THESE ARE THE VOYAGES: THE NEEDS OF THE ONE OUTWEIGHED THE NEEDS OF THE MANY

There used to be a rule, that maybe does not have so much currency with the younger folk, given that it was spectacularly broken in 2002, so I will restate it for those who are unfamiliar with it: Even-numbered Star Trek movies are good. Odd-numbered Star Trek movies are bad.

What, exactly, that means depends on the teller. For some it's literally that the the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth movies in the franchise are worth watching, and the first, third, fifth, seventh, and ninth are not. For some it's merely that the evens are better, as a whole. I've even heard the narrow view that it only refers to even-numbered movies being better than the odd-numbered movie immediately preceding, though I don't know what would drive somebody to that level of specificity.

The point being: we're at Star Trek III: The Search for Spock now. I'll let you do the math.

It was only with this film that the pattern can be said to emerge: Star Trek: The Motion Picture could be fairly dismissed as overreachingly ambitious, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was the course-correction, setting a new template for the rest of the series to follow. Except that whatever template it set is plainly not followed in The Search for Spock, a damn weird little movies in all the ways a movie can be weird. Or damned.

Okay, fair is fair: this is almost certainly the best of the "bad" Star Trek films (I'd rank it neck-and-neck with fellow odd-number, 2009's quasi-reboot Star Trek, though of course it's a minority opinion to rank that one along with the bad Star Treks), and for the first 30 or 40 minutes, it's not really even bad, to speak of. A gigantic drop-off in ambition and execution from The Wrath of Khan, to be sure, but there's plenty of fun to be wrung from the first act, in which the crew of the wheezing U.S.S. Enterprise, ready to be put out to pasture by Starfleet, engages in some caper-movie shenanigans to steal the ship back and embark on an illicit quest, and the final scene is excellent, if just the little bit saccharine in its attempt to play the audience's presumed emotional connection to the characters for maximum waterworks. In between that caper movie opening and that lovely character-driven ending, though, all is death - the middle sequence of The Search for Spock is as tedious and meandering as anything in The Motion Picture, and without the benefit of really sublime visual effects to keep your attention from focusing on the various dramatic dead-ends being played out onscreen.

The film doesn't even open right after the ending of The Wrath of Khan: it opens with a recap of the "Spock dies" scene from The Wrath of Khan, which producer & screenwriter Harve Bennett felt was a necessary step to make sure the audience could get caught up quickly, just in case anybody would go and see a movie called Star Trek III: The Search for Spock without having some attachment to the franchise already (seriously, that is the most willfully off-putting title of all 12 Star Trek features; putting a character name in a title is already dubious for a franchise picture, and it becomes downright asinine when that name is an alien word). So Spock is dead. Got it.

As the new material ramps up, we find that the crew of the Enterprise is rather bleary and upset, with Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley) in particular suffering an apparent mental break, speaking in something awfully like Spock's voice and acting like a cross-breed of his normal irritable self and the stoic Vulcan. With a shiny new toy in the form of the U.S.S. Excelsior at its disposal, Starfleet is ready to put the Enterprise and all aboard her out to pasture, leaving the crew to be split up uncaringly as politics demand.

Luckily for the purposes of spacefaring adventure, about this time Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner) is visited by Spock's father, Sarek (Mark Lenard), who brings a tale of Vulcan mysticism, claiming that Spock would certainly have left is katra, or the essence of his soul, before plunging into death's grip. Kirk shortly realises that this explains McCoy's aberrant behavior, and now it needs only finding Spock's corpse to revive their fallen comrade; lucky, then, that the science mission sent to the newly formed Genesis planet (explosively born at the end of The Wrath of Khan), headed up by Kirk's son David Marcus (Merritt Butrick) and Vulcan science officer Saavik (Robin Curtis), has just discovered the torpedo tube in which Spock's body was launched into space, on the planet surface. They've also discovered that it's empty, and that the Genesis planet has the ability to regenerate tissue, owing to a highly dangerous substance David used in building the Genesis technology, something not even vaguely hinted at in the last movie, but the new film needs some ginned-up interpersonal drama, and making David a mad scientist tampering in God's domain will have to do.

The Enterprise crew - most of them, anyway - escapes into space, where they find a more immediate problem: the Genesis planet has attracted the attention of a rather nasty Klingon commander, Kruge (Christopher Lloyd), and by the time the starship arrives, the Klingons have already taken David and Saavik and a rapidly aging child Spock hostage. Meanwhile, David's wicked technology is backfiring, and the whole planet is about to disintegrate. So many dramas! Such a ticking clock! So many possibilities for searing personal conflict! So pointless and dull!

