The single point of genesis of my two favorite Star Trek movies

And the word "genesis" is chosen intentionally, as you will see.

But first some background on why I just read a book about one of the most beloved epsiodes of television of all time, why there's an incredible controversy about it, and why it fits appropriately as a post in my movie blog.

You may recall I told you last year that I wanted to read more about films. Sure, reading is a time I cherish for specifically not doing movie-related things. But reading about films is also part of deepening your love for/knowledge of the movies. So last year I vowed, at least in the short run, to read a book about movies or filmmaking as every second book I read, starting with Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation, which I read in November and December and wrote about several times on the blog.

So after reading Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles in January, I turned my attentions in February to a project I'd been putting off.

Last year, an old friend sent me the book you see above, as well as a graphic novel depiction of the same controversial Harlan Ellison episode of the original Star Trek series, "The City on the Edge of Forever." He also sent me a Red Sox t-shirt that is in my regular rotation, since he's a lot more Star Trek than Red Sox. 

All three items were appreciated, but the two Star Trek ones seemed like they could cause me a headache. 

See, a few months ago I started to read the book you see above, and it starts with Ellison basically in the middle of a diatribe whose beginning I had not heard. Ellison, you see, was not only a legendary science fiction writer, but he was also legendary for his belligerance and argumentatitve nature. This did not just make him a boor; it appears that his friends cherished him, and he had many professional relationships that were cordial. But he didn't suffer fools and he rarely kept quiet about something that bothered him, or at least, not "forever." (He was sitting on his "City on the Edge of Forever" gripes for something like 30 years before spewing them all here.) Anyway, the tone of the rage-filled rant, which eviscerates people like Gene Roddenberry and which had not (initially) provided me the sort of background context I'm trying to provide you here, caused me to set down the book and save it for another day. 

The basic background here is that Ellison submitted a script for the 28th episode of the first season of Star Trek that, according to Gene Roddenberry, could not be filmed. Having read the teleplay, I'm inclined to agree. There's so much plot in this one episode that it was better suited to being a feature film, not a single 48-minute episode of television. 

Did Roddenberry et al make gutless decisions in rewriting the teleplay so it would fit into their standard allotment of screen minutes and their standard budget? I'm sure they did. And I'm sure everyone who took a pass at the script -- which seems to have been about 13 people -- was a less talented writer than Ellison. But then they took more credit for it than Ellison thought they should, especially as they sprinkled their discourse about it with disparaging comments about him. 

Well, the episode was a success in two very specific ways, or three, if you consider its legacy. In the moment, the episode won an award both for the televised version, and the teleplay that Ellison submitted for consideration -- even though those two things were quite different. Its legacy? "The City on the Edge of Forever" edges out "The Trouble with Tribbles" to be considered the favorite episode of the original series, any time a vote is taken about this sort of thing.

The plot? I'll give you that as well. Kirk and Spock must go back in time to the U.S. of 1930, following a troubled Enterprise crewman who is escaping the rest of the crew and whose presence in 1930 is going to alter the course of the future beyond all recognition. While there, Kirk falls in love with a woman who, in space-time terms, is a focal point of this point in history, and who must die in order for the future to proceed as it has. Ironically, it's the troubled crewman who is trying to save this woman, while Kirk must let her die.

Heady stuff. Much headier in Ellison's script than the pallid facsimile we get in the TV show, though of course, this also became the favorite episode of the entire series, so they had to be doing something right. They couldn't have known, at the time, how much better the episode would have been with more of Ellison's original ideas intact, but then again, that would have been twice the length. (When the graphic novel version of it was made, it was made into five separate comic books, which tells you a little something about its length.) 

I'm writing this post for two reasons: 1) I need to get something up on my blog after leaving you with a rant about racism at the movies three days ago, and 2) I want my friend to read this as my reaction to reading the book and the graphic novel, and then finishing it off with my first-ever viewing of "The City on the Edge of Tomorrow," which I did last night after buying it on AppleTV. So I may at this point shift to not clarifying everything I'm talking about as I address my comments more to him, though we'll see how that goes. The journalist in me demands to provide context at every juncture. 

So yes, it's quite clear that Ellison wrote a very thoughtful treatment in which the bad seed on the episode is a drug-dealing Enterprise crewman (not a poisoned Dr. McCoy, as he turned out to be on TV) and there's a lot more of interest in the scenes of Earth of 1930, which take place in an unspecified American city. His vision of the planet with the time portal, which gives the episode its title, is undeniably more grand, but that's where the budgetary restrictions of a show with a weekly production schedule come more into play. In any case, the graphic novel is a glorious realization of Ellison's every hope for the episode, and on this occasion he is inclined to offer plenty of praise, as he says he was "over the moon" for how they conceived of his words in the artwork. 

