Why the new Star Trek is more consistent than you may think - and the parts where it dives into the deep end of crazy

I caught Star Trek: Into Darkness Friday night and it was a real fun movie to watch. Like it's predecessor its more of a spiritual successor to the franchise, lacking some of the grace and philosophical introspection Trek has sometimes been known for in the past. Like Trek in general (and the first Abram's movie in specific) it's full of pseudo-science, science gaffs, and some occasional plot holes you could pilot the Enterprise through. It has an early reference to a "cold fusion bomb" that was such a bad choice of name for the actual device they deployed that I felt like the screenwriters were deliberately screwing with us, for example.

I'll take a moment here to give you my grade on this movie before the spoiler-laden rants below: A solid A+ for general enjoyment, with a C+ for coherence; to contrast with the 2009 Trek film, I'd have given that an A+ for fun and a D for coherence. So in some regards this film is an improvement. I'd also add this caveat: if you are a hardcore Trekkie, the kind who is bothered about why the new movies don't properly emulate the look and feel of the tech from the 1967 series, then you probably already know you hate this movie but that's okay because it's not really for you. It's for Trekkies like me who feel that the rigid adherence to canon had made Trek a wallowing mass of nonsensical contradictions over the years, have accepted that fact, and moved on.

Spoilers ahead, just a warning!

Despite all this, there's an interesting internal coherence going on in the movie that is surprisingly decent, although it may not seem so to non-Trekkies unfamiliar with some of the tenets of the franchise universe, or hardcore Trekkies blinded by the trees and thus missing the forest. For example, in the first Trek movie in the new universe we saw most of Earth's armada devastated by Nero's planetcracker while it was destroying Vulcan. Cut to three years later, roughly, and we find that Earth's fleet is nowhere near up to speed, and a lot of private or hidden resources are being sucked into a defense program to build a Dreadnaught, all at the direction of the Grand Admiral himself. So when, at the film's end, we see that same dreadnaught fighting the Enterprise, some people have wondered where the hell Starfleet's other local ships were. The short answer: the Admiral probably ordered everyone away, to give him breathing room to polish off the Enterprise. Later, when the dreadnaught is piloted by Khan and plows into San Francisco, it's probably not shot down precisely because the ship has all of the Grand Admiral's "stand down and ignore us" protocols in effect.

Now, it's the movie's fault for not at least tacitly addressing this (a simple scene in which Admiral Marcus tells Earth's defense forces to stand down would have sufficed) but it makes sense to me in the context of what happened. A second explanation is that this dreadnaught is pretty tough, and no amount of planetary defenses would have sufficed to take it down. A third, and even likelier option which is implied by the movie's own story is that Earth doesn't really have a very weaponized defense force....given that the flagship of the fleet, the Enterprise, is rendered to swiss cheese by the dreadnaught, I have to say that makes a lot of sense. What we're seeing here is a weird mix of the conventional technology of the Enterprise vs. an unholy union of the pre-war tech info brought to the table by Khan, plus the scanned future-tech taken from Nero's ship in the last movie. The fact that they made this new vessel reminiscent of a mix of Enterprise D and E just made it even more interesting.

So why the advanced technology? This is all way beyond the TOS era tech from the original era, right? This technically was already answered by the film makers, who indicated that the presumption was that in the first movie Nero's ship was scanned and details recorded, opening up Starfleet's eyes to a wide range of technological options not previously imagined. I, however, would suggest a different (or amended) answer, which hinges on the whole time travel element: this isn't really even the same universe rewound; Spock and Nero from the first movie slipped backwards and sideways in time, to a slightly different universe, one with slightly different laws of reality and history that extend well beyond the scope of the original series.

Transporters work differently in this Trek. Seriously, they do; aside from the visuals, which actually imply people being surrounded by an array of circulating particles rather than just being disintegrated, transporters seem to be a lot more fidgety, and have trouble picking people up if a bug is walking on them, or there's atmospheric trouble, or any number of other issues. Simultaneously, a very specific portable device (the Scotty super-transporter) can transport a target light years and even his a moving target in Warp. Is this inconsistent? I have a hard time working this one out, and my gut tells me that the problem here is screenwriters who went for Rule of Cool first and "this will mess with our universe's implied assumptions" ended up ignored.

If, however, I try to apply some logic to the way transporters work (and fail to work) I arrive at the conclusion that it's a suggestion that the technology works very differently in certain key ways from the way it worked in Old Trek. I'd postulate it's using some sort of strange quantum entanglement to get the job done, and that the device is "repopulating" the target at a new destination rather than its current location. This becomes trivially easy to do when you know the speed and distance of a target, but something as simple as a ladybug in your hair could screw things up, because now you have another observer and a whole bunch of additional variables to account for. Something like that? Ah, I got nuthin' on this one.

