Don't give away the surprise beginning.

"It's a poor memory sort of memory that only works backwards."
The White Queen, Alice in Wonderland.

It's surprising that this summer's first three big action movie releases are all prequels. (For me, it's even more surprising that two of them feature Anton Yelchin in prominent roles.) Well, perhaps not that surprising, Hollywood has an unfortunate but understandable tendency to farm ground which has already proven fertile.

The big three here are, of course, Wolverine, Star Trek and Terminator Salvation. All three are franchise films, and logically, as prequels, all three are faced with the responsibility of not violating the established plotlines - of not changing the future, if you will.

Or are they?

Wolverine is the most workmanlike in this area. As with any comic book movie, it occupies that difficult middle ground between fans of the original material, and people who have only seen the X-Men movies, and as such it has to try to make everyone happy. Wolverine has received indifferent reviews - I myself didn't find it too bad, as I say, it's a workmanlike film. You can almost see the checklist: Wolverine's childhood revelation, check...falling to his knees and screaming at the sky, check...walking away from an explosion like it's not happening, check... I'm being a bit unfair, perhaps, but there aren't a lot of places in this movie where anything unexpected takes place. (I wish they'd quit killing off supporting mutant characters, though, there seem to be a lot of mutant villains and heroes who only make it through one movie.)

That aside, Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber work quite well together on screen, and the movie does fulfill its prequel obligations by establishing Wolverine's origins and by managing to explain his memory loss regarding those origins. Again, the whole thing has a sort of methodical, working-off-the-list feeling.

For me, the joke was that the little stub after the credits, set in Japan, is the setup for a Japanese/ninja/yakuza sequel from the comic story arc that we comic book fans wanted in the first place.

Now, let's get serious: Star Trek. As per the fertile ground analogy in the introduction, the Star Trek franchise has been left fallow for a few years due to poor returns on the crop, as it were. The new film is part of the trend toward the concept reboot, but with the difference of exploring an aspect of the Star Trek history that's never been dealt with: the early days of the original crew of the NCC-1701.

I had mixed feelings about this movie going in, to be honest. I was never one of those foaming-at-the-mouth Star Trek fans, but I've always liked the various iterations of the show (okay, Enterprise didn't ring the bell for me) and I viewed any attempt to redo the original characters as being a bit of a mine field.

As it turned out, that was the least of my concerns. The various actors, called upon to re-interpret what may well be the most iconic TV characters of all time, all do admirable jobs. Chris Pine's Kirk may be a bit cockier than his TV predecessor, but he's younger, it's understandable. Spock, as played by Zachary Quinto, had just the right feel, and so on down the line. Anton Yelchin is perhaps over the top as Chekov, and Karl Urban gets a bit too close to doing a parody of DeForest Kelley, but generally all the actors make the roles their own.

Now, as to the movie itself. As in the joke about the man having sex with a running ostrich, the first few minutes were fabulous, but then I got out of step. The opening scenes of the film showed a vivid, kinetic view of a doomed starship fighting a losing battle, with a touching and emotional communicator exchange between George Kirk and his wife as their son James is being born.

After that? It all sort of went downhill for me. The aggressors in the opening conflict turn out to be Romulans who have come back in time to wreak their vengeance on the Federation for failing to save Romulus from a supernova. In traditional eye-for-an-eye fashion, they plan to destroy the planets of the Federation, starting with Vulcan - apparently the future Spock is guilty of dropping the ball in his attempt to use a black hole to eliminate the supernova.

Now, I realize that the time travel element allows them to rewrite the rules, but even so, there were just too many things that violated canon. Not that canon exists anymore, online Star Trek databases are already having to distinguish between the previous information and the Abramsverse.

And outside of all that, Kirk spends the whole movie getting beaten up by everyone else, the engineering section of the Enterprise looks more like a brewery than a starship, and my god, isn't Nero's ship sort of over-armed for a mining vessel? And hey, Nero, here's some advice on vengeance and physics. If you want to torment someone with the death of their homeworld, KEEP THEM WITH YOU TO WATCH. Dumping them on a planet that's apparently in another solar system is NOT going to be as effective - in fact, I'm willing to bet that I could drop Mars into a black hole without the man on the street noticing a thing, and Mars is just next door by stellar standards. For that matter, the whole supernova thing doesn't work as a plot point for the same reason. Unless it's Romulus' actual sun blowing up, which didn't seem to be the case, the effects of a supernova would take years to travel from one solar system to another, and even then the resulting gamma radiation would mostly have a negative effect on the ozone layer, rather than destroying the planet.*

And goddamn it, is the view screen of the Enterprise a window now?

Sorry, got a little carried away there...

I saw the movie with my friend Laurie, and I was trying to find a way to explain my disappointment to her. She's never been a fan of the whole Star Trek thing, but considers life in general to be pretty close to the Star Wars alien bar scenes. On that basis, I said to her, "Imagine this - as an old man, Luke Skywalker masters the most difficult aspects of the Force, uses it to travel back in time, and kills Darth Sideous decades before he becomes Emperor."

She thought for a moment, and said, "But that would mean that none of the movies ever happened..."

Yep.

I feel a bit as though I've lost a bunch of old friends. Not the characters themselves, but the episodes and plots that can't exist in the Abramsverse. The Conscience of the King - great little episode based in Kirk's survival of the purge by Kodos, governor of Tarsus IV. Not gonna happen, Kirk's gone straight from the Academy to being captain of the Enterprise, no other service. Amok Time? Vulcan's gone, and T'pring is probably dead. And so on....

Terminator Salvation occupies unique territory as prequels go, in that it takes place in the future rather than before the other films. However, thanks to the time travel element, it has the same responsibilities as a prequel: things need to happen in order to set up the stories we've already seen. John Connor has to send father-to-be Kyle Reese into the past, along with a couple of T-800s with thick Bavarian accents.

Frankly, I had high hopes for this one. There have been all sorts of comic book continuations from the original movies that attempt to deal with the complexities of a war waged through time.** Sadly, Salvation never even attempts to take this route, relying instead on a subplot involving a condemned killer and an improbable heart transplant. I did however like the suggestion of messiah complex on the part of John Connor - let's face it, the man has spent his whole life KNOWING that he was going to save humanity, how hard would it be for him to be humble about it?

Oh, and Mr. Yelchin was surprisingly effective as the young Kyle Reese - although, like everyone else in this gritty, post-apocalyptic future, he has the nicest white teeth. It's good to see that cosmetic dentistry is thriving in the face of cybernetic destruction.

- Sid

* There's a Larry Niven short story called At the Core which involves the discovery that the core of the galaxy is exploding - one supernova cascading into another, a phenomenon made possible by the closeness of the systems. Now that's more like it...

** Two movies that have dealt well with the uncertain nature of causality in time travel are Frequency, with Dennis Quaid and James Caviezel, where they show changes rippling across the face of the future as events in the past take place, and of course Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. There's a great little sequence at the end where Bill and Ted discuss how they'll have to use their time machine to go back in time and set up all of the factors that will allow them to win - after they've won.