“Tribbles.”

Years:  1967, 1968
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan, Walter Koenig
Creator:  Gene Roddenberry
Run time:  21 hours, 50 minutes
Blu-Ray distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     For a review of the actual Season Two of Star Trek, click here.  This is a review of the Blu-Ray, which should appeal to all the techno-geeks out there.  And the techno-geeks love their Star Trek.  So it works great.  There really is a higher standard that must be applied to Blu-Ray editions of Star Trek seasons, because the nerds hold the show to that much higher a standard than do fans of other series.  And thankfully, the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Original Series on Blu-Ray have delivered.  The Blu-Ray transfer is impeccable, the added detail and enhanced content is terrific, and the show really does look a lot better in both Season Two and Season One. 

     It’s the special features that matter, however, and those are hit-and-miss.  I still have no idea how that Tribbles episode managed to become the most famous of the Star Trek canon.  I am so sick of the Tribbles episode.  I thought it was cute once, but cute doesn’t hold up over time, unless it’s E.T. cute.  And the tribbles are not E.T. cute.  Yet, the Season Two Blu-Ray of Star Trek comes with an entire bonus disc devoted entirely to tribbles.  Including cartoons and commentary and so forth.  Seriously, Star Trek.  Enough with the tribbles.  The Starfleet Access Mode remains pretty cool, though, and should delight the geek world who revel in their Star Trek.

     OK, I have now run out of links to place with the words “Star Trek” in this review.  So that’s over.  And so’s the review.  This is a wicked Blu-Ray, but enough with the tribbles.  It was forty years ago.  Let it go.

“He was an honest man, and he didn’t deserve any of what happened to him”

Year:  2009
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Sharlto Copley, David James, Vanessa Haywood
Director:  Neil Blomkamp
Producer:  Peter Jackson
Run time:  112 minutes

     District 9 is a strange, wonferful movie.  It’s thought-provoking and silly.  It’s smart and bonkers.  It’s violent and sad.  There is a little bit of everything in the film, except for romance.  There is no romance at all.  Unless you count the trumped-up tabloid pictures of Wikus Van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley) having sex with aliens.  The movie is set in Johannesburg, South Africa in an alien internment camp.  The extra-terrestrials have come to Earth, and their ship appears to have stalled above South Africa.  The aliens did not attempt to make contact, they had no revelatory technology to share with the human race, and there was no attack.  They were just sick, and we went into their ship to cut them out.

     The governments of the world had no idea what to do with the aliens, so they stuck them in this internment camp and began practicing a type of human-alien apartheid.  Which is why the choice of South Africa is so poignant.  As the movie points out, It’s quite a surprise that the ship didn’t come down over New York City or Chicago or Los Angeles, but rather over Johannesburg.  In a way, this is a shot at the Independance Days of the world where all kinds of familiar scenery gets blown up as the good guys flee the aliens past the Empire State Building and the White House and so forth.  In another way, though, it’s just a cool addition to this film, which does everything differently.

     I have heard this movie compared to Independance Day, the X-Files, and other films, but all of that misses the mark.  District 9 is something entirely new.  This is one of the most original Sci-Fi alien movies I have ever seen, and it turns the entire genre on its ear.  The filming is brilliant, using a combination of hand-held cameras and news footage and regular cameras to tell its story.  There are scenes that remind me of the incredible work done in Children of Men, and others that are as chaotic and difficult to follow as Cloverfield.  It all comes together to form an incredible whole, and some of the scenes (the helicopters rising to meet the alien spacecraft, for example) are breathtaking.

     While the references to apartheid, intolerance and the marginalization of minorities are too obvious to ignore, they are just the framework of the movie, rather than the thrust.  Really, the movie is about one guy, Wikus Van de Merwe.  Who has a really oddly awkward name for the main character in a cheesy sci-fi flick.  Wikus works at MNU (Multi-National United), a company that has been tasked with keeping order in the alien compound, which has now become a slum complete with weapons dealers and drug dealers.  Much of this is incredibly silly and often quite amusing – the “drugs” in question happen to be cat food, which is highly addictive to this alien race.  So they deal cans of cat food.

     Wikus is charged with going in to serve eviction notices to the aliens.  The people of Johannesburg have grown tired of the aliens living in their midst, in this slum.  They have been there for 20 years, and have become scavengers.  So MNU and Wikus are tasked with moving the entire slum to a new, more secure and more high-tech internment camp far outside the city limits.  As Wikus describes it later, this new camp is really a concentration camp.  But that’s something he thinks about only much later, as he starts the movie blissfully ignorant of the fact that the alien creatures (which are referred to by the derogatory term “prawns”) might have brains and feelings and needs, just like human beings.

     Quickly, however, Wikus has an unfortunate accident which involves him being sprayed in the face by an alien substance of some kind.  And when he starts to turn into an alien himself, he becomes the most valuable man in the world to the government.  You see, the aliens have incredibly, high-power weapons that the government is desperate to use.  But those weapons are engineered to be used only by the aliens themselves.  Only someone with alien DNA can operate these things, which have been confiscated from the alien race.  So Wikus needs to be studied, which to the government really means cut open and drained of fluids and murdered in the most horrible way.

     The scenes where the government officials (including Wikus’ father-in-law) discuss this idea in a matter-of-fact manner right in front of Wikus, who is strapped down to a table and can’t move, are the perfect scenes that exemplify the film.  There is something cheesy and B-movie-ish about the whole thing, as the scientists determine that of course draining all of Wikus’ blood is the only reasonable course of action.  At the same time, the scene is frightening and genuine because the actors are great and because the scene has been set up so well.

     Of course, Wikus escapes.  And he heads into the only place he knows the government won’t chase him – the alien slum.  There, he hooks up with an alien scientist and the two of them must fight the humans, break into MNU, and get fuel for the spaceship so the aliens can escape Earth and Wikus can get the medical treatment he needs (from the aliens) to turn back into a human being.  In another bizarre and silly yet still somehow totally poignant touch, the alien is named Christopher Johnson.  Obviously, this isn’t really his name at all, it’s a name that was designated by the human authorities when the camps were set up – something human beings have done many times over the years, at Ellis Island and elsewhere.

     From here on in, Disctrict 9 is primarily an action movie.  An over-the-top, gloriously violent action movie.  There are scenes that are utterly silly, others that are totally badass, and they all work.  The big final showdown between Wikus (now in an alien weapon-suit) and the gung-ho racist leader of the military government commando team does not disappoint.  That alien weapon-suit, by the way, would not be out of place in Robocop or even cheesier movies.  Yet, somehow, it manages to be the coolest thing about the end of District 9, which finishes with half an hour of the most awesome action imaginable in an alien film.

     District 9, better than any movie I have ever seen, straddles the line between silly B-movie and brilliant sci-fi film.  The cheesiest B-movie portions of the film are also the smartest and most stunning moments.  Altogether, District 9 is virtually flawless.  Go see this movie right now.

“I’m running the asymmetrical trajectory algorithm.”

