglorious response: "Plot Matters".

But look how well that turned out!

The Phantom Menace is, as any fule nose, the third movie from the Lucas' stable with the same plot as Return of the Jedi and Star Wars, just with first muppets and then CGI frogs standing in for the Rebel Alliance for the "blow up the spherical-spacecraft-in-orbit at the end" bit.

But to my mind "plot" just means the sequence of events that the characters have to pass through; story is the thing that you care about, it is, if you'll forgive the cliché, the journey that the characters go on, not just the places they visit (and, yes, I'm aware that E M Forster may have had it the other way around).

JJ Abrams has apparently never seen the immediately-preceding movie in the franchise, Star Trek: Nemesis. Which is a shame, or he'd have known that his plot – Romulan with big spiky ship plans to go Death Star on the Earth while riffing on The Wrath of Khan – was oddly familiar.

(It is, as I said, a very nice big spiky ship. But even so…)

But is that what is important? When, because they are telling different stories, the whole character of the two movies couldn't be more different.

Star Trek: Nemesis is all shades of grey – not the moral dilemmas, the colour palette. Grey uniforms and gloomy shadows are the order of the day. It's as if it's self-consciously trying to feel end-of-an-era; far from being a meditation on aging (as the similarly plotted Wrath of Khan) it sometimes seems like an attempt to just wrap everything up. With the cast all starting to get a little bit too old for this sort of thing and on television Enterprise bolding journeying to the bottom of the ratings, there was much talk of "too much Star Trek".

In contrast, Star Trek (2009) is full of primary colours and brightly lit, whether it's the stark whites of the bridge or sunlit Vulcan or also-sunlit San Francisco. Even the ice-planet Delta Vega is brilliant white with a dash of scarlet space-monster.

And it's all about beginnings, opening with Kirk's birth (in battle, no less) and his joining the Star Fleet Academy and Spock's decision to join Star Fleet, and then on to the "first mission". Everything is about the future opening up to these people, whether it's Spock's cautious, logical planning or Kirk's gung-ho barrelling into it.

Positivity suffuses this movie, and that's a good thing.

In fact, it's a bit of a laugh, even though the whole of the backstory is palpably dreadful: the galaxy being threatened by a supernova is pulp SF of the worst kind, shockingly misunderstanding the differences in scale between these two phenomena. If you are going to use real science terms, it is too much to ask the writer for a ten-second search on the Wikipedia?

And even Nimoy can't save exposition as dreadful as "suddenly, the worst happened… Romulus was destroyed!"

What? How? What? Was it Romulus' own star that was going supernova? You do know that a supernova is an exploding star, don't you, JJ? So this solution to save the galaxy by turning it into a black hole… not looking much good for Romulus anyway, was it? Also, you've forgotten Remus altogether, haven't you. (Which is ironic given that in part, Star Trek: Nemesis was about how pissed the Remans were that everyone kept forgetting about them.)

None of that really seems to matter, though, when were racing along with such glee.

Meanwhile, "Red Matter" scores huge marks on the "drive Lawrence Miles nuts" scale, being clearly drawn from the same well as the mysterious, all-powerful and probably imaginary "Red Uranium" macguffin from "This Town Will Never Let Us Go". "Nahhh," says Alex, "surely it's from Bugs' Red Mercury!"

And clearly someone has been using the Infinite Improbability Drive in this universe, because the chances of Spock marooning Kirk not merely on the same planet as but within walking distance of where Nero has marooned the time/dimension-warped Ambassador Spock has to measure in the "ooh, that's a bit unlikely" range.

(Also, we get a flashback of Spock looking up and seeing Vulcan implode in the sky above him which is clearly ripped off from staring up at the Death Star explosion at the end of Return of the Jedi. Now, I'm not much of an astronomer, but neither Mars nor Venus are that large in the Earth's sky… so we're basically saying that Delta Vega is Vulcan's moon. And therefore, very much likely to be heading into that same black hole any time now.)

(Of course, back in the "real" universe of classic Star Trek, in "The Man Trap", there's a lovely flirtatious scene between Spock and Uhura where she asks him if he's never gazed up at the moon. "Vulcan has no moon," states Spock unemotionally. I suppose now, instead of the classy "I'm not surprised, Mr Spock," Uhura will have to answer "No, you berk, because it got foomed with the rest of your stupid homeworld". Sigh.)