I'll give Nimoy, making his directorial debut (becoming the first Star Trek actor to direct Star Trek, setting up a noble tradition that spread across four more features and a great many TV episodes), credit for this much: like the best actors-turned-directors, he had a keen sense of what actors need, and as a member of the Star Trek ensemble, he had a lot of love for not just Spock, but all the characters, to go around. That, plus the way he shaped the first act as a riff on his other old TV show, Mission: Impossible, giving each of the characters a specific role to execute a complicated task, makes The Search for Spock the first Star Trek movie in which every character has something worthwhile to do, and a good chance to show off their personality (almost: as he admitted in his autobiography, I Am Spock, Nimoy left Walter Koenig and his Pavel Chekhov hanging). It's an especially strong outing for DeForest Kelley, the alleged third spoke of the show's central triangle, who'd been left out of the loop for the most part in the preceding movies, and with Nimoy largely absent for reasons of character death, he gets to play two characters in one body, and virtually all of the best moments in the film either revolve around him, or at least feature him in an important capacity.

This love for his friends in the ensemble is worthy and all, as is Nimoy's apparent enthusiasm for using the script as a guide rather than a blueprint, and encouraging ad-libbing (this unfortunately resulted in Shatner giving a bit too loose of a performance, though I enjoy the moment where he learns that David is dead, and falls down trying to sit in his chair). But it's not exactly the same as being a solid director, which is why The Search for Spock end up being, frankly, a flimsy movie, shot with the indifferent set-ups of a TV show and no sense of scale whatsoever - when the Enterprise blows up, what should be a completely devastating moment feels oddly small, with the actors barely responding no matter how hard James Horner's score screams at us to feel bittersweet. The film cost a bit more than The Wrath of Khan, and by reusing sets and costumes had a lot more budget to spend on effects and new locations, yet it feels considerably shabbier, which I take to ultimately be the fault of Nimoy, and probably Harve Bennett as well; the producer's background in television was never more palpable in any of his Star Trek films than this one.

That's a huge problem: compared to the first two movies, The Search for Spock feels very much like the movie version of a TV show, and not a feature film set in the same universe as a TV show. But that is not the only problem, nor even the worst. The worst problem is that the middle part of the film is desperately hunting for dramatic stakes, throwing out all sorts of heightened conflicts to try and get there, but Nimoy is not director enough to find them. The script relies, heavily, on David and Saavik to generate human interest; but the characters speak in sci-fi clichés, and the expectation that The Wrath of Khan will have set them up as people we like as much as Kirk, McCoy, et alia is laughably far off-base. Especially with Butrick feeling so much more watery without having Shatner and Bibi Besch to play off, and Curtis proving an awful, dime store replacement for Kirstie Alley in the same role (Alley having exploded in the intervening years, and becoming prohibitively expensive). When Lloyd - making for a damn fine villain, as it turns out - menaces them, it's too imbalanced to feel threatening, and spills right on into absurdity, and by the time the action shifts from Kruge vs. scientists to Kruge vs. Kirk, it's far too late to salvage the Klingon subplot, which is chiefly of value because of a fine motif for the Klingons that is Horner's chief new contribution to a largely redundant score.

With the interesting Kelley performance being sidelined and the personal touch slipping away desperately, The Search for Spock has a giant hole right in its center, obliterating all goodwill that might be leftover from the solid opening; that the movie has any kind of reputation at all (it's easily the best-regarded of the odd-numbered films in the first ten pictures) probably owes a lot, or everything, to the final sequence, where to absolutely nobody's surprise, Spock is revived. It's honestly not that worthy of a payoff considering how much blind work it took to get the film there, and it leaves us with the dubious sense that the whole movie only ever served as a vaguely-defined excuse to undo all of the rich plot developments that made The Wrath of Khan a great film. I do enjoy Spock, but I still don't know that it wouldn't have been better to live him dead.

Still, the scene where Spock, in a mental fog, meets his old friends for the first time is excellently acted and staged with admirable simplicity (probably accidental simplicity as well, given that nothing in the whole movie has been particularly complex); Nimoy's reading of the line "Jim... your name is Jim" is exactly what I want Star Trek to be at all times and in all contexts, and I like Kelley's knowing tap on the side of his head almost as much. The deeply corny "...and the Adventure continues" title card at the end is to be regretted, but outside of that, The Search for Spock ends on its highest point, which has been the saving grace of many a film. It's not the saving grace of this film, quite, but it does make it easier to like it more than its hollow center should have made possible.

Reviews in this series
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Wise, 1979)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Meyer, 1982)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Nimoy, 1984)
Star Trek (Abrams, 2009)
Star Trek Into Darkness (Abrams, 2013)

BEST SHOTS: FANTASIA

There has not been and will not ever be a week of Hit Me with Your Best Shot more perfectly attuned to my tastes than this one. The movie is Walt Disney's Fantasia, (which I've reviewed, and adored) and the very specific rules Nathaniel laid out are:

1) Beginners (or Short on Time?): In honor of the May Centennial of "The Rite of Spring", choose your Best Shot from that section of Disney's experimental early feature.
2) Apprentice: Choose from "Rite of Spring" AND the movie as a whole. Two shots.
3) Sorcerer: Your post will contain six screenshots, your choice for "best" from each of the movies major classical movements: "The Nutcracker Suite", "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", "Rite of Spring", "The Pastoral Symphony", "Dance of the Hours", and "Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria"

Could there be any doubt at all? The only thing we like more than Disney animation here at Antagony & Ecstasy is intense completionism, and the only problem I have with this assignment is that he either forgot or ignored "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor", featuring the eye-searing Technicolor cinematography of James Wong Howe. I will play according the rules as they were set out, but not so strictly as to not include, sans commentary, my favorite image from that sequence.