Year:  2009
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jason Alexander, Christopher Lloyd, Marla Sokoloff, Stacy Keach, Michael Rooker, Billy Campbell, Mimi Michaels
Director:  Ernie Barbarash
Run time:  188 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Despite cheesy acting, made-for-TV silliness, and some staggeringly implausible dialogue, Meteor has moments where it works.  They’re just few and far between.  At three plus hours, this TV miniseries needed to cram extra stuff into it’s already threadbare plot.  You see, there is a meteor heading for the Earth.  It will wipe out life as we know it.  Only one woman (Marla Sokoloff) knows how to blow the meteor out of the sky, but she’s having trouble getting to the U.S. military base with all the weapons.  What are the other countries in the world doing?  Who cares.  The point is, the world is coming to the end, so people go all crazy (think The Mist), and that is making Imogene’s journey more difficult.  That’s about it.

     However, there is a father-daughter thing going on, a kidnapping going on, and a bizarrely evil character (Michael Rooker) who is totally unnecessary.  People are raping each other, murdering each other, and fighting tooth and nail over water and supplies as they head underground or just panic.  Part of the entertainment of the film could come from the regular people becoming crazier and crazier.  Why add a guy who was already a murderous rapist, even without the end of the world approaching?  No real reason.  Just needed to fill time, I suppose.  Then there’s a kid trapped in a hospital, and his mom and his dad and their seperate frantic searches for him, and we have two unnecessary subplots.

     I don’t think there is a single frame of Meteor that comes as a surprise.  In fact, I could probably have described the entire plot of the film after watching Scene One with about 80 percent accuracy.  Somehow, though, Billy Campbell manages to remain a sympathetic character amid the porno-quality acting, and a few supporting characters are pretty good as well.  But it just doesn’t add up, and the three hours I sat watching this movie were hours I could have spent eating gummy bears, clipping my toes, reading Macleans and not cringing.  Meteor comes out September 8th from Alliance Films.

“Systems that find meaning in numbers are a dime in dozen…because people see what they want to see.”

Year:  2009
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Nicolas Cage, Lara Robinson, Chandler Canterbury
Eye candy:  Rose Byrne
Director:  Alex Proyas
Run time:  121 minutes

     I have long maintained that Nicolas Cage’s acting ability is inversely proportional to the budget of the movie in which he is doing that acting.  Sadly, the box office return on Nicolas Cage’s movies is often inversely proportional to the quality of those films as well.  A good example of this is Knowing, which made 80 million dollars domestically and about 180 million dollars worldwide despite being a giant pile of flamingo feces.  Nicolas Cage is dreadful in this movie.  The movie is abysmal around him.  And I knew this before I started watching.  It was clear to me, because I knew that this movie was made for a budget of around 50 million dollars.  A quick sampling of Cage movies, and their budgets.  Notice a pattern?

Ghost Rider – $120 million budget
Gone In 60 Seconds – $103 million budget
National Treasure – $100 million budget
Con Air – $80 million budget
Knowing – $50 million budget
Bangkok Dangerous – $45 million budget
Lord of War – $42 million budget
8 MM – $40 million budget
The Weather Man – $20 million budget
Adaptation – $18.5 million budget
Matchstick Men – Budget #s not available – I’m guessing it was between 6 and 18 million
Raising Arizona – $6 million budget
Leaving Las Vegas – $4 million budget

     Did you notice that as you read down the list, the movies got better and better?  And that Cage’s performance in those movies got better and better, culminating with the brilliant classic Leaving Las Vegas, for which he received a Best Actor Oscar in 1995?  (I will admit to messing with the list a little – I didn’t include Face/Off, because it would have screwed up the continuity.  Face/Off cost $80 million, and I still really like that movie.  Full disclosure.)  Anything Cage does that costs more than $100 million will automatically be putrid garbage.  Anything below $50 million has a chance.  And anything below $40 million will likely be rather good.  Below $20 million and you have a classic.

     I have a suggestion for Mr. Cage.  Suppose you want to pad that trophy case with a few more golden trophies.  Take some roles in really, really obscure films.  Like maybe someone’s film school project.  I am guessing that if Nic Cage appeared in a movie that was shot for a total budget of eleven dollars, his performance would go down in history on a par with Brando in On The Waterfront, DeNiro in Raging Bull, and Scott in Patton.  Get on it, Cage!  I would pay four hundred dollars myself to have the movie made, just so I could watch it!

     Anyway, this is a review of Knowing.  Right?  Right.  I knew I was going somewhere with this.  Sorry about all the meandering earlier in this review.  You see, I just watched this movie called Knowing, and I’m pretty certain my IQ has slipped about eleven points since two hours ago and I am having trouble focusing.  Knowing is a movie with a budget of $50 million, or thereabouts.  Some of that budget went into paying Nicolas Cage and Rose Byrne.  Then the movie was made for about 10 million bucks.  Then, with seven minutes to go in the two-hour film, someone noticed that there was still a lot of money lying around.  So the final $40 million went into special effects for the last seven minutes.

     In the meantime, there are a few special effects, but they are either bad or laughable.  A plane crash is bad, a moose burning up in the forest is laughable.  The premise of the movie, much like the burning moose, is laughable as well.  You see, in 1959 a creepy little girl (Lara Robinson) is asked to draw a picture of the future for a time capsule, to be unearthed in 2009.  Instead of drawing a picture, she writes a crazy series of numbers.  In 2009, when the capsule is pulled out of the ground, her page of numbers is given to a young boy (Chandler Canterbury) who brings it home where his dad (Nicolas Cage) can find it.  His dad is an astrophysicist or something.

     Of course, only he would be smart enough to figure out what all these numbers mean.  And that they correspond exactly to the date, the coordinates and the death toll of every major disaster of the past 50 years.  But at the end, things get weird.  Is the page predicting the end of the world?  For some reason, while the rest of the page has been pretty straightforward – date, death toll, coordinates – the final entry is done totally differently, in a way that can be deciphered only by the creepy little 1950s girl’s now-adult daughter.  Why?  More dramatic, I suppose.  This little girl grew up, became a woman, and died.  And apparently, throughout her life, she remained plagued by voices and remained creepy and weird.  And judging by her picture in the newspaper beside the story of her death, she was pretty gaunt and haggard the whole time.

     And yet somehow she managed to get a husband and a daughter along the way.  Despite her creepy weirdness, her crazy head-voices, her obsession with a cabin in the woods, and her anorexic heroin-ish visage.  Well, there’s a guy out there for everyone, I guess.  Now, all of this is reasonably plausible.  But from here, we are asked to swallow more and more preposterous coincidences.  Cage’s son also hears the voices.  So does the creepy girl’s granddaughter (also Lara Robinson).  And somehow, the proper paper fell into the hands of the proper kid with the appropriate dad, who was able to decipher it in the proper way just in time to see the end of the world coming.

     The end of the movie makes it all clear.  As many similar, half-assed, badly thought out movies do, it creates a very easy out for all the coincidences and plot holes.  Something didn’t make sense?  The aliens did it.  Cage’s son was also writing a page of numbers, but no one thought it was important ever, and it turned out to, indeed, not be important at all?  Aliens did it.  They are pulling the strings and making everyone do all the things it would take to get them to the point where…ugh.  Anyway, if we follow that logic through the whole movie, it is still preposterous and nonsensical.

