the m0vie blog

Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Icarus Factor (Review)

Posted on January 13, 2014 by Darren

This January and February, we’ll be finishing up our look at the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and moving on to the third year of the show, both recently and lovingly remastered for high definition. Check back daily for the latest review.

The Icarus Factor is a character-driven story. At least, it wants to be a character-driven story. The problem is that Star Trek: The Next Generation hasn’t reached the point where it can really do character-driven storytelling with a measure of consistence. (The fact that Picard confronting his future failures in Time Squared worked was more down to Patrick Stewart than the episode’s script.)

The Icarus Factor is a story focusing on Riker as a character, and it suffers from the fact that Riker hasn’t really been well-defined to date. We’re repeatedly told that he’s ambitious and career-driven, but most his on-screen characterisation has fluctuated between reckless, jerkish and horny. So The Icarus Factor tries to compensate by giving Riker the most generic back story possible for a lead male character on a television show.

This is the story of Riker’s daddy issues.

Somehow, this image just sums up Riker as a character…

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: Deanna Troi, Icarus Factor, Joe Menosky, Katherine Pulaski, Klingon, Miles O'Brien, O'BRIEN, patrick stewart, Riker, Star Trek Next Generation, Time Squared, Troi, William Riker, Worf | 3 Comments »

Star Trek: The Lost Era – Deny Thy Father by Jeff Mariotte (Review)

Posted on January 13, 2014 by Darren

We’ll be supplementing our coverage of the episodes with some additional materials – mainly novels and comics and films. This is one such entry.

In theory, you can probably tell a good story about just about anything. There’s a knack to constructing a narrative and in making particular characters fascinating or compelling. In the right hands, even the most tired and boring premise can generate some measure of excitement and over a glimpse of depth that we never thought was there. For example, I didn’t come out of Star Trek: Generations thinking that I’d ever read a classic story about John Harriman, and then I read the superb Serpents Among the Ruins.

However, some ideas strike you as a little less exciting than others. Some concepts seem a bit riskier to pull off, a bit more daunting in scope. Constructing a compelling narrative around the youth of Commander William T. Riker, probably one of the blandest members of the Star Trek: The Next Generation ensemble, seems like an uphill struggle.

Unfortunately, Jeff Mariote’s Deny Thy Father isn’t up to the task of making the boring father-son relationship glimpsed in The Icarus Factor seem any more exciting.

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: Icarus Factor, james t. kirk, jean-luc picard, John Harriman, kirk, Margaret Wander Bonanno, Riker, san francisco, spock, Star Trek Next Generation, Star Trek Original Series, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: enterprise, Star Trek: The Animated Series, star trek: the next generation, Starfleet, StarTrek, William Riker, William Shatner | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Time Squared (Review)

Posted on January 10, 2014 by Darren

Time Squared is an intriguing little episode, if not entirely satisfying. Like The Royale before it, it features the Enterprise stumbling across a phenomenon that it can’t explain. Also like The Royale, the episode presents an existential horror to the crew. Time Squared is significantly stronger as a character piece, forcing Picard to confront a potential future version of himself that he can’t reconcile with his own expectations and self-image. Unfortunately, the open-ended mystery of the episode lacks the bizarre charm of the unresolved questions dangling at the end of The Royale.

“I never noticed before, but the Captain has pretty spectacular bone structure…”

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: Deanna Troi, gene roddenberry, Geordi La Forge, Hurley, jean-luc picard, patrick stewart, picard, Q Who, Royale, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, Time Squared, USS Enterprise, William Riker, Worf | 10 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Last Vegas

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Darren

Last Vegas is a curious blend. On a purely practical level, it’s a genre hybrid that was bound to happen. Audiences love the “boys behaving badly” narratives that have been revitalised by The Hangover; indeed, that unlikely hit was popular enough to spawn a trilogy. Recent years have also seen audiences flock to films involving older performers, the cynically-described “grey dollar” that turned The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel into such a runaway success, but has been bubbling away in the background with films like Red or The Bucket List.

So, from a studio’s perspective, combining these two successful genres was a bit of a no-brainer. However, the two genres are also somewhat opposed to one another. The Hangover and its string of imitators pride themselves on their immaturity and their irreverence. There’s nothing that is off limits or out-of-bounds to those reckless young turks, no sacred cows that can’t be slaughtered, no sense of good taste that can’t be ignored completely in pursuit of the next laugh.

In contrast, films banking on elderly stars to draw aging audiences are built around reverence. Isn’t it nice to have films that don’t marginalise and sideline elderly performers? Isn’t it great to give people like Morgan Freeman or Robert DeNiro their due? In a way, the genre is built around reverence.

That puts Last Vegas in a very weird place, where it’s constantly trying to go far enough that it can pass as an irreverent “boys on vacation” comedy, but also trying to remain courteous enough and respectful enough of its leads that it won’t alienate viewers who just want to hang out with Douglas, DeNiro, Freeman and Kline. The result is predictably unsatisfying.

Putting their cards on the table…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | 2 Comments »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Royale (Review)

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Darren

“None of it makes any sense, sir,” Riker succinctly states before the credits role on The Royale. The Royale is a decidedly nonsensical episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where an away team find themselves trapped inside an atrocious casino melodrama and have to figure out how to return to the ship. The episode is packed with interesting visuals and a bizarre situations, but it never quite comes together in the end.

