There are two big budget movies in theaters this month that present audiences with very different visions of the future.
In the long-off world of Star Trek, humanity has united with several different alien races to explore space. Sure, they carry weapons, but their missions are diplomatic, not militaristic.
In the 2018 of Terminator: Salvation, humanity is fighting the war referenced (and often glimpsed) throughout the Terminator mythos: people vs. machines, with the machines winning. It's a much more bleak version of the future than Star Trek presents.
But what's also interesting is the way the two movies approach their audiences.
Star Trek seems to have been made for people who have no interest in the franchise, either the TV series or the movies that followed. Put me in that camp. I have absolutely no interest in Star Trek. Never have, never will. * Other than an episode of that baked potato-dull cartoon based on the original series, I've never seen anything having to do with Star Trek. (Incidentally, I watched the cartoon when I was maybe 10 or 11, and suffering from a really bad stomach flu. So you can imagine how I felt about it).
* Maybe it's like a Beatles/Stones thing: you either like Star Wars or Star Trek, and I'm in the Wars camp.
This movie takes the characters back to their beginning, more or less, shaking up the series continuity with the use of a time travel/alternate reality plot device that actually works pretty well. (The movie was directed by J.J. Abrams, who seemed to be borrowing these elements from Lost and Fringe, the TV shows he's connected with.)
Abrams gets solid performances from his actors -- especially Zachary Quinto as Spock; it's nice to see him doing something other than the nonsense that is Heroes -- and any movie that gives nerd-hero Simon Pegg work is OK in my book.
But Star Trek has also gotten more or less universal acclaim -- the best reviewed movie of the year, according to its ad campaign -- and it's hard to see why; it's good, but never great. It's an entertaining, competently made sci-fi action movie, one that doesn't talk down to us. It is to this summer what Iron Man was to 2008. But if critics are calling this the resurrection of Star Trek, the previous movies must have not only buried the franchise, but dismembered it and encased it in concrete.
Like I said above, I don't know much about Star Trek beyond the basics. But on the other hand, I'm fairly well-schooled in Terminator lore, and I feel like I was the target audience for Salvation, which is more or less a prequel to the first movie in the series. And like a lot of prequels, it only works if you go in with a lot of knowledge of the previous movies.
For example -- and I could be wrong about his -- but I don't think this movie explained why Kyle Reese was an important character. He's played here by the young actor Anton Yelchin, and he's one of the best things about the movie. Yelchin actually appears in Star Trek as well as the wide-eyed but capable Chekov. Here, he's much more intese, channeling Michael Biehn, who played Reese way back in 1984 in the first movie.
For awhile, TS tells two different stories: Reese and his travels with a mysterious drifter named Marcus Wright, and John Connor (played here by Christian Bale, the fourth actor to play Connor) war against the machines.
The movie would have been far better without Connor's story. For all the heat associated with Bale and this role off camera, he's sort of bland here. I was far more interested in Sam Worthington as Wright, a half-man, half-machine (and I'm not giving anything away here; the previews let you know what Wright is).
Salvation was in sort of a lose-lose position. On one hand, we've already had three movies featuring time traveling robots out to kill John and/or Sarah Connor. On the other hand, getting rid of this premise robs Salvation of a chance to have anything close to a central villain. So while a lot of the action sequences are well done and the robots are often frightening, the movie lacks any real tension.
It's funny that this movie came out right around the time that FOX cancelled Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles. The show never really found an audience, which is too bad. It was well-acted, had interesting characters (even their terminators, both good and evil, had more life than anyone in Salvation) and a compelling narrative. Salvation could have learned from it.
Tom Coombe
Posted by: |