Space issues: Star Trek

“Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence,” so states a flustered Dr. “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban) en route to the heavens in Star Trek. Yet while Bones’ assessment sounds right, those vacuous descriptives don’t really jive with the colossal spectacle of director J.J. Abrams’ film, a fully loaded throwback/re-conception of the beloved 1960s television series with the bountiful offspring. For two solid hours, darkness and silence are held at bay by explosions that dazzle and bellow in the galactic depths and heated debates between crewmembers that echo unnervingly throughout the starship Enterprise.

It starts with plenty of death and one conspicuous birth. I guess it can’t be helped when a lady goes into labour at the precise moment that her husband chooses to sacrifice himself for the survival of millions while under attack, but it sure leaves her son, one James T. Kirk, with a serious case of survivor’s guilt, which will manifest as arrogance self-destructive behaviour when he grows into a young man (Chris Pine). Meanwhile, another troublesome legacy brews when Vulcan dad meets human mom (Winona Ryder!), generating a half-breed burdened with finding the balance between paternal logic and maternal emotion. Baby Spock will grow into a seductively smart and ambitious young fellow (Zachary Quinto) who’ll serve as the perfect foil for the wild, undisciplined Kirk. These guys barely make it into space before unfathomable terror causes their antagonistic tendencies to flare up and only gradually settle into the collaboration necessary to save the universe from some ireful Romulans in possession of some red matter that makes black holes and kills off entire planets in the blink of an eye.

As I watched Star Trek with a capacity audience, I actually heard some people behind me hyperventilate, usually upon the first appearance of some familiar character with a new face. Full disclosure: I am not one of these people, but, breathing disruptions aside, I know there are millions of you out there and, presumably, unless you had to be hospitalized during the first ten minutes, you’ve all seen the movie by now. I can’t speak for Trekkies, but it seems to me that Abrams’ film, written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, whom Abrams worked with on Alias, walks a pretty fine line between homage and camp. Pine and Quinto give engaging, original and fairly nuanced performances, even if Pine succumbs to his own version of Shatneresque excess on occasion. But a number of others work so arduously to invoke the mannerisms of the original cast that it feels like parody, an effect that’s heightened still further by some pretty one-dimensional villains.

This tension between reverence for the old Star Trek and the thirst for innovation is mirrored in an uncertain overall tone. With a plot that hinges on wildly implausible/poetic coincidences (just wait until you see how they manage to wrangle Leonard Nimoy into this thing), this Star Trek feels at times cut from the blunt stencils of ancient myth, yet at others it’s imbued with the clarity and psychology of a very modern, textured drama. I guess there was no way of avoiding any kind of Star Trek that wouldn't get tangled up in trying to be many things to many people. But whatever it is, this Star Trek is relentlessly entertaining, has sequences of striking beauty and otherworldly strangeness, and speaks to the sort of old-fashioned heroism rarely invoked with any conviction anymore.

Death makes a holiday: One Week

There are those painful things in life that movies rarely render in a way that truly resonates, that elevates the material above a level of facile catharsis or emotional pornography. Atrocities, life imprisonment, genocides, tax audits, terminal cancer. Yet that last one, however daunting, never goes too long without some fresh taker eager to step up to the plate and give it a whack. Most often, it seems the younger the afflicted protagonist, the better. You know how it is. Die young, leave a beautiful blah-blah-blah. You’d roll your eyes if they weren’t so full of tears.

Among the virtues of One Week, our most recent entry into this fraught subgenre, is its ability to avoid getting too bogged down in the despair of being young, hopeful and ostensibly healthy only to suddenly find out Death’s in the waiting room checking his watch. Written and directed by Michael McGowan (Saint Ralph), this decidedly quirky road movie, narrated by some anonymous literary sage (actually Campbell Scott) with a great deal of privileged knowledge, is so thoroughly infused with winky little detours into flashback and fantasy, into little anecdotes about what happened to characters met briefly en route by our hero, that it attains a welcome layer of detachment, something that helps to stave off the inert bathos that is so often the cancer of cancer movies. If only this same approach could also keep One Week from succumbing to cheap national boosterism and a palette of locations and vistas that amounted to something more than what feels like an extended advert for Canadian tourism or, worse, a telecommunications provider. (The truly lame sub-Coldplay score doesn't help.) Torontonian Ben (Joshua Jackson) sheds his everyday obligations and hits the road after getting his death sentence in part because he realizes that he never wanted to live a life of passive conformity. Yet the greatest hits itinerary of his cross-Canada trek sure feels like the same one your polyester-slacked grandparents would take, albeit in a Winnebago instead of a gorgeous old Norton.

Ben’s engage to Samantha (Liane Balaban of Last Chance Harvey, underused), a pretty actuary. He’s a failed novelist-turned schoolteacher, a guy who’s just too damned nice to really pursue his dreams with the necessary rigor. Cancer may very well extinguish his life with brutal efficiency, but it does give him the gift of gumption. He buys the motorbike on a whim. He takes up a spookily-apt proposal found inside the rim of a cup of Timmy’s and goes west on his own instead of going in for debilitating treatments. He takes photos of giant objects, stumbles upon the Stanley Cup, smokes reefer with Gord Downie—admittedly, pretty cool. He takes a horseback ride in Saskatchewan, where he most improbably drinks Steam Whistle with a horny farmer. (Product placement trumps verisimilitude.) He gets lost in the woods in Banff and surfs off of Vancouver Island. As I recall, I don’t think anything happens to him in Manitoba, alas. Along the way he considers what really matters, lists life’s compromises, and ponders the deep subjectivity of food odour, an issue never resolved.

If looming death doesn’t over-burden One Week, it hardly injects it with a great deal of urgency either. Jackson emanates sweetness and familiarity, but can’t seem to convey the minimal panic, revelation and/or insanity required by the situation. McGowan falls back on sentimentality and staying shackled to over-prudent story editing when he could have chosen to explore at least a couple of roads less traveled, which is the secret gift waiting inside the road movie for those willing to roll with it. So One Week is often a bit dull, sometimes wince-worthy, yet so genuinely good-natured you still walk out kinda rooting for it, hoping that its title isn’t a prediction for how long it’ll last in theatres.