"Star Trek Into Darkness" is just light enough for fun.

It’s not so great a feeling to walk into a theater to see a flick and find yourself becoming mentally prepared to be disappointed, but I must admit to just such a situation this past weekend when going to see Star Trek Into Darkness.  The Star Trek reboot four years ago was a little fun, but with some of the heresy director J.J. Abrams committed upon Star Trek canon, and all that God-awful lens-flaring to which he subjected us, I wasn’t really yearning for the sequel at first.  Well, maybe “heresy” is perhaps a strong word, but it’s the first one to come to mind.  Anyway, as I began to see the promotional materials and teaser trailers over the last several months, and being blown away by some of the visuals, I found myself looking more and more forward to seeing his next attempt at the Star Trek universe.

The pre-title sequence, with Kirk and McCoy fleeing some pursuing primitives while Spock becomes trapped in an erupting volcano, didn’t do much to allay my fears that I’d be disappointed in the movie, though.  Sure, the very Raiders of the Lost Ark-esque chase scene is quite well-crafted, but it almost immediately conveyed to me that Abrams still didn’t “get it” (damn it, Federation Battle Cruisers CAN NOT make landfall!!!).  It had enough hectic and funny banter and interplay amongst the characters, however, that I found myself getting past the details and getting caught up in the movie pretty quickly. 

The movie has the reckless feel of some of original series episodes where Kirk showed his rashness and selective disregard for authority, as the first film did, but the rebelliousness seems to be less for its own sake in this film, and in that sense is an improvement on the previous film.  The Prime-Directive-be-Damned attitude for which Original-Series Kirk was so beloved is in full-force here, and while we do get to see a little bit more consequence of his actions, it’s still not as much as there SHOULD be.  This character trait is the one that Chris Pine seems to enjoy portraying the most, with his smirk-and-narrow-eyes being dished out in Shatner-like proportions.  It’s also the facet of Kirk’s personality that sets the movie’s events in motion.

I won’t delve into plot details too much for fear of inadvertently dropping spoilers, and there are so many to avoid revealing that I hope I can still convey to you that I did enjoy the movie and recommend that you see it.  Into Darkness shamelessly steals plot elements from a few different points of Star Trek’s past, namely some shady forces attempting to instigate a war with the Klingons and a certain villain who turns out to be more than meets the eye.  All of our favorite characters are back, and all have enough to do that their presence doesn’t feel like glorified cameos. 

Seeing these characters interact is the best thing about it, even more so than the previous film.  The casting of all these actors is spot-on, and their preparation and attention to detail is evident.  There were several instances of some combination of each or all three of the lead actors being onscreen when I found myself thinking of Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley, as the body language of Messrs. Pine, Quinto and Urban is all so very perfect. 

On the other hand, not every character harkens back to the original - Simon Pegg’s portrayal of Scotty is done to such a hyperactive level that James Doohan himself might not even recognize the character anymore (if he were still with us, that is…).  The rebooted version of Dr. Carol Marcus didn’t even really seem to serve much purpose here, either, other than to provide an opportunity for Kirk to see her in her undies and possibly plant the seed for him to… er, plant the seed… in the next movie.

After praising the casting, though, I must wonder about the logic of John Harrison’s ethnicity and accent without putting so much detail to this question as to reveal a vital plot point.  Watching any movie requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief by the audience, but the level of that suspension should not be too great, and if a film attempts at least a token explanation of some illogical point, most folks would probably buy it and move along.  Sadly, Abrams’ screenwriters didn’t even attempt to explain why we’re supposed to accept Benedict Cumberbatch as “Harrison,” and that one point of logic nagged me enough that it took me out of the movie for a few moments.  

The movie is a visual treat, too.  The actions sequences, and there are plenty of ‘em, are technical marvels to be sure, and while Abrams’ penchant for filling the screen with debris and an almost pornographic level of mass destruction continues from the first film, thank God he throttled back on the lens-flare somewhat!

Star Trek Into Darkness is a funny, involving and entertaining popcorn-flick that is very enjoyable in the moment, but I don’t think it as good as the first three or four movie adventures of the original cast.  Abrams expends a lot of effort in giving us “Easter eggs” that remind us of moments from the series’ previous iteration, so much so that his version almost doesn’t seem to be moving in an original direction.  Given his public admission that he was never as enamored of Star Trek as he is with Star Wars, one might hope that his taking over the Star Wars franchise will mean the next Star Trek film might be made by someone who has some interest in creating an entirely original story for these characters to inhabit.

