The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: Star Trek: Generations (1994), directed by David Carson

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - "Alphabet Song" by Captain Picard

       In 1979, after a cavalcade of enthusiastic support, merchandise sales and homoerotic fanfiction from a legion of fans, Gene Roddenberry was finally able to finagle a deal with Paramount Pictures to bring his science fiction program known as Star Trek to the silver screen. Entitled Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the film would see the return of James Tiberius Kirk, Mister Spock and the rest of the cast to the bridge of the USS Enterprise for the first time in a decade, going where no man had ever gone before in a way that would have been impossible on a TV show’s budget. While several points of criticism were launched against the film when it released, such as a lack of action set pieces in favor of special effects showcases (Star Wars had come out two years prior and had quickly become the benchmark by which all films were judged), that grassroots support ultimately helped to make Star Trek: The Motion Picture quite lucrative at the box office, earning 139 million dollars over a 44 million dollar budget. In case you’re still confused about why WB signed off on the Snyder Cut horseshit, it’s not without precedent or intent.

       The success of Star Trek: The Motion Picture naturally led to a string of sequels, all of which proved to be relatively successful and none of which involved Gene Roddenberry in any meaningful way. Still, being the creator of a multi-million dollar franchise does earn you a bit of clout in the industry, and after years of workshopping ideas and casting out nets ol’ Gene was finally able to finagle a deal for a new TV show. Dubbed Star Trek: The Next Generation, the show started up around a century after the events of the original series, featuring a new cast and crew traveling on a new Enterprise, exploring a galaxy that would have been strange yet familiar to any old Trekker that stumbled across it. While initially a bit shaky, part of which can be blamed on Gene himself, once it hit syndication TNG proved to be an overwhelming triumph for the little cult sci-fi show that could; Running for seven seasons (four more than the original series had managed to do) and spawning two long-running spin-off shows in Deep Space 9 and Voyager, as well as comics, video games, novels and so on. For a good many people, myself included, The Next Generation was their introduction to Star Trek as a concept, their Star Trek, which is why CBS and Paramount’s general abandon of that part of the franchise in favor of rebooting, revisiting and rewriting the original series over the last couple years has been particularly tedious. Except for Picard that is, although judging from the reviews it seems that we were better off forgotten.

       Given the fortune that the original Star Trek had at the cinema, it’s only logical to assume that The Next Generation, once it gained steam, would also make the trip to the cinema. Which it did, several times in fact. It would also be logical to assume that, having spent the better part of a decade covering the six TOS Star Trek movies, that I would then move on to the TNG era films. Which I am, and here we are. Unfortunately this does mean we’ll be out of sync with the Apes films in the end, but I wasn’t about to watch Tim Burton’s attempt at Planet of the Apes just for the sake of synchronicity. Life goes on.

       Released in 1994, Star Trek: Generations was written by Rick Berman, Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga (all major creative figures in the TNG era) and directed by David Carson, produced by Rick Berman through Paramount. After a five year mission and saving the Federation a half dozen times Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner) is now officially retired, which would be fine if he had a family or any life outside of his service to Starfleet, but that was taken care of back in Star Trek III. While on a publicity tour with the newly christened USS Enterprise-B, the ship receives a distress call from two civilian transport ships who have been caught in the wake of some sort of bizarre energy ribbons, the gravimetric pressure being too great for their systems to handle. Despite a severe lack of equipment and manpower, the Enterprise-B not yet fitted for active duty, Kirk’s leadership allows them to rescue at least a portion of the survivors, including a rather desperate man played by Malcolm McDowell, which tells you right away that he’s probably the villain. While attempting to escape the pull of the ribbon however, the ship is struck by a wave of energy, breaching the hull and heavily damaging several decks, including the one that Kirk was on at the time. His body is never found.