And there are some good sci-fi ideas, even "Star Trek" ideas, in the mix too. That the Romulan invader isn't an almighty warship from the future, merely a mining ship that came back in time by accident is really quite smart. Imagine a super-tanker from today finding itself confronting the Pirates of the Caribbean… yes, you're quite right, the pirates would have cannons and the super-tanker wouldn't. But the Romulans are a pretty piratical bunch themselves, maybe they're happy for their merchant fleet to carry torpedoes.

Similarly, when Spock starts behaving in a fashion that has Alex going, "er, er, I'm sure even Star Fleet wouldn't let him do that" (though remember, we've seen Star Fleet's "correctional planets") the film has an answer for him: he's quite right, and Kirk proving to Spock that the Vulcan is emotionally compromised is a key turning point.

Mind you, you would have thought that somebody could have mentioned to the director that time/space anomalies are not exactly the cutting-edge of "new" among the Star Trek stories of this world.

Add to that, they even "hang a lantern" on the whole cliché when young Kirk says to old Spock: "isn't going back in time to give yourself the answer cheating?"



Was it that it wasn't "Star Trek" enough?

Well, in the sense that Star Trek ought to be about exploration, new worlds, new civilisations rather than big space battles then that is true.

But it's also true of Star Trek's II and VI which are arguably the best of the breed.

Ironically, Star Trek, The Motionless Picture (new life form), Star Trek III, the Search for Plot (strange new world) and Star Trek V (where no one has gone before) are closer to what Star Trek ought to be about than the, er, good ones. I'll kind of let Star Trek IV get away with it because treating 1980s California as a "strange new world" is part of the joke.

What many people would say, though, is that Star Trek is about the human relationships of the crew. In that sense, The Wrath of Khan (Kirk deals with growing old, his own metaphorical Kobyashi Maru) and The Undiscovered County (Kirk faces his own prejudices) are very Star Trek.

Judged by that standard, this movie was a little hit-and-miss. The drawing together of the crew, Kirk's instant friendship with McCoy contrasted with Uhura's coolness and Spock's outright animosity, form a solid backbone, but it equally lacks a true emotional through-line. Kirk is a cocky bastard right from the start (especially in the Anakin Skywalker sulky-teenager scene – what exactly was that supposed to add?) and is still a cocky bastard at the end. He doesn't appear to learn anything, and the other crew members don't so much come to admire him as acquiesce to his Captaincy. No, that's unfair: the do come to admire him, just for no particularly obvious reason. Maybe they all have Stockholm Syndrome by the end.

Was it the pick'n'mix approach to continuity, then?

I have to admit that this may have left me irked. It's funny little things, things that are out of place, or rather in place for no reason other than to say "hey, I watched the DVD of The Wrath of Khan".

Young Spock gets to play Saavik to his (sort-of) older self when he complains "you lied" and Nimoy gets to find new ways of saying "moi?". Similarly, Spock gives the young Scotty the secret of his big discovery, just as Scotty gave the inventor of transparent aluminium the secret of his big discovery back in The Voyage Home. And when Sulu tries to put the Enterprise in gear for the first time he stalls her, just like the Excelsior did in The Search for Spock. And Romulan commander Nero (you're kidding, right? No, that is his name) tortures Captain Pike with those beetle/scorpion/bug things from Ceti Alpha Five that kept Khan amused.

Is this homage or just grinding lack of originality? Am I supposed to be impressed by these "kisses to the past" or just think that you're rummaging through the series' locker for the good bits to pilfer?

Returning to The Wrath of Khan, though, the recurring motif in the film is the Kobayashi Maru test, which Saavik takes at the start and Spock passes at the end. During the film it is revealed that Kirk took the test three times and on the third go, he beat it. He beat it by reprogramming the computer, by cheating, but nevertheless he beat the unbeatable test because – and this is the message of his life, but more importantly almost the whole point of Star Trek – he doesn't believe in the no-win scenario. Optimism wins.

As a key plot point in a movie about facing the inevitable and not giving up your optimism, about going through hell and feeling young at the end, that is a thing of legend.

It is crushingly banal to actually show us the test.

Worse than that, to show us a test where "cocky bastard" Kirk is completely cock-sure that he is going to win and doesn't bother to hide it and, worse, where his win is so blatantly a cheat. The simulator hiccoughs and the Klingon warbirds' shields are down. Excuse me? He might as well have just stood up and announced "Computer, execute Kirk Hack Code One!"

(And while we're on the subject, Klingon warships are called "battlecruisers"; it's Romulan warships that are called "Warbirds". Why does this bug me more than the similar error of calling the Klingon scout a "Bird of Prey" from Star Trek III onwards?)