And it's true that very little of that survives on the show. In fact, there are points where it feels like they could have used some of Ellison's original turns of phrase or other dialogue, because the stories are similar enough, but they deviated from those words more out of spite than actual necessity. So that gives credence to some of Ellison's charges that Roddenberry and others were acting in bad faith, though I suppose it also gives credence to the idea that Roddenberry and others bore a greater responsibility for what was actually on screen -- and this is the notion that perturbs Ellison the most. 

I do think it's funny that there is such a controversy over this episode, because often controversies, especially those resulting from tampering with the creative process, are the result of something that failed spectacularly. "The City on the Edge of Forever" was a spectacular success, by any measure. So I think that's what initially struck me as obtuse about Ellison's complaints. Can't everyone just be happy that a really good Star Trek episode resulted from this? They all get dragged down by the "success has many fathers" nature of the controversy. Just be glad it was a success, I think.

But watching the episode, especially after already reading four treatments of Ellison's material across the two books, it does seem very puny by comparison to what Ellison wrote. Surely it needed to be streamlined, but within that, you can see the lack of courage in the decisions. Ellison wanted Kirk to approach doing the wrong thing, or actually not be able to do the right in the moment and need to be saved by Spock. In the completed version, Kirk does do the right thing, and we don't even really see any emotional aftermath of it. 

The thing that I find really interesting about this whole thing, though, is that fans had to already love the episode to even get to this point of there being a controversy and there existing an unexpurgated version of this story. My friend introduced this to me as the episode that made him love Star Trek, which is funny, because I am coming at it from the angle that the episode is pretty weak compared to what Ellison wrote. Then again, this is just part of my theory that you like the first version of something you encounter the best, a theory that usually applies to songs. For example, if you hear the remixed version of a song first and fall in love with it, you will not like the original, even though without the original the remix would not exist.

I wonder if I would have felt differently about it if I'd watched the episode first, and maybe my friend assumed I was already familiar with it. Maybe then I would have been attached to the decisions on the show and found Ellison's choices perverse. Then again, I suspect most people who love Ellison's take had already seen (and loved) the televised version, yet still had a place in their heart for his original version. Me, I'm a Star Trek fan, have been since The Wrath of Khan. But interestingly, I've only seen a couple of the original episodes all the way through. I just didn't watch the show at the time -- obviously, I wasn't alive yet -- and never went back to it over the years, even though I love these characters and the movies they're in, and even though reruns were surely available on television stations I had access to as a kid. 

Although I have a clear preference for Ellison's version, I do want to acknowledge something that I thought the episode got right that Ellison got wrong. And here we get into the stereotypical Trekkie complaints, the kind William Shatner lampooned when he was on Saturday Night Live, that get way too into the weeds. But they're weeds that I think Ellison would respect.

In Ellison's version of the story, the time disruption caused by the drug-dealing crewman Beckwith, when he goes back in time, results in significant changes to this version of the universe. But not so significant there is not still a ship sitting at the exact coordinates of where the Enterprise was when the crew beamed down to the planet, and is, in fact, actually the Enterprise itself -- just manned by a pirate crew. It would be reasonable to argue that if Beckwith had caused a permanent rift in time, not only would the Enterprise not be in that exact space at that exact time, it might not exist at all. (Ellison would probably have an explanation for this, maybe that the renegade crew/pirates constitute a visual representation of an altered universe, containing the ring of truth if not actual plausible scientific truth.)

In the TV show, the Enterprise is, in fact, gone. The crew that are with Kirk and Spock -- which includes Uhura, who utters the cringe-worthy line of dialogue "Captain, I'm scared" -- are stranded on the planet, rather than stranded on the Enterprise with a crew of renegades. At least the Trekkies who thrive on pushing their glasses up the bridges of their noses can appreciate this more believable outcome. (Of course, if we were going full Back to the Future, then probably they would all just vanish from existence -- but then you wouldn't have an episode.)

Because he didn't tell me, I'm not sure exactly why my friend was convinced of his love for Star Trek by "The City on the Edge of Forever," but I can tell you why it would have convinced me, even if I have to retrofit an explanation that might not have made sense if I'd first encountered the episode years ago. And here now we finally get to the two movies I referenced in the subject of this post.

"The City on the Edge of Forever" features primary components of both Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, far and away the best of the original six Star Trek movies. And those two components nourish two different parts of the brain of the devoted Star Trek fan. 

Let's start with the fun one.

There's a decent argument to suggest that without "City on the Edge of Forever," Star Trek IV would not exist, or not in its current form. Talk about time-related causalities. 

The Voyage Home involves a return by the Enterprise crew (though not the Enterprise itself) to present-day San Francisco of 1986, the year the film was released, in order to acquire a humpback whale to prevent future Earth from being desiccated by an alien craft trying to make contact with the (now extinct) whales. As notably the only movie in the series where "comedy" is an appropriate genre, the film relies heavily on the rapport between Kirk and Spock as they try to blend in with the San Franciscans, much of it very funny. The rest of the crew are there, on different missions and also blending in, but Kirk and Spock -- and a present-day love interest for Kirk -- are sequestered on their own mission. 