The rest:
"The Nutcracker Suite"
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice"
"The Rite of Spring"
"The Pastoral Symphony"
"Dance of the Hours"
"Night on Bald Mountain"/"Ave Maria"

* * * * *

"The Nutcracker Suite"

The easiest by far for me to pick, and it was almost easier. As I mentioned in my review, my favorite piece of animation ever is the "Chinese Dance" segment, which was, in my head, a single uninterrupted take; I was going to simply put the whole thing out, declare a rather strict, mechanical definition of "shot", and spend a couple thousand words cooing over character animation of inanimate objects. Unfortunately, there is a cut. So out went that idea, and I'll have to ask the final position to stand in for the whole.

Two things I love about this sequence - the most racist left in the movie, what with Sunflower the centaur having been sent to the memory hole, but what can you do, it was the '40s and "Chinese" was right there in the name of the piece - first being the way that mushrooms are animated to look exactly like people and still like mushrooms, moving in a way that does not for a second violate their essential nature. Except inasmuch as moving is a violation of a mushroom's essential nature.

Second is the little baby mushroom, Hop Low (swear to God, he has a canonical name, and you can thank me whenever there's a Disney night at bar trivia that I've just helped you to win), the best example in Disney's many long decades of work of instilling personality into a non-speaking character whose face never changes. His clumsy, out-of-step dancing is pretty much as sweet and delicately-expressed as it gets, right up until he finally gets it together in and quickly arrives perfectly in place just in time for the music to stop. That's the moment in the shot I've chosen: when even the clumsy little kid is able at the last second to get everything perfect. An absolute treasure of American animation.

* * * * *

"The Sorcerer's Apprentice"

Okay, so my favorite shot - my favorite two shots - are the same as everybody else's I bet. The one with the silhouette axe, and the one with the fragments picking themselves up, the two blasts of Expressionist horror sitting right there in the middle of the single best Mickey Mouse short of all time. But going with either of those would have so lazy that "lazy" doesn't even cover it. Instead, I picked this:

For a simple enough reason; "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (and by extension, all of Fantasia) was designed from the ground up to give Mickey a chance to shine in a solo work, after Goofy and Donald had effectively reduced him to the role of straight man; a role he'd fully embrace in the years to follow. But in his earliest incarnation, Mickey was a plucky little shit, apt to get into trouble and be a prankster, and "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is the final chance that aspect of his personality got to shine onscreen.

And so, I wanted to find a shot where Mickey got to have some personality; easily done, since he has personality in spades throughout the short, aided in large part by the new, more easily-readable design for his eyes that debuted in this sequence. I went with the particular image I went with because of how perfectly the expression on his face communicates a sense of surprise and confusion with just a hint of "wait, there's no way this is my fault, right?" All pretty subtle and sophisticated stuff for a cartoon mouse.

Also, the great water animation. Long-time readers are well aware that I will absolutely give it up 100% of the time for great water animation.

* * * * *

"The Rite of Spring"

Now, the reason we're all here. A little ironic, honestly, given that of all the pieces in the film, Stravinsky's radical ballet is the one which has been re-ordered and re-orchestrated the most dramatically, and to arguably the most damaging effect, though speaking as one who tolerates rather than enjoys most of Stravinsky, I'm not terribly annoyed by that, except in an abstract, intellectual sense.

The piece, in any incarnation, is about primitivism: human primitives for the composer, primeval Earth for the animators, who tell a story about the creation of the planet and the origin of life, plus dinosaurs (one of my favorite parts of the restored 124-minute version of the movie: listening to Deems Taylor patiently and authoritatively explain what "dinosaurs" are using all the best 1930s paleontology and laying out the most astonishing pack of lies). There's a lot of good stuff with the dinos, too, but I headed off in a different direction.

Throughout this sequence, a great marriage is struck between graphic beauty and violent content, and there's something about the soft, almost watercolor impressionism of this volcanic landscape that is absolutely haunting in its painterly beauty. And yet it is a wasteland, growling through Stravinsky's music and guttering death. To me, the perfect encapsulation of what the animators were going for throughout this, the longest sequence of Fantasia.

