April | 2016 | the m0vie blog

Non-Review Review: Captain America – Civil War

Posted on April 20, 2016 by Darren

Captain America: Civil War is, in some ways, a little too civil.

The third film in the series (following Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain America: The Winter Soldier) is produced to the highest professional standard. It is sleek and stylish, well-constructed and cleanly edited. It is always clear what is going on, no mean feat for a film with a cast this expansive. Character motivations are always entirely clear, even if there’s seldom any effort to explain why these characters have these motivations. It is a well-oiled, well-lubricated machine that hits all its marks and zips through its two-and-a-half hour runtime.

America, #!?> yeah…

The biggest problem with Civil War is that it is a little too clean and professional, a little too mechanical and a little too impersonal. The film’s plot is anchored in some pretty heavy ideas about collateral damage and the responsibility that comes with unilateral intervention, but the script contorts awkwardly to ensure that things never get too heavy. “We’re still friends, right?” the Black Widow quips during her throwdown with Hawkeye, and Civil War is very careful to ensure that it doesn’t damage anything that cannot be replaced.

This is a perfectly reasonable approach to the film, given how many more films are leaning upon it, but it also feels a little forced. There are points at which Civil War bends itself into unnatural shapes to ensure that it can have its cake and eat it too.

He ain’t heavy, he’s my Rhodey…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: captain america, Civil War, iron man, marvel, non-review review, review | 15 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Friend Request

Posted on April 19, 2016 by Darren

Friend Request does not work.

There is a great horror film to be made about the internet age. After all, the best horror has always reflected the time around it. The witch hunts of the fifties paved the way for The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, while the AIDs panic of the eighties gave way to body horrors like The Fly or The Thing. There is undoubtedly a classic horror waiting to be made about the perils of online life and the strange connections that form through computer monitors. Unfortunately, Friend Request is not it.

“I CAN HAZ FRIEND?”

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Alycia Jasmin Debnam-Carey, facebook, film, friend request, Movie, non-review review, review | 6 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Broken Link (Review)

Posted on April 19, 2016 by Darren

This February and March (and a little bit of April), we’re taking a look at the 1995 to 1996 season of Star Trek, including Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. Check back daily for the latest review.

What is perhaps most surprising about Broken Link is how quiet and subdued it all it.

The fourth season began with a bang, with the dissolution of the alliance between the Klingons and the Federation that had been established in Heart of Glory and dramatised in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. In fact, The Way of the Warrior featured the largest and most impressive combat sequence in the history of the Star Trek franchise to that point. Even allowing for The Sacrifice of Angels and What You Leave Behind, the fourth season premiere still ranks as one of the most elaborate set pieces in the franchise’s history.

Pray… for… Odo…

Broken Link consciously circles back to that. It features the first reappearance of Robert O’Reilly as Gowron since The Way of the Warrior. The episode makes it clear that the problems depicted in The Way of the Warrior are only worsening. There is no small suggestion that Gowron is hoping to turn the cold war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire into a shooting war. Broken Link is very much a show about taking the status quo that was established in The Way of the Warrior and ramping it up.

However, what is most striking about Broken Link is the manner in which it escalates the situation. Not a single weapon is discharged in Broken Link, which is the last season finalé of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine not to feature a combat sequence of some description. The actual plot of the episode is remarkably straightforward and linear, keenly focused on a single member of the ensemble rather while relegating politics into the background. Even in terms of the scripting of the episode, care is taken to slow the pace down and allow character-driven dialogue scenes.

Oh no, Odo!

The result is a strangely intimate season finalé, one free of the bombast that comes with the season-bridging two-parters favoured by Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager. It is interesting to compare Broken Link to something like Basics, Part I, if only because the latter would never make room for Jadzia joking about being surrounded by “naked men” or Garak playing “Star Trek Cluedo” with Odo in sickbay. In fact, Broken Link is even relatively quiet by the standards of Deep Space Nine, lacking the galactic status quo shift of The Jem’Hadar or A Call to Arms.

As with a lot of the fourth season, there is a sense that the production team have made a point to learn from the third season: to improve upon what works and to fix what doesn’t. The Adversary was something of a happy accident at the end of the third season, a script thrown together at short notice when Paramount vetoed a season-ending cliffhanger that would be loosely adapted for Homefront and Paradise Lost. The slow character-centric tension of The Adversary was never intended to close the third season, but Broken Link realises that such an approach worked well.

“Melting! Melting! Oh, what a world!”

The result is an episode that feels incredibly comfortable in its own skin. Deep Space Nine is well aware of what it is, regardless of the direction and input that the studio offered the production team at the start of the fourth season. In fact, despite its somewhat relaxed pace and the space that it affords its character interactions, Broken Link is remarkably focused on what it wants to do. The closing line of the episode (and the season) is clever, consciously tying back the bold new direction of The Way of the Warrior back into the series’ own larger endgame.

