Star Trek Beyond Expectations

Being a Star Trek fan has always been a double edged bat’leth.  On the one hand it has enjoyed some of the finest science fiction writing to date with both The Wrath of Kahn and First Contact topping the majority of the competition.  On the other however, is The Motion Picture.  Enough said.  But then came the event.  The trauma.  The reboot.  Which is in no way a commentary on the movie’s quality, but the fear engendered by the very notion of a new Kirk, a new Spock and a new Enterprise.  For while undoubtedly mainstream, Star Trek has always been off centre in terms of its popularity; the very term “Trekkie” becoming part of everyday lexicon to denote a rather nerdy individual.  A king among all geeky men.  

Brought to you by Apple IN SPACE!

The new Trek was specifically designed to do away with all that.  It was meant to be sleek, cool and oozing sex appeal.  Even Spock became the focus of some serious man crushes.  It also did away with the techno-babble that so flummoxed and confused the regular going public.  Something Star Trek had always been famous for; the inversions of field polarities and harmonic resonances being part of every true Trekkie's vocabulary.  Instead, we got “lightning storms in space”, thanks J.J.  As you may be able to tell, I was not over enamoured with this dumbing down but I enjoyed the first two movies well enough.  They were fun if uninspired and wiled away a few hours in a thinned out universe I still loved.  Originality however, was sorely lacking.

             

 Much as with the new Star Wars a fear of doing too much outside the established norm bred complacency and not a little laziness.  The first was centred entirely on resetting the continuity and making it clear Trek was now cool.  The second clung so tightly to The Wrath of Kahn’s popularity that it left little in the way of effort and committed multiple plot convenience sins.  Super blood, interplanetary beaming technology and why, oh why the Klingons let the slaughter of dozens of soldiers go without even a shrug, to name a few?  But, as I said, they’re fun movies nit picking aside.  With Beyond therefore, I was expecting more of the same.  So colour me speechless when all did not go according to presumption.

                        

Lines around the eyes.

From the very beginning there is a feeling that this is a Star Trek film.  Perhaps due to the Enterprise being three years into their five-year mission, or simply that the cast has grown into their roles.  Iconic and daunting as they surely are.  Some are still more fleshed out than others, Chekhov and Uhura still lagging behind in the developmental races, but from Chris Pine we get a better rounded character.  A character who identifies as James Tiberius Kirk.  The rigours of command have finally started to take a toll, making both he and Spock question their places with Starfleet.  It’s a definite nod to the original films, with Kirk’s possible admiralship being dangled as a diverging path.  The road taken in another life and perhaps, even after all that has happened, again here.  It adds definition to a captain who’s seen two movies go by serving the Federation all on a dare, with nary a thought for whether he really belongs.

                                     

Krall, there'll be no cancelling the apocalypse.

The storyline itself feels like it could have been lifted straight from an episode.  Without revealing the whole shebang: The Enterprise answers a distress call, an enemy presents themselves and cue the action.  My main worry was that by not relying on previous material we might have seen a regression to the two dimensional bad guy, the Nero of first movie fame.  For while Into Darkness may have lacked originality, Benedict Cumberbatch nailed the part of Kahn with aplomb and carried the plot through some of its faultier aspects by performance alone.  Eric Banner did not.  As it would seem however, all that was needed was another Brit and some alien prosthetics to transform Idris Elba into Krall, our baddy in residence.  He growls, he snarls and most of all he has a severe and unrelenting hatred of the Federation.  The reasons for which make for an interesting reveal, although they could have gone into more detail.  It’s a forgivable lapse but a missed opportunity to create a villain with a little more depth. 

                                                

Relatable and awesome.

We also see the introduction of Jaylah, ably played by Sofia Boutella of Kingsman fame.  Remember those blades?  The disabled had never been so deadly.  A refreshingly able but flawed character, both Justin Lin and the screenwriters involved deserve a pat on the back.  Vulnerable but competent, brave but unsure, she makes for a fine addition to the crew and it’ll be fun to see whether she returns in future installments.  Hopefully, alongside an absent Carol Marcus who for some reason they were unable to work into Beyond.  One suspects the controversy the internet created over *that* scene in Into Darkness may have played a part, but one never knows.  In any case she contributed mightily to my enjoyment of the film and aided it in pipping Star Wars: The Force Awakens to the post for my favourite science fiction film of the recent past.  Originality is a boon, not a sin and it’s a lesson Star Trek seems to have learned from its previous outings. 