At least they acknowledged the staggering significance of Scotty's transwarp teleporter device as a distinct thing in this movie, being sequestered away by Section 31 for weaponization.

Another thing that I find head-scratching is the whole "Qo's'Nos" (alias Chronos) event. There are a lot of things we can interpret from the event in which the Enterprise warps to the Klingon Homeworld, as follows:

First, the klingons appear to have already destroyed Praxis. Notice in the one space scene with the disintegrating moon in the background? Now, in the implied new history Nero supposedly was captured by klingons and locked away in Rura Pente for twenty odd years before being freed, and after his escape he destroyed the prison world....but going by Star Trek VI Rura Pente was not a  moon in the Klingon system, best as I could tell. This means that Praxis was already mined out and blew up, a couple decades early. This help explains the next issues.

Second, the klingons have a lousy detection grid around their homeworld. Maybe they used to have one but Praxis blowing up fried it. Maybe Chronos (because I refuse to keep retyping the klingon spelling) has been thoroughly mined out and is now effectively a slum planet, and the bulk of the klingon interests have shifted to other worlds, and resources along with it. Maybe they just aren't as technologically advanced. Remember, in Trek VI the Enterprise-A slipped through the neutral zone and only got picked up by a listening post with a very bored guard. The newer Enterprise (which, as I'll discuss below, moves a lot faster) might have just gotten lucky, or been using coordinates provided by Admiral Marcus which was a known dead zone in Klingon monitoring posts. So this doesn't bug me so much.

Finally, klingons do appear to have effective sensor shielding, and maybe even stealth tech by now, given that the Romulans are out there selling arms to the klingons. As such, even if we didn't see the klingon defense ships in stealth mode its reasonable to assume they had either sensor-defeating stealth tech or actual romulan stealth tech that kept them from being picked up by the Enterprise's sensors. As for the intel that they acted on (that the sector on Chronos was abandoned)...nothing in that scene suggests that info was fresh, and assuming Starfleet got that info from its own stealth probes, could be a bit out of date anyway. So this seems like a problem on the surface that goes away quickly.

Now, a quick bit about Khan. Why did Admiral Marcus think finding a sleeper ship of genetically enhanced humans from the eugenics wars was a good idea? This seems like a no-brainer, although it relies a bit on the assumption that this universe is a retcon timeline: Khan and his people were true super soldiers, genetically engineered not just to be the smartest and most cunning leaders of the world (as the TOS Khan was) but to be true killers and super men. Admiral Marcus realized that in the current era humankind was made of survivors that had operated under a clause of nonviolence and peace for more than 150 years now, and that he needed someone who was a product of the tumultuous and vague wars which wiped out most of Earth from the old days to help him conceive of what could be done with the weapon's technology stolen from Nero's ship.

The movie obliquely references Khan's origins as being from roughly 300 years ago, without being specific (i.e. 1996), and this is a younger less factually-focused crew, so it would be nice if the new Trek universe was one which held even less certainty about exactly when and how everything went down in Earth's past, including exactly when the so-called Eugenics Wars happened. Call me a fool of a Trekkie but I still like the idea that Trek postulates a potential future history that spins off from out own, rather than one which spins off from 1967's conception of such. The scene where Khan kicks the crap out of a small army of klingons lends credence to this whole notion.

The bit where Kirk calls up Scotty? Not an issue. The only reason we didn't see more of that in TOS and the old movies was that we didn't have cell phones back then. Other than that, Kirk and crew took plenty of direct phone calls across vast distances, just usually sitting down in front of a vidscreen. Trek has had a long and established history of instantaneous communication, and this is just the new series continuing the trend in a way more modern and familiar to us.

Some of my unanswerables:

1. Why did Khan hide his crew in torpedoes? What possible benefit did he think could come of this action? Did these torpedoes have such a small payload that they had that much room in them, making the idea seem sensible, or did Spock, toward the end of the movie, have to add in explosive charges to the torpedoes as well after removing their stasis-tube contents? I do not feel the movie explained Khan's actions on this, or the full nature of the torpedoes well enough here.

2. What the hell is a Cold Fusion Bomb and why would they call it that? What that bomb did was more of a energy-sapping device.

3. The entire "Enterprise hidden under water" scene struck me as 100% Rule of Cool and not at all feasible. Assuming the Enterprise can sustain itself under water (I reasonably expect it could) I still question why parking it there made any sense. Also, why were Kirk and McCoy faffing around in the alien temple in the first place? WHY???? I assume it was to provide a distraction from the shuttle gliding into the volcano's mouth.....but....still.