* * * * *

"The Pastoral Symphony"

My least-favorite part of Fantasia, and the only one where I'm willing to concede the "it's so kitschy!" criticisms have a point, though I do not necessarily trust the word "kitschy" when it shows up in aesthetic discussion. Anyway, the use of buoyant cartoon mythological characters is a little weird, though what the sequence does have going for it that no amount of criticism can squelch, is its extraordinary control of color, telling its story entirely through the shift of color palette from pinks and baby blues to rich golds and reds to harsh greys to warm greens and yellows to navy blue in the end. There was absolutely no way to communicate any of that in a single shot. So after a lot false attempts, I ended up with this image from the last stage of the sequence:

The storm is over, the sun is out, the day is coming to a close, and all is well. Everything in this image - which strikes me as unusually Romantic in the context of the other imagery seen in this sequence - is calming and beautiful. It suggests a sense of scale and grandeur, but not in the "let's go exploring" way that the rest of the sequence taps into, simply in a "the world is beautiful and good, and we needn't be afraid of things" way. One of the most muted frames in a very colorful sequence, it's a great wind-down in addition to being damn pretyt in its own right.

* * * * *

"Dance of the Hours"

For this most exquisitely cartoony of the sequences in Fantasia, I cut right to the chase: my favorite bit of cartoon character animation.

Nothing sophisticated about my choice: it's entirely due to the look of misery on Ben Ali Gator's face (seriously, like, everything in this movie has an official name), and the outstanding rubber hose animation of his body as he tries to lift up a very fat Hyacinth Hippo, with her blissful look of not having any idea what the hell is going on. Particularly in light of how the dominant idea of the sequence, which is that graceless and large animals can dance with the effortless delicacy of the finest ballerinas, I love that just once, the animators tip their hand, and admit that yes, it is ridiculous to think that an alligator could life a hippopotamus. So let's draw it to be as funny as we know how. It's just great slapstick and character animation, in the most aesthetically simple but probably most readily enjoyable part of the film.

* * * * *

"Night on Bald Mountain"/"Ave Maria"

Agony. Pure agony. I totally get the logic of combining these two sequences with one Best Shot, but they're so different, it's impossible to know where to start. Bill Tytla's career-peak, the feline, muscular Chernabog? Or the eye-watering triumph of multiplane camera in "Ave Maria"? Trying to decide between the two took longer than any other part of writing this post - I've been thinking about it since Nathaniel announced this week's topic, and hadn't made up my decision until in the actual process of writing.

Anyway, Tytla won out.

It's right at the end, as Chernabog's satanic revelries are interrupted by the church bell tolling midnight and the coming of a new day. You really need to see it in motion to get the full effect, but what's going on, in essence, is that a being of total evil, doing nothing particularly destructive or menacing, just amusing himself by tormenting the damned all night, is annoyed that he has to go to bed. The expression he wears is not one of pain, or terror of God's light, but of irritation and impatience, and given that his body is still tensely shaped for whatever bit of nastiness he was about to indulge in, it's exactly like seeing a kid freeze up when he's caught doing something naughty.

I love about this finale that it doesn't resolve anything. Chernabog is still evil, unfathomably evil; he hasn't been defeated, just sent back to nap in his mountain peak. Tytla's animation, and the way that he makes the demon seem petulant rather than anguished, are so wonderful at emphasising that, making it clear that this creature is far beyond our human sense of narrative and conflict. The nuns and their lamps that end Fantasia aren't banishing this, though they conclude the movie on a sense of calm; they're just establishing the next repetition of an endless cycle, which this fleshy but indestructible Chernabog will undoubtedly be happy to perpetuate.

To send you all on your way, I'd like to share this 1933 pin screen animated adaptation of "Night on Bald Mountain", made by Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker; I don't know that it influenced the Disney version, but it seems awfully suspicious. More to the point, it's an absolutely incredible piece of work, complicated as hell and wholly effective, and legitimately terrifying in its way.

THESE ARE THE VOYAGES: DO YOU KNOW THE OLD KLINGON PROVERB THAT TELLS US, REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED COLD? ...IT IS VERY COLD IN SPACE.

I genuinely don't know if Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan saved the Star Trek franchise, or forever condemned it. Hopefully, that doesn't come across as heresy: like pretty much else willing to concede the existence of Star Trek movies prior to 2009, The Wrath of Khan is my ready pick for the best feature film in the franchise, and quite the equal of all but the very best episodes of any of the five TV series. But it changed things in Star Trek, both because Gene Roddenberry was jettisoned as executive producer and replaced with the more studio-friendly Harve Bennett (who held onto the job for a four-movie stint), and because director Nicholas Meyer, one of the half-dozen people responsible for the script, wanted to make a submarine movie.

Bennett's function, relative to the man he replaced, is simple to demonstrate: he made sure than the lugubrious philosophisin' that made Star Trek: The Motion Picture such a pointedly action-light film in 1979 would be kept well in check, probably not realising and certainly not caring that florid moral arguments were a vital component of the classic Star Trek TV show. This de-emphasis on ideas almost certainly was to Star Trek's benefit in the long run as a commercial film series, but it did, to a certain degree, leech it of something essential that made Star Trek different from other science fiction properties; not that this kind of moral element was outright banished from the films, mind you, but it certainly only existed in a very muted form from this point onward.

