About a third of the way into this movie, there’s a non-stop 12-minute car chase action scene that is easily the most enjoyable vehicular mayhem on screen since Mad Max. The camera gets into and then swoops out of cars on the move, taking us this way, then that way, zipping like a bullet across the battle scene, never resting for an instant. It’s glorious, simply glorious.
We are now in the Wickensian era of the action movie. The balletic bullet moves of Keanu Reeves’ John Wick movies are all on display here—twisting and flipping opponents around like rag dolls before putting two bullets into their faces at point-blank range.
The plot is Mad Max simple, though without all that extraneous “set up” and “payoff” bullshit that Max indulged in. Mercenary Chris Hemsworth has to rescue the son of a kidnapped drug lord from the clutches of a rival in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and get him across the border into India. The rival conveniently has complete control over the police and special tactics forces, giving him unlimited numbers of cannon fodder to hurl at Chris, leading to a body count that would make even Wick blink a bit. Chris and the boy walk across Dhaka, pursued at all times by baddies who unerringly find the two regardless of where they hide. There’s a half-hearted attempt at bonding between Chris and his charge, but seriously, who cares? Get back to chasing cars.
It’s a shame the movie blows its load at the start, for the rest of it never quite measures up. The law of diminishing returns sets in, and the later gunfights feel a bit dull by comparison. The climactic showdown on a bridge feels almost tame, being conducted at merely walking speeds, constrained by the bridge’s structure into purely linear movement.
I see grumbling about this being another ‘white savior’ tale where our milky-white hero swoops in to rescue the noble coloreds from other savage, dark-skinned people, but frankly any movie starts to sound ridiculous once you oversimplify it. Mad Max: Fury Road is a long drive with a U-Turn in the middle, Lord of the Rings a nine-hour hike to return some jewelry, Star Wars is about a young man with daddy issues. Extraction at least makes an attempt to humanize the other players—notably Randeep Hoopa as a henchman working for the boy’s dad and Golshifteh Farahani as the agent who recruits Chris—though yes, it’s a pretty weak attempt, as the movie is far more interesting in kicking as much ass as cinematically possible.
It’s interesting that many action movies seem to be increasingly specializing, bit by bit paring away all those other humanizing elements that aren’t the core of their appeal—the love interest, and so on—and throwing more and more of their weight into pure adrenaline: Mad Max and John Wick I’ve mentioned, Atomic Blonde may be another. I wonder if audiences are fragmenting with the growth of streaming and other entertainment options, giving action movies more freedom to focus and less need to appeal to a wider audience, especially with a direct-to-Netflix release like Extraction.
If it’s a trend that gives us more sequences like this, buddy, no need for the rescue team. I’m quite happy here.
Executive producers: Eugene Roddenberry, Trevor Roth, James Duff, Patrick Stewart, Heather Kadin, Akiva Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman
Network: Amazon Prime (CBS All Access)
OK, now it’s personal.
Patrick Stewart is 79. My father is 77. Dad is, I hope, enjoying his retirement, busy with his books and movies and horribly complicated jigsaws of railway trains. I hope he is comfortable and loved, and that if he has regrets, they do not trouble his sleep overmuch. I would hate to think he is wracked by guilt, shame, or feel he had failed us in some way.
We watched “Star Trek: The Next Generation” together, the way families still did back in 1987. The show became a part of the ritual of family life, Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard a comforting and reliable presence in our home throughout the show’s seven-year run. I suppose it’s inevitable that, much like choosing your favorite Doctor Who or Star Wars movie, your first encounter with a series always holds a special place in your heart, so Jean-Luc Picard and his crew have always been synonymous with Star Trek for me ever since. It’s not like Picard was ever any kind of father-figure to me, but still, he’s embedded in that period in my life when I still lived with my dad and we did stuff together.
Later series never quite measured up, to me. “Deep Space 9” had some great characters but replaced the sense of wonder with angsty dark stories. “Voyager” had some great stories but angsty dark characters. “Enterprise” was just bad (I hear it got better, towards the end). I finished university, moved out, moved halfway across the world. Life moved on.
I missed most of the movies that followed, catching them only on the back of airplane seats in hauls back and forth across the Pacific. I still haven’t seen the last one—“Nemesis”—when Patrick Stewart swore he was done with the series. I did see the first of J. J. Abrams’ new-Trek movies, but found it a fairly brainless SFX spectacle that did nothing to scratch the nostalgia itch. The “Discovery” series and its evident antipathy for its own legacy cemented that whatever was being produced under the Star Trek name now, it wasn’t for me.