       Seventy eight years later the Enterprise-D, lead by Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) receives a distress call from a remote starbase that has been attacked for some reason. On that base is one Doctor Tolian Soran, the same guy that was rescued all those years ago, as well as some dead Romulans. Seems that the Romulans caught wind of a trilithium in the area, a substance capable of killing stars, although such a material has heretofore been impossible to manufacture in any significant capacity. Except Soran totally is the bad guy and did make trilithium, and he’s teamed up with some renegade Klingons to boot. We can easily guess what use the Klingons would have for such a horrific weapon, but what of Soran? What does he stand to gain in such a deal, and how does it connect to that bizarre ribbon of energy all those years ago, now known as the Nexus? And what about all these subplots? You’re gonna have to watch and find out.

       The first thing that came to mind when I was watching Generations was how much I enjoy the look of cinematic Star Trek. Part of that is the special effects of course, scenes like the dying stars or the Enterprise-D crash-landing on Viridian-3 looking far beyond what was possible for any science fiction television show at the time, but honestly a lot of it has to do with the cinematography. Even from the time of The Motion Picture the films have had this more natural setting that made the universe of Star Trek feel more real, as opposed to the technicolor TOS and fluorescent TNG. Generally speaking Generations is no exception to that rule, flashy where it counts but otherwise impeccable, aside from David Carson’s apparent predilection for piss yellow lighting cropping up several times over the course of the film, which when combined with shadowy setting really does not look good. It comes across like you’re watching the film while wearing those big rim sunglasses that people wore in the 70’s, or playing one of those FMV computer games from back in the day.

       As someone who cut their teeth on The Next Generation I will say it’s nice to see the crew of my Enterprise together again, even if most of the attention is split between Picard, bartender/mysterious alien Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) and my favorite character Data (Brent Spiner), whose consistent struggle with his newly installed emotion chip serves as the main source of humour in the film. Malcolm McDowell puts in his usual good work, even if Soran as an antagonist is unremarkable. I even find William Shatner tolerable here, even though I found his smarmy interpretation of the character in the later TOS films to be almost an insult. Before I started these films I had heard that some of the actors phoned it in for the movies, particularly Marina Sirtis, but for their first shot at bat I think everyone put in a good day’s work.

       Speaking of films though, one of Generation’s big problems is that it doesn’t feel like a movie. This is probably a given, but when you get a bunch of people who write for TV to write a movie, the movie is inevitably going to feel like a TV show. It starts off normally, but once we get into the TNG era the tropes start to interject themselves. Picard’s stardate monologues, the A and B plots that are wrapped up by the end, even the Trek staple outdoor scene that takes place on a rocky outcropping. This might not seem like a bad thing, TNG made for some great TV after all, yet in spite of having almost two hours to flesh this formula the film feels very ephemeral. As I said earlier Soran is incredibly underwhelming as an antagonist, the aliens who loved whales back in Star Trek IV were more compelling, and despite developing the most powerful weapon of mass destruction in the series history is basically an afterthought used to move the plot. Data’s plot, which is meant to be a capstone moment for his entire character arc, is mainly used for joke fodder and the one moment it does have an impact in the story it’s resolved within minutes. Picard’s plot, revolving around the death of his nephew and his family legacy, is treated somewhat better but it’s also rather subdued and only really comes into play like twice in the film, which admittedly is more attention than Kirk’s son has gotten in the last two movies. I mean it’s not out of character for Picard to bottle emotions like that but it really feels like that should have been more of the focus than it was, especially when the true nature of the Nexus is revealed, which is yet another thing that feels like it we barely got time with. It’s like I’m not allowed to relax and think in this movie, I’m constantly being pushed along to the next scene and the next bit of dialogue. Something that I don’t think came up across TNG’s several two-parters, despite those being about the same length of time as a feature film.