Meyer's actions, meanwhile, turned Star Trek into a franchise about military men. Cinematically, at least; on TV, both Star Trek: The Next Generation (which Roddenberry had an active hand in for most of its run) and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (which he did not live to see realised) were able to keep in line with the series' brainier - more pretentious, if you'd rather - elements, keeping the spirit of inquiry alive in the franchise until whatever it was happened that Star Trek: Voyager was on about. No mincing words: it was a fantastic franchise about the space military, when it was being handled well, and Meyer, in The Wrath of Khan, did a better job exploring that element of the series that the pacific Roddenberry preferred to leave in the background than anyone else who ever touched a movie or TV episode. It's just that the series' mission statement, "To seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before" - which puts in an appearance here, having been kept out of The Motion Picture - rings a little hollow given that only one out of eleven sequels ends up having more than a cursory nod towards "exploration", while blowing shit straight to hell using photon torpedoes becomes quite a trustworthy standby.

Enough of that, it matters more in the future. In the present of 1982, when The Wrath of Khan bowed, all we have to go on is a movie that is exciting in all the ways that The Motion Picture was ponderous, while doing a much better job of integrating the characters that the show's cultish fandom already loved into the action, and introducing those characters in a way that's welcoming to newbies (full disclosure: The Wrath of Khan was the first Star Trek story that I ever saw, absent maybe one or two forgotten Next Generation episodes. Thus is born the fanboy). Taking place an undisclosed length of time after The Motion Picture, but 13 years after the series, it makes for a much more sensible place to begin the cinematic adventures of the U.S.S. Enterprise and her crew, by virtue of moving forward in real time (in The Motion Picture, a largely successful but weird and pointless attempt was made to disguise the cast's age), and giving a simple, easily understood, and perfectly reasonable explanation for why everybody is where they are. After the completion of his mission, Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) took a promotion to admiral that he's since lived to regret; Commander Spock (Leonard Nimoy) has been promoted to captain, even as the Enterprise has been taken from her duties as ship of the line, and turned into a training vessel for cadets, still staffed by most of her old crew heads. In fact, the only old character who's not aboard the ship at the movie's start is Commander Pavel Chekhov (Walter Koenig) of the U.S.S. Reliant, on a exploratory science mission to find a barren planet to test a radical new terraforming technology called Genesis.

A profound bit of bad luck, coupled with out-of-date starcharts, lands Chekhov and his captain, Terrell (Paul Winfield), on the wrong planet in the Ceti Alpha system, a desert wasteland that's meant to be free of all life, but is in fact home to a tiny population of rag-tag humans, led by the very pissed-off Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban), who'd previously encountered the Enterprise - but not, infamously, Chekhov, because it makes so much sense to commit an easily-dodged continuity error in a movie whose target audience is the most notoriously nitpicky and obsessed in television - 15 years prior, in a solid episode of the original series, "Space Seed", that only stands out as top-tier because it led to this very movie. Using his genetically-enhanced intelligence, Khan is quickly able to take over the Reliant and the science space station Regula I, hunting for the Genesis device, and putting into action a tremendously angry plan of revenge against Kirk, peppered with lovely little references to Moby-Dick and everything.

What makes The Wrath of Khan the best of all 12 Star Trek movies, in my opinion and that of so many people that I think we can almost safely assume that it's a fact, is that it spends its entire length doing two very different things, doing both of them very well, and marrying them so tightly that you don't really think about them as being separate. One of these things is a terrific spaceship-bound thriller that openly admits its debt to the great submarine thrillers of yesteryear (a connection in good standing with the franchise: one of the best original series episodes, "Balance of Terror", is plainly modeled on Run Silent, Run Deep), and includes the best spaceship combat scenes in the whole of the series, big screen or little. It even points this latter fact out, by acerbically mentioning the idea of two-dimensional vs. three-dimensional thinking, diplomatically refusing to mention that Star Trek itself is pretty thoroughly two-dimensional most of the time.

The other is a film about aging and dying. This, in particular, is what makes it better than The Motion Picture: by openly confessing to the actors' ages, the film very actively becomes about their ages, and the first important character scene in the movie finds Kirk quietly celebrating his birthday with his dearest friends Spock and Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley). There's a through-line that is placed into the movie with absolutely perfect timing, about "no-win scenarios": the first scene presents this in the form of the Kobayashi Maru simulation, where officer candidate Saavik (Kirstie Alley) finds that Starfleet has a training program specifically designed to confront its officers with the idea that there may come a time when they have no opportunity to survive, and then at roughly one-third marks, this sequence is referenced again, in terms of how Kirk bested it, refusing to believe in no-win scenarios. And then the film ends with just such a no-win scenario, only a little bit spoiled by the script calling attention to this metaphor openly and shamelessly; but we should not demand of our popcorn movies that they present themes with the complexity and obscurity of Continental philosophers.

