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jayj-17577
Reviews
Star Trek Continues (2013)
a well-done homage
I just stumbled across this on You Tube, but wow, awesome. I've watched the first two episodes.
I'm not some huge "trekkie". I watched the original series when it aired (yes, I'm an old man) and liked it, but my opinion of subsequent Trek incarnations went steadily downhill.
You have to understand that in may ways this series is a homage to the original series. It does not attempt to go in any new directions: quite the opposite, it appears to be a deliberate attempt at "more of the same".
I was amazed at how well they reproduced the original sets. I didn't study pictures of the original series and this side by side to compare, but the bridge and the transporter room looked the same to me, and other places clearly had the same look and feel. I'd be interested to know how they produced the sets: did they get their hands on 50-year old sets from Desilu? Did they reproduce them by studying the old series? Etc. Similarly, the model of the Enterprise looks the same to me, the sound effects all sound the same, the background music is the same style, etc.
The new Captain Kirk was clearly trying to imitate the style and mannerisms of the original Captain Kirk, and I think he does a very good job of this. The other actors don't seem to take reprising the roles quite so far. They're more what you'd expect of a new actor in a familiar role.
The plots of these first two episodes clearly show the "homage" factor. The first episode is a sequel to an episode from the original series, "Who Mourns for Adonais?" (Much as "Wrath of Khan" was a sequel to an episode from the original series.) The second episode is a homage in two ways: the main character is an "Orion slave girl" a la the brief scene in the original pilot that apparently fascinated fans so much, and it carries on the Star Trek tradition of heavy-handed social messages. (Though at least this time it wasn't about racism.)
I see there are, as of this writing, a total of 7 episodes made. I'll have to see how the other 5 fare.
I'd score this as follows:
Fidelity to the original sets, miniatures, costumes, and music: 9
Recreating the original cast: Kirk 9, the rest average maybe 6 or 7.
Fidelity to themes and writing style: 8
Originality: 2
C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004)
doesn't go anywhere
I generally like "alternate history" stories: I enjoy studying history, and alternate history stories are a great way to discuss what happened and why, and it's just plain fun to kick around what-if's.
But I found this one generally disappointing. I think to make an alternate history story interesting, you have to have some kind of twist. Something unexpected has to happen. But here ... The South wins the Civil War, and so slavery continues and the whites are all racist. And then slavery continues. And then the whites do other racist things. And then slavery still continues. And then whites do more racist things. And on and on. Yes, I agree that racism is bad. If someone recited case after case of real racism, maybe it would get tedious, though of course I'd hope it would stir us to action. But this is someone reciting case after case of make believe, fictional racism. It's obviously intended to make us mad at these evil racists, but sorry, I'm not going to get worked up about hypothetical crimes that never happened.
The premise of the movie is that the South won the Civil War because they got help from Britain and France. They certainly tried to get such help, so it's at least a marginally plausible idea. But then they say that the South conquers the North. This is VERY far-fetched. It would have been a stretch for the South to survive as an independent nation, even with European help.
They do almost nothing to explore how history might really have been different if the South had won, other than slavery continuing. There are a few scenes about Confederate leaders being friendly with Hitler and comparing notes on how best to oppress minorities. But then does that mean America does not get involved in WW2 in Europe? So what happens? Do the Allies still win, or not? There's a quick clip of an astronaut planting a Confederate battle flag on the Moon. (Unlikely, actually. Wouldn't they plant the Stars and Bars, not the battle flag?) So is there still a space race with Russia? Is there a Cold War? They never say. I don't recall them saying anything about World War 1. What was supposed to have happened there? They don't even try to discuss anything that isn't specifically about race and slavery. Well, except for the curious, unexplained interludes where they toss in religious discrimination and wife beating.