That this features the essential fundamental dynamics from "City" is no accident, though it should be noted, the Voyage Home version of Kirk and Spock do not appear to remember their previous trip to 20th century America. I think we're meant to take this as similar to the James Bond movies, where we don't really believe that this James Bond has had all the experiences of the previous James Bonds -- though the fact that Kirk and Spock are played by the same actors does make this problematic.

For me, this movie came along at the perfect time, as I was still high off of wrestling with the time travel conundrums presented to us in Back to the Future the year before. And while there are not quite so many "if you change this, then this" moments in The Voyage Home -- no one is fading in and out of existence, for example -- it still delves deep into the problems of being in an earlier time period, including the fact that things you need to get back home haven't been invented yet. That's also a plot point in "City," I should mention, as well as Back to the Future. Although Ellison says The Voyage Home was one of about four Trek movies he was approached to write, he didn't write it -- though his fingerprints are all over it. This is certainly the more "Roddenberry accessible" version of a thing Ellison might have written, especially since it gives Kirk a happy ending with the girl.

And this is just the "fun" part of Star Trek. Sling-shotting around the sun in order to travel back in time. Building a tank on a Klingon vessel (remember, the Enterprise blew up in the last movie) in order to transport a whale. Scotty trying to talk into a mouse to address the computer. It's great stuff and I get a grin on my face just thinking about it.

But "City" also has the much more serious theme at the heart of The Wrath of Khan, not to mention its band of renegades, Khan's crew, who were first envisioned by Ellison in his version of the "City" teleplay.

I don't suppose I need to give a spoiler alert for The Wrath of Khan, seeing as how it turns 44 years old this year, and seeing as how I didn't avoid spoiling that Kirk gets the girl at the end of The Voyage Home. But here is your Star Trek II SPOILER ALERT anyway.

So you know that after a ripping yarn about a mano-a-mano space battle between Kirk and Khan, during which Kirk is also grappling with his own mortality and the surprise of being in close contact with his estranged son, we get the gut punch of the death of Spock. It's not a permanent death, of course -- you already know, because I've told you, that he was in Star Trek IV. We have the Genesis planet to thank for that, and now you see why I included that word in the subject of this post. A weapon of either ultimate creation or ultimate destruction gets fired at a nearby barren planet, which quickly becomes verdant and teeming with life -- and which is where Spock is ultimately "reborn," a saga that continues throughout Star Trek III, which is of course subtitled The Search for Spock. (And one of the reasons The Search for Spock conforms to the Trek rule of thumb that the odd-numbered movies are not so good, is that the regrowth of Spock into an adult is never not weird and is always wobbly in its execution.)

But at the time Khan came out, we couldn't know for sure that this was not the end of Spock. Maybe Leonard Nimoy wanted out of his contract or something.

Anyway, Spock must expose himself to untold amounts of radiation to help save the Enterprise crew, which he does, knowing it will be the end of him. His death scene, one of the more emotional out there, contains this famous line: "The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many ... or the one."

Which is pretty much the thesis of the sacrifice of Edith Keeler in "City."

Kirk has the chance to save her, but he knows that it will mean either the loss of the Enterprise entirely (on TV) or the loss of the crew to a band of renegades (in the teleplay), which amount to the same thing, for all intents and purposes. And though in the show we don't know if this version of the universe is worse -- we just know the Enterprise is no longer there -- in the teleplay we know that renegades run amok in the galaxy, avoiding punishment and spreading evil.

And so yes, the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the one. Outweighed the needs of Edith Keeler, but also outweighed the needs of James Kirk.

So yes I'm glad to have spent this time with "The City on the Edge of Forever," even if Harlan Ellison created a very difficult entry point at first with his spewing of bile at the already dead Gene Roddenberry. (And to be fair, he did castigate himself every time he did this because you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead.)

I am convinced that his version of the story is better, but both versions contribute wonderful things to our culture, and both versions helped make my friend a Star Trek fan. So I'm glad both versions exist.

And as a last comment, seeing the teleplay and then seeing the TV show give me a great glimpse into the creative process, which is what makes this another invaluable part of my project of reading about film. Any script undergoes great changes before it ends up on screen, whether it's a TV script or a movie script -- and this exercise gave me a greater appreciation of just how complicated that process can be. 

Galaxy Quest and its most direct source of inspiration

It was Australian Father's Day on Sunday, meaning Daddy gets to choose.

We did some other Daddy-chosen activities throughout the weekend -- a bonfire in our new backyard fire pit on Saturday night, including s'mores, and lunch out at a place called Grazeland that has about 40 food trucks on Sunday afternoon. But I also took advantage of the chance to guide our Sunday night viewing priorities, as I did last year when I pushed Star Wars: The Force Awakens on the family for a viewing on the projector in our garage. 

I thought the kids might want to get a bit more aspirational this year, with a movie aimed a little more at older viewers, and my wife and I had talked before about exposing them to one of our favorite comedies. I'd hoped a viewing of Galaxy Quest would accomplish both things. 

