May 20 2009
Science fiction double feature
Within the last week we’ve seen Star Trek and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, two science fiction movies with a great deal of difference in the craftsmanship put into them.
Star Trek could also be called The Young James Kirk Chronicles, but in a good way. I’m not mocking Indiana Jones here, after all. This story creates an alternate history for James Kirk and the original crew of the Enterprise, and follows their story from Starfleet Academy. But don’t worry, it’s not the Hogwarts School of Exploration and Astrophysics. They quickly head out to war rather than staring into their own navels.
All the characters from the original set appear, with subtly altered stories to suit the new timeline and to make things a bit more interesting. Kirk’s a tearaway, Spock’s been suffering some playground abuse for being half-human, and Bones… we’ll he’s still a cantankerous pessimist so that’s okay.
It was a really great movie, neatly treading the line between the high camp silliness of the original Star Trek series and a modern action movie. At one or two points they veered into Galaxy Quest territory but they also balanced this with some heavy emotional stuff. Well worth seeing at the cinema.
The contrasting X-Men Origins: Wolverine was terrible on almost every level. The script was leakier than Rab C Nesbitt’s semmit, and you have to use a lot of brainpower not to think about all the ways these people with superhuman powers could have solved their problems earlier.
The story was long and lumpy, which only frenetic action scenes can disguise. The editing was woeful. If you care about spoilers, jump to the end of this paragraph. But there is no good reason why Victor is seen climbing up the outside of the building in Africa because he does nothing up there. There is no good reason why Gambit being elbowed in the face should leave him running across the rooftops. But those scenes still happened, completely without context or explanation.
Even the individual scenes were so terribly cliched it’s hard to remember them without cringing. Surely Hugh Jackman’s got bored of cradling people in his arms and screaming at the sky?
The big secret about this movie is the two separate teaser endings. We didn’t know about them and left the cinema early (very unusual for us, and doubly irritating because of it). The two different prints are distributed randomly between cinemas and the idea is that you see the film twice to catch both endings. Either that or it’s an attempt to create interest in the pirated films, which will probably be available with both endings. Cos really, who’s going to see this dreck twice for the thirty seconds of extra footage?