                                                         

Live long and... well you know the rest.

Not to say that we don’t have plenty of nostalgia and tie ins to the wider Star Trek universe.  The passing of Leonard Nimoy is given appropriate attention, a saddened Spock sorting through his aged self’s possessions to find a photograph of the original crew.  There’s also plenty of nods to Enterprise, the black sheep of the Star Trek continuity that demonstrates a respect not only for the source material but just as importantly, the fans as well.  Regardless of one’s position on Captain Archer he and his ship are part of the canon and one of the few parts of the history not retconned by time travel hijinks.  Finally, I mentioned its absence earlier, but we see the return of techno gobbledegook.  Not a lot and certainly not enough to confuse or alienate anyone, but enough to make the crew appear slightly better educated than a bunch of frat boys joyriding in Starfleet’s most advanced warship.  So, on a whole how best to sum up Star Trek Beyond?  It’s solid, dependable and entertaining.  You’ll leave the cinema after two hours feeling content, not necessarily blown away but knowing what you just watched was definitely good.  I am one of those people who is notoriously difficult to please and like many analyse a film even as I’m watching it for the first time.  Inconsistencies, plot holes and laziness are genuinely irritating and yet my radar barely pinged in this instance. Now there’s only one thing left to say.  Justin Lin, we forgive you for Tokyo Drift, we forgive you.

Independence Day: Resurgence - Quietly Into the Night

I am not a wise man.  I like a lot of bad things.  More specifically I’ve enjoyed many a bad movie.  I’ve sat and thought to myself, “Dear god this is garbage,” and yet watched through to the credits being sufficiently amused by a film’s deficiencies to compensate for the overall failure of the attempt.  I did it with Wing Commander, I did it with Battleship and I did it with Batman and Robin.  But this doesn’t preclude the simple fact that they are bad movies.  Their directors creating freaks that we point and laugh at as opposed to visions of narrative and thespian beauty.  

We forgive you for After Earth, come back!

So, the question becomes when faced with such an abomination, was I entertained even if for the wrong reasons?  Was I amused or was I robbed?  Independence Day: Resurgence faced just such a quandary.  Following on from Roland Emmerich’s now two-decade old tour-de-force it was a questionable enterprise right out of the gate.  Minus Will Smith and having to capture the attention of a whole new generation of movie goers it had an uphill battle against the likes of modern blockbusters that dominate the box office.  A world of tie ins, sequels and what has become in no small part an exercise in brand recognition.  As such, I went into Resurgence with my fingers crossed that we were going to see alien invasions kicking it old school with some modern tropes, but still holding a core forged from the original.  But that’s not what happened. That’s not what happened at all.

         

Here on the Internet we’re prone to the extreme opinions and reviews of the masses.  Sometimes the vitriol is justified and often it’s not, but usually the truth falls somewhere in the middle.  So when I say that Independence Day: Resurgence is bad, I want you to understand something.  It's bad in a way that is not funny.  If anything it's borderline tragic with hints of pity and despair.  It's the Gulf of Tonkin incident without the amusing deception and decade long war.  In summary dear reader, it's a bad kind of bad.  So, what went wrong?

                 

Pod people.

First of all, the flesh puppets...  I mean actors.  Alien invasion movies are straight forward affairs with plenty of A to B writing.  That’s no bad thing, for a tight story with the right script can be great, much like the original Independence Day.  It allows for maximum  explosions and just the right amount of character development.  As we don’t want characters we don’t give a damn about but equally we don’t want to be flipping through their family albums while all the cool stuff happens off camera.  Resurgence however, falls into the former category; so much so that neither I nor my friend could remember any of the new characters’ names come the credits.  Not a one.  Nada.  Liam Hemsworth remained Liam Hemsworth; not Will Smith (no matter how desperately they wished otherwise) remained not Will Smith and Bill Pullman, somehow, was not President Whitmore.  In point of fact the only new character that achieved their purpose was the Chinese pilot played by Angelababy (stage name), who doubtless helped draw cinemagoers in the ever more lucrative Asian markets.  There’s even a line to the effect of, “China has been the most important partner in developing our super anti-alien defences,” thrown in near the beginning.  It’s so transparent that unless English is your second language, you’ll flinch when you see it. 