Oh, and as a side note - it’s certainly a relief that San Francisco won’t be destroyed for another 250 years, since I’d very much like to see it before all of Telegraph Hill is overtaken by the Starfleet Campus…

"Iron Man 3" seems to be an experiment in the effects of rapid-fire wise-cracks.

Robert Downey, Jr. is a funny guy.  We all know that, right?  I don’t mean just as the characters he plays – you’ve seen him do press or talk shows when he’s promoting something, and he’s obviously as sharp as a tack.  We’ve also all seen the other two Iron Man pictures, as well as The Avengers, and it’s fairly apparent that the wise-ass genius Tony Stark was the role he was born to play.  The snarky, rapid-fire dialogue which comes so easily to Downey was the highlight of his three previous portrayals of the character (well, four, if you include his post-credits scene in The Incredible Hulk).  The question I have after seeing Iron Man 3, however, is at what point does a highlight start to blind us?

Shane Black, the screenwriter who created Riggs & Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon, and wrote and directed the criminally-underappreciated Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang (also starring Downey), assumes the director’s chair for this entry of the series from Jon Favreau (who thankfully still found time to return and play Stark’s bodyguard Happy Hogan).  He and his co-writer Drew Pearce give us a story of how Stark is adjusting to his world after being so emotionally scarred by his experiences in The Avengers, suffering from anxiety and insomnia, and driving him to focus obsessively on his various suits of armor, which puts strain on his relationship with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow).  Along comes the terrorist threat known as The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), as well as some professional acquaintances from Stark’s past conveniently reentering his life, namely one Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), and the resulting death and destruction drive him to learn just what his priorities really should be.  

Iron Man 3 is a lot of fun and fits in the series very well.  It feels like we’re seeing the same characters in the same world we’ve observed before, and it’s definitely the most frenetic of the three movies.  The action pieces of the film, of which there are several, are spectacular.  We’ve all seen the destruction of Stark’s mansion in the trailers and TV spots, so it’s not a spoiler to say that if you thought that was impressive, there are others just as good before movie’s end.  Stark spends a great deal of the time outside his armor, even during battle, and this new story-wrinkle leads to a whole lot more techno-cacophony.  If anything, Black gets a little carried away with the mayhem at the movie’s conclusion, but Hell, if you buy a ticket to a superhero movie (or a Shane Black movie, for that matter) without expecting lots and lots of Stuff-Blown-Up-Good, then you’d best do a better job of researching how to spend your entertainment dollar.  

Black tries to take us a little deeper into everybody’s psyche than the previous movies did.  Stark has so much of his world upended during this movie that he has to seriously reexamine just what being Iron Man means to him, and how it impacts the people around him.  He spends a large portion of the movie out of his armor, being forced to come to grips with his emotional distress and to rely on his wits, and not his inventions.  Black excels at writing the sort of dialogue that Downey excels at delivering, and he has provided a different tone for the series, but while the concept of Stark’s introspection is very interesting, I think Black misfires in the execution in a few ways. 

Sure, it would be foolish to attempt making this film without taking advantage of Downey’s wit, but there are some instances in Iron Man 3 where the old adage of Less-being-More is ignored.  Stark’s mouth is pretty much running constantly throughout the movie, yapping off at each and every character he encounters, regardless of the logic.  The addition of an almost-stereotypical “kid sidekick” was a bitter disappointment, and seemed to primarily be A) a means to provide Stark a target for some rapid-fire smart-ass-ness, and B) a marketing ploy to involve kids who are probably too young to be seeing this PG-13/borderline-R movie in the first place.  

As good a job as Black does at delving deeper into Stark, he does it at the expense of the other characters around him.  The Killian and Maya Hansen characters are woefully underdeveloped, and the Hansen character in particular is almost dumped from the film about two-thirds of the way through.  As much fun as Don Cheadle’s Rhodey/Iron Patriot may be in the movie's final act, even his inclusion felt wedged in there, in a story-logic sort of way. 