4. So they know Khan's blood can regenerate dead tissue. There are 72 additional supermen in the ship's hold that can be used as well, right? Well, I do have a partial answer for this, as follows: McCoy determined that it was only Khan's blood which would do; his other genetically enhanced followers weren't subject to the same level of modification he was. Given that in Khan's TOS and Trek II appearances his people were all closer to sheep and cult followers than genetic supermen like himself, this makes sense to me. It would also explain why Admiral Marcus left them in cold sleep rather than wake them up, because they were more useful as bargaining chips than actual agents of Section 31. That said, my real question is: WHY DOES KHAN'S BLOOD REGENERATE DEAD TISSUE....including radiated tissue? WHY?!?!?!?

5. When the Enterprise starts to fall into Earth orbit, I can't help but notice that that entire scene started closer to the Moon, but rapidly seemed to move closer to Earth, despite the fact that neither vessel was under power. This is an example of Sci Fi authors have no sense of scale. Another example: the fact that as best I can tell it took the Enterprise maybe 20 minutes to get from Earth to Chronos. Even assuming that this timeline's ships had benefited from improved warp technology thanks to Nero polluting the timeline, that's very damned fast.

6. More evidence this is an alternate universe and not just a timeline reboot: Carol Marcus was a weapon's researcher and not the much more green-friendly physicist she was in TOS.

7. Is it just me, or do Trek shuttles still not have a proper airlock?

Hey look someone got some Dead Space in my Star Trek

Thirty One Days of Horror: Pandorum

Day Seven: Pandorum

If yesterday's spin-off theme from Resident Evil was Milla, today's spin-off theme is for her husband, Paul W.S. Anderson, for his work on Pandorum. Specifically, Paul was a producer on this movie, which was written by Travis Milloy and Christian Alvert. So the secret to a good story when Paul is around is to let him direct or produce or something....but leave the keyboard alone.

Here's the deal with Pandorum: every now and then I get to watch a film where I think to myself, "Boy, I wish I'd seen this when it first came out, in the theaters." Pandorum is that film for me.

Here's the plot in a nutshell, and you'll understand just why I'm so taken with this movie: Corporal Bower (Ben Foster) is the ship engineer on flight team five, assigned to wake up on a steady two-year rotation with a number of other flight teams who man the immense colony ship Pandorum, the last such ship to leave Earth before...something bad happens. He wakes up disoriented and with amnesia from the cold sleep process. He's sure of only one thing: something isn't right with the ship. It's power is fluctuating, and mostly out; the reactor's surging like its about to go critical, and an automated system tripped his awakening as a last ditch fix. Then his superior, Lt. Payton (Dennis Quaid) who is also suffering disorientation and amnesia, awakens. Together they try to figure out how to get out of the shut-down section of the ship they're in, figure out what's happened, where the last flight crew went, and why the engines are about to melt down.

So at this point, if you haven't seen the movie yet telling you any more would be very, very bad of me, so I'm not going to say any more than that. I will say this much: the trailers for this film did a good job of not selling the movie, because I don't remember this film looking all that exciting before. I was interested, but in the end I figured, "Eh, probably another Super Nova-style Alien rip-off." Oh could I have been any more wrong?

This movie reminds me of Brian Aldiss's Starship, or Eric Brown's Helix (for a more modern reference). It reminds me of a lot of grim world-ship adventures gone horribly, horribly wrong and despite being science fiction (and really, surprisingly good science fiction at that) it is also a great horror film.



If you want to see a movie that will inspire you to play Metamorphosis Alpha, or provide a wealth of visual inspiration for your next weird GURPS or BRP sci fi extravaganza, this movie has it in spades. It's got great sets, effects, and even acting. It's got very few holes that I could easily identify, though a few do pop up...but nothing so specific that I was left scratching my head in disbelief.

So how good was it? Well, I really want to see the hypothetical sequel (or prequel) now. It's good enough that when I read some other film critic snubbing it I want to point out that bashing a good film like this is why we don't get more..well...good films like this anymore.

Don't get me wrong, it's not perfect. This movie wallows in the deep pits of action, horror and suspense. Pandorum is not a film dramatizing the adventures of Priscilla Hutchins, to take a random example of a series I'd desperately love to see on film. But for Hollywood? This stuff is surprisingly good for the horror-sf genre. Straight A from the Death Bat!

Thirty One Days of Horror: Resident Evil - Extinction

Day Four: Resident Evil: Extinction

2007 demonstrated that you could take an established franchise and carry it in a direction that the IP holders probably never imagined. The third movie in the Resident Evil franchise starts by dispensing with more or less the entire body of canon which the two previous films had paid some measure of lip service to. It’s four years later and the world is a bloody shambles, as the T-Virus has decimated plant and animal life across the globe, stolen our water and apparently turned everyone except for Umbrella execs, faceless goons and a handful of survivors into endless hordes of zombies. Umbrella has some operation in the undefined Midwest out of which their resident mad scientist is trying to replicate the creation of a new Alice, whom he can use to synthesize some sort of serum from her blood, but for some reason he’s obsessed with running her through a gauntlet of traps inspired by specific memories of her experiences from the first movie. Meanwhile Alice is on the run, and her destiny as usual is about to converge with some hapless survivors, some of whom made it to the end of the second movie.