       I also question the decision to place Generations deep into TNG continuity. Usually when you’re adapting a TV show, or anything really, to the screen you go into it under the assumption that the person watching it has never heard of this thing before. It’s why half of all superhero movies ever made have been origin stories or featured something related to the origin. Which isn’t to say Generations should have been a TNG prequel or anything, but scenes like Worf being promoted or Data installing the emotion chip are things which only have emotional impact if you’ve been watching the show and knew these characters. Although to be honest it feels like they fucked over Data’s character to shove in that emotion chip plotline anyway, dude’s run the gamut of human experiences but he suddenly doesn’t understand humor, so they were better off nixing it entirely. The TOS films took place after the show but it still gave you time to understand the characters before they started to change things up too much. TNG doesn't get that same courtesy, and I think the film suffers for it.

       Then there’s Kirk. Now listen, I understand how important Kirk was to the popularity and sustainability of the Star Trek franchise, but after 6 movies I’m tired of Captain Kirk. Maybe someone thought that bringing Shatner in would help ease moviegoers in, but fuck that; TNG was coming off a seven year run as one of the most successful science fiction shows in the world at the time, they earned their place in the spotlight and they didn’t need to share it with the guy from The Devil’s Rain. Some people might point out that Leonard Nimoy, James Doohan and DeForest Kelly had made guest appearances on TNG, but I would argue that those episodes always celebrated the past while promoting the future. Kirk’s screen time in Generations mainly centers around people falling over themselves to extoll the greatness of James Kirk. The idea of the two captains of the Enterprise meeting sounds good on paper, but in practice this meeting of equals consists of Kirk throwing around smarmy one-liners and Picard being treated like a chump who can’t do anything on his own. While he redeems himself somewhat at the finale, the character was better served taking the bow with the rest of the crew in Star Trek VI. Or, if they were dead set on ruining the ‘one last ride’ theme of ST6 they should’ve just bit the bullet and brought back the entire crew. Enterprise meets Enterprise sounds way cooler than just captain meets captain, would have felt like a proper passing of the torch from one era of Trek films to another, rather than an excuse to blow smoke up William Shatner’s ass.

       Watching Star Trek: Generations is like reading the abridged version of a novel. What you see might be interesting, but you can’t escape the feeling that you’re missing some important chunks of the story. Given the reputation of the TNG films though I was expecting a lot worse, and while I would have preferred a more solid first outing for my favorite Trek, I would still take this over Star Trek V. Star Trek: Generations gets the recommendation, although those who aren’t already fans of Star Trek or The Next Generation will likely find little reason to bother with the film this Halloween.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019:Tank Girl (1995), directed by Rachel Talalay

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Boys Wanna Be Her", by Peaches

       I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The 1990’s and early 2000’s were the best time for comic book movies. Sure, you didn’t have Marvel churning out some new crap every couple of months, in fact Marvel was practically dead in the water around this time, but it was also a time where you could actually see a movie based on a comic book that wasn’t just from Marvel or DC. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Crow, American Splendor, Men in Black... Some of them might not have been quite up to snuff, although who doesn’t love John Leguizamo as a fat demon clown, but at the same time it’s nice to see some degree of separation from the superhero status quo that we’ve been subjected to for about a decade, because it gave comic books fans some hope that comic books were finally being recognized as a storytelling medium worthy of adaptation like novels and plays. The possibilities were endless; Love & Rockets: The Movie, an Elfquest trilogy, Sam and Max Do America. What a time to be alive, if you only focused on that and not all that other horrible shit that going on in the world at the time. 

