by Alex Kane
In other words, Star Trek Into Darkness shows the manner by which we tend to place all blame for any grave injustice not upon entire nations, or specific political blunders, but instead upon a single human scapegoat, regardless of how dubious or vague the facts surrounding a particular conflict prove to be. Even if the war itself ultimately has little to do with the one declared responsible.
We want quick gratification. A name and visage toward which to direct our collective hatred.
But with tears streaming down his face, something truly haunting Harrison behind those chilly eyes of his, we can’t help but question the narrative at play. Question our justifications for even the most clear-cut of wars. There are those who assert, for instance, that the organization known as al-Qaeda is little more than a fiction of the English-speaking world’s media. Where that’s true or not is irrelevant: Either way, we need a humanistic, peacekeeping force like Starfleet—like the United Nations, like Amnesty International—to propagate the gifts of peaceful coexistence, understanding, and, most importantly, the idea of forgiveness.
Abrams’s Into Darkness forces us to give pause, and reconsider the motivations at play behind militaristic campaigns and their xenophobic leaders—the “Masters of War,” as Dylan calls them.
As Captain Kirk reflects in the film’s ending, to seek revenge upon wrongdoers is to risk losing our own sense of right and wrong. In Foster’s novelization, the captain goes on to say in his speech:
“We are gathered here to pay our respects to fallen friends and family. We take solace in the knowledge that we honor those who lost their lives doing what they believed was right. And no matter what path they took, we hope that in death they can find forgiveness.” (Simon & Schuster)
That is something I fear we may be hard-pressed to find in the Western world, even twelve long years after the atrocities of September 11, 2001. To forgive is such a foreign concept to us. And yet in a sense, sealing Harrison away in cryostasis is a sign that we’re somehow, as Kirk would put it, getting better—but as a nation whose deep-seated ideologies stem from the war crimes and bomb scares and genocides of the twentieth century? Well, we still have so very far to go.
I applaud the filmmakers and studio heads at Paramount and Bad Robot not only for being willing to admit this, that our collective kind hasn’t quite learned to forgive and get along with one another, but also for having the fullness of vision to dedicate the movie and its bold message to those brave souls who have served among U.S. and NATO Coalition forces in the wake of that single, unforgettable morning that shook the innocence from our once-great nation forever.
Alone on the Moon
Looking Back at Duncan Jones’s Directorial Debut
I’m sitting with a group of friends in the Seminary Street Pub, familiar faces here and there casting shadows upon near-forgotten memories, making plain the slippery nature of time and life. Red neon lights drench the dark paint of the walls. I watch my last beer swirl, dizzying, half-gone, inside a green glass bottle as I peel off the metallic label. . . .
After we went to dinner, my fiancée suggested we skip out on Iron Man 3. There’s always tomorrow, she pointed out—and quite rightly. Hell. We can always watch Silver Linings Playbook at home. True, true.
Days later, I’m still thinking about Duncan Jones’s Moon anyway. About the column I was supposed to write half a week ago. Loneliness fostered by distance and time and sheer solitude.
One can only imagine how it must feel to live alone on the Moon.
Sam Rockwell’s performance—performances?—may be the closest we’ll ever come to knowing for sure. Certainly I wouldn’t advocate for some lone maintenance man patrolling a lunar harvesting field, digging up barrels of helium-3 and firing them off toward home. How long before you’d break? Before you’d be willing to take your life’s work, and just overturn it all?
Rockwell’s character, Sam Bell, represents the best in science fiction cinema. He’s a curious little man, childlike in both his ignorance and curiosity; he dares to challenge that which he finds suspicious or otherwise dissatisfactory.
Through his stumbling about, watching his mirror image deteriorate before his very eyes and then seeking to unleash knowledge upon an unsuspecting, corporate-dominated world . . . we expect and demand great things of him. We feel the pain of his loss as he realizes that he’s lost his wife already, even before he was born—and as it dawns on him that he’ll only last for the three brief years it takes to fulfill his “contract.”
Such is the curse of the blue-collar man in today’s world. We are obliged to spend so much of our precious lives on the clock, toiling in the midst of some great machinery at once incomprehensible but also quite basic. Inching our overlords toward some fabled bottom line.
But I think the gift of Jones’s quiet science fiction film may be the sense of hope, of justice, that is to be grasped from the larger tragedy of the working individual’s life amid tedium.
We have those rare opportunities to expose indiscretions, and to show the world what profit-obsessed institutions are capable of inflicting on human beings at the level of the underpaid, more-than-likely desperate individual.
How our jobs take us away from the ones we love and the moments we treasure, leaving us with little more than the fading memories of some idealized past, held in high regard but only ever glimpsed in the act of reflection: in some dusty old mirror, near-forgotten in the attic of the mind.