Here’s the weird thing about RE: Extinction: as a “movie based on the game” goes, it’s terrible, unless you said that game was Fallout 3, in which case I’d say, “yeah, I can see it.” But as apocalyptic zombie horror flicks go, this one’s not half bad. If they could just jettison the Resident Evil universe baggage, this movie could almost stand on its own as a fun post-apocalyptic romp with zombies.

There are problems, of course. Alice is a super-heroic horror hero with supernatural abilities ranging from amazing wire-fu prowess to randomly functioning psionics that do whatever looks cool on screen or the plot calls for. She’s almost completely gone Mary Sue by now, though the formal transition doesn’t fully happen until the end of the movie.

The movie continues with the pretense of being somehow related to its source IP by naming one character Claire Redfield (played by Jodie Foster kinda-lookalike Ali Larter) even as Umbrella Corp. remains the Big Bad. Wesker appears for the first time in a notable way, as the behind-the-scenes exec who is pulling the strings. The fact that they even bother to puppeteer these characters on stage as if they bear any relationship to their in-game counterparts is amazing. This movie only makes canonical sense if you try to imagine it as a super divergent extreme in GURPS Infinite Worlds, behind multiple other divergent realities from “RE baseline.” If you look at it like that, this reality is Alice 6+n or something.

Okay, so if you take this film for what it is: a post-apocalyptic zombie flick that pretends it has ties to another IP entirely, does it work? Short answer yes, but with caveats. Long answer: yes, and then you get to the end.

The movie holds its own well, and the special effects are really decent this time around (zombies are starting to look good here). The plot is basic survival but done reasonably well. The underlying premise (of a promised land) has been done better in other movies (notably in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) but that aside it holds fairly well here. Someone should explain to Anderson and co. that helicopters aren’t usually known for flying vast distances (i.e. across half the country…or to Alaska), though. Well, it’s the future. Maybe they’re running on unobtanium or something. Umbrella seems to have a lot of it lying around (more in a minute on that).

So the movie holds well until Alice gets to the end of the road and seeks to shut down the Umbrella operation that’s been cloning her for experiments. A few weird things happen that just totally derails this film at the end, although not in a “what the hell I can’t enjoy this” sort of way, but more like a “Gee I guess they didn’t really want to do a sequel, eh?” kind of way. Also, a “what the hell is that and why isn’t it more important than all this T-Virus crap?!?!?” sort of way. Specifically:

Clones Clones Clones: at the end of the movie we know Alice is being cloned so they can develop a serum that makes zombies more obedient, although the mad scientist figures out it makes them more aggressive and cunning instead. Then a new AI pops in and informs Alice that her blood holds the cure, possibly, to the whole mess. Okay….typical Hollywood “blood is a serum” approach to Science. I can deal with it.

Then, toward the end, Alice discovers that they aren’t just cloning her a bit, they’ve got a veritable warehouse full of her clones. We’re at the end of the line, and the entire world is starting to look like its going to be populated by only three types of creature now: Alice clones, black-suited Umbrella goons, and zombies. Ay yi yi brain hurts!!!!!

Then a bit of “fridge logic” hits as well, albeit for me it hit while watching: each Alice clone is nurtured in a circular orb of water held together by some sort of projecting force field. Cool, sure. Typical throw-away special effect, I imagine.

Now just consider for a moment what we’re looking at here: not only have Umbrella perfected human cloning, the T-Virus, holographic technology and artificial intelligence, they have also invented some sort of gravity/force controlling projector. Holy crap. They’re so busy unleashing a zombie apocalypse nobody bothered to notice Dept. 13D down the hall had just discovered how to manipulate time, space and gravity....and Dr. Bozo co-opts it for his little sick clone-torturing experiments.

So Umbrella is basically a giant slush organization for mad scientists, and it just so happens that they got a bit carried away with the ones who made a mutagenic zombie-generating, monster-making virus before the guy with the power to control gravity and matter could show them what he had going along with its many world-destroying applications. Gotcha.

The only thing more bizarre than how this film ends is how the sequel starts…hint: it does not start with an army of force-field wielding Alice clones spreading the blood-cure across America. 

Anyway, I give this movie a A- right up until the end, when it goes so far off the rails I can’t even see what letter it earned. Maybe a “W” for “WTF?!?!?”

Next Up: Resident Evil - Retribution Review