Released in 1995 under United Artists and directed by Rachel Talalay, whose previous directing credits include Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare and Ghost in the Machine, which probably doesn’t feature Sting at all, Tank Girl was based on the British comic series/character of the same name created by Alan and Jamie Hewlett, the same Jamie Hewlett who would later go on to international acclaim with his co-creating of Gorillaz with Damon Albarn. The film takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth (destroyed by a comet passing over us turns out, and not any of the several other ways we’ll all be dead by 2033), where the control of water means power, so much so that even the local fascistic empire decided to name themselves after the idea. Lori Petty stars as ‘Rebecca’ (she is never referred to once as Tank Girl, always a great sign of things to come), an often drunk and very disorderly woman who’s just trying to eke out a living hanging out with her friends, scrounging for supplies, and avoiding both the forces of Water & Power and the Rippers, a mysterious band of killer mutants that have no love for the remnants of the human race. However that meager existence is forever altered when Water & Power raid their little hideout, killing Rebecca’s friends and enslaving her to do vaguely defined slave labor. Which, unbeknownst to Water & Power and its devious leader Kesslee (Malcolm McDowell), might have been the wrong move, as Rebecca is completely uninterested in the slavish lifestyle, like violently so. Plus there’s a tank right there so...yeah she’s just gonna leave.

Featuring Ice-T as a talking kangaroo man.

Alright, let’s start with what I liked about the film. I think they made a good choice with casting Lori Petty, as she’s got the look of Tank Girl down pat, and I don’t know if there’s anyone around at the time who could have done it better. I like the soundtrack, consisting of some of the best alternative butt rock of the time, including Bush, L7 and Veruca Salt. The two animated sequences in the film were also a real treat, as well as the abundance of art from the comics the film used as well. Honestly makes me wish we had gotten a Tank Girl animated series, in the vein of MTV’s The Maxx or HBO’s Spawn.

       As for what I didn’t like about the movie...well that was pretty much everything else. Now I wouldn’t call myself a Tank Girl superfan or anything, but I have read a few issues, and to me the world of Tank Girl was a combination of Mad Max, Tex Avery and an Ed Roth painting. Dirty, anarchic, rife with social commentary, all wrapped up in classic Sex Pistol chic, and Tank Girl was the poster child of that world. The OG riot grrl, an amoral, hedonistic punk who got her daily dose of id satisfaction through wanton acts of  extreme violence and debauchery (intended or otherwise). The kind of woman you’d think you’d want having your back in a bar fight, because she takes no one’s shit and dishes it out twice as hard, but chances are she’d kick your ass too after she ran out of whiskey. Maybe not the most nuanced character ever written, but a perfect fit for the leather and chains, chaotic neutral comic book scene of the late 80s through the mid 90s. 

       Tank Girl the movie is not that, although it tries to be. It tries to craft this gritty dieselpunk world by showing a lot of sand and industrial equipment, but there’s no grit! In this fucked-to-death scrap of dust where the most common career path is ‘dessicated corpse’ and water is such a limited resource that the bad guys literally invented a killing machine that sucks it out of people, everything feels so clean and plasticine, like ten feet away they're filming an episode of Star Trek. It’s the same with Lori Petty, who despite some slight glimpses of TG generally comes across as goofy child than a badass rebel icon. In many ways it reminds me of The Mask, which began life as a gritty, ultra-violent comic book that was then transformed into cartoony, PG-13 fare for the silver screen, including the now dated cultural references and shoehorned in musical number. Except that movie worked thanks to them getting Jim Carrey, and Tank Girl doesn’t thanks to them getting Ice-T dressed up as a kangaroo man.

       The pacing is also rather bad. The movie is about an hour and forty-three minutes long, and it feels like 15 hours before Tank Girl actually actually touches a fucking tank, so they’ve got to shove the rest of the movie into what’s left. Then when she actually becomes Tank Girl the movie poops its pants in confusion at how to fill the rest of the time. We get an ‘infiltrate the club to get the MacGuffin’ scene, a dress-up montage, a huge song and dance number, and then the MacGuffin is immediately retaken, rendering the whole sequence completely pointless. Then suddenly TG and Jet (haven’t mentioned her yet, basically she’s the live-action version of the shy girl in every anime you’ve ever seen and I guess the deuteragonist but she’s barely relevant) are looking for the Rippers to build an army, then a cut, and then the next scene they find them. The whole thing really needed another go round on the cutting room floor, although I’m not sure it got the first pass, considering the fact that during the climactic fight scene at the end they couldn’t even edit out those wires actors use to leap higher.