Well, my older son laughed one time. It was when Sam Rockwell said "There's a red thingy going toward the green thingy. I think we're the green thingy."

My younger son didn't laugh, but I'm not sure he has the same instincts for comedy that his older brother has. I ultimately didn't really get an assessment of the movie from either of them as we just hurried them off to bed when it was over. Which was fine. At least my wife enjoyed it, as she always does.

After it ended, I did something I almost never do. I took the recommendation by the streaming service (Stan) of another movie to watch if I enjoyed Galaxy Quest.

That movie was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I've heard of it.

That's a joke of course. Star Trek II is the movie that single-handedly salvaged the prospects of me liking Star Trek after I was left so cold by Star Trek: The Motion Picture as a kid. Watching it again now, I am surprised I found it such an action-packed adventure, comparatively speaking, since it really is just a giant chess match between Kirk and Khan. But the nine-year-old me was apparently pretty sophisticated in this tastes, and a love affair with that other major science fiction franchise was born. The only Star Wars movie I have ahead of it on my Flickchart, in fact, is the original Star Wars. It's sitting in the august spot of #23 on my chart, and after another viewing, I've again confirmed Wrath of Khan is worth every little bit of that ranking.

It was especially interesting to watch it in the context of having just seen Galaxy Quest, since I'm now formally convinced of something I probably kind of subconsciously assumed in the past: While Galaxy Quest is certainly a spoof of everything Star Trek, it gets more material from Wrath of Khan than anywhere else.

Consider:

1) Both movies contain an extremely powerful device with the power to destroy worlds. In Khan that is Genesis, a technology that can create a vibrant world on a dead planet -- or will destroy and recreate on a planet that is not dead. In Quest, it's the Omega 13, which happens to be a device that rearranges matter to allow a time shift of 13 seconds -- though for most of the movie they don't know what it is, and worry it could destroy all matter in the universe. In either case it serves as a MacGuffin that that rival captain wants.

2) And let's talk about that rival captain. As epic as Khan is in the pantheon of villains, I'd argue that Quest's Sarris is a well-drawn character who has earned his own high level of cult appreciation. Speaking of chess matches, both Khan and Sarris engage in battles of the wills and intellects with the man who is either Captain Kirk himself or a direct spoof of Kirk, Jason Nesmith's Peter Quincy Taggert. Because this is the dominant technological mode, these tete-a-tete battles are carried out via the big control room screens where they one can see the other -- though one difference between them is that Sarris and Taggert (actually Nesmith) do share the same space at one point, whereas Kirk and Khan never do. (A surprising decision, one would say, that ends up never diminishing the chemistry between the two archrivals.)

3) Both films feature a scene where an inexperienced captain and/or pilot steers a starship out of a docking port. The scene is played hilariously for comedy in Quest, where Laredo -- actually the grown child actor Tommy Webber -- attempts something he has no business doing and scrapes the side of the ship against the port wall, accompanied by an eternal screeching sound and all the other passengers twisting their head sideways in agony. The comedy is there but more muted in Khan, where Kirk displays his obvious nerves over the fact that Lt. Saavik will be supervising for the first time as her crew pilots the ship out of port. That one goes much more smoothly. (Some dialogue I jotted down. Kirk says to Sulu "I'm glad to have you at the helm for two weeks. I don't think these kids can steer." Well, Laredo is literally a kid -- a grown kid, but a kid on the original show -- and all evidence suggests that he cannot really steer.)

4) In Wrath of Khan, Kirk talks about reprogramming the simulation test Kobayashi Maru that presents a no-win situation for prospective captains, because "I don't like to lose." In Quest, Taggart's motto is "Never give up, never surrender."

5) This might be a little more of a stretch, but both movies contain a scene where a character holds a dying man in his arms and says he will avenge him. It's Alexander Dane's Dr. Lazarus cradling Quellek after Quellek has been shot, when Dane finally is genuinely moved to produce his much-loathed catchphrase: "By Grabthar's Hammer, by the suns of Worvan, you shall be avenged." It's actually the villain in Khan, as Khan promises "I will avenge you" to Joachim, whose name I just had to look up, but is listed on Wikipedia as "Khan's chief henchman." Joachim certainly deserves to be avenged, as he's constantly giving Khan good advice that Khan ignores, and it gest him nothing but a large chunk of the Starship Reliant dropped on his midsection.

And in #4, I found my two unexpected bits of Father's Day resonance. In Quellek's death scene, he says to Dane/Lazarus, "And although we had never met, I always considered you as a father to me." Given their age difference and general relationship, you could think of Joachim as Khan's son, surrogate or otherwise. (In fact, it may have been otherwise -- there are certain places on the internet that flatly state that Joachim is Khan's son.)