In hindsight, Broken Link is something of a misleading title. Instead, it ties everything together.

Only a stone’s throw away…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: continuity, deep space nine, Dominion, klingons, Odo, Season finale, star trek, star trek: deep space nine, Television | 15 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Body Parts (Review)

Posted on April 15, 2016 by Darren

Like The Quickening before it, Body Parts offers another glimpse at the humanism at the heart of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Body Parts plays into the broader themes of the fourth season. Zack Handlen effectively and memorably described Deep Space Nine as “Star Trek’s version of the Island of Misfit Toys.” In a way, that has been true since Emissary; the episode where the series got a bitter widower who wasn’t even a proper captain and a chief engineer who used to manage a transporter room on the flagship. Characters like Odo and Garak were always outcasts, while it never felt like the crew operating the station could claim to be the franchise’s “best and brightest.”

“Look, we’re all exhausted after the season that’s been…”

However, the fourth season really emphasises this aspect of the series. Worf joins the cast in The Way of the Warrior, and is promptly cut off from his own people. In Sons of Mogh, Worf is quickly cut off from his own brother. Kira brings Tora Ziyal to the station in Return to Grace, and she reflects on her isolation in For the Cause. Odo’s estrangement from his own people will be properly formalised in Broken Link, when he is cast into a wilderness between human and changeling. Body Parts simply puts Quark through his version of this arc.

Body Parts is essentially a story about how Quark is no longer a proper Ferengi. He has been exposed to the values and ideals of the Federation, corrupted and changed through his time on Deep Space Nine. Although this winds up costing Quark a lot, the final scenes of Body Parts suggest that Quark has also benefited from his time on the station. Body Parts suggests that wandering out into the winder universe and exposing yourself to different cultures is inherently a good thing, even if it does generate tension.

Bearing the Brunt of his wrath…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: arc of history, body parts, brunt, cultural relativism, ds9, Ferengi, pregnancy, Quark, Relativism, Television | 20 Comments »

Star Trek: Voyager – Basics, Part I (Review)

Posted on April 14, 2016 by Darren

With Basics, Part I, the second season comes to an end.

In a very specific sense, of course. The production team decided to retain the strategy that they had employed during the show’s first season, adding an additional filming block on to the end of the season in order to film a bunch of episodes that would be broadcast at the start of the third broadcast season. At the end of the first season, four episodes were produced and held back – Projections, Elogium, Twisted, and The 37’s. As such, four second season episodes were produced after Basics, Part I – Sacred Ground, False Profits, Flashback and Basics, Part II.

Heading home alone.

However, Basics, Part I marks the end of the show’s second broadcast season. It is very consciously designed as season finalé, something that the first season had struggled with by slotting Learning Curve into the broadcast slot. Basics, Part I also marks the beginning of the end for various threads running through the first two seasons of Star Trek: Voyager. It is the first part of the last Kazon story, the last Seska story, the last Lon Suder story, the last Star Trek television story written by Michael Piller.

It marks the beginning of the end of a troubled era for the show and for the larger franchise.

Hitchhiking in this part of space is very dangerous.

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: basics, kazon, Michael Piller, star trek: voyager, voyager | 12 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Quickening (Review)

Posted on April 13, 2016 by Darren

Somehow, it happened. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine went from a show that could barely produce one good Bashir episode in a season to a series that could crank out three great Bashir episodes within the same production year.

The fourth season of Deep Space Nine is a fantastic season of television, even allowing for the episodes that don’t quite work (Sons of Mogh, Rules of Engagement) and those that fall completely apart (Shattered Mirror, The Muse). There any number of ways of measuring this success: the ease with which Worf has been integrated into the ensemble; the very high average quality of the individual episodes; the skill with which the production team navigated the introduction of the Klingon plot threads at the suggestion of the studio.

Paradise lost.

These are all perfect valid barometres of the season’s success. As is the most obvious indicator: the season is fun to watch and largely holds up on rewatch. However, the simple fact that Deep Space Nine could produce three great centring around Julian Bashir over the course of a single season speaks to how far the production team had come. After all, the studio had repeatedly asked the staff to write Bashir out of the show, convinced that fans were not responding to the station’s chief medical officer.

The Quickening is the third and final “good Bashir episode” of the fourth season, and it demonstrates just how important Bashir is to the fabric and framework of Deep Space Nine. Bashir represents Deep Space Nine‘s esoteric utopianism.

Bashir determination…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: cynicsm, hope, idealism, john eaves, optimism, star trek, star trek: deep space nine, the quickening, utopianism | 14 Comments »

Star Trek: Voyager – Resolutions (Review)

Posted on April 12, 2016 by Darren

So, shipping.