       Also, this might be a personal thing, but I fucking hate the Rippers. They’re supposed to be kangaroos but they look like the Who’s from the live action Grinch movie fucked a Gremlin, they’re played as an existential threat to the big bad despite there being only about ten of them, and every second their annoying, bucktoothed asses are on screen feels like some new kind of torture that ought to have been banned by the Geneva Convention. The fact that they got Ice-T, a man who at one point was cool as hell, to dress up like a bargain bin Klingon and growl at people is almost as bad as being forced to imagine Lori Petty banging one of these butt-ugly monstrosities. Why is their skin so blotchy, if I may ask? Pretty sure I’ve never seen a kangaroo with rosacea, or is it the human DNA that causes skin conditions. Give me the Ewoks any day, seeing moldy Care Bears using sticks and rocks to kill space Nazis is far less insulting to my intelligence than this.

       So this is going to be a firm ‘No’ on the Tank Girl recommendation from me. I’m sure that there are folks who can find a diamond in the rough with this one, but to me it was tedious, and that’s the one sin I can’t forgive in a movie. Malcolm McDowell couldn’t save it. An appearance by James Hong couldn’t save it. Art by Peter Milligan couldn’t save it. If you want a comic book movie from the period watch The Crow or the first TMNT movie, if you want Tank Girl just read the comics, both options are a better use of your time than this movie. Or just skip the movies entirely this Halloween and buy yourself a tank. Never know when it might come handy.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016: Time After Time (1979), directed by Nicholas Meyer

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Time After Time", by Chet Baker

     You ever notice how in TV and such, I’m looking at you Quantum Leap, that whenever you’re dealing with historical figures they really hit you over the head with the whole ‘this is what they’re famous for’ thing? Like if they do something with Albert Einstein, they always have a moment where he figures out the Theory of Relativity or atomic energy and what not. Or it’s Arthur Conan Doyle, they have him solving mysteries or playing Watson to somebody. As though it’s not enough for our protagonists (if they aren’t the figures themselves) to interact with these people, we always have to be on the stepping stones of history, to see the moment of inspiration that sets these people off on their life’s journey. I mean, is there anyone the Doctor doesn’t know at this point? Because I’m pretty sure he’s saved every major novelist and the Queen of England at least 5 times.

     It makes sense then that eventually the bottle would land on H.G. Wells. He was the grandfather of science fiction after all, even if he didn’t establish the literary genre he certainly brought such concepts into the public eye, while embodying the progressive spirit that the genre would be based on. Plus the wealth of material you get to work with; alien invasions, time travel, grotesque animal men (manimals, if you’re from the 80s), future wars, invisible killers, the possibilities are endless. Not to mention that, as an avid pacifist, women’s right advocate and all around nice guy, you can use him as a benchmark for how great we are as a society for having progressed. Wanna remind people how awesome women’s liberation or children not working in sweatshops is? Throw some dude from the Victorian era into the future and have him be all like ‘woah man, women can vote and Little Jimmy didn’t have his fingers ripped off in a textile factory? I am flabbergasted, to say the least’. Really makes us modern folks feel like we accomplished something, when in reality we just take this stuff for granted and actively work against other people trying to share those same freedoms.

     Anyway, that mindset, and the whole ‘novelists live out their books’ thing is what fueled the creation of 1979’s Time After Time, starring Malcolm McDowell (whom you might remember from A Clockwork Orange), David Warner (whom you might remember from Brazil, The Omen, Tron or Batman: The Animated Series) and Mary Steenburgen (whom you might remember from Back to the Future Part III, Elf, or the award winning film Melvin and Howard). Directed by Nicholas Meyer, who was also the director/writer for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and the writer for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and The Prince of Egypt. A solid wellspring of talent to work from, seems like.