In the meantime, there’s been a rush of nostalgiapunk movies and shows resurrecting decades-old properties and giving the original actors one last hurrah. Sylvester Stallone did with Rambo and Rocky, Harrison Ford with Han Solo and Indiana Jones and Deckard of “Blade Runner” fame, Schwarzenegger did it with the Terminator, they are even getting Bill Murray to do another Ghostbusters.
And now Patrick Stewart has done it with “Star Trek: Picard.”
And you know, it was painful to watch, because this Jean-Luc Picard starts out as a lonely, dying old man eaten away by his regrets and failures, angry at everything, feeling betrayed by everyone. And I look at Patrick Stewart and I see my dad, and it’s hard, man. It’s really hard. Again, I’m not projecting too much but damn, here’s a guy the same age as my dad, who I used to watch regularly when I lived with my dad, and now here he is again, and he’s fucking miserable.
I was pretty happy with Picard warping off into the star-set and that was that. If you have to bring him back, couldn’t he at least be happy? I was hoping for more nostalgiapunk, I’ll admit. However, much like “Discovery,” “Picard” keeps only the surface of Star Trek—the technobabble names, some of the characters, a touch of the visual aesthetic—and dumps everything else. Jean-Luc Picard, the Federation he served, the tone, the mood, that’s all gone. Everyone is broken and traumatized and sick and awful.
As we open the new series, Jean-Luc Picard is heartbroken about the death of android Data in “Nemesis” (didn’t see it, so, idk), about a group of rogue androids who blew up a shipyard on Mars, and about a failed rescue mission to the planet Romulus, based on the events of the Abrams movie. He’s angry at Starfleet and the Federation. Oh, and he’s dying of brain cancer.
He sets off on a mission to rescue an android (Isa Briones) created from a part of Data—Data’s daughter, essentially—along with a crew of quirky and lovable characters, such as the alcoholic drug addict (Michelle Hurd), a neurotic doctor who murders her lover (Alison Pill), an ex-Starfleet pilot traumatized by his former captain’s suicide (Santiago Cabrera), a revenge-crazed killer (Voyager’s Jeri Ryan) and sword guy (Evan Evagora).
The plot that follows is, as others have pointed out, a bit of a rip-off of the “Mass Effect” video game series: Protheans um, ancient aliens leave a warning against creating artificial life. Fanatics decide that means they have to kill all “synthetics” (they even copied the term from the games). The androids learn they can contact the Reapers some kind of creepy-crawly super-space-robot thing to come and kill everybody else. People spend a lot of time crying, throwing up or bleeding to death.
The original Star Trek famously invented the “Vulcan nerve pinch” because actor Leonard Nimoy thought an advanced civilization should have a better way of taking people out that smacking them. In “Star Trek: Picard,” Seven-of-Nine goes on a one-woman, two-fisted rampage with a phaser rifle that looks exactly like an assault rifle in each hand and she totally slaughters all the bad guys who ripped her friend’s eyeball out of its socket and left him so badly hurt she had to kill him out of mercy. Yeah! Kick-ass!
I won’t go further into the plot, which as already been raked over the coals at greater length and depth by commentators like Red Letter Media than I have stomach to. The back story is excessively convoluted and contradictory, returning characters feel unconnected to their previous incarnations, the new ones are all as fucked up as the putative hero, and the show is frequently tone-deaf to its own text. The above-mentioned homicidal doctor feels guilty for about one episode, and then everyone forgets that she brutally murdered her ex-lover. In another scene, an android talks about the necessity of death if one is to be considered truly alive, and immediately afterwards a character who has died has their brain transferred into an android body, thereby cheating death. Also, that beat is a rip-off of the Asimov story, Bicentennial Man. But whatever.
Pretty much the only non-depressing episode is when Johnathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis reprise their roles as William Riker and Dianna Troi, and make pizza.
It’s wonderful. It’s the high point of the whole damn series. You get to see people who genuinely like and care about each other sit down, talk instead of punch and shoot things, figure out what they’re going to do, express their fondness and admiration for each other. Fuck, yes. This is what I signed on for. Patrick Stewart and his old buddies hanging out and having a good time. Thank you. That’s the nostalgiapunk I needed. Make a show of nothing but Pat Stew and a string of cameos by old Star Trek hands.