And, yet, despite the obvious problems, The Royale is intriguing. Visually, it’s one of the most striking and memorable episodes of the show’s first two season. The rotating door to nowhere is a beautifully strange image, and the sight of the Enterprise away team wandering around a twentieth century casino is enough to prevent the episode from ever becoming boring. The Royale isn’t the best constructed episode of the show’s first two years, and it has more than its fair share of problems.

However, it’s also a wonderfully bizarre and adventurous piece of science-fiction, as if Riker has beamed into a cheap imitation of The Twilight Zone. That’s enough to make it well worth a watch.

The whole plot revolves around absurdities…

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: Big Goodbye, Crown, Data, Deanna Troi, doctor, DoctorWho, Earth, Fermat's Last Theorem, god, Hotel Royale, Next Generation, Pond, Royale, Sam Anderson, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, StarTrek, tardis, Time Squared, Tracy Tormé, William Riker, Worf | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Sky’s The Limit: Meet with Triumph and Disaster & Trust Yourself When All Men Doubt You by Michael Schuster & Steve Mollmann (Review)

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Darren

We’ll be supplementing our coverage of the episodes with some additional materials – mainly novels and comics and films. This is one such entry. This is actually supplementary to the first season of the Next Generation, specifically the episode Encounter at Farpoint.

The Sky’s the Limit was an anthology released to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 2007. It was a bit of a no brainer, edited by the wonderful Marco Palmieri in the style of anthologies like The Lives of Dax or Prophecy and Change. The goal was to draw together a bunch of talented writers to fashion stories involving the crew and the ship at various stages in the life cycle of the Enterprise. There is a short story for every season of the show, save the fourth, and between each of the movies.

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: arts, Beverly Crusher, Christopher L. Bennett, february, List of Star Trek planets (T–Z), Next Generation, picard, science fiction, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: enterprise, StarTrek, William Riker | Leave a comment »

Stalker Hits Irish Cinemas 26th February

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Darren

Always glad to do my bit to help Irish film, I received the following press release about Stalker, Mark O’Connor’s film that has taken quite a few festivals by storm. I’ve heard good things about the film from New York and Galway, and wider audiences will get a chance to take a look at the film towards the end of next month, when it goes into Irish release.

Full press release below.

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Filed under: Movies | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Delivery Man

Posted on January 8, 2014 by Darren

Delivery Man works surprisingly well. Like something of a throwback to the nineties “overgrown manchild” comedy about slackers honestly trying to pull their lives together, Vince Vaughn’s latest effort is disarmingly sincere. It isn’t plotted particularly well, and there are points where Delivery Man threatens to unspool if you think about it too much, but this adaptation of Canadian comedy Starbuck has its heart in the right place and manages to deliver a nice sentimental comedy without every becoming overwrought or overly earnest.

Cue a tonne of “who’s your daddy?” jokes…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: comedy, delivery man, fatherhood, films, Movies, non-review review, paternity, review, Vince Vaughn | 6 Comments »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Contagion (Review)

Posted on January 8, 2014 by Darren

Contagion is a nice reminder that the average quality of Star Trek: The Next Generation is improving. While the stand-out episodes of the second season of The Next Generation tend to attract a lot of attention, the more solid episodes tend to get a bit lost in the discussion. Contagion doesn’t rank alongside Elementary, Dear Data, A Matter of Honour, The Measure of a Man or Q Who?, but it’s still demonstrating that we’ve reached a point where the show can churn out a pretty good episode without it feeling like a special occasion.

It’s a bit of a shame, then, that Contagion comes from two individuals outside the show’s writers’ room.

The Yamato rests in pieces…

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: Cold War, Contagion, gene roddenberry, history, Iconia, jean-luc picard, Klingon, List of Star Trek characters (N–S), marvel, Matter of Honor, Michael Piller, Neutral Zone, Next Generation, Romulan, ronald d. moore, star trek, star trek: the next generation, StarTrek, Steve Gerber, United States, William Riker | 2 Comments »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Masks by John Vornholt (Review)

Posted on January 8, 2014 by Darren

We’ll be supplementing our coverage of the episodes with some additional materials – mainly novels and comics and films. This is one such entry.

Generally, I’ve been looking at novels and tie-ins that are specifically or thematically related to specific episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s a valid approach to writing about the show, searching out material that expands or develops themes and concepts and characters lightly touched upon during the episode in question. However, some times it is also worth taking time out to look at what was happening in tie-in fiction at approximately the same time.

Obviously, the scripts written by writers working on the show were the result of a careful creative process drawing input from the writers in general, the producers and the studio. They were crafted with a key eye to shaping the future direction of the show, by the people working on the show. Looking at official tie-in material from the same time allows us to venture a bit outside that circle, and to get a glimpse of what The Next Generation might have looked like to a creator outside the writers’ room as it was going to air.

Masks was published in July 1989, after Shades of Grey had aired and the second season had limped off the screen. While author John Vornholt obviously could not have seen the whole season on submitting his novel, it is interesting to get his view of the sci-fi spin-off in its sophomore season.