The acting is pretty lame. Especially in the scenes that are supposed to be clips from historical movies. Maybe that's deliberate: when movie-makers put a "movie within the movie", they often seem to deliberately have bad acting in the "inner movie". Maybe they want to make sure that the acting in the inner movie doesn't end up better than the acting in the outer movie and thus looking incongruous. But wow, did they push it far here. I've routinely seen better acting in high school plays.
This is a highly political movie so I'll include one political comment. At the end they reveal that many of the parody advertisements scattered through the movie were in fact for real products. They solemnly inform us that even today many advertisements use "slave imagery, like Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima". Except, umm, Uncle Ben is based on a real person, who was never a slave, but a 1940s rice farmer. And Aunt Jemima is just a picture of a fictional woman. I've never seen any ads that portrayed her as a slave. One of their fake ads in the movie is for Gold Dust cleaning powder, which had many ads featuring two black children, called "the Gold Dust twins", performing household chores. There's no indication that they're slaves. Plenty of advertisements, before and since, have had pictures of white people preparing food or performing household chores, from Betty Crocker to Chef Boyardee to Little Debbie. Apparently the position of the film makers is that it's racist to include pictures of black people in advertisements. I'd think that if they never used pictures of black people but only showed whites using their product, that would be racist.
Advantageous (2015)
mostly social commentary
The heroine, Gwen, is a spokesperson for a company that has invented a way to transfer a person's mind or consciousness into an artificial body. These bodies are, of course, healthy, young-looking, and attractive. The company advertises this as a solution for physical handicaps, and of course people who are getting old and losing their good looks, or who never were that good-looking, can be young and handsome or pretty.
Then the company pressures Gwen to get one of these artificial bodies herself, because (a) she can then present herself as a satisfied customer; and (b) she's middle-aged, and they want a face that is young and pretty. Gwen doesn't want to do this because she feels she would be losing her identity.
I don't think any of what I've just said is a spoiler. This all happens early in the movie and it's the premise for what follows. In fact -- and here's the big problem I have with this movie -- I think it would be almost impossible to write a spoiler for this movie, because nothing really happens. There's only one real "revelation" in the movie, and I thought it was pretty obvious, doesn't really change things that much. And one decision for the heroine to make: will she cave in and get the artificial body or not. And I won't say any more there to avoid spoilers.
What this movie is really about is discussing how society only values women for their physical appearance and how women are pressured to conform. In my opinion, the message is repeated so often and is so heavy-handed that it just got tedious. It's not a story with social commentary. It's social commentary with a thin veneer of a story.
Even the basic point the movie is trying to make gets muddled by side issues. The story starts out with the company's plan apparently being that they will fire her, then spread nasty rumors about her so she can't get a job anywhere else, so she'll have no choice but to come and beg for her old job back, and then they can tell her they'll hire her back only if she agrees to get the new body. This seems to me to be a rather dumb plan. Why didn't they start out by just asking her to do it? Maybe she would have enthusiastically agreed, and they would have gotten what they wanted without alienating their own employee. Why not make demands before firing her? What would they have done if they fired her and, despite their rumor campaign, she had gotten another job? I hate movies where people do something stupid for no apparent reason. They also throw in a side line about how the artificial bodies experience minor but constant pain. This adds a negative that just distracts from the theme of beauty and identity.
Oh, and there's a curious sub-plot about how her mother disapproves of her for having an affair. We're clearly supposed to see the mother as being narrow-minded and judgmental. Then they show us how much unhappiness the affair caused her, the man, and the man's wife. So we as the audience are apparently supposed to see the affair as a bad thing -- but her mother was narrow-minded and judgmental for saying it was a bad thing. I didn't quite get the point there.
The movie DOES raise an interesting question: If you could get a young, healthy, strong, good-looking body, would you do it? Or would you see it as taking away your identity. Personally, as an old man with medical problems, sure I'd do it, assuming I could afford it and there were no side effects. I thought that was a no-brainer, but when I asked my daughter she said she wouldn't. So there might actually be an interesting philosophical question in there.