Of course the most obvious instance of the father theme in Star Trek II is the fact that Kirk meets, for the first time ever it would appear, his own son, David Marcus, whose mother Carol never told him that his father was one of the most famous captains in the history of the federation. Kirk isn't just a deadbeat dad; Carol actually asked him to stay away. "You had your world and I had mine," she says. "And I wanted him in mine, not off gallivanting through the universe with his father."

There's no David death scene; not in this movie, anyway. (Yes, I may have to reckon with Star Trek III for the first time in forever after having my appetite whetted here.) But it was a really nice way to finish the night to see the two have a somewhat awkward but ultimately poignant hug as David formally acknowledges Kirk as his father and says he's proud to be his son. 

The longest interval

If you'd asked me last week what was my oldest movie that I'd seen only once, I would have had an easy answer for you.

Now, I'd have to stop and think about it.

You'll note I said "my oldest" rather than "the oldest" in order to steer you clear of movies like The Great Train Robbery, which I have indeed seen only once. And instead steer you toward the movie I saw longest ago, only that one time -- which wouldn't have been quite so easy to phrase as an elegant question.

That movie had been Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which I saw in the theater in 1979 and only just revisited this past Sunday night. I wish it had been a summer tentpole, rather than a holiday release, because then it could have been a true 35 years since I'd seen it. Instead, it's just 34 and 1/2.

But yes, that pretty definitely constitutes the longest interval between viewings of the same movie in my lifetime.

There are only three or four movies I can really be sure I saw in the 1970s at all. Actually, only two for 100% certain. I was born in October of 1973, and the first movie I saw in the theater -- or at least, that's what I've been telling myself all these years -- was Star Wars in 1977. The Rescuers came out a month after that, and I know I saw that in the theater, but I also believe I've seen it again since then -- and I may very well have seen it on a re-release. The Black Hole came out at the very end of 1979, two weeks after Star Trek, but I know I've seen that again because it was a movie my friend owned on Betamax, impressing us all greatly. And then there were any number of older Disney movies I may have seen in the 70s, which would have all been on re-releases.

I know I haven't seen Star Trek: The Motion Picture a second time, because I could barely stand to watch it the first time.

I went in expecting something like Star Wars, and I'm sure that's why my parents took me to it. Instead, it made up half of a 1-2 punch of sci-fi boredom with 2001: A Space Odyssey, which my parents also rolled the dice on sometime around then.

I now love 2001. Star Trek? Not so much.

It remains a miracle that this series ended up continuing -- and in fact, is still going today. Credit is due entirely to the superlative Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which I have now confirmed can be considered the most influential sequel in the history of the movies. What other sequel took an otherwise moribund franchise and more or less directly spurred into existence ten additional movies?

As with my recent discussion of finally re-watching Superman for the first time in decades, in which I promised to catch up with Star Trek next, there were a lot of things I forgot about the first Star Trek movie. One of them was not how boring it was. If I told you that this was the most boring movie ever made, it would only be a slight exaggeration.

How boring? How about the fact that there isn't a single phaser in this movie, set for stun or otherwise? How about the fact that not a single person throws a single punch or kick? How about the fact that dozens of minutes are spent on just flying the Enterprise toward a giant electrical phenomenon in space?

It's clear that how to pace a modern science fiction movie eluded director Robert Wise and his crew, but that might not be such a surprise, even with Star Wars there to provide a perfect template. After all, this is the same Robert Wise who directed my dad's favorite movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, 28 years earlier in 1951. He wasn't exactly some young turk trying to prove himself, though I should also say he wasn't over the hill either -- he was only 64. But he may not have been exactly the right guy for the job, considering that this movie isn't even half as exciting as The Day the Earth Stood Still -- a movie that actually celebrates inertia in its very title.

In fact, the movie is so boring that it was an exceptionally poor decision of mine to try to tackle it after 9 p.m. on a Sunday night, when I'd imbibed three to four glasses of alcohol over a leisurely Sunday lunch. I recovered from that in order to do all my bedtime duties and even cook dinner, but I couldn't recover from that and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

I could think of plenty of other ways to tell you how boring it is, but I'd only be repeating myself.

However, I do want to tell you some other things that I learned/remembered about the movie:

1) How much more than three years before Star Trek II does this movie seem? The actors look like they are ten years younger than in Star Trek II. Nichelle Nichols, for one, seems like a leftover from the late 1960s with her dated hairdo. Only three years later she has already become somewhat grandmotherly. The uniforms are entirely different than the red uniforms that I've gotten accustomed to from my ten or so viewings of Wrath of Khan. It goes to show you how much they tried to change for the second movie -- while, curiously, still keeping things fairly modest in terms of traditional action.

2) The dad from 7th Heaven is in this movie. That's right, Stephen Collins is Decker, the erstwhile captain of the Enterprise whose authority Admiral Kirk casually usurps. It's interesting how little is made of this blatantly political and frankly somewhat cowardly move by Kirk in order to regain control of a starship.