Shockingly, everything in The Wrath of Khan is in service to that theme, of becoming aware that there's more past than future, and deciding how best to live in the present. Revenge is Khan's driving motivation; a fixation on the past. Kirk's arc is entirely based on learning how to turn down the cocksure bravado that makes him ignore the future. The film's most famous sequence - oh, you know the one - is very much about how to live a purposeful life and die a meaningful, dignified death. All of this is deeply sober, and it's not depressingly only because it's worked through in the context of an action thriller in which a madman tries to blow up everything.

Meyer, after Robert Wise the best director to ever touch a Star Trek picture, and the mind behind the best stories in the film series, pushes all of this forward with excellent focus and discipline, never letting the pyrotechnics overwhelm the very tender feelings of the script, but also not losing sight of the need to make his movie exciting and tense. It was only his second work as director in a curiously small career, but it's powerfully self-assured and proficient. Considering how much of the film takes place on a very small number of sets (several of them recycled into other sets), it' a miracle that the film moves as fast as it does, and feels as kinetic. He has help getting there, of course: sharp editing by William P. Dornisch and one of the rarest things you could ever hope to find in a motion picture, a great James Horner score. It was early in Horner's career yet, and he didn't have a chance to start copying himself (though there is a huge amount of John Williams and a healthy serving of Jerry Goldsmith in his Wrath of Khan music), and the result is perhaps the single best score of his entire career, with a triumphant main theme almost the equal of Goldsmith's The Motion Picture motif, and several rhythmic action cues without which the action wouldn't be nearly as exciting as it so very much is.

Also helping Meyer out, unexpectedly, is the cast. We don't typically look to Star Trek and expect to find more than proficient acting (Nimoy excepted, and only sometimes), but a lot of people are in peak form here, none more than Shatner, whose performance is so far divorced from his usually robust, ham-saturated take on Kirk that it's tempting to wonder if a different actor managed to take his place. The quiet moments of amused introspection kill, his gulping of the word "human" in his eulogy at the end is heartbreaking, and even his bigger moments work perfectly in the way the film needs them to. Take his giant "KHAAAN" moment - have you watched it lately, in context? Because one thing it sure as hell ain't, is campy. The word is practically being torn from Shatner's tongue, as the tendons in his neck vibrate in uncut fury.

All of this is so good, and builds so perfectly to the climactic sequence (which itself has some outstanding acting from both Shatner and Nimoy), that I kind of wish they'd just ended it here. Oh, the sequels are sometimes wonderful and all, but it sort of cheapens this film's emotional arc to press the "genre films cancel death" button. Meyer was right to be aghast at the sequel hooks planted without his input: though it doesn't undercut the sincerity and impact of the film's treatment of death in the same way that the copycat moment in Star Trek Into Darkness does - at least the death here isn't reversed until the next film - it absolutely pulls the stakes down, in an absolutely deadening way. Since I'm complaining, here are a few more: the visual effects (outside that one groundbreaking use of CGI) are noticeably smaller than they were in The Motion Picture, owing to budgetary restraint, and even by the standards of Star Trek, the film does a terrible job of giving anything interesting to most of the ensemble, though in the director's cut (an incremental improvement over the theatrical version), James Doohan at least gets a little more depth in his portrayal of Scotty.

Still, "there are some flaws" is a very survivable bit of criticism for a popcorn movie, and especially for a Star Trek picture, where even the very best tend to have a distinct feel of television kicking around at the heels. None of that in The Wrath of Khan. This isn't great "for a Star Trek movie", it's one of the best sci-fi adventure films of the post-Star Wars era, tensely mechanistic and weepily humane in equal measure and in perfect harmony.

Reviews in this series
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Wise, 1979)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Meyer, 1982)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Nimoy, 1984)
Star Trek (Abrams, 2009)
Star Trek Into Darkness (Abrams, 2013)

DISNEY SEQUELS: KNOWING I CAN FACE THE THINGS THAT USED TO SEEM SO HARD

We've officially hit the point where it's just silly: we have arrived at the existence of Brother Bear 2. What explains the justification for this project, if anything, beyond the power-drunk realisation that the DisneyToon Studios DTV films cost very little to make and brought in at least some amount of profit no matter what, is totally unknown to me, and impossible to guess. Say whatever horrible things one wants to about the earlier Disney sequels, but they all, more or less, were marketable. But 2003's Brother Bear isn't Lilo & Stitch, or Mulan, or Lady and the Tramp; it's not even The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It is a film about which the single most salient fact is that it underwhelmed at the box office, thus smoothing the path for Disney to shut down its traditional animation program. Not exactly the kind of legacy that you'd think would have convinced anybody that a sequel would be met by an eager fanbase. I dunno, maybe they were hoping that they could retroactively legitimise the first movie by giving it a sequel: "See, it's an animated classic! It has those characters so beloved that we brought them back!"