Iron Man 3 as Critique of Techno-Darwinism
War Machines, Broken Toy Soldiers, and the Quest for Godhood
Iron Man Three surpasses its predecessor, Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, in one very exciting and fundamental way: it feels more like an actual comic book than any single Marvel flick before it—hell, maybe more than any comic adaptation, period. It celebrates the humor and cool-gadgetry flair of the first two Iron Man flicks while simultaneously shoving billionaire “mechanic” Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr. in the role of his career) into his proverbial dark night of the soul. No small thing for a former military industrialist-turned-Avenger.
Defying expectations at a number of cleverly scripted turns, the film proves to be the most intelligent in the series by a marked degree. Whereas in previous installments Stark remarked that he and the hot-rod red suit were a single heroic entity, Shane Black’s first entry in the series establishes that the man makes the suit, not the other way around.
It does so by having Stark wear the suit, oddly enough, as rarely as possible. And the movie is no weaker for it. Honest. In fact, we grow to know Tony Stark’s visage as the true face of Iron Man; in Iron Man Three, anyone might be behind the mask. Or no one, even—the suits are now equipped with a Jarvis-integrated AI autopilot system that allows them to act independently of their maker, which makes for some nice Mission: Impossible-style, all-is-not-as-it-seems theatricality.
Without getting too pretentious and philosophical, I’ll just say that the film asks important questions about the nature of humanity and our conception of a “soul,” shedding light (and in some cases, explosive heat) on the possible downsides to technological evolution and even transhumanism. But it’s not exactly clean-cut or heavy-handed about it; the very same mutagenic technology that gives the Mandarin and his minions such wicked strength and resilience also saves the life of Stark’s beloved partner, Pepper Potts.
A young boy living in rural Tennessee saves Tony’s life at one point. Pepper—and don’t go crying “spoiler,” because it’s in the freaking trailer—dons the Iron Man armor in another tense scene of mass destruction and saves Stark’s life with his own suit.
The movie’s endgame features a grandiose spectacle of unmanned—iron men?—arriving to tip the tide of battle during a final showdown with the murderous Mandarin as he prepares to assassinate the president of the United States in downright savage fashion. And no, I ain’t talking about the paint job on Iron Patriot, renamed thusly because apparently “War Machine” was—ahem—a little too on-the-nose in its descri
ption of American foreign policy.
Stark’s army of iron mirror-selves assists him in his battle against the film’s upstaging surprise villain, played perfectly and effortlessly, it seems, by a transformed Guy Pierce. Not transformed in terms of appearance so much as by the seductive nature of both technological progress’s promise of human perfection and its implications for an inevitable social reordering. A spurned admirer from Tony’s past, Pierce plays a scientist named Aldrich Killian who develops a viral mutagen known as Extremis: the next step toward humankind’s ascent to godhood, save for a few vital flaws—for instance, addictive properties and side-effects like causing the user to explode.
The film succeeds so admirably on the grounds of its boldness, risk-taking, and Downey’s voiceover narration, which serves to tie the experience together as a self-contained graphic novel-esque story arc within the larger context of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe and its flagship achievement, The Avengers.
Oblivion
Yet Another Heady, Action-Heavy Science Fiction Epic Falls Short of Its Ambitions
Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion (2013) is a love letter to every science fiction film you’ve already seen, and a pretty beautiful one, at that, but it nearly collapses under the weight of its own ambition. Nevertheless, it’s an enjoyable movie, filled with the kind of eye- and ear-candy you’d expect from the man who directed Tron: Legacy, and it convinces you to truly care about the characters and their various conflicts—even if it has you scratching your head occasionally, uncertain what you’ve just seen, and leaves one massive thread hanging loose in the end.
Tom Cruise seems right at home on the set of yet another heady, action-fueled science fiction epic, playing the role of drone repairman Jack Harper. He lives in the raddest apartment on post-apocalyptic Earth, looking a bit like an aging GQ model, living and sleeping with a woman he doesn’t seem all that interested in, despite her apparent admiration for him; instead he dreams constantly of another lovely face, replaying the same prewar memory fragment over and over.
We’re spoon-fed a bit of heavy exposition at the beginning of the flick, in typical Hollywood fashion, but it somehow feels more authentic, less hammer-to-the-head than even more successful examples, like Avatar, et cetera. Cruise’s voiceover works because, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s in Looper, he is an actor with the chops to really sell it.
You come to believe in Kosinski’s worldbuilding, even if it looks too alien to accept—a real testament to Cruise’s abilities. Not to mention those of Andrea Riseborough, Morgan Freeman in a role reminiscent of Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus (The Matrix), a stoic but likable Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, an underused but competent Olga Kurylenko, and the incomparable Melissa Leo in a haunting turn as Harper’s mission controller. Her character lives aboard the mysterious Tet, a colossal tetrahedral orbital habitat we’re told houses a number of post-nuclear-war survivors awaiting final transport to humanity’s new colony on Saturn’s moon Titan.
Did I mention our Moon is gone? Yeah, she’s basically an oversized shaft of debris in the sky. It’s a lot more beautiful than it sounds.
For reasons that aren’t immediately clear upon a first viewing, command (Leo) informs Victoria (Riseborough) and Harper that they’ll be transferred to the Tet in two weeks’ time, and then rerouted toward civilization on Titan.