3) This movie has an exceptionally odd scene of the Enterprise teleporter technology failing. Ever wonder what happens when Scotty doesn't beam someone up correctly? I had entirely forgotten that this film offers an answer. Because the Enterprise is pressed into service to go confront the alien energy cloud before it is finished being refurbished, some systems don't work properly. Much to the chagrin of the short-lived science officer and one of his comrades, the teleporter is one of them. In what, as I said, is a very odd moment, you see a blurry image of the two figures half beaming in, and hear their screams. They then return to their point of origin, where someone grimly reports to Kirk, "What arrived didn't live very long." Bleak. Made me instantly think of that scene in Galaxy Quest where the alien warthog gets beamed up inside out, though that scene was of course played for laughs.

4) Almost none of the characters have anything to do in this movie, let alone have character arcs. Sulu's only purpose seems to be to ominously read out the increasing warp speeds. Uhura occasionally reports on something. Spock returns from a self-imposed return to Vulcan, but without much explanation for his change of heart, and seeming to be a bit miffed at the crew -- for reasons that may have been explained in the last episode of the TV show, but certainly aren't explained here. Bones wisecracks. Scotty offers some nice Scottish blarney. (Do Scots have blarney?) Chekhov ... was in this movie I think. Even Kirk doesn't do anything, not even answering for his naked ambition about getting control of a starship again. That's one big thing they correct in the sequel, giving Kirk an arc. His anxiety about getting older is front and center in that movie.

5) What this energy field actually turns out to be is sort of interesting, but it takes an hour and 45 minutes of treading water, of nobody shooting anyone with phasers, of nobody successfully beaming anywhere, and of only about ten seconds of Klingons at the beginning to get us there.

Like I said, the sheer existence of any other Star Trek movies is nothing short of miraculous.

"Our Zod" and "our Khan"

I've long associated Superman II and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in my head, but never before had so many reasons to do so as I do these days.

Not only did they both come out around the same time (1981 and 1982, respectively), they were both installments in series that would run for years and years and reboot in multiple incarnations. They were also both second movies that I loved, following on the heels of original movies that underwhelmed me. In fact, I'm sure I've seen Star Trek: The Motion Picture only once, and I've seen Superman: The Movie twice at most, though possibly only once.

Both movies also gave birth to what, to this day, I consider to be two of the greatest villains in cinema history. Their names should come as no surprise to you, since I've included them in the title of this post and furnished you with pictures of them above.

SPOILERS TO FOLLOW ABOUT STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS AND MAN OF STEEL

Zod (then played by Terence Stamp) and Khan (then played by Ricardo Montalban) have dug themselves into our collective moviegoing psyche to such an extent that they were both rebooted in movies from the summer of 2013 (one in an actual second movie, the other in a second reboot of the series in the last ten years). It's not a secret in Man of Steel; it's sort of a secret in Star Trek Into Darkness, hence the spoiler warning. In fact, these characters' reappearance in these franchises (neither having appeared since their original movies) was such a selling point that the characters' presence alone got people in my generation excited about seeing these movies.

The thing is, they're not "our Zod" or "our Khan."

I thought that was particular felicitous phrasing from a friend over the weekend. I hadn't seen Man of Steel yet (I accomplished that feat Tuesday night), but people were talking about it a little at someone's birthday drinks -- not very positively, as it turns out. They knew not to get into spoiler territory with me present, but I also didn't want my presence to shut down the conversation completely, so I gave my one friend the chance to throw me a bone on something that I thought would be easy: "Is Michael Shannon at least good?" I figured there was only one possible answer to this question.

"Yes, but he's not our Zod," my friend said.

It turns out I both agreed and disagreed with my friend. Michael Shannon wasn't our Zod, it's true. But he also wasn't that good. Maybe my friend didn't think he was so good either, but wanted to give me something I could use to bring a sense of optimism to my impending screening.

However, Shannon was enough like our Zod, appearance and otherwise, to at least be recognizable as Zod. I can't really say the same for Benedict Cumberbatch as (LAST SPOILER ALERT) Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness. Cumberbatch is a far more interesting presence than Shannon, more cunning and diabolical, but he's really not that much like Ricardo Montalban. I suppose giving a character in 2013 bronzed muscles and a mane of shoulder-length white hair isn't really practical, but did Cumberbatch have to be so different from that template? Why even call him Khan in the first place?

As I try to make an objective case for those movies from the early 1980s being superior efforts to the movies from the summer of 2013, I must also realize that there's nothing objective about it. I try to imagine myself as a teenager today coming to these movies, and what I would think of them. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is a real oddity in a lot of ways, as the hero (Captain Kirk) and the villain (Khan) are never actually in the same place at the same time. Not once. As a teenager today, I'd probably be flummoxed by long parts of the movie in which "nothing happens." Superman II is as much of an oddity in different ways. It does contain moments of the kind of darkness Zack Snyder is going for in Man of Steel -- don't forget Christopher Reeve dramatically yelling "Father!!!" in the shattered Fortress of Solitude -- but it's also got a ton of moments of levity, more than any modern teen is accustomed to seeing in their superhero movies. Whole characters (Lex Luthor, Non) are basically comic relief -- and that's just among the "villains."