Alex puts forward the idea that in the "real" Star Trek universe the "real" Kirk did beat the test with a solution that was worthy of a "commendation for original thinking". But this Kirk is different: he's had a different upbringing without the influence of his father. The George Kirk of this universe died on the USS Kelvin. So this Kirk is arrogant and cocky and responds aggressively and not necessarily wisely. And so, rather than beating the test, he's actually doing this so blatantly as a deliberate act of defiance, a massive "giving the finger" to the test he doesn’t believe in.

And this, I think, brings us to the answer we arrived at as to why this Star Trek, which I enjoyed, which amused me, entertained me, even moved me occasionally, left me with the feeling that it was hollow.

The problem for me is not the convoluted time travel / dimension jump to a parallel universe plotline. It's not that the approach to continuity is either slipshod or worse deliberately slipshod.

The answer that we settled on is slightly more subtle than that.

It's that the film makes a point of using its plot, in fact the entire point of its plot is to say: "hey folks, we're in a different Universe so the continuity doesn't apply to us!"

There is a point to watching The Wrath of Khan beyond seeing Enterprise and Reliant duke it out – brilliantly choreographed, and far better than anything here, though that space battle is.

There is no similar point to watching JJ Abrams' Star Trek.

Allow me to digress…

In the long twilight of Doctor Who, between the Paul McGann movie and the Russell Davies renaissance, there came a massive two-book story by Lawrence Miles called "Interference".

In the midst of an adventure where the eighth Doctor gets locked up interminably (again) and Faction Paradox kidnap his companions, where the better bits are in fact an extended adventure for K-9 and Company, seemingly incidentally the Doctor crosses his timeline with that of his third incarnation. And then at the end of the story, the third Doctor gets shot dead and regenerates. Without ever going near Metebelis III. With nary a whiff of a Giant Spider.

"Interference" is a story with… issues. Should it be mentioned in our flat, we will often immediately quote either Sutekh from "Pyramids of Mars" – "There is…[voice trembles with rage] …Interference!" – or Professor Bernice Summerfield from "The Shadow of the Scourge" – "Damn! Interference!"

Funny story: "Goddess, that Interference is awful" says I, loudly, at the Fitzroy Tavern surrounded by Who fans. "Oh yes, why?" says the terribly nice author standing immediately behind me who was, frankly, ever so good enough not to hit me for bad-mouthing his book…

My problem at the time with "Interference" centred on the fact that I was assuming that there was supposed to be a causal connection between the actions of the Doctor in his eighth self and the change to the fate of his third self. And there wasn't.

(Actually, apart from the Doctor appearing as a ghost to his earlier self, there is another connection, namely the eighth Doctor's companion Fitz who, by a route too ludicrously circuitous to describe, arrives a thousand years later in the third Doctor's adventure as the villain. But he doesn't cause the third Doctor to be there, nor does he materially affect the course of events nor make any use of foreknowledge to change things. So, as I say, the eighth Doctor's adventure doesn't cause the change in the third Doctor's story.)

But what Lawrence was trying to do, and what he patiently explained to me, was that he wanted to be able to write past Doctor stories where anything could happen because we were not constrained by "knowing how everyone died".

Well now, in part I would fault that because it slightly presupposes that the only merit in a book is in not knowing how it will end, which kind of negates the pleasure of re-reading something. And there's a great many tragedies written where you know what the ending is going to be. But really, I would say, if that's what you want to do, then just call it "Doctor Who Unbound" and do it! Don't lumber yourself, and all the rest of us, with a hundred and sixty thousand words of justification for why you are allowed to do it.

Furthermore, since nobody else was onboard with Larry's ideas, we were left with a great big lurching paradox (that wasn't an actual paradox, says Alex, because that nothing from the future caused it; it was merely a contradiction) that no one knew how to handle, eventually leading a year later to the range editor wiping all continuity and blowing up Gallifrey – a process known colloquially as "foom".

And that's pretty much what JJ Abrams has done in this movie. He has made it quite explicit that Ambassador Spock does not travel back in time; he travels to an alternative reality, one that is very similar to the Star Trek universe, but where everything is slightly different.

And, of course, he underlines his point by giving Vulcan the "foom" treatment. It is impossible for Ambassador Spock to come from the future of this universe because the black hole that brought him here was formed by Red Matter made at the Vulcan Science Academy. On Vulcan. Which no longer exists.

So basically, this isn't Star Trek… this is Star Trek: Interference.

To which again I say: that's nice, but did you really need a hundred and fifty million dollars to tell me that?