     Knowing starts out with a promising moment, as Cage is teaching a class, where he talks about the difference between determinism and randomness.  Determinism suggesting that everything in the world happens for a reason, to lead to a certain conclusion, and that there are no coincidences.  And randomness, apparently, suggesting that everything is a coincidence and that there’s no point to anything.  It’s an interesting premise, and on some level I think the people who made this film believe that they are making a movie about that difference.  But they aren’t.  They are making a movie about crap, as portrayed by crappy actors, that happens to pay lip service once or twice to determinism.  That’s it.

     Nicolas Cage is terrible in this film.  Chandler Canterbury, who is a very small child so I shouldn’t really rag on him much, is also terrible.  OK, I’m ragging on him.  But I blame Cage, who really isn’t helping the kid out.  Rose Byrne is adequate most of the time, but in certain scenes (like some late-movie scenes in a car) she is downright dreadful.  Lara Robinson is OK, but she really has little to do.  She’s the best part of a really, really bad movie.

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“F**k.”

     That is the first line of dialogue spoken in Outlander.  Jim Caviezel, you see, has just crash-landed his spaceship in Norway in 709 A.D., and through some kind of technological miracle, he implants the dialect and language spoken at that time, in that place, into his brain.  So now he can communicate with the viking barbarians who inhabit that land.  And the first word he says is “f**k”.  If you’re the type of person who would wonder whether Norwegians of 709 A.D. knew the word ”f**k”, or used it, then this is likely not the movie for you.  If, however, you are the type of person who raises a clenched fist at the TV and celebrates lines like “f**k”, then you may well love this film.

     Outlander comes out on DVD May 26th from Alliance Films.  It is described as “Beowulf meets Predator” on the DVD box.  That IS a fairly apt description.  Predator was a pretty badass movie where cartoonishly tough guys hunt some kind of super-killer being through the woods.  And Beowulf is a movie about cartoonishly tough guy vikings that can be enjoyed only if you don’t, in any way, take it seriously.  I would not be surprised if the entire concept behind Outlander was some studio executive saying “you know what would be cool – Beowulf Vs. Predator“.  That is apparently all the thought that actually went into this movie.

     Frankly, Outlander is a dreadful movie.  It’s silly, it’s totally stupid, and it spends a lot of time throwing melodramatic nonsense around the screen with no regard for anything resembling logic.  However, I enjoyed it.  Like Beowulf, I am not 100% sure that the filmmakers had their tongues in their cheeks for this one.  But I watched it as though they did, and on that level Outlander is reasonably enjoyable.  This is just a really kinetic, foolish B-movie.  It proves that Jim Caviezel doesn’t quite have the star power or cachet one would expect after playing Jesus, but that he can still carry a B-movie on his earnestly silly shoulders.

     The basic premise – get this – is that Caviezel is some kind of space explorer who, for some reason, crash lands back in time in Norway.  He implants viking language and dialect into his brain, and then sets off after a beast.  This monster has come with him, on his spaceship, and is now loose in the area, slaughtering entire villages and indiscriminately killing everything.  We learn how dangerous it is right away, because it appears to have killed a whale and then spit it up on shore.  Whether it actually eats the people it kills is irrelevant.  It is merely a killing machine, and that’s all we need to know.

     In fact, we don’t even really see the monster until about an hour and ten minutes into the film.  The rest of the time, it blends into the background (like the Predator), becomes invisible, and kills people from outside camera range so we don;t see it.  This, of course, heightens the anticipation for the Big Reveal of the creature, which is decidedly disappointing.  It’s very CGI-looking whenever we see it in its regular state, and the rest of the movie is mostly flashes of it rather than the full creature.  When it’s in camouflage mode, it appears to be just a flashing display of LCD lights, like a sign outside a Las Vegas strip club.  And only Jim Caviezel, the former Jesus, can save the vikings from Girls Girls Girls and the free Roast Beef Buffet.

     So, not only do you have to be someone who can watch a movie with your tongue in your cheek, and also someone who enjoys lines like “f**k”, you also must be the kind of person who believes that a sign outside a strip club could eat vikings.  And you can’t be someone who wonders why, when he is constantly wearing crazy sci-fi spaceman armor, does Caviezel never put on a helmet to go into space, or how the viking women ended up wearing so much makeup in 709.  The only important viking woman is Freya, played by Sophia Myles, who is kind of like a low-rent Keira Knightley.  Which actually works for me a lot, because I like Myles.  And I hate Keira Knightley.  She is, of course, the love interest who is hot for this stranger when he shows up, then she hates him, then eventually she learns to love him.  Wait – this seems familiar, doesn’t it?

     Well, to some of us it does.  This is virtually the exact same plot as Army of Darkness, the sensationally tongue-in-cheek B movie from Sam Raimi to close out his Evil Dead trilogy.  Where Bruce Campbell gets somehow sent back in time and unites two warring clans to fight the army of the dead.  In this case, it’s Jim Caviezel instead of Campbell (no improvement) who unites the two warring tribes to fight this giant monster.  They call him “Outlander”, instead of “strange one”, and his girlfriend doesn’t turn into a demon, so they aren’t exactly the same movie.  But really, Outlander is Predator meets Beowulf meets Army of Darkness.  And I smile a nerdy smile, because this makes me a little bit happy.

     Of course, every movie about vikings must present them as a drunken bunch of manly, tough, barbaric brawlers who entertain themselves by fighting each other.  If they weren’t like this, why bother putting vikings in a movie?  In this case, they entertain themselves with a strange game of running-on-shields-while-drunk, which does double duty as Caviezel’s initiation into the viking fraternity.  All of which lasts FAR too long and isn’t interesting at all.  It’s fun, but likely inaccurate, to believe that vikings were really like this all the time. 

     The point is, however, that Jim Caviezel (who plays a character named Kainaan, but I am using his full name because I prefer to think of him as Jesus) is accepted into the fraternity.  And now all the women are hot for him, and the kids all idolize him.  (Including one kid named Eric, who I think is supposed to grow up to become Eric the Red.  But no one explains.)  In short, he becomes David Caruso from CSI: Miami, only in Norway 1300 years ago.  And he unites the tribes, and fights the monster, and there is a decidedly cool sudden-beheading, and all the central characters get their final-meaningful-words death scenes, and everyone leaves happy.

     I can understand someone watching Outlander and being very upset about it.  You know, people who like their movies to be…good.  I get that.  If good is what you want, wait a week and rent Revolutionary Road.  But if you can laugh at idiocy, smile at unnecessary badass dialogue, and wink back when a movie winks at you, you may well enjoy Outlander the way I did.  The way I enjoy Steven Seagal movies.

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 ”Very odd, what happens in a world without children’s voices.” 

     Children of Men will invariably, years from now, be compared to many other movies.  It will be compared to the class of 2006 – was it, in fact, the best movie of the year?  Well, no, because it wasn’t The Departed.  But it was a close second. People will compare it to Blade Runner, Brazil and Minority Report, as it will be in the running for the best bleak Sci-Fi future world ever made. And it’s awfully close.

     Clive Owen has never been better than in this movie about the not-too-distant future where the women of the world have become infertile. When he meets up with the first pregnant woman the world has seen in eighteen years, her significance to mankind becomes obvious, and he must protect her at all costs. The future world is grim and amazingly realized. The action scenes have nice touches, like blood spatter the director leaves on the camera, and Michael Caine is excellent as always in his pivotal supporting role.