So yeah, of course I'm going to prefer "our Zod" and "our Khan" over "their Zod" and "their Khan." They may see it as the reverse. If they're smart, they'll overcome the problem of being born in the late 1990s and find the true genius in the original incarnations of those roles, and in the inimitable performances of Stamp and Montalban, each subtle in their own ways, each chewing the scenery in their own ways as well.

More than anything, though, I see the resurrection of these characters as a validation of two movies from my youth that I have cherished for years, standing up for them even when others in my generation were snubbing them upon discovered "Great films" with a capital G.

Oh, I don't take the fact that they're being offered to the next generation of pop culture junkies as proof, per se, that Star Trek II and Superman II were great. You might say I should draw the opposite conclusion, that if Zod and Khan are being offered to the masses again, it's a sign that they are safe enough for general consumption.

But I don't choose to see it that way. I always thought I was a little weird that I could quote whole sections of Khan's whispered threats to Kirk. I always thought it was a little goofy when I put on my best Terence Stamp voice and operatically performed the line "Why do you say these things to me, when you know I will kill you for it?" Now I feel more prophetic than marginalized.

And I guess I do pity today's kids a bit, because they're not getting movies that are both awesome and sort of ridiculous at the same time. You can't love Zod and Khan without realizing that you are, on some level, getting off on a completely hammy performance. But these hammy performances didn't make the movie suffer, as they might today. Somehow they elevated the movie and made it more grandiose. That's what's been lost today: the ability to look at a big performance unironically. Zod and Khan filled the screen, sometimes with near Shakespearean levels of gravitas that couldn't help but verge on the camp. But that's what made them great.

It's not just that movies tried to be funny back then but they don't try to be funny today. Strangely, you have a flip-flop in the tones of these movies from the movies that revived these characters this summer. Star Trek II is a dour film, containing almost no humor outside of an occasional playful exchange between Bones and Kirk. Star Trek Into Darkness tries to be funnier than that -- not a lot funnier, but somewhat funnier, as the whole character of Scotty (Simon Pegg) exists for comic purposes. Superman II, on the other hand, is practically a comedy for whole patches of the running time, while Man of Steel barely cracks a smile once -- and when it does so, it's inappropriately out of sync with what's going on in the story.

This does make me wonder what today's young people grab onto when they're looking for "their Zod" or "their Khan" -- not those actual characters, but the modern equivalents they will one day cherish. Is it Loki from The Avengers? Is it Bane or the Joker? Is it the character Michael Sheen plays in the Twilight movies? I hear he's frigging hilarious.

What seems likeliest is that they don't have a Khan or a Zod -- and that's the saddest part. Everyone deserves a Khan or a Zod ... even if they have the audacity to have been born in the late 1990s.

The inevitability of excess

I was all set to write a piece this Friday about how Iron Man 2 appeared to be following the dispiriting "bigger, more, but not better" trend of Hollywood sequels.

But sometimes in the blogging world, with all the reading we do, we come across the work of another blogger who has already taken that same perspective, and taken it more eloquently and succinctly than we would have ourselves. So I'd like to refer you to the work of my esteemed colleague Daddy Geek Boy on the topic. It's a good write-up, and you can find it here.

I'll still write about Iron Man 2, but I thought I'd take a slightly different approach, ask a slightly different question. Namely, is it possible for a sequel not to succumb to the sin of excess? Is it possible for a sequel not to have double the good guys, double the bad guys, double the explosions, and in some cases, double the babes?

It's easy to think of examples where they indulged themselves, and it's very easy to think of dozens, if not hundreds, of bad sequels. But this morning I want to consider the good sequels, and see if they were able to avoid this pitfall. Even The Dark Knight, which I won't write about again because I just wrote about yesterday (albeit in purely semantic terms), couldn't resist the urge to add a second villain, even with the first villain as dynamic and dominant as Heath Ledger's Joker.

So I'm examining five of my favorite sequels of all time, ones that I liked better than the original in some cases. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm leaving out series where the first film was always planned as part of a larger story, where future installments of the story were already written (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter) or envisioned by the creator (Star Wars).

Granted, most creative talents will tell you that they always envisioned their movies as multi-part stories, which is probably true to the extent that it makes sense to mentally blueprint a franchise if you think your movie is marketable. (Plus, most creative types are dreamers, and are overly optimistic/delusional about the quality of their own ideas.) But most sequels came into being because the first movie was good. If it hadn't been good, we simply wouldn't have cared about "the rest of the story" that existed purely in the writer's head.

So without any further ado, here are five excellent sequels, listed in no particular order. Let's hold them up to the light and see how they did.