But—in keeping with the basic Hollywood SF formula—Things Begin to Go Horribly Wrong. Drones malfunction and misbehave; one of the Tet’s water-extraction stations explodes in a fiery nuclear blast; scavengers are afoot. The literal girl of Harper’s dreams falls from the sky, the last remaining crew member of a heretofore unmentioned NASA spaceship dubbed the Odyssey.
The less you know going into the theater, or before popping in the inevitable Blu-ray, the better.
Kosinski’s treatment of the material—his own original script, co-written with comics writer Arvid Nelson—from here on out is fairly deft, given what a laughable mess a less capable director might have made of things . . . but the plot does sag at times, and I would have preferred to be given more time for certain key information to sink in before moving on to the resultant, somewhat gratuitous action.
Overall, it’s a satisfying moviegoing experience—the kind of thing that overreaches a bit, maybe, trying to do too much in too short a time span, with too little development of certain ideas. It also suffers from a couple glaring plot holes, barring a medical miracle. But you can’t help but admire the confidence and passion of the screenwriters, and the actors required to bring it all to life. While it may ultimately fall short of timeless-classic status, it’s an excellent collage of classic-SF film homages and ideas that might pave the way for more mature, far better works from Kosinski and Nelson at some point in the future.
Individualism, Atheism, and the Search for God
in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road exemplifies both the acknowledgment of essential human goodness and the flaws inherent in the Emersonian individualism that has grown to define the American identity. In doing so, it achieves a successful, resonant portrayal of human life enduring—albeit not without hardship and great loss—in the face of a hypothetical global catastrophe that has irreversibly altered the state of our planet’s ecology. Nevertheless, McCarthy presents a somewhat false vision of human nature. Despite the merits of American individualism and the truth with which it endows McCarthy’s characters, the Christian moral framework presented in the novel fails to confront properly the rise of American pragmatist ideals in what appears to be the author’s effort to define an antagonist in society’s remnants that may not, in fact, exist at all. Because of his assertions that anyone else is dangerous, and that giving aid to others will only bring the principle characters harm, the father in the novel represents, at least in part, the failure of amoral thought to rebuild humankind through communal endeavor.
What caused the end of the civilization goes unexplained, although various contrasting evidence is presented that might be used to support both biblical and scientific explanation, which need not be exclusive. The beginning describes “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world” (3). The grayness, the cold, and the motif of blindness recur throughout the work; the sun has been permanently obscured by whatever cataclysm, whether cosmic or geological, has blackened the earth with ash.
Regardless of the cause, in which humanity itself may have played a role, the world McCarthy envisions is one of a dismal future, in which technology no longer seems to benefit the scattered human beings who still survive. Instead, basic expedience and the allocation of resources necessary for survival drive the plot. Science fiction is a genre of hypothetical future scenarios, in which characters work to problem-solve, making use of whichever scientific fields or concepts are most appropriate, and find some sort of salvation from the ills of the imagined future. In The Road, we discover an Earth no longer hospitable to life, a world which has never existed previously but which is all too plausible, and a microcosmic struggle between the voices of morality and amorality; between pragmatism and individualism; between rationality and faith. Certainly this qualifies the novel as a work of science fiction, despite its reputation as one of mainstream literature, and the genres of speculative fiction have every reason to lay claim to what is arguably the most important novel of the previous decade.
The narrator, whose concern is mostly with the viewpoint of the father—ostensibly the protagonist—describes “[t]he cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void” (11). Later, at the sight of a distant forest fire’s glow, the father observes that “[e]verything was alight. As if the lost sun were returning at last” (31), and notes that “[t]he color of it moved something in him long forgotten” (31). Clearly, then, the sun has become little more than a memory for the father and his son; what little light and warmth
has kept them alive has come filtered through a veil of gray or from the constant kindling of campfires.
In the novel’s beginning, the narrative supposes that any hope for the survival of the father and his son must come from each other, explaining that “they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire” (6). The titular road, then, serves as a symbol not only of the father and son’s progress but also that of humanity as a whole—particularly the ultimate question of whether our species is to survive a flood of breath-stifling ash, be it by Darwinian or moral means. It is the man and his son’s path toward what they hope will be their eventual salvation, and also, reasonably, the trials they’ll face along the way. These very trials are where the moral heart of the novel is illuminated.
The biblical atmosphere McCarthy weaves with his vision of a desolate, post-apocalyptic America lends itself to the question of God’s role in humankind’s collective suffering. From the outset, the reader is offered the image of a world “[b]arren, silent, godless” (4)—with “[d]ust and ash everywhere” (7). Upon the reader’s initial introduction to the viewpoint character’s sleeping son, the protagonist reflects, “If he is not the word of God God never spoke” (5). This effectively establishes the son’s most constant and vital role in the novel, which is that of moral authority. Yet later, when the boy is again sleeping, the man is shown to be ill, “crouched coughing . . . for a long time” (11), and even cursing God: “Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally, have you a soul?” (11–12).