Times change surprisingly quickly. It is fair to say that Star Trek: Voyager emerged in a different world than the original Star Trek. However, it also emerged in a different world than Star Trek: The Next Generation. In a way, the show had acknowledged as much through its experiments with serialisation earlier in the second season. Michael Piller was trying to keep the franchise at the bleeding edge of contemporary television, realising that the medium was not the same as it had been when Jean-Luc Picard emerged at the end of the Reagan era.

Reach out…

Resolutions nods towards a different type of change in the way that television storytelling worked, particularly conversations about television storytelling. Although it could be argued that Star Trek helped to popularise the notion of romantically (or sexually) pairing off television characters through the practice of “slashing” Kirk and Spock, the notion of “shipping” had begun to enter the mainstream during the mid-nineties. The raw sexual chemistry between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson on The X-Files played no small part.

Resolutions is essentially about “shipping” Janeway and Chakotay.

… and touch somebody.

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: chakotay, fandom, janeway, Jeri Taylor, resolutions, shipping, voyager | 24 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – To the Death (Review)

Posted on April 8, 2016 by Darren

To the Death continues the late fourth season shift in focus back towards elements unique to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

At the end of the third season, the production team found themselves receiving notes and input from the network, who wanted Deep Space Nine to go in a different direction. The writing staff on Deep Space Nine were willing to compromise, and took some of the network input on board. As a result, The Way of the Warrior added Worf to the cast and brought the Klingons back to the fore. However, it was clear that Deep Space Nine was not particularly interested in telling a long-term story about new hostilities between the Federation and the Klingons.

The Weyoun of the Warrior…

Over the course of the fourth season, the writing staff’s original plans and interests began to reassert themselves in an organic and logical manner. A story similar to Homefront and Paradise Lost had originally been planned to bridge the third and fourth seasons; instead, it was pushed back to almost half-way through the fourth seasons. The Bajoran religion was still the focus of Accession. Gul Dukat received a character arc in Indiscretion and Return to Grace. The Jem’Hadar got a focus episode in Hippocratic Oath. Ferengi politics popped up in Bar Association.

However, these aspects of the show really galvanise towards the end of the fourth season, with the production team really focusing on the elements that had been important during the third season and which would become even more important during the fifth season. For the Cause marked the return of the Maquis as a political player. Body Parts focused on Ferengi culture. However, three of the season’s final four episodes focus on the Dominion, working to reestablish the Dominion as the most credible of threats and the show’s primary antagonists.

Boy, does Sisko ever break out the welcome wagon…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Dominion, ds9, Jeffrey Combs, Jem'Hadar, star trek, star trek: deep space nine, Weyoun | 13 Comments »

Star Trek: Voyager – Tuvix (Review)

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Darren

Tuvix is a controversial piece of Star Trek.

The episode tends to polarise fandom. In particular, the climax of the episode seems to divide fans firmly down the middle. When the fan site Trek Today marked the end of Star Trek: Voyager by staging a mock “Court Martial of Captain Kathryn Janeway”, it was argued that the events of Tuvix should have been included as evidence against her. It is no surprise that the episode generated such a strong response. Discussing the production of the episode, Tom Wright reflected, “The truth is that the higher ups of Star Trek knew that this would cause some controversy.”

“Neevok was never gonna cut it.”

Of course it generates some controversy. This is the episode where Janeway elects to murder one crew member in order to resurrect two lost crew members. This is a story about how the title character is convenient for about forty-five minutes of screentime, only for the crew to quickly dispose of him as soon as the end credits beacon. Tuvix never really makes a convincing moral case for why the eponymous character has to die, beyond the fact that it conveniently resets the status quo.

Then again, perhaps that is reason enough.

Two for the price of one…

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: continuity, episodic, morality, reset button, star trek: voyager, tom wright, transporter malfunction, tuvix, voyager | 21 Comments »

Non-Review Review: The Man Who Knew Infinity

Posted on April 6, 2016 by Darren

It takes a lot of skill to make mathematics seem beautiful. It is enough work to render those complex equations that mash together numbers and greek letters as something profound and understandable to contemporary audiences. After all, maths is static at best. When it comes to the kind of mathematical genius that inspires these sorts of biographies, the math tends towards the abstract. When The Man Who Knew Infinity works best, it manages to capture just some of the romance trapped between those braces.

Of course, there are points at which The Man Who Knew Infinity threatens to get too romantic. Writer and director Matthew Brown has an obvious (and infectious) enthusiasm for his subject, Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. The Man Who Knew Infinity works best when it expresses this affection through its leads. Jeremy Irons makes a surprisingly convincing evangelist for abstract mathematics, and Dev Patel offers utter conviction in the lead role. However, there are points at which Brown seems unwilling or unable to trust his actors or his audience.