Properties that trade on nostalgia want to have it both ways. They want all us old fans to come back, and they want to bring in the new crowd. In both Star Wars and Star Trek, the way they’ve chosen to do that is to make the central character old and miserable. Missing, of course, the fact that the whole point of nostalgia is to be comforting and familiar.
The idea that grim is somehow deeper, smarter, more meaningful or realistic than bright and hopeful certainly isn’t new, and Star Trek has been sliding towards this since at least “Deep Space 9,” albeit with fewer vivisection scenes. I get it. Deconstruction can feel bold, daring and creative, like “Unforgiven” did for Westerns or “Game of Thrones” tried to do for high fantasy. I also get that actors and writers don’t want to keep doing the same thing over and over again.
Great news: They don’t have to. They can do other things. Unforgiven and Game of Thrones worked because they were fresh, original and creative. George R.R. Martin wanted to write about a world in which Aragorn became king and then found out ruling wasn’t quite so easy. So he made up his own world. With his own characters. And everyone loved him for it.
If you want to do nostalgia, fine: THEN DO NOSTALGIA. That one episode (number 7, “Nepenthe”) shows it doesn’t have to be that way. There is conflict, even sadness, but within the framework of people who actually like each other and get along. It’s gentle, it’s fun, it’s a blanket and a cup of cocoa by the fire. Maybe challenging old tropes feels more “necessary” or whatever, but this episode shows you can achieve much the same affect without all the blood and guts. Remind people of what they had. Remind them of what was good. We can figure out for ourselves if we’ve lost something along the way, and want to recover it or not. There’s nothing inherently creatively barren about nostalgia anymore than there’s anything inherently creative about yet another band of merry misfits turning in their badges and going rogue. Stories like this can have value.
I talk to my dad every week. He seems okay. Happy, I hope. Disappointed with the way some things worked out, I guess, but on balance satisfied. I take solace and comfort from the trajectory of his life. I have hope that things will turn out, if not great, then okay in the end.
On an online discussion forum, someone recently asked about Joe Abercrombie’s “Last Wish” series (I reviewed the first two books here and here), to which I replied they were an inversion of common fantasy tropes. Right? Right. Pretty basic stuff.
Oh, but no. That’s a spoiler, you see.
Not five minutes later I had two users passive-aggressively bitching at me for spoiling the series. Yes, I know, boo-hoo, woe is me. I’ll live, I’ll survive. But for fuck’s sake, can we knock this shit off?
(The girl in The Crying Game is transgender.)
The spoiler crusade probably grew out of a sympathetic impulse—to prevent online assholes (“trolls,” sorry) from deliberately trying to ruin books and movies for other people—and like all our good impulses it was immediately taken up and wielded by the worst sort of literal-minded, unimaginative, killjoy people on the planet to stifle virtually any media discussion that doesn’t cater to their fragile paleo-diet sensitivities. Spoiler warnings are the emotional support dogs of Internet Karens constantly screaming for forum managers. They are the “Do Not Iron While Wearing Shirt” product warning labels of people too stupid to take care of themselves.
(Kylo Ren kills Han Solo.)
If you haven’t guessed, I’m not too keen on spoiler warnings.
(Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze.)
Partly, I think the structure of a lot of modern media is to blame, and partly it’s part of an online outrage culture that rewards vigilantism over actual discussion and thought.
(Bruce Willis was dead the whole time.)
Now there are some stories in which the big reveal at the ending is the point. The mystery genre is an obvious example—the whole story revolves around unraveling whodunit. Revealing the end in that case would, of course, lessen your enjoyment of the story. No question there.
(Jesus comes back from the dead.)
The problem is, with the popularity of shows like “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica,” the rise of the “mystery box” and “subverting expectations” approaches to storytelling have exported these techniques to genres where the whodunit isn’t, or rather shouldn’t be the point at all. In the bid to ensure every property is must-see “appointment television” that you have to watch as soon as it is released or miss out on the zeitgeist forever, more and more entertainment is being drained of repeat value, turned into a pump-and-dump one night stand that’s forgotten the next morning.
(Oedipus kills his dad and marries his mom.)