Iron Man 3 is a worthy entry in the series, and I enjoyed it enough that I look forward to the character’s return in The Avengers 2 in a couple of years, but as good a movie as it is, I can see how it could have been even better.  I liked how we delved deeper into Stark’s relationship with Pepper and his overall mindset after his experiences in The Avengers, but while Stark so famously said “I am Iron Man” at the conclusion of the first film, and he does come to learn more about what that phrase means to him by the end of this movie, I’m left wanting to learn a few more things.  But, hey - we sure got a lot of great one-liners…

Yet another sci-fi flick takes us to "Oblivion," but THIS ride...

Oh, great… another Tom Cruise flick…  Have you ever noticed how some people say that with such derision?  I’ll even admit that I’ve even said it a time or two myself.  I’m not even one to hold the off-camera couch-jumping and psychology-bashing against him to the point I’d refuse to buy a ticket to a movie in which he stars, but you’ve got to admit that Tom Cruise is a bit of an over-actor.  Now, wait a second - that’s not completely meant as a knock, as there are roles where that’s appropriate, and some actors make a fine living doing it (you ever hear of Nicolas Cage…?). 

Something about all the promotional clips I’ve seen for Oblivion over the last few months have drawn me to it, though, despite seeing Jack Reacher not three months ago and having Cruise’s… zeal, for lack of a better word… still fresh in my mind.  Well, I shouldn’t say “something,” because I know what drew me to it – director Joseph Kosinski.  His first feature, the underappreciated Tron: Legacy was a visual feast, and after seeing the trailers for his follow-up, I was fairly certain this would be just as impressive.  Lemme tell ya - it’s nice to be right, folks.

The story he tells here is that some sixty years after an alien attack upon Earth, humanity has defeated the invaders, but has devastated the planet in the process.  While the survivors are supposedly being resettled on one of Saturn’s moons, Cruise’s Jack Harper and his teammate/partner/lover Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are stationed in one of numerous work towers high above Earth’s surface as a maintenance crew, servicing the automated drones that patrol the landscape searching for and eradicating the remaining aliens.  Without going into too much detail of their memory of life before their assignment being wiped and Jack’s troubling dreams of some pre-war life he couldn’t possibly have lived, including a mysterious woman in those dreams (Olga Kurylenko) who happens to (literally) fall out of the sky during the course of the story, I’ll let you know that Jack comes to learn a lot of the things he held as truths are definitely not so.

There are a lot of familiar sci-fi elements here – a post-apocalyptic, dystopian setting; alien invasion; a central character familiar with or longing for the world as it was before – so a lot of the plot points can be seen coming a ways down the road, but that’s okay.  After all, any Western worth a toot is going to have a gunfight in it, right?  Without saying that it’s exactly like such films as Logan’s Run or Silent Running, it certainly had that same sort of feel to it.  Call me crazy, but I even felt a little Planet of the Apes vibe, too, with some of the things Jack comes to learn about the universe around him and how he reacts to his discoveries.  To his credit, Cruise keeps his sometimes-manic energy level mostly in check here, and it makes his character’s actions, predictable they may be, a lot more interesting and believable.

It’s Kosinski’s visual style that drives the film, though.  Some of the plot points that I may have been certain were about to crop up (and I was right more often than not) were still made fairly effective by how little he showed the audience leading up to them.  Sure, I knew who those dudes in the black leather really were.  Of course, that’s who that other Tech-dude checking out that downed drone was while Jack watches from behind the sand dune.  Certainly, Victoria would be at that place when Jack arrives, almost half-expecting to see her.  But, dang!  How cool to have it dropped on us like THAT!  Even something as simple as having the majority of the film take place in daylight is an effective choice, avoiding the somewhat-cliché mood of the dark, rainy, depressing post-apocalyptic pictures we’ve all seen before.

Those of us who dig sci-fi know it better than most other movie-goers – if the movie is well-made, you can very quickly forgive it being a little predictable (and even forgive it starring Tom Cruise), so with that in mind, you ought to catch Oblivion in the theater.  You may not end up loving it to the point you’d pre-order your Blu-ray as soon as you could, but you’ll be glad you saw it on the big screen instead of waiting for HBO to run it next year.

Tarantino lays it on pretty thick with "Django Unchained"

Ah... the Antebellum South.  What a fairy-tale land, awash in mint juleps, and excellent manners.  What a grand time of ladies in hoop skirts, nattily-dressed gentlemen, and children who actually understood that they were meant to be seen and not heard.  What a more genteel world it must have been back then!  Even the indentured servants were happy with their lot in life (or so we were always told…).  If this is your notion of the Antebellum South, dear reader, then Quentin Tarantino spits great, big, fat loogies on it, and with Django Unchained, paints a two-hour and forty-five minute picture of him doing it.

