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.

...and Cathy is suffering from status block.

I've described Facebook to a few people as really just being an excuse to use the Internet - let's face it, if Facebook disappeared at this exact moment, no lives would be lost as a result. Well, there might be one or two suicides, among them my niece Jody, who spends so much time posting on Facebook that I've started to suspect that she either owns stock in the company or is hoping to gain ownership by squatter's rights.

Recently, one of her posts announced that she had taken the "Which Star Trek Next Generation Character Are You?" quiz, and that she was Counselor Deanna Troi. Mildly curious (and hoping to find out that I'm really Jean-Luc Picard, paragon of Starfleet) I clicked on the link for the quiz, only to discover ten questions later that apparently I'm Lieutenant Commander Data, the android. People have reassured me that this is a good thing, but I was only able to overcome my disappointment by coming to the realization that it could have been worse: I could have been Barclay.

Lieutenant Reginald Endicott Barclay III made his first appearance in the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and returned to provide comic relief in several episodes, as well as showing up now and then on Voyager. Socially inept but sometimes technically inspired, Barclay's bumbling adventures provided a mirror image to the perfection of the rest of the crew.

The aspect of Barclay's character that leaps out at me is that he's one of the few Starfleet officers that seems to be, well, normal. Offered a chance at using the holodeck, wouldn't we all be tempted to run a programme that let us be a hero in our own lives, worshipped by all the women, admired and in some cases feared by the men? Would it be that unusual to have a hidden phobia of being transported? (Lord knows what the damn thing is actually doing to you when you step onto that platform.) Wouldn't anyone be mortified to be called an embarrassing nickname by their boss? (In this case, Captain Picard, who accidentally calls him "Mr. Broccoli".) And finally, who wouldn't be nervous and intimidated by an assignment to the flag ship of the fleet, and screw up a few times as a result?

Unfortunately, when Barclay began to show up as part of the Starfleet support team for Voyager's return to the Alpha Quadrant, he'd become more confident and reliable - just like everyone else. Presumably this made him a better support for Voyager's efforts, and there were occasional glimpses of the old Reg, but frankly I missed the original character. Shouldn't every starship have someone with the good sense to be scared?

- Sid

Happy Towel Day, froods.

May 25th, and Towel Day is once again upon us. For the unfortunate few who are reading this without knowing what Towel Day commemorates (sorry to single you out again, Laurie), today is dedicated to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its author, Douglas Adams. (Who passed away on May 11, 2001 at the age of 49 - Towel Day comes two weeks later, for no good reason that I'm aware of.) In honour of Mr. Adams and his creations, fans around the world* carry a towel throughout the course of the day.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

A more intelligent planet would probably declare this a work holiday, but sadly we can't claim to be intelligent, just harmless - sorry, mostly harmless.

- Sid

* Towelday.org, the official web site of Towel Day, says "fans around the universe", but they don't seem to have any posts that originate from off-planet.