Take the Star Wars franchise: “The Force Awakens” is a prime example of mystery box storytelling, but for fucks' sake why? Star Wars is space opera, not Agatha Christie. Sure, the movies have always had surprises … just, that was never the point of the movies. The twist that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father is a surprise, but your enjoyment of the franchise doesn’t hinge on not knowing this fact. Hell, the entire prequel trilogy depends on you knowing this fact, otherwise its relationship to the original three movies would be utterly baffling.
(Oldboy is her dad.)
Another example would be Game of Thrones, which did a lot to popularize the use of shocking twists: Ned's execution or the murder of the Starks at the Red Wedding are also surprising, but let me tell you I and thousands of other book readers knew exactly what was coming and loved every minute of it.
(Beowulf kills Grendel.)
Those aren’t spoilers, you see, they’re just plot points. Those are things that happen in the course of the story, not the central point of the story itself. If you call those spoilers, then literally every fact about the book or movie, the names of the characters, the genre, the gist of the plot, they’re all spoilers. Every trailer, poster, announcement or review is a spoiler. "I liked it," is a spoiler. If you want to wander in into a movie theater and plump your whining arse down completely unspoiled, you’d have to be blindfolded and led inside without even knowing the title.
(Soylent green is people.)
Even overlooking that point, any narrative that is only enjoyable once and never again because now you know the details is shit. Worthless. Insulting, condescending entertainment that has nothing of value to offer and nothing to say other than “Fooled you!” It’s an admission that there is nothing but plot—no characters, no setting, no mood, no drama, no tension. Just plot. And that’s a shallow, shallow way to approach entertainment.
(Tyler Durden doesn’t exist.)
For an example of the opposite approach, let’s look at Chris Nolan’s movie, “Memento.” There’s a fairly complicated plot. Like almost all Nolan movies, it screws around with time, this time by putting you into the amnesiac main character’s head by having events play out in reverse chronological order, so you don’t know what’s happening, either. At the end, turns out the amnesiac is responsible for his own wife’s death and keeps cynically hunting for people to get revenge on as a way of giving himself a reason to live. Now you can go back and watch the movie, and see how that all gets set up. THERE IS MORE THAN JUST PLOT. You can still enjoy every single moment of it. Because the point is the nature and malleability of memory, not whether or not this loony bastard has killed anyone or not.
Journey, not the destination, people.
(Macbeth did it.)
The other aspect of this narrative nannying is that it plays into social media’s tendency to reward grandstanding and style over substance. People are upvoted for reposting a funny picture, not for making one. They are praised for making posts like “Can we all appreciate X…” rather than, you know, everyone actually appreciating the person directly. Spoiler-whinging is part of this, too. The finger-wagging for mentioning spoilers means, of course, that the finger-wagger has already consumed the media in question and is thus being outraged on some theoretical other’s behalf.
(Achilles dies at the end.)
It’s white-knighting, only for the supposed lambs wandering innocently into movie or book discussions blissfully unaware that a movie or book discussion might contain details of the movie or book in question. They aren’t actually defending or protecting anyone, they’re just performatively demonstrating how pure and noble they are, in return for watching a small digit on their screen display a slightly larger number.
Listen: I saw an online book discussion in which the plot of the Iliad was deemed a spoiler. The Iliad. A three thousand year old poem. A tale in the oral tradition whose impact relies on the audience being familiar with the plot.
Listen: People want to spoiler tag the plot of Dune. A 60 year-old novel that has already been adapted to the screen twice, and (as of this writing) is scheduled for a third trip to the silver screen.
(This isn’t a spoiler. Aha, made you look.)
Arguing or attempting to publicly shame someone online is designed to draw more attention to the point in question, to get more people to see the spoiler, not less (Otherwise, how else will everyone see how brave the spoiler defender is being).
In this sense, it’s part of the same trend towards worshipping lore over story, the desire for exclusive control over how media is consumed and enjoyed. Just as lord nerds insist that fictional facts fit their stores of hoarded trivia, so spoiler queens insist that experiences with fiction fit their ideals. Everyone must watch or read in the spoiler purist’s approved way—no others are allowed.
(This post ends after the next paragraph.)
So what perhaps once began as a genuine attempt to improve everyone’s online experience has now been cynically twisted into a self-serving attempt to show what a great guy you are. It isn’t for anyone’s benefit but the complainer. It’s petty, it’s childish, and it’s time for this shit to stop.