     Children of Men has one other terrific device, and that is the best use of popular music this side of Tarantino. I have never heard the Court of the Crimson King used so well, but the real musical highlight shows up about three times. It’s a bizarre, Scottish-sounding version of the Stones’ Ruby Tuesday.  A magnificently-shot, wonderfully acted bleak and brilliant 2006 movie, Children Of Men comes out on Blu-Ray May 26th.

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To hear the review     Some movies just don’t get the credit they deserve. That is because we look at them simply as movies. Take, for example Predator. A very good, high-octane action movie where an alien comes to earth to hunt humans.  But it is so much more than that.  It stars a former BC Lion and Oakland Raider, Carl Weathers.  Two admitted steroid users, Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  A former champion wrestler and a former champion bodybuilder, Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  And two future US State governors…Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

     Predator is not a movie, it’s a historic document! Not since Ronald Reagan appeared with future wife Nancy Davis in Hellcats of the Navy has there been a more significant on-screen duo! Predator does not belong on the shelves of Rogers video, to be purchased for eleven ninety-nine by some punk who just wants to see Arnie blow stuff up, no! It belongs in a time capsule, hidden deep within the earth, waiting for a future generation to dig it up and giving that future generation a chance to reminisce about the glorious luminaries, actors and politicians, who populated America in the late 80s.

     Some day this film will be remembered in the same way as Hellcats of the Navy.  No, that’s not true, because Predator will actually be remembered.  And Arnie was actually (I mean this) a better actor than Reagan.  Some day, it will rank up there with This Is The Army, featuring Reagan and Joe Louis.  No, I’m wrong again.  Predator will rank much, much higher than that piece of junk.  Some day, it will be as much a part of the cultural fabric of our neighbours to the south as Sweet Home Alabama!  I got that right!

“Seeing the future will destroy us.”

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      John Woo has made some of the worst, most confusing movies ever.  Mission: Impossible 2 is maybe the worst example of this, but Paycheck ranks right up there.  Ben Affleck is this guy, see, who steals computer-related secrets from companies.  For some reason, this involves his memory being erased each time he is finished with an assignment.  I never really understood, in any way, why this was necessary.  If he has completed his task, why bother erasing any memory of that task?  Wouldn’t that make him less effective for his next assignment, given that he hasn’t learned anything new in the past several years?  And what difference would it make if he remembered what he stole?

     It doesn’t really matter to the movie though.  All they care about is the fact that his memory does get erased.  And when he takes a particularly crazy assignment that involves his memories being wiped for three whole years, then some crazy stuff is bound to happen.  For some reason, he allows his brain to be wiped at the end of this assignment, even though he has seen something over the course of those three years that indicates to him that he should not be doing so.  But he does, ’cause that’s what the movie says he does.  You see, he has seen the future.  And he mails himself an envelope before he gets wiped clean so that he can escape from the people who wiped his brain.  You see where that gets confusing?  Or why it makes little sense?

     So he knows the people who wipe his memories will go after him, and that he needs to escape.  But he still puts himself in that situation, then escapes, then runs from them with the aid of this envelope full of stuff.  You see, he has seen the future.  So he knows how to get out of these situations.  But why?  And if the people who wiped his brain clean were going to kill him anyway, why wouldn’t they have done so when they did the wiping, rather than waiting for him to do stuff to escape?  It’s utter nonsense. 

     Then there’s Uma Thurman (who of course would have to play a genius biologist).  During those three missing years, she became the Love Of Affleck’s Life, and she will have to help him do stuff to avoid capture, and, in the end, save the world.  She is clearly as oblivious as he is – she never brings up the fact that he sent himself an envelope full of random stuff that will help him in some strange way, but didn’t send himself a note explaining exactly what the hell is going on.  She gets the message that he writes her on her mirror – you know, one of those messages that shows up when the shower steams up the place?  She knows the bad guys are coming, but doesn’t wipe the mirror clean.  What a dummy.

     There are the standard John Woo touches here too.  The crossed-gun standoffs.  The doves.  The slow-motion.  Rarely has this stuff seemed more contrived or silly.  In fact, the silliness of some of these scenes is the best part of the film.  The scene where Ben Affleck gets tasered, and screams, in slow-motion is unintentionally hilarious.  Also hilarious is the scene where he winces in his chair as his memory gets extracted that made me laugh a lot too.  He and Aaron Eckhardt both have these truly bizarre little-boy haircuts that amused me as well.

     Really, Paycheck is a series of preposterous leaps in logic that get more and more complex as the movie goes on.  It really doesn’t make sense, unless you accept that every one of the characters in the film is an absolute dummy.  But you would think that someone who can build a machine that can see the future is no dummy.  I would think that.  But then, I’d rather not think about Paycheck any more than I have to.  It comes out on Blu-Ray May 19th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

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     Paramount Home Entertainment released a magnificent Blu-Ray box set on May 12th, featuring the first six Star Trek movies in stunning high-definition, with an extra disc featuring an interview that will, I’m sure, thrill nerds the world over.  It’s a 70-minute piece called The Captain’s Chair, where five huge stars have been brought together to reminisce about Star Trek – Whoopi Goldberg, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes talk, for 70 minutes, about Star Trek.  I found this to be terribly boring.  But I am not (even though I just watched SIX Blu-Ray movies), a Trekkie.  Or, Trekker.  Whatever.  I suspect that those who are Trekkies(ers) would love this exclusive content.

     There are extensive special features, including commentaries and interviews and behind the scenes stuff and nerd stuff on every single disc.  However, it’s the movies that everyone cares about, so I will review them one at a time.  Here goes:

Star Trek The Motion Picture (****4/10): 

“It’s life, Captain.  But not life as we know it.” 

     It’s hard to believe that Star Trek lasted so long given the silliness of the original series and the poor quality of this first movie.  This is, really, a bad movie.  It’s all special effects, which are great in Blu-Ray, but totally pointless.  The movie goes on way too long, trying to cram one special effect on top of another for the entire two-hour-plus running time.  The movie opens with some special effects, then other special effects, then Spock talking to his Vulcan elders.  They are about to present him with a medallion, which symbolizes his attainment of Total Logic.  I thought right away – if he has truly attained Total Logic, banishing all emotion from his psyche, would he really need a medallion to symbolize that?  That isn’t terribly logical, is it?

     From there the movie gets sillier and sillier.  Kirk is an admiral now, and he is sour at his desk job.  This will continue over the course of several movies.  A mysterious cloud is approaching the Earth, and the crew of the Enterprise go inside to discover an entity that has achieved self-awareness and seeks its creator.  And there are more special effects.  Which seems to take all the charm out of the movie, and all the interesting features of the characters, and turns it all flat.  Considering this is a Star Trek movie and it’s in outer space and it involves Kirk and the Enterprise and so forth, Star Trek The Motion Picture is sadly devoid, utterly, of wonder and charm.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (*********9/10): 

“Who am I hiding from?”
“From yourself!” 

