Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I know, I’m running behind. It’s probably mostly a busy holiday season that kept me out of the theater all together, but it might just be a little bit that when I saw the original Avatar (2009), I made the boneheaded move to show up to the theater late. This was before theaters had assigned seating (kids, ask your parents). I then sat in a 3D IMAX screening for 3 hours in the front row. I spent the next few… uh, weeks, if memory serves, vomiting.

The movie was fine. I enjoy it now a lot more on Blu Ray and with no 3D

Did I Like It: So, anyway, yeah, I went to go see it in IMAX 3D again. I chose seating anywhere other than the front row, and am happy to report that I experienced not even the slightest bit of nausea this time. Put that on a newspaper ad*, Disney!

There’s been an obnoxious, bad-faith debate leading up to the release of this movie about whether or not the whole Avatar thing has any cultural relevance, especially with more than ten years between movies. Given that the sequel is making money hand over fist, that argument feels quaint already, but why did it come about in the first place?

Is it that gap? No, I think that’s too easy. Really, I think it was the first film’s success giving way to a new trend of 3D releases, many of them not needing them in the slightest. I’m looking in your direction, The Green Hornet (2011). I spent most of the 2010s patiently wearing two pairs of glasses in every movie, and you can’t help but feel a little resentment for the Na’vi each time it came up.

Which is unfair. The first was great (even with becoming quite ill), and now it is absolutely impossible to deny both the skills of James Cameron, and any film that goes north of 3 hours and doesn’t wear out its welcome. Sure, the man who built the Terminator may be returning to some wells here (is there a director who can better make a third act out of a sinking ship?), but the action is non-stop, it all serves character and story.

But do you want to know the movie’s best special effect? Sigourney Weaver. No, not the fact that Weta’s motion capture can make her character look like a 14 year old, but her performance in making me believe that she might actually be one.

That’s Cameron’s real strength. All the toys and tools are put to full effect, but in the end the writing and performances keep things aloft… until the third act, when they’re supposed to sink.

*Do newspapers even run a movie times section anymore?

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2017)

Director: James Gunn

Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Karen Gillan, Kurt Russell

Have I Seen it Before: Sure. And I’m only 50% sure that’s a comment on how this film is very much More Of The Same in relation to the original Guardians of the Galaxy (2014).

Did I Like It: It’s good, but I’m surprised to report that it hasn’t stuck with me like some of the other films in the MCU.

And to add a statement like that doesn’t feel fair. I can’t fault the film in any way. The movie is generally amiable and funny throughout, and it manages to avoid the occasion Part II curse of Marvel movies and is happily content to not need to set up much for future films. 

As a matter of fact, there are several elements of the film that are candidates for the Greatest Of All Time. The opening credits are a big ball of crowd-pleasing joy. It possesses far and above the greatest Stan Lee cameo in any film ever. Peter Quill (Pratt) exclaiming “I’m going to make some weird shit!” is as fine a creative mission statement as we’re ever going to get on film. 

One might think that the reliance on Baby Groot (Vin Diesel) for much of the action and plot would be cloying, but I’m of a mind to believe the market research dictating that idea was right on that money. Anyone who insists they aren’t entertained by Groot is hiding something. Maybe they aren’t charmed by the toddler tree, but if that much is true, they probably have a couple of bodies buried in their backyard.

I also appreciate that Quill’s walkman actually sounds as crappy as a walkman ought to sound in the instant before Ego (Russell) destroys it, but only because it resolves one of my nitpicks from the original film.

As I type all of this I begin to realize that maybe on this viewing the movie will stick with me more. It deserves to.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Director: James Gunn

Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Lee Pace

Have I Seen it Before: I’m not sure what insisted that I make it for the opening weekend of a movie featuring characters I had no prior awareness, but we all made it, and now Star-Lord and company are all a part of us… And many of us were not opposed to the idea of a (new) Howard the Duck movie as we thought we might have been beforehand.

The state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was probably more precarious in 2014 than Disney and Company. The movies had yet to flounder at the box office, and The Avengers (2012) was one of the big box-office money makers of all time. But, as could clearly be seen now through the lens of hindsight, the characters we had all come to love (or, more accurately, the actors playing them) might not be cost effective for the bean counters anymore.

And so, Marvel would have to start dipping deeper into the catalog. It was a gamble on Marvel’s part, but they could afford to gamble a bit at this point in their output. But they did it in a smart way. They did it just a little bit, and they made sure the movie they branched out in was actually pretty good. And they managed to stumble upon the reality that Chris Pratt was a verifiable movie star*.

