Star Trek Beyond came out almost a year ago and I liked it quite well. It was no Undiscovered Country or Wrath of Khan, but it was fun and enjoyable and sometimes that's all you can hope for with Star Trek. I never wrote a review because, quite frankly, there wasn't all that much to say. Fast and Furious director Justin Lin did a fine job remaining faithful to both the aesthetic established by JJ Abrams when he rebooted it a few years ago, as well as the characters themselves. But a few cleverly framed visual sequences aside, he didn't exactly push the story in any new directions or expand the mythology much. I finally got around to watching it again and this time I think I can put my finger on why this passable installment that had quite favorable reviews (in a summer movie schedule otherwise rife with disappointing duds) still somehow managed to be... only okay? It let spectacle and plot overwhelm the themes and characters. And this can kill your story too and leave it merely okay when it otherwise had the potential to be resonant.
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I swear when this all started, I was only doing research for my next Lorna Lockheed story. I had this epiphany that I could use The Fast and the Furious as a structural template for Lorna's next adventure in much the same way Director Sam Mendes admitted to using Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight as a visual, thematic and structural template for his popular James Bond film Skyfall (Or to use a more relevant example, how The Fast and the Furious itself was modeled after Point Break). Movies and stories are doing this sort of thing all the time, borrowing the bones of some well established or literary benchmark and growing new muscle and skin over the top to breathe life and depth into their work. I wanted my story to be about family, to pit rival gangs against each other and the police, to feature visceral, high-octane racing scenes, and indulge in a little exuberant attitude along the way (as Lorna is wont to do). What better film to homage than The Fast and the Furious, which, for all its flaws and cheap thrills, nonetheless hangs on a straight forward and functional plot progression I could very much take advantage of. The film is pretty dated, I'll admit, but there is something compelling beneath all the gratuitous bikini B-roll and thug culture that surprised me this time. It's nothing so flashy as complex characterization or culturally critical commentary or even ambitious artistic aspiration. It's just good old fashioned serialized soap-opera continuity porn. Wait, what? What does that even mean? Let's take a closer look. |
Captain's Blog
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