     Thank God the series continued, for this terrifically campy and silly film!  And make no mistake, this movie is CAMPY.  And SILLY.  It is a battle of two titanic overactors – who will suffer an aneurysm from overacting first?  Kirk or Khan?  Shatner or Ricardo Montalban?  Khan rages, shakes his fist, and quotes Moby Dick at Shatner.  Shatner emotes, sighs, screams and quotes A Tale Of Two Cities at Khan.  Shatner makes a dramatic entrance, bathed in blue light as his silhouette emerges in a doorway.  Montalban, not to be upstaged, emerges from a sandstorm and takes off the hood of his robe in a truly dramatic moment of revelation – It’s KHAN!

     It certainly helps to have seen the Khan episode of the original series, but it isn’t necessary.  That would explain fully why Khan is so obsessed with killing Kirk.  However, reading Moby Dick could prepare you for this as well.  Khan is basically Captain Ahab, so obsessed with his White Whale, Kirk, that he is willing to die in order to take down his nemesis.  Kirk and Spock are meanwhile living out A Tale Of Two Cities, quotes from the book and everything – “it is a far, far better thing that I do…”

     We learn that some scientists have managed to create life from nothing, in a project called Genesis.  We also learn that Kirk has a son.  Which appears to be forgotten rather quickly, but I’m sure it means something in a later movie.  What makes Wrath of Khan work the best of all the Star Trek pictures is that Ricardo Montalban is the only appropriate foil for William Shatner.  Only a massive overactor can truly be a nemesis to another massive overactor.  Given all the silliness, however, Wrath of Khan has a surprisingly moving conclusion as Khan brings destruction upon himself, Kirk embraces his son, Spock makes the ultimate sacrifice, and they all quote Moby Dick and A Tale of Two Cities.

Star Trek III: The Search For Spock (********8/10): 

“I have been, and always shall be, your friend.” 

     This movie, amazingly, is almost as good as Wrath Of Khan, although it is far less cheesy than its predecessor.  Gone is Ricardo Montalban, despite his attempt to stab at Kirk from Hell’s Heart, and so forth.  Instead, we get Christopher Lloyd in the role of nemesis, Bad Guy and all around irritant to the crew of the Enterprise.  He is a Klingon warlord who is after that Genesis thing that was introduced in Khan.  He too is a massive overactor, but his overacting is just one marble short of being Doc from Back To the Future, and that is just distracting.  And too silly for an otherwise serious movie.

     The central story, however, is not that of Kirk Versus the Klingon.  It is, of course, the Search For Spock.  Spock can’t die, you see, and he has somehow begun to regenerate on the planet to which his body was fired at the end of the second film.  When the Enterprise crew beam down to that planet to rescue him (and go through the weird Vulcan ritual where his mind is put back into his body and so forth), the planet is growing at a crazy rate, and Spock with it.  This has the terrifically convenient effect of making sure that at the end of the movie, Spock can once again be played by Leonard Nimoy!  (Who also directed.)

     There are some solid scenes, and some solid camp as well.  Shatner, in mourning, basically puts on this cheesy and bizarre puppy-dog face.  He may as well be pouting and whining and licking his hands.  The Klingon Bird Of Prey spaceship looks amazing in HD.  Christopher Lloyd’s rat-dog-gremlin pet thing looks idiotic in HD.  There is a solid scene breaking Bones out of the brig as the crew goes renegade to bring Spock home.  And of course, the ship always takes off just as the planet explodes, and Kirk is beamed up just as the fire gets to him, and everything happens Just In The Nick Of Time.

     In Search For Spock, Kirk’s son dies.  Which is, apparently, why he was introduced in the second film.  It gives Shatner a chance to do some pretty funny emotional over-acting, but it appears to be forgotten rather quickly.  I mean, it was his son.  Not SPOCK!  And now everything is cool and they can take Spock back to Vulcan to get his mind right.  The costumes there are cool.  They look good in HD.  The next movie involves whales.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (******6/10): 

“A joke is a story with a humourous climax.”

     Explaining the plot of The Voyage Home could backfire.  This could easily be interpreted as a joke.  They need to go back in time to get humpback whales and bring them to the future so they can communicate with this probe which is somehow shutting down all electronic devices within a several thousand mile radius.  So they go to Sea World in 1989…seriously.  This is the plot of the movie.  Remember when Jaws went to Sea World in the third one?  Remember how cheesy and stupid that was?

     Amazingly though, The Voyage Home is not, really, that stupid.  It’s certainly silly.  After all, it’s the 80s, and there HAS to be a punk kid making too much noise on the bus who gets his comeuppance, and there has to be sleazy accountant types, and there has to be a hot blonde woman with big hair who cares deeply about animals…basically, Kirk and Spock and Bones and the rest of them appear to have been beamed back right into the middle of Crocodile Dundee.  Then there is a Culture Clash!  And hilarity ensues!  Leonard Nimoy directed this one too, and he deserves credit for not letting it become…well…Crocodile Dundee.  Well, not totally.

     The fun parts of this movie involve Spock, mostly, who is still not back to his old self.  He is now a total straight-arrow Vulcan, using only logic and unable to carry on a regular conversation with anyone.  Bones wants to fight with him and argue with him like old times, but every time he tries, he hits a brick wall.  There are some moments of real humour there.  Shatner is as understated as he can possibly be, most of the time, mostly because Spock is the star of the film this time around.  And, of course, they are all going to save the world.  With whales.

     “Captain!  There be whales here!”

     They get the whales, save the right two, of COURSE they manage to get to them just before a whaling vessel – whaling vessels being everwhere in the ocean – and we learn some good, helpful environmental lessons along the way.  There is a real ambitious desire to make an environmental point in this movie, and I appreciate that.  But the whales ARE pretty silly.  And then, just to hammer home the point that this is THE 80s, the final credits roll to a synth tune, over still photos from the movie we’ve just seen, like the end of some dreadful 80s TV show.  It’s like Star Trek by way of Magnum P.I.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (****4/10):

“All I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.”

     It appears that by the time Star Trek V came around, Gene Roddenberry and his entourage had completely run out of ideas.  I mean, even the title – the Final Frontier?  Where have I heard that before?  Leonard Nimoy left the director’s chair for this one, and left William Shatner in charge.  What we get is a staggeringly strange mishmash of stupidity and idiocy, and not necessarily in that order.  We DO get to see Spock put that Vulcan neck knock-out thing on a horse.  Which is something neat.  A horse.

     The movie opens, as did Mission: Impossible II (both dreadful movies) with William Shatner free-climbing a rock face in Yosemite National Park.  This shows how Extreme he is.  You see, he is camping with Spock and Bones.  This goes on for a while.  The camping.  And the brotherly love and the joshing and the cameraderie and the campfire and so forth.  When they are finally called back to emergency duty, they are strangely awkward with each other, like they had a gay threesome in the woods and must never speak of it again.

     They are called back into action because Spock’s half-brother, a cult leaderish type guy, has escaped from somewhere and taken over the Enterprise.  So Kirk and Spock and Bones run around the ship, trying to evade the rest of their crewmates who are under the spell of the cult leader, until they finally cross a barrier that no one has crossed in history.  (Judging by their reaction to crossing this barrier, they are timidly going where no man has gone before.)  On the other side, they meet God, or some approximation of him who appears to be inspired by the Wizard of Oz, and Spock fires a laser gun from a Klingon ship, and everyone goes home happy.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (*******7/10):

“The Federation is no more than a homo-sapiens only club.”