And so the movie plays out like an approximation of what it would be like if Quentin Tarantino made a high-action space opera**. Gunn may not quite be the mast craftsman that Tarantino is, but the dish is made with the right ingredients, and presents a pretty enjoyable feast, all things considered.

On one directly critical note: is it weird that I think the biggest suspension of disbelief in this movie is that I’m supposed to somehow believe that a cassette mix tape has crystal-clear audio quality nearly thirty years after it was originally mixed? When played through a walkman that was just as old? That the tape ever played that well? In a movie filled with hollowed-out god heads, tree men, and the blind faith that a superhero movie with no known superheroes could ever hope to be any kind of hit, the music presentation probably shouldn’t bother me, and yet, there are moments when I can’t quite push it out of my mind.

*Although I’ll admit that I might be wrong in this assessment. The end titles call the shot that the Guardians will return. I mean, I suppose they might have been able to guess that even if the movie underperformed, they would play a vital role in the quickly forming Infinity Saga but man… Especially in a movie with the aforementioned Howard, they should have allowed for the possibility that this might not work out quite as well as they might have hoped.

**Which—to be fair—he still may do.

Star Trek Beyond (2016)

Director: Justin Lin

Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Idris Elba

Have I Seen it Before: Once again. Unless it’s a brand-spanking new release, it’s a safe bet that I’ve seen a Star Trek film before.

Did I Like It: It’s almost like they finally took every complaint I had about the previous two films (more the second than the first) and incorporated them into a new film. This is that film.

Here’s a deep, dark secret about Star Trek, especially anything having to do with any version of Kirk and company, the original crew. Everyone says it is about lofty ideals and political parables. But really, truly, it is an adventure series. It works best when its an adventure story. 

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) goes back to the purest distillation of the franchise and presents Horatio Hornblower in space. Certainly, you get something like various episodes of the TV series, or both Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) that have deeper ideas, but those ideas are fully developed. This film’s predecessor, Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), tries to reach for those lofty ideas, but half-bakes some kind of post 9/11 mush.

This film doesn’t have that problem. There’s a hint of a dissertation as to whether the Federation’s ideals of peace and unity, but here are the elements that keep the film together. There’s a bad guy who wants to do bad things. The only people that can stop them are the crew of the USS Enterprise. they will have a hard time repelling this threat.

That’s all you need, really, and this film doesn’t need anything more than the basics. Those lofty ideals should really be reserved for Nicholas Meyer, honestly. This film is far more engagingly Star Trek than any of the previous Abrams-involved ones. It also has the unusual distinction of not having any scenes take place on or in orbit of Earth (Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) is the only other entry in the film series to do this), and that is far more true to the reality of Star Trek than the alternative.

At the time of this writing, it is entirely possible that the “Kelvin” series will stay a trilogy. Time will tell, but as a finale, it works in remarkably subtle ways. The Beastie Boys are back to my undying chagrin, but at least here it has some kind of story-based reason for existing in Roddenberry’s future, and even kind-of-sort-of makes its original existence in Star Trek (2009) as set-up for this eventual payoff. The angry young men that Kirk (Pine) and Spock (Quinto) were when we first met them have settled into the people they are supposed to be, and are no longer bound by the prime universe that preceded them. If they do return, then it would be nice to see them just inhabit the characters, now that the development is complete.

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

Director: J.J. Abrams

Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Bruce Greenwood, and that great latin lover, Benedict Cumberbatch.

Have I Seen it Before: Since 1994, it is reasonable to assume that I’ve been there for every Star Trek film on opening weekend.

Did I Like It: Folks, I really want to enjoy every Star Trek film. I want to. And yet…

It’s difficult to try and criticize this film without taking a deep dive into my long-standing Trek fandom…

So here I go criticizing from that perspective:

The opening scene is such a complete and total violation of the Prime Directive in every way, shape and form. How Kirk (Pine) is not arrested and sent to a prison colony for life twenty minutes into this movie is beyond me.

They keep referring to the transwarp beaming equation that Scotty (Simon Pegg) “developed” in the original film. That was supposed to allow people to beam onto a ship traveling away from you at warp speed. It has nothing to do with beaming people to a planet in a completely different sector of space many light years away. Also, not for nothing, the effective development of that technology negates the need for starships at all, and pretty much nullifies the entire concept of Star Trek. Not great, all things considered.

The fact that Leonard Nimoy, in his final performance as Spock Prime, doesn’t argue with McCoy (Karl Urban) is a missed opportunity that will never present itself again.