                                  

Bigger ship, bigger fun.

As for the narrative itself it’s uninspired but not fatal alone.  The aliens come back, other aliens show up and declare themselves the enemy of the original aliens and war ensues.  Then things fall down.  For we are shown/told all of this in forced exposition that feels so disconnected from the first movie it’s hard to see how one leads to two.  The invaders are now lead by “Harvester Queens” and only by killing this Alien knockoff can they be thwarted, although it has never been done before!  Apart from last time when they nuked the sons of bitches.  But that’s semantics.  After this we’re subjected to a very familiar set of events.  The humans are overwhelmed, the alien ship lands, the humans launch a daring but ultimately doomed assault on the now 3000 kilometres sized mothership before defeating them at Area 51 just in the nick of time.  It was almost like paying one’s entry fee to see a favourite film performed by second-rate actors.  That was nice; I was too young to see the original at the cinema. 

                                        

The family underachiever.

The stinking, putrid glue that holds it all together is the script.  For without one it’s just a bunch of people gesturing dramatically and dying without context.  In hindsight, this may have been an improvement, but you live and learn.  Remember those modern tropes that we mentioned earlier?  Well they’re present, albeit in their worst possible forms.  I’m talking about the quips.  The unending, unfunny and unrelenting quips that are so desperately ill-judged at times it makes you wonder at Emmerich’s sanity.  The great thing about the original was that while it was funny (“Welcome to Earth!”) it was also plausible.  That the characters were saying one-liners and mouthing off as a coping mechanism for the fact the entire world was ending around them.  It’s what people do.  Admittedly sometimes a one-liner is just a one-liner, but they never felt misplaced.  In Resurgence however, I didn’t laugh once.  No one in the audience did either.  It was offensive, it was juvenile and best summed up by Liam Hemsworth whipping his dick out to take a piss as to distract a bunch of aliens.  He was talking at the time which made it even worse.

                                                 

I could go on for another five pages documenting this movies sins but by the time I’d finish it would be an inquiry ten years in the making.  An entire dissertation could be squandered on the terrible effects alone before running a financial breakdown on what exactly they spent that 165 million dollars on.  Other than the nine writers who “contributed” to the films creation of course, which goes some way towards explaining the horrendously fractured narrative.  But I digress.  For there is only one message you should take away from this review and that is stay away.  Hide.  Take shelter.  Independence Day: Resurgence is an atrocity not only for its violation of a classic, but because it took everything wrong with the current mega-movie industry and distilled it into something more unwatchable than Transformers: Age of Extinction.  Sadly, there’s no such thing as a cinematic crime against humanity, so if you need me that’s where I’ll be.  At The Hague, protesting for one.

Retro Rehash - Die Clanner! MechCommander Review

Like most people living here in the West I am party to the glitz and glamour of the First World.  Champagne, caviar, murdering the occasional prostitute and passing off the storage locker in which I keep their remains as a business expense.  Yet, the greatest example of my bourgeois pride is undoubtedly my Steam account, with its 248 games and backlog so mountainous it contends with Snowden for Britain’s highest peak.  So, of course, I’m here to talk about MechCommander, a now freeware RTS that you can download for nothing off the web.  To those reading in less developed nations you have just pinpointed the weakness in our soft, consumerist underbelly; but before the proles of the world rise up and cast our wasteful asses into the sea let’s wax lyrical about giant robots doing battle across the stars.

         

For those of you born after the great PC revolution that sowed the seeds of all video game greatness (this may be revisionist history), there used to be this little table top game called Battle Tech.  Set in a universe of warring houses, political intrigues and galactic conquest it demanded the use of miniatures, dice and hours of commitment.  Luckily, the good fellows over at FASA Studios (may they rest in peace) recognised that even humble folks like myself needed to exercise generalship over an elite cadre of Battle Mechs in pursuit of ultimate victory, sometimes.  And in 1998 they delivered the dream of every layman out there with the first MechCommander.