     Kim Catrall joins the cast of Star Trek for a brief one-movie stint as a sharp-eyebrowed, pointy-eared character who looks like Spock.  This leads me to believe that she may be a Vulcan.  Spock is a Vulcan.  She looks like Spock.  She is a Vulcan.  That is logic, and Spock would be proud, I think.  By this point, the rest of the crew is pretty old.  Shatner and Nimoy are long in the tooth, James Doohan is large in the paunch, and Bones and Chekov and Sulu are pretty tired.  Good thing Catrall and Christian Slater are there to infuse the series with a little bit of youthful exuberance.  Not that they are any good.

     You know who is good though?  Christopher Plummer.  He is the best Star Trek villain since Khan, and like Mr. Montalban, his character has a tendancy to quote from great literature – in this case, Shakespeare.  Plummer plays General Chang, a Klingon general who plans to get rid of Kirk once and for all.  The setting is a series of Klingon-Federation peace talks, and Kirk represents the bigotry of the human beings against the Klingon race.  This is not just the one-sided view of Klingons.  Kirk is genuinely prejudiced against Klingons, because they killed his son.  (I know, I know, he barely seemed upset about it at the time, but his is a slow-burning anger.)

     Some Klingons are killed while in the care of the crew of the Enterprise, and of course Kirk is blamed.  Of course, he also didn’t do it.  But he gets arrested anyway, and sent to an underground labour camp in the Dilithium mines for Klingon prisoners.  While there, he has sex with some space-hottie who then shape-shifts into – an exact replica of Kirk!  In some kind of bizarre plot  to murder Kirk while he’s “trying to escape”.  This is the second-most remarkable Shatner-vs-Shatner scene since the finale of White Comanche back in 1967.

     In the end, the success of Star Trek VI rests mostly on the shoulders of Plummer, Nimoy and Catrall, who do most of the interesting things in the film.  Bones, Chekhov, Uhura and Scotty are all pretty obnoxious here.  As Shatner has toned down his overacting, the rest of the cast appears to be determined to compensate.  They are virtually insufferable.  But the movie works anyway, with it’s racial overtones, sci-fi atmosphere, courtroom drama, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome scene and prison escape.  This movie has everything!  And most of it works.  And so concludes the Star Trek Original Motion Picture Collection, on Blu-Ray now.

     “Second star to the left.  And straight on ’til morning.”

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      Truly, I gave the Star Trek Original Motion Picture Collection a better rating simply because I’m a completist.  I like the fact that there are a ton of extra special features on each disc, and the full series comes with an extra disc for Star Trek fanatics where William Shatner talks to Patrick Stewart for an hour and a half.  None of this is particularly useful to the non-fanatic, but it’s essential to a good Blu-Ray release.  And really, I like the three movies contained in the Trilogy.  Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is deservedly a classic movie, Star Trek III: The Search For Spock is a decent follow-up, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home closes out the little trilogy nicely.

     But I liked Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country quite a lot.  In fact, I liked it better than Star Trek IV.  And I always like to have a complete collection.  That being said, Star Trek The Motion Picture was awful, and the William Shatner-directed Star Trex V: The Final Frontier was even worse.  So you’re not missing out on much if you go with the trilogy instead.  The special features on all three discs are the exact same that you get on those same three movies were you to get them in the full set.  Just know that there are options out there!

“Never Give Up.  Never Surrender.”

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      Galaxy Quest managed to be two things at once when it was released in 2000.  Totally generic, and totally new.  And the terrific balance between the two was what made it terrific.  I really, really like Galaxy Quest.  It’s generic in that it tells the story of people we’ve seen in movies many times before, every character is a cliche, the plot follows the same arc as almost every other movie ever made, and it involves Tim Allen.  It’s new in that the generic nature of the characters and plot are done on purpose.  And the casting of Tim Allen was actually a good idea.  And showing Sigourney Weaver’s cleavage the whole movie is totally hot, but with a reason.  Just about everything in this movie works.

     Galaxy Quest has clearly been released, by Paramount Home Entertainment on May 12th, as part of Star Trek week.  With the new movie doing crazy box office in the theatres, everything Star Trek-related will have a market.  I hope Galaxy Quest gets a bump from this crowd, because it’s better than ANY of the Star Trek movies.  Well, maybe Wrath of Khan.  The idea is that Galaxy Quest is a TV show just like Star Trek.  And it has a crazy, rabid, nerdy following of people who are obsessed with the minutiae of the show, just like Trekkies.  And the actors who starred on the show have done nothing with their lives or careers since the show ended, and make their money attending the nerdy conventions.  Just like…well, you get the picture.

     The characters are fantastic – Tim Allen plays the Shatner role, the commander of the Starfleet, the Big Star everyone is waiting to see.  Sure, he hasn’t worked in years, but he loves the fans and loves being adored, even though he’s a broken-down deluded old superstar outside the convention circuit.  Sigourney Weaver was the big-boobed, all-cleavage eye candy on the show, although she had no role other than repeating what the computer said.  She still looks spectacular years later.  Alan Rickman might be the best character in the movie.  His character on Galaxy Quest was an alien of some kind, with weird makeup and a funny head.  And he is constantly bemoaning the fact that he was once a serious actor, and a GOOD actor, but now he’s reduced to this convention stuff which is so much beneath him.

     Also solid are Tony Shalhoub as a stoner actor who goes to the conventions because he doesn’t care about anything, and Sam Rockwell as an actor who appeared in one episode of Galaxy Quest and was killed in the first two minutes.  Like an ensign on Star Trek.  Justin Long shows up in an early role as the Nerdiest Of The Nerds, the Biggest Galaxy Quest Fan In The World.  Just as a spoof on “what might have happened to the cast of Star Trek” movie about the conventions and the actors who frequent them, this film would have worked.  But instead they tell a story along the most generic arc of all – rock bottom, followed by a deception that lifts them out of the dumps, followed by a conflict they attempt to escape, followed by the revelation of their deception, and then of course their collective redemption.

     This story arc comes courtesy of a group of ACTUAL aliens who have seen the old Galaxy Quest episodes which have somehow been beamed into outer space.  They believe that the episodes they have seen are “historical documents” of this group of people on Earth, and they think this crew can save them from an evil menacing alien race of bug-looking creepy things.  Which is basically the plot of Seven Samurai, or Magnificent Seven, or, more accurately, The Three Amigos.  The actors at first have no idea what they’re getting themselves into, but once they realize that they are, really, in space, they decide to make the best of it.

     It’s the little touches that make Galaxy Quest so good.  Most of those touches come before the crew are actually in space.  The scene where the cast are opening a shopping mall in front of a small gathering of loyal geeks is priceless.  Tim Allen is (dare I say) actually good as a Shatner-esque actor in love with his own reflection, and the scenes involving Justin Long as the crazy nerd trying to figure out some tiny detail about the spaceship and the flux-filtration system (or whatever it is – I didn’t write it down) are where Allen really shines.  And little things like Allen’s cheesy line from every Galaxy Quest episode - “Never give up.  Never surrender.” – are what make this movie so clever.  It SEEMS like a tough-guy, outer-space sci-fi type line, but really it’s redundant nonsense.