I'll say this much for Brother Bear 2: it's a good sequel. Or an appropriate one, anyway. By which I mean, my response to this film was very nearly identical to my response to the first: having an incredibly hard time remembering its content even a couple of hours after I watched it, and seeing no reason for the story to have been told outside of a defiant "Um, because".

That being the case, it's still noteworthy that the film proceeds more or less logically from the first movie, outside of the arguable point that the depiction of Inuit society presented there doesn't entirely gel with the depiction here; the whole entire narrative of Brother Bear 2 hinges upon its protagonist's years-ago friendship with a girl from another tribe, or merchant camp, or something that's not actually clarified very well. It's bothersome in a way that I let become far too much of a problem for me.

But anyway, spotting the movie that a girl from the next tribe over doesn't really fit in with the implied world of the first Brother Bear, mostly we're in the realm of plausibly organic developments from the situation at the end of the last movie, in which human-turned-bear Kenai (Patrick Dempsey, an alarmingly fucking weird replacement for Joaquin Phoenix) and his adopted cub brother Koda (Jeremy Suarez) are just waking up from their first hibernation as a new little family. It's mating season, and the rest of the bears are insisting upon Kenai going off to find some sweet hairy thing, but he wants to keep things strictly a boy's club, and Koda is absolutely fine with that. All is not totally un-fraught, though; Kenai has of late been recalling his childhood sweetheart, a certain Nita (Mandy Moore), and Koda is moderately concerned that his big brother's resolute "no girls!" stance might be less stable than he'd like.

Naturally enough, Nita is about to re-enter Kenai's life. It's the day of her wedding to a strapping hunk of Inuit man meat named Atka (Jeff Bennett), and she's excited and scared, as a bride will be; she has reason to be extra-scared, though, as it turns out that the Great Spirits themselves don't want this marriage to take place, through a thunderstorm and an earthquake at the ceremony. Fans of the original will recall that the Great Spirits don't go in for half-measures, or subtlety. Immediately consulting with the local wise woman Innoko (Wanda Sykes), Nita finds that this is because she's been promised to Kenai ever since receiving his pendant as a child, after rescuing her from a frozen river. The only way to free herself from this betrothal is if both she and Kenai - whom she knows to be a bear, which strikes me as just odd, but probably not for a legitimate reason - journey to the exact spot where he gave her the pendant in the first place, and burn it. This would seem to be an awful lot of contrivance on the Great Spirits' part, but if they made it simple, then Kenai and Nita won't have several days together in which to fall back in love. Oops, spoilers. Also, I want to point out that Kenai is still a bear and Nita is still a human as they fall back in love, which arguably makes Brother Bear 2 the first-ever Disney film to actively court an audience of furries.

The beats are telegraphed to an unbelievably precise degree, and that sense of inevitable fatality is one of my bigger problems with the movie, particularly since filmmakers Benjamin Gluck (the director) and Rich Burns (the only credited writer) forget to do the thing that all proper 21st Century romantic comedies do - and let me tell you, the instant your realise that Brother Bear 2 is a Disney furry romcom for children is not a happy instant - by making it clear that Nita has dodged an incredibly huge bullet with Atka, who is a complete and irredeemable dickhole. On the contrary! In his brief appearance, Atka seems to be quite pleasant and levelheaded, being forced into the designated villain role because he tries to kill the bear that started rampaging through his village, roaring like the gates of Hell. But not at all because he's actually, in any meaningful way, a villain. It is frankly not clear to me at all why Nita wouldn't be better off sticking with him, and thus sparing us the somewhat unattractive moral that the first person you fall in love with is clearly the person you should end up with, even if ten years later he is a member of a different species and you've hooked up with a new man that you and every member of your family seem to genuinely like. Somehow, all the daft princess shit seems actually less damaging to me than that message, which proclaims brightly and reflexively, "don't let go of the past!"

That is my ideological objection to Brother Bear 2. I also have a more general narrative objection, which is the film's semi-awareness that it doesn't even have plot to fill its ultimate 73 minutes, and so a bunch of nonsensical incidents have to be trotted out to push the thing up to feature's worth of running time. This mostly takes the form of some easily-avoidable crisis cropping up because one or more of the three travelers acts in an aggressively stupid way, making things bad and then making them even worse, just to create a problem that can then be solved. I still prefer that to the script's other gambit, which is to bring out the comic relief. I was already not a fan of the moose brothers Rutt (Rick Moranis) and Tuke (Dave Thomas) in the first movie, when they only had to be stupid and bumbling. I like them even less when they are given a complimentary B-plot, in which they relentlessly and incompetently pursue a pair of lady moose - the film christens them with the ugly word "moosettes" - who are not named in the film proper, though the credits assure us they are called Anda and Kata, voiced respectively by Andrea Martin and Catherine O'Hara, Moranis and Thomas's old SCTV castmates, neither of them given anything that in any inhabited universe resembles enough to do, given their massive talent. But whatever, even Canadian comedy icons need to eat. The point being, it was odd enough to hear Moranis and Thomas doing an animated, kid-friendly parody of the McKenzie brothers; it's just damn depressing to hear them doing an audibly disinterested retread of that parody.