               

Battle Tech has a rich backstory which I encourage you to look into; unlike many other sci-fi universes it hasn’t fallen to the predations of money making and general enfeeblement that typifies much of Games Workshop’s and Star Wars fair.  MechCommander opens with the invasion of the planet Port Arthur, currently held by the forces of Clan Smoke Jaguar and follows your war of liberation from start to finish.  It’s worth noting that for the diehard fans out there MechCommander is a great addition to the lore, fleshing out the backstory to the reformation of the Star League and retaliation following the original Clan Invasion.  While for the uninitiated it offers a perfect backdrop for shooty, shooty fun with substance, thereby catering for everyone.  The intro is full motion video gold and much like Wing Commander shows how FMV’s should be used.  While the acting isn’t perfect it’s better than most and adds a dramatic flair to the proceedings that traditional computer rendered video just couldn’t match.  If you doubt it, check it out below.

                            

Following the model of a squad based combat system whereby you enter into each mission with a specified drop weight limit, each ‘Mech and pilot you lose can have a catastrophic knock on effect further down the line.  Of the two, the latter is typically more difficult to replace, for as each mission goes by those same pilots gain valuable skill improvements in areas like gunnery and sensor management, eventually achieving veterancy status.  As such, you end up with a core group of elites capable of handling the heaviest and deadliest of your war machines.  Their deaths are therefore cause for genuine mourning as your lance is accordingly diminished by their loss.  When losing ‘Mechs however, it’s all about what you can salvage from the battlefield and hock between missions. Whether that be the battle damaged steed of a former opponent or from numerous enemy caches scattered around the combat zone.  Everything adds up, with you typically choosing the choicest pieces of hardware for yourself, selling the rest to turn a profit and reinvesting in new weapons, pilots and ‘Mechs along the way.  Although it must be noted that while I’ve had units taken down (usually by prestigious amounts of weapons fire) I’ve almost always salvaged what I’ve lost, leading to a rather low attrition rate in my mechanised death machines.  Therefore, once the maintenance crews finished scraping the remains of the last occupant from between the dashboard they were ready to be forced back into the fight.

                                            

This is in no way to suggest that the game is easy, with creating the right mixture of ‘Mechs and loadouts to complete mission objectives sometimes being an empirical process.  I reloaded… a lot and given that you can only save between drops it can really eat up the time and be a tad frustrating.  Especially when you get almost to the end of a mission and run into, say, a Madcat. Are you ambushing multiple convoys?  In which case compact firepower and fast ‘Mechs are your best friend.  Or are you holding a forward base against staggering odds?  Your only hope being your heavies, with thick armour and overwhelming ordinance.  There are also a variety of limited special abilities such as artillery strikes (both large and small) and sensor probes, which accentuate your overall capabilities. These are allotted during your mission brief and cannot be changed.  There’s nothing quite like maneuvering an enemy vehicle into your kill zone and bringing the rain.  Add to this the addition of support like minelayers and scout vehicles and you can really have some fun figuring out the best way to meet your objectives.

                                                     

When looking at MechCommander I’m filled with a certain nostalgia, partially from the use of FMV’s but also the general feel of the game.  It’s been a good while since I played a new RTS of the same calibre that also made me feel like I was part of a real universe, that was truly immersive.  MechCommander achieves this in a variety of ways, from each set of missions being broken up into separate “operations” and the fact that while you’re the invading force, your enemy still outclasses you in a fair fight.  Clan ‘Mechs are where the action is at, trust me.  This, coupled with the variety of mission types and complexity makes you rely on outwitting your opponent as much as outfighting them.  The feeling you get bringing down a Catapult heavy packed with LRM’s (Long Range Missiles) up close and personal is hard to beat.  It was like watching a pack of dire wolves bring down an oliphaunt.  Most importantly of course, it’s free and will cost you nothing to try.  At best it might introduce you to a new and interesting sci-fi universe; at worst you’ll be unable to get it working and be out ten minutes.  But since this can easily be avoided by just copying all the game files into a folder and running the game from there, I doubt it.