     The deluxe edition of Galaxy Quest comes out May 12th from Paramount Home Entertainment, and includes several bonus features.  Historical Documents: The Story Of ‘Galaxy Quest’, Never Give Up.  Never Surrender: The Intrepid Crew of the NSEA Protector, By Grabthar’s Hammer What Amazing Effects, and some deleted scenes and actor features.  It’s a movie that has been forgotten over the past ten years, but it remains as good as ever, maybe even better with time.  Pick up Galaxy Quest, it’s certainly worth it.

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      Here is a DVD I do not understand.  First of all, the idea of a “greatest hits” album for a band has always struck me as something that must be reserved for bands that have made at least four albums.  Except for Jimi Hendrix, because he was just that damn good.  And Star Trek, The Original Series is no Jimi Hendrix.  It’s pretty good, but it’s no Hendrix.  The second thing that strikes me as odd is – to whom is this Best Of DVD directed?  People are, as I understand, either INTO Star Trek in a hardcore way, or they don’t care a whit when it comes to the Shatner years.  And thirdly, when it comes to the Shatner-level Star Trek freaks, how can you possibly choose four episodes as “the best” without pissing off every single one of them?

     Well, I think I can answer at least one of those questions.  Paramount is hoping that the people who went out this weekend and saw the brand new Star Trek prequel will be newly-minted Trekkies on Tuesday, May 12th.  And they will want to run back to the classics and learn everything there is to know about the history of this fine program.  And they will want to check out something smaller and cheaper than a full First Season DVD set.  So this, and the Best Of The Next Generation DVD also being put out on Tuesday by Paramount Home Entertainment are for those people who want to dabble after seeing the big-screen story of the young Captain Kirk.

     So, on that level, I get it.  No idea how successful that will be, I suppose it depends on the success of the movie.  But as for picking the four Best Episodes, I don’t know how the Trekkies will react.  Then again, I suppose it doesn’t matter, because those Trekkies will already have picked up the superior First Season Blu-Ray set from Paramount last week, right?  Not being a Trekkie myself, I probably have a different opinion of the four Best Episodes than others.  But these are some fine ones, and I get why they were chosen. 

     The first, The City On The Edge Of Forever, sees Kirk and Spock and Dr. McCoy (it’s always those three) transported back into the 1930s, where Shatner falls in love with Joan Collins.  I get it.  I could fall in love with Joan Collins.  Well, in the late sixties, I could have.  The western clothes and scenes make this one memorable, if not a great episode.  The second one, The Trouble With Tribbles, is probably the most-talked-about, best-known episode of the Original Series, where the little furballs called Tribbles take over the Enterprise and make cute little noises and act all cute.  Trekkies still talk about Tribbles as though they were an important part of the series.  Like the Borg, or Klingons, or Federation meetings at big long tables.

     The last two episodes chosen as the Best Of are Balance of Terror and Amok Time.  Balance Of Terror sees the Romulans enter the Star Trek universe for the first time.  It’s a very good episode, where Kirk and the Enterprise do battle and play a cat-and-mouse game with a Romulan ship and captain which both closely resemble their own.  This all stems from some historic animosity between human beings and Romulans, which is never really explained at all.  But it involves a no-fly zone in some way.  I expect that the introduction of Romulans to the Star Trek universe is a pretty big deal.  Then there’s Amok Time, which involves the famous scene of Kirk and Spock fighting each other among giant styrofoam rocks.  Not as fun as the episode where Shatner fights that big green lizard, or the movie where he fights himself, but I understand this to be a Big Moment in Star Trek history.

     I will let the Trekkies comment on this post to quibble over which of these episodes deserves to be among the Best Ever.  But then, they likely won’t read this, because they will likely already own the first three seasons on DVD, and it will be a moot point.  They are ALL The Best Ever!  But for those of you who don’t know Tribbles from Troglodytes, and who have a limited vocabulary in Klingon, you might want to check out this set.  It comes out May 12th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

“Strength is irrelevant.  Resistance is futile.” 

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      The best-of DVDs of Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation come out May 12th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  I will let the Trekkie universe debate whether the four episodes selected for each disc really constitute the Greatest Hits of the respective series.  But as I said about the Original Series best-of, these discs are clearly not created for Trekkies.  Rather, they are constructed as an introduction to each series for those who have become newly-minted Trekkies after being charmed by the Star Trek movie that hit theatres this weekend.  And I expect there will be a few of those.

     The four episodes in the Orignal Series best-of introduced the Romulans for the first time, and then featured three of the quirky fun episodes where the Tribbles show up, Spock fights Kirk, and Shatner falls in love with Joan Collins in 1930s America.  The four episodes on The Next Generation best-of are a little more serious.  (Although, I think technically, there are only three episodes, since the first one is a two-parter.)  And frankly, although I am no Trekkie, I always believed that the Naked Now episode was the most talked-about episode from the Next Generation canon.  But it is not included here.  Instead, these four episodes are:

     The Best Of Both Worlds (Parts I and II).  Obviously an episode that was intended to bridge two seasons, Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) becomes assimilated by the Borg.  With all of Picard’s knowledge now being used by the Borg and their collective consciousness, the Enterprise is in real danger of being destroyed.  It’s up to (now acting) Captain Riker to find away around the defenses of the Borg, rescue Picard, and destroy the Borg ship before they take over the universe.  This is one of those episodes that I, a non-Trekkie, have heard about, and as such it must be a big one.  It has been chosen as one of the 100 greatest TV episodes, ever, by TV Guide.  The first part was the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation season three, and the second part was the first episode of season four.

     The second (or, third) episode is called Yesterday’s Enterprise, and the DVD case says it’s notable for being one of ONLY TWO episodes to feature two different versions of the Starship Enterprise.  There is some kind of inexplicable…thing…that happens…in space…I think…that creates a situation where the Enterprise C-22 meets the Enterprise D 22 years in the future.  Or the past.  Depending on whose perspective you take.  It’s a pretty weak episode, frankly, and seems to exist only to bring Denise Crosby (who plays Tasha Yar) back for one episode.  Must’ve been one episode shy on her contract. 

     WHY this one is included in the Best Of, I have no idea.  Maybe the Trekkies really care about the Only Two Episodes that feature two different versions of the Enterprise.  But the rest of us, I think, could care less.  And, as I have stated several times before, these Best Of DVDs clearly can’t be made for Trekkies.  They’re made for the rest of us.  And for me, or for the Rest Of Us, the episodes with two versions of the Starship Enterprise are meaningless.  That’s like saying it’s one of Only Four Episodes where Picard uses a blue toothbrush, or the Only Episode where Data uses the word “solipsism”.  In short, it is utterly meaningless in this context.

     The Measure Of A Man.  OK, this one I get.  Data’s emotions were a large part of Star Trek: Generations (the best part, I would say – otherwise, that movie was dreadful).  And Data (a robot…basically…) is the central character in this episode when a scientist wants to disassemble him to understand his makeup better.  Basically, this means “killing” him, and a battle over “human rights”, or “robot rights” ensues.  Data does not want to be disassambled, but he is considered to be the “property” of Starfleet.  A court battle ensues with Picard facing off against Riker.  It’s remarkably (for Star Trek) powerful and resonant.  Oh, and for the nerds – wikipedia says that this is the first appearance of the “rare ‘Interim Admiral’s Uniform’ seen only in Season Two of the Next Generation series”.  So…there you go.