1) Superman II (1980, Richard Lester). This is by far my favorite Superman movie, which has everything to do with relegating Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) to the role of comic relief, and replacing him with not one, not two, but three new villains. The plot itself is bigger as well. Although it could be argued that reversing the rotation of the earth to turn back time is a pretty big deal, I'd say that having the world taken over by the three Krypton refugees and willingly giving up his super powers qualify as more earth-shattering, as it were, for Superman.

Why it works: Three supervillains might ordinarily spin your head like a bad Joel Schumacher Batman movie, but since they essentially operate as one character in terms of their function in the narrative, the movie feels clean and focused. Plus, Terrence Stamp gives what I would argue is one of the great villain performances of all time as General Zod.

2) Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, James Cameron). I don't mean to blaspheme, but this is another case of me liking the sequel better than the original. The T-1000 was like nothing I had ever seen before -- in fact, the rush of excitement I got from Cameron's digital innovations with this character was much greater than what I got watching Avatar. Still, when you break it down to its elements, the movie does have two terminators, and it adds a squeaky-voiced Edward Furlong as the young John Connor.

Why it works: Although there are two terminators, they are not both the hero or both the villain, so the mano-a-mano dynamics of the original are still in place, shifted from Arnold Schwarzenegger's terminator against Linda Hamilton to Robert Patrick's T-1000 against Schwarzenegger. And John Connor essentially replaces Kyle Reese from the original. The net gain is really only one character.

3) Toy Story 2 (1999, John Lasseter). Officially, I like Toy Story better than Toy Story 2, but it's so close that Toy Story 2 has to be considered, hands down, one of the best sequels of all time. True enough, though, there are both more heroes and more villains. Added to the characters we love are a second Buzz Lightyear and Jessie the Cowgirl (voiced by Joan Cusack), and there are three characters who share the villain role: the evil toy collector (voiced by Wayne Knight), the evil collectible prospector toy Stinky Pete (voiced by Kelsey Grammer), and, well, The Evil Emperor Zurg, come to life in toy form (voiced by future Pixar director Andrew Stanton, to the extent that the character has any real dialogue). The adventure is slightly bigger as well, as it involves more trips out of the house.

Why it works: Pixar has an instinct for narrative structure that is unmatched in the industry. The writers are smart enough to dole out enough lines to the minor characters so that they all feel involved, so that the extra new characters don't push them into irrelevance. I expect Toy Story 3 to be similarly successful with this narrative balancing act.

4) X2: X-Men United (2003, Bryan Singer). This one's going to be a bit more difficult for me, because although I know I like the X-Men sequel better than the original, I have a hard time quantifying why. I can tell you that there are more heroes and villains than the first. The heroic additions include Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) and Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), who walks the line between hero and villain, and the villains pile on with Lady Deathstrike (Kelly Hu) and William Stryker (Brian Cox), in addition to the usual stable featuring Magneto, Mystique, etc. This film also does what a lot of second movies gain the confidence to do: kill off one of the beloved stars of the first movie, if only temporarily, in Jean Gray (Famke Janssen).

Why it works: X2 is more like the typical superhero sequel than any other movie on this list, which makes sense since only one of the other movies is actually a superhero movie. But it works because the multiplicity of characters actually helped shove at least one character that I did not particularly like, James Marsden's Cyclops, into a corner. Thankfully, Cyclops has little more than a cameo in this movie.

5) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982, Nicholas Meyer). And here's a sequel that is really, truly different. Star Trek II is a brilliant movie, but it doesn't feel like a sequel at all. Even though it deals with the Genesis device, which can create a whole planet from scratch, and the (temporary) death of Spock, who comes back to life in the next movie during a rapid re-growth on the new planet, Star Trek II feels intimate more than grandiose. There are a lot of quiet moments in which the characters discuss their mortality, and the hero and the villain never once see each other in the flesh.

Why it works: The impression created by Star Trek II has everything to do with the impression created -- or not created -- by Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The first Star Trek was a total dud -- I remember feeling a profound sense of disappointment and wondering if there was any hope for the series. If it weren't for Star Trek II, there surely wouldn't have been. We have Star Trek II to thank for all the other Star Trek movies, even the reboot we got last year -- which, if it weren't for Star Trek II, might have been attempted in the 1990s and starred someone like David Caruso. So Star Trek II is a lot more like a first movie than a second movie in that sense, though when you think about it, the whole Star Trek series has kind of assumed a serial quality, as traditionally defined -- each chapter doesn't really need to be bigger and better, it just needs to follow the characters to the next chapter in their lives. I think I'm starting to ramble here.

So is there anything we can take from all this to apply to Iron Man 2? I guess what I personally take from it is that I shouldn't perceive its "bigger, more" approach as creatively bankrupt -- not automatically, anyway. Even the best sequels have to provide more things to look at, more places to turn your attention, and in all likelihood, more minutes of celluloid. That in itself is not a guaranteed recipe for failure, and in fact, it maybe inevitable.

Obnoxious lines like Tony Stark yelling "You complete me!" to Pepper Potts after he jumps out of the plane to retrieve his helmet ... well, that may be cause for worry.