Django Unchained is Tarantino’s Western, or his “Southern,” as he himself calls it, which is perhaps a more appropriate term.  It’s his homage to the Spaghetti Westerns he so loves, which suits me fine, as I’m rather fond of the few of them I’ve seen, too.  Borrowing his title character’s name from the 1966 Italian-made Western Django, Tarantino crafts a story of Dr. King Schultz, a German dentist/bounty hunter (played by the baddie from Inglourious Basterds, Christoph Waltz) who obtains a slave (Jamie Foxx) who can identify some certain wanted men Schultz is seeking.  Django has been separated from his wife as a result of their being sold to separate buyers, but Schultz offers Django a partnership of sorts – if Django helps him find his quarry, then he’ll grant Django his freedom and help him find his wife.  They eventually find her in the ownership of plantation owner Calvin Candie, played repulsively by Leonardo DiCaprio, and being supervised by Candie’s chief House slave Stephen, played almost-even-more repulsively by Samuel L. Jackson. 

As a general rule, those of us who are Tarantino fans like his work, and those of us who aren’t his fans don’t like his work.  I count myself among his fans, and I find that there’s usually not much to be gained by trying to convert a non-fan – either you is a fan or you ain’t.  First and foremost, I love his dialogue.  Sure, some folks grouse about the gratuitous profanity his characters spew, but I've never found it to be outside of the logic of whatever story he's telling. Tarantino has consistently created characters and situations full of interesting and/or hilarious conversation, and the number of pop culture reference-worthy quotes we all find familiar is proof of how good at it he is. 

Secondly, it’s hard to deny that Tarantino has a great eye.  He shows us yet again how wonderfully he can frame shots, with Schultz and Django traversing snowy mountains, muddy frontier towns and sprawling cotton plantations.  Some great locations in Wyoming and Northern California, and Louisiana substituting for Texas and Mississippi, help him compose images that we might expect to see in some Sergio Leone picture from years ago. 

The first two acts of the movie progress quickly through Django and Schultz’s forming their partnership and hunting the owners of Django’s wife.  It seems that Django is a “natural” with a gun, and takes to the bounty-hunting business like the proverbial fish to water.  He makes Schultz a great partner, as well as a good friend.  These two characters are alike in so many ways, yet so different in their societal place, that the way they interact and deal with the situations in which they find themselves is fun to watch. 

It’s the final third of the film, however, where the story starts to lose me.  Django has a final showdown with his wife’s owners and their lackeys, which any good Western would be remiss to not include, and of course, that showdown must be a shootout.   Everyone understands that violence exaggerated to ludicrous levels is a Tarantino trademark, and is most often used by him for comedic effect, but I don’t recall the splatter and spray from his earlier films being anything near what he utilizes here.  Sure, sure, I should probably expect a tad more crimson in a Western (Southern) shootout than I would from films like Jackie Brown, or even Inglourious Basterds, but geez, Louise!  Even the two Kill Bill chapters, which are basically revenge movies, don’t have the geysers of blood flowing like is flowing here.  I don’t mind gore one bit when it’s logical, but it seems to me that, for the first time in his career, Tarantino has shoveled it on to the point it’s a distraction from the story he’s trying to tell, and no good movie should ever take the audience out of a story’s flow. 

Tarantino has publicly said that he intended to tackle the horrible subject of slavery with this film because no one else has had the nerve or the right to do so, but I don’t think he recalls numerous other works (Spielberg’s The Color Purple, or Alex Haley’s books, to name just two) that have addressed the subject, and done so with a bit more level-headedness.  For example, I certainly hope his inclusion of “Mandingo fighting,” gladiator-like fights to the death between slaves, is merely an exercise in artistic license, as there is no historical evidence that any such practice ever took place.  Quint may have been born in Knoxville, Tennessee, but it seems his living in California since the age of two has purged him of any allegiance to the Land of the old Confederacy he might have had. 

Django Unchained is a pretty good film on the whole, but not Tarantino’s best.  As a fan of his work, I’m glad I saw it, but I hope the subject of his next movie is one about which he might be able to exercise a bit more artistic restraint.