     Three of the four (or, two of the three) episodes on this disc make sense to me.  But as I would say about the Original Series best-of DVD that comes out today as well, you’re better off getting the full seasons of Star Trek than a Greatest Hits DVD.  But as an introductory course to Star Trek: The Next Generation, you could certainly do worse than this collection, out May 12th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Boldly going where no man has gone before…

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   Just making this Blu-Ray set is not exactly a bold move, but it may well be a Blu-Ray set that no man has made before.  OK.  That was a pretty nerdy way to start off this review.  I feel a little like wedgying myself.  But really, let’s not kid ourselves.  Star Trek was for space-nerds, and Blu-Ray is a format for techno-nerds, and very often the two are one and the same.  So the best thing Paramount Home Entertainment could do with the first season of Star Trek, for this Blu-Ray release, is come up with some really cool but really nerdy special features and unique Blu-Ray stuff.

   And boy, did they ever.  The Original Series First Season hits Blu-Ray April 28th, and it’s darn cool.  You know, if you’re a nerd.  Of course, there are seven discs, and each one has extensive bonus features.  There are a few features that exist throughout – one the Starfleet Command special feature – acts like a sort of pop-up video feature.  Little information boxes pop up on the screen to give us the history of the Galactic Barrier, or the character bio of Gary Mitchell, or just to define ESP (in the Star Trek context, of course).  This is a pretty neat feature, for those who are interested in geeking it up over the series, but very often the explanation we get to read is virtually word-for-word the explanation being simultaneously given by the characters on the screen.

   Perhaps the coolest special feature is the “Enhanced visual effects”.  With the ANGLE button on your Blu-Ray remote, you can switch back and forth between the original effects and these new ones right in the middle of an episode when it’s available.  Basically, those old-school scenes of ships passing by planets have been totally redone to look amazing.  Where the planets used to look like blurry giant marbles, now we can see topography, mountain ranges, oceans, and so forth.  In short – they look like a real planet.  So, if you’re a die-hard old-school fan who wants to see only the original series as was originally intended, you can do that.  And if you’re willing to flip over to the enhanced visual features, you can actually see the show look really good.

   Of course, this Blu-Ray release, and the upcoming Star Trek movie releases (keep checking, they are coming out just about every week for the next month) are timed to coincide with the theatrical release of the Star Trek prequel.  And, of course, there is a trailer for that prequel on this set.  I can’t remember ever commenting on a trailer as a DVD special feature before, but this one bears mentioning.  Watching the trailer, and then the original series, the connection between the two is tenuous at best, it seems.  Even with the enhanced visual effects, the production values on the original series are less than spectacular.  They look great in Blu-Ray, but the sets still look cheap and cheesy.

   That being said, this upcoming Star Trek movie looks like it’s going to be pretty awesome.  And watching the Original Series in High-Def is pretty awesome.  From the first episode on, (“The Man Trap”, where they started killing off nameless ensigns awfully quickly), the series is solid but it’s the Blu-Ray disc and the features that are the real story here.  It’s a set only for people with Blu-Ray and people who are massive Star Trek geeks.  But what massive Star Trek geek doesn’t yet have a Blu-Ray player?

“You should really let me go.” 

   There are some movie roles Keanu Reeves was born to play.  Like a robot.  Or a soulless killing machine.  Or a sequioa.  When he took his first acting class, and the drama teacher did that excercise where everyone pretends they are a tree, he figured he was done, and he never progressed past that moment.  So he is now very well suited to playing trees, or robots.  And this is the biggest problem with Klaatu, the character Reeves is playing in the remake of the classic Sci-Fi movie The Day The Earth Stood Still.  Reeves apparently believes that his character is a robot.  Or someone told him that Klaatu is a robot.  Or, at the very least, a terminator-like cyborg, able to replicate the most basic of human expression.

   But Klaatu, unfortunately, is not a robot.  He is an alien.  And he has come to Earth to save the planet from the people who are making it uninhabitable.  (Which is a great message for a movie, by the way.  I like that, at least.)  While here on Earth, he meets other members of the alien race to which he belongs, creatures who have, like him, taken human form in order to live amongst us human beings.  And they are emotional beings.  They speak of their love for the human race, and of their joy and elation at the fact that they have been able to live an entire life as one of us.  And Klaatu stares blankly and then moves on with his task.  Eventually, the movie’s resolution will revolve around his own personal emotions, and whether he too has found enough love for the human race to save us from ourselves.  (I won’t ruin it by telling you whether or not this happens.)

   But in what should be a scene filled with emotional crisis, a heart-wrenching decision to end the film, becomes a decidedly uninteresting, totally nonchalant decision on the part of Klaatu, because Reeves still seems to believe he is a robot.  Outside Reeves, however, the movie for the most part is decent.  Jennifer Connelly is reasonably good as a scientist of some kind who gets recruited for some kind of mission because there is some kind of unknown menace threatening the Earth.  It is all very vague.  In the end, it doesn’t matter what kind of scientist she is, because she never makes use of her scientific skills in any way.  It doesn’t matter why the government recruited her for this mission, because she is quickly on the run with Klaatu.  Basically she exists as a device that will hopefully convince Reeves that humanity is worth saving.

   And the main way she is supposed to do this, I suppose, is through her little son Jacob, played by Will Smith’s son Jaden, last seen playing in a movie with his father in The Pursuit of Happyness.  In this film, he is one of the most irritating kids in movie history.  He constantly fights his mother.  He hates the alien and wants the government to catch him.  He complains incessantly, and does that little-kid movie-cliche thing where he is constantly talking about his dead father, and what his real father would have done if he were here today.  And when he isn’t talking about his father, it’s OK because all the other characters are talking about him.  He misses the man, you see.  And let us never forget it.

   The main thing The Day The Earth Stood Still has going for it are some pretty neat special effects, specifically a big swarm-of-locusts thing they do.  But that alone isn’t enough to make up for the shortcomings in the script.  For a movie that is ostensibly about the End Of Days, and the environmental apocalypse that we human beings have visited upon ourselves, there is an awful lot of tried-and-true movie moments.  The great Kathy Bates is badly used as the American Secretary of State, who represents the President and tries to do everything she can to thwart the intentions of this alien being.  For no good reason, other than the fact that this is what government officials do in movies.  They try to destroy everything they don’t understand.

   I know, we just came out of the world of the Bush administration, and this doesn’t exactly strain credulity.  But imagine an alien being emerging from a spaceship that lands in Central Park, and asking to speak to world leaders.  We all know Bush didn’t like talking to his “enemies”, but I think even he would meet with an alien if it asked for him by name.  Would he really have sent Condoleeza Rice to deal with it for him?  I don’t know.  Maybe he would.  I’m just glad no aliens landed before January 27th, so we never had to find out.

   The Day The Earth Stood Still is not a horrible movie, and I feel like I’ve been ragging on it perhaps a little too much.  But it just isn’t memorable, it isn’t very interesting, and I am really struggling to find nice things to say about it.  John Cleese is good in his two-minute cameo…the giant alien robot thing is kinda cool…my girlfriend liked it…that’s about all I’ve got.  And I’ve been trying not to compare this movie with the 1951 original, but it’s tough because that movie was a superior effort.  This film is average at best.