Comic relief is a major problem for the film: the moose are actually the least annoying. The most annoying is probably the strange pair of aunts helping Nita get ready for her wedding, played by Wendy Malick and Kathy Najimy as a pair of passive-aggressive old hens who do not even marginally resemble any human beings that you'd expect to see in prehistoric Canada. But they are given a hefty run for their money by Sykes, playing a sassy black feminist in a narrative universe where, by all sanity, not one of those three things should attain. All of this is to say: Brother Bear 2 has a huge injection of quippy contemporary humor, and given that Rutt and Tuke were the only modern embellishments in the first movie, the fact that the sequel feels like it takes place within shouting distance of a Southern California shopping mall is just strange. Not all of it is the comedy; some of it is as simple, pervasive, and damaging as the utterly uncontrolled vocal performances of Dempsey and Moore, neither of them attempting in even the smallest way not to sound like 21st Century actors. Suarez, whose performance is exactly identical to the flippant kid routine he did in the last picture, has suddenly but definitively become the most period-authentic voice actor with a lead role. That's how far afield we've gotten.

It looks good, though, so that's a thing. The one thing that Brother Bear absolutely had going for it was a complex and gorgeously classical vocabulary of wilderness art, using colors and textures skillfully to suggest landscape paintings with depth and body and movement, and of course Brother Bear 2 isn't vaguely interested in competing with it on that front, for budgetary reasons if nothing else. Even so, it's much more handsome than most DisneyToon productions, even taking into account that studio's undeniable upswing in quality throughout the mid-00s, and the character animation, though a little prone to mugging (especially with Kenai, though I imagine Dempsey's performance doesn't help), is smooth and evocative. I would speak against the character design of Nita, but I think my real problem is that Moore's voice coming out of that face is a much bigger problem than the face itself.

The whole thing, basically, is totally bland. The basic level of storytelling competence is such that the flaws do not seriously damage it, nor do the few, but legitimate, strengths do much to save it. It's such a big, fluffy, nothing of a movie, as pointedly blank and inoffensive as the lazy, anonymous songs contributed by a slumming Melissa Etheridge. With its weirdly adult-centered narrative wrapped around characters that nobody had all that much affection for to begin with, it's hard to even speak bromides about "oh, but the kids would like it!" I honestly don't see why anybody would like it, any more than I see why anybody would dislike it. It's just a neutral object, with bears.

THESE ARE THE VOYAGES: I SENSE NO EMOTION, ONLY PURE LOGIC

I weep for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, as I would for a brother. Honestly. Rechristened by audiences as The Motionless Picture almost from the instant it opened in December, 1979, it has never once shaken the reputation of being a joyless slog, neither pleasurable in its own right nor remotely successful as a big-screen followup to the 1966-'69 TV series Star Trek, and subject to the worst indulgences of pretentious science fiction of the late '70s. And all these things are true, to a degree, though the film gets beat up too much, treated with a sort of caustic recoil that it does not earn. This is merely a weak, inapt Star Trek movie, not a completely awful one.

Hindsight makes the movie much easier to take, certainly: both in knowing that compared to something as spectacularly worthless as Star Trek: Nemesis, The Motion Picture is pretty decent, in fact, and also in knowing that with genuinely excellent movies in the franchise's immediate future, it doesn't have to bear the weight of being "The Star Trek movie we've been waiting for all these years", but merely a Star Trek movie, one of many. Still, it's easy to understand what a singularly deflating experience it must have been for the first audiences, who'd been keeping the fires lit for the series ever since it was unceremoniously cancelled a decade earlier, only to find its bright, Western-influenced sense of space adventure replaced by a lugubrious sense of self-seriousness in which the free humor of the TV show had been banished to a few character moments included more as a sop to the fans than an integral part of the movie.

This state of affairs was by no means an accident. The reason that a half-decade of attempts to launch a Star Trek feature, or a new TV series (under the name Star Trek: Phase II) finally ended in success has nothing at all to do with the dogged perseverance of creator Gene Roddenberry, and mostly because in 1977, Star Wars made an amount of money that you wouldn't have even joked about before it opened. Overnight, every studio wanted their own massive sci-fi epic to jump on that bandwagon ASAP, and Paramount had the good fortune of already owning a sci-fi franchise with a built-in fanbase and something like brand recognition even among those who weren't fans. It even had "Star" in the title. On the other hand, the people responsible for bringing Star Trek to cinemas were eager to distinguish their property from George Lucas's rousing but trivial space opera, by emphasising the philosophical side, the serious side, the "hard" side of Star Trek. A series that had never, before 1979, ever had the slightest inclination towards hard sci-fi.

So the expectation that The Motion Picture would be something like Star Wars but with more humanism and a sense of exploration rather than action - would be the thing the show always was - was already doomed by the time that