Maybe one can try to make an argument that the film has a certain energy that someone who isn’t steeped in the lore of this franchise might find entertaining, but in my best attempt to try and see this film from that perspective, I just can’t make it happen. This movie has been unleashed on the public for nearly six years. Can anyone explain to me what it is actually about, beyond a tame studio-watered down semi-parable for the post 9/11 world? 

Even the stakes are much lower here. In Star Trek (2009), Nero threatens the entirety of planet Earth, after proving that he is a real threat by destroying the planet Vulcan. Here, Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch) has a plan. I’m still not entirely sure what it is, but at the end of it, a large ship crashes into San Francisco. 

Let’s talk about Khan, and for that matter, Khan, while we’re at it. The casting of the whitest man in all of time and space to succeed a decidedly non-white hispanic actor playing a man of Indian decent is a little… Well, it’s certainly something. The error is retconned by a four-part comic series published after the movie was released, but it doesn’t bode well for the film itself if you have to have the ancillary material to make heads or tails out of it. Also, the reversal of roles merely for a rehash of the far, far superior Wrath of Khan (1982) is lame in extreme.

Also, his blood wasn’t some sort of fountain of youth. Just saying.

It’s flimsy, and cheap in its writing, and that’s pretty impressive when you could say that about a lot of the big budget action far hoisted upon us. I cannot help but think that Abrams was eyeing adventures in another galaxy, far, far away and didn’t have his eyes on the prize here, and it became clear that his various lieutenants don’t have his same skill.

For some reason I want to rate this film higher than the generally accepted worst films in the franchise (either Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) or Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), depending on your particular taste), but on this particular viewing I don’t think I can go light on it. This may be the worst Trek film…

Or it’s as bad as Nemesis, not worse. I think I’ll go with that much. Worse than Nemesis feels like a stretch. 

Star Trek (2009)

Director: J.J. Abrams

Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quntio, Zoe Saldana, and keeping the whole thing together, the late, great Leonard Nimoy

Have I Seen it Before: I saw it four times in the theater. 

Did I Like It: It may have launched some irritating things (including its own 2013 sequel), but it is hard to deny this film its charms, or, more importantly, the moments where it absolutely sings.

The last ten years or so should be a difficult time for action-adventure movies like those that make up the Star Trek series. They aren’t about anything, other than the thin connective tissue that will propel characters from explosion to explosion. So that this first attempt to relaunch the franchise after the petering out experience by Nemesis (2002) and the then most-recent series, Enterprise, does something incredibly smart. It presents the space opera as coming of age story. Sure, it’s not the loft ambition of a Horatio Hornblower story, or even a parable about Chernobyl in space, but telling the tale of James T. Kirk (Pine) and Spock (Quinto), Angry Young Men, is certainly a good starting out point for the film.

And it mostly works! There are things that serve to annoy. The lens flares are ubiquitous, but commentary about them has become far more irritating than the flares could ever have hoped to be. The decision to shot any utilitarian section of a starship in a brewery has never made sense to me. The Beastie Boy-laden scene where the spunky tween-who-would be Captain Kirk (Jimmy Bennett) faces off with Robocop and gravity remains one of the most irritating scenes in recent memory, compounded by the unassailable reality that it lifts right out of the movie. Not many people talk about how there’s some serious post-production jiggery pokery that leaves the bad guys waiting around for twenty-five years with nothing to do, and I will opt not to go into it much further here.

I could go on. Honestly, it should be a little bit harder to beat the Kobayashi Maru test, even if you have reprogrammed the simulator. But the parts that do work far outweigh the nitpicks. The film is cast perfectly, with the new cast bringing new energy to roles we already think we know. Karl Urban might (and I stress, might) have been more born to play the role than even Deforrest Kelley. The mini-tragedy at the beginning of the movie heralds the coming of Chris Hemsworth, undeniable movie star and latches the film to real emotions, even during those scenes and plot holes I can’t abide. 

And there is one moment, and one spark of performance, that makes this film—and, indeed, the entire “Kelvin” series—work on the whole. It is the first moment in which Kirk encounters Spock Prime (Nimoy). The elder Spock takes one look at this brash upstart and says, haunted by everything we as the audience has already seen. “James T. Kirk…I have been, and always shall be, your friend.” In that moment, I believe Pine is Kirk, Quinto is Spock, and on and on. It’s a moment the film absolutely depends on, and Nimoy nails it with such subtlety, that it’s hard not to marvel at the moment with every repeat viewing.