     The story goes as follows: In a Victorian era London not entirely unlike our own, a not-yet-famous writer known as H.G. Wells has stepped beyond the realm of theories and into the world of super-science when he constructs an honest to goodness time machine. The greatest scientific discovery since that guy figured that if you dumped your shit away from your drinking water you wouldn’t get typhoid some might say, but before Wells is able to test his extraordinary invention, it is stolen by his former friend John Leslie Stephenson, who just so happens to be the infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper. Jack ends up in San Francisco in the far flung year and Wells, feeling a bit responsible for allowing a sociopathic murderer free reign over the entirety of human history, decides to go after him. Wells was an idealist however, a utopist who genuinely believed that humanity was one step away from reaching a Golden Age of peace & prosperity. How does a man who believes in the universal goodness of man deal with a world that’s already been through two world wars? A world where books are gone in favor of televisions, where horse-drawn carriages have been replaced with fantastical motorized vehicles, and women do things other than push out kids and die of tuberculosis? Well, presumably you’d watch the movie if you really wanted to find that out, because I’m not telling you.

     Now you’re probably thinking to yourself, ‘a movie where H.G. Wells tracks Jack the Ripper across time & space? That sounds fucking awesome!!’, and you’d be right in the sense that that is basically what the movie is about and that the idea sounds cool as hell, but Time After Time falls a little bit short of expectations. Here’s a handy bulleted list to address the major points:

• Despite being a movie that prominently features a time machine, and the actual Wells’ novel The Time Machine taking place at several points in the future, Time After Time deals almost entirely in one place (San Fran) and one time (1979). Might seem like a bit of a ripoff, but I guess the fact that Frisco is technically a the future to Wells they get away with it. 

• Despite being a movie about H.G. Wells tracking down Jack the Ripper, it doesn’t really feel too much like anything resembling a suspenseful thriller. In fact, most of the movie is spent dealing with the romance between Wells and modern day woman Amy (Steenburgen), and the ultimate confrontation with Jack, the clashing of ideologies, is treated more as an afterthought when compared to the ‘relationship’. Take that as you will. 

• Despite being the major driving force of the film (you know, aside from that whole ‘time traveling serial killer’ thing), Amy just rubs me the wrong way as a character. Like they make it a major point of the film that women’s liberation is great and that women are independent and can do things for themselves, but then she doesn’t do anything on her own terms aside from screwing H.G. Wells. She’s the damsel in distress, she does everything Wells asks her to do, and at a time when her life is in danger and she needs to stay alert she gulps down booze and valium like she’s Lucille Bluth. While still pushing this ‘I am woman hear me roar’ line. I dunno, seems a bit hypocritical. 

• Plenty of ‘stranger in a strange land’ humor, which can be good or bad depending on your preferences. ‘Look, he doesn’t understand telephones!’ or ‘Tee hee, look at him try to work an electric toothbrush!’ type stuff. If you’ve seen Encino Man, My Favorite Martian or about hundreds of other movies over the years, then you get the jist of it. I never really found Time After Time all that funny though, despite the scenes of Malcolm McDowell being mystified at the sight of Mickey Mouse. Whimsical maybe, but never really funny. 

• The runtime. Time After Time clocks in at about 2 hours long, which isn’t an uncommon thing in modern movies, but it just doesn’t utilize it well. You really start to feel the drag at the start of the second half, and considering that this isn’t a movie with a lot of action in the first place, expect your mind to wander while the Victorian bonefest plays itself out. Would it have been better if Meyer had lopped a few minutes from the final cut 

     Time After Time is a charming film though, in spite of those issues. Wells’ wide-eyed wonder at this strange world that we call the present can be a bit infectious too, even if he ends up becoming a little jaded by the end. Maybe not jaded, maybe it’s more that he becomes a bit more grounded in his beliefs. And in so doing, maybe we modern cynical types can learn to be a bit more hopeful. If you’re looking for something light this Halloween season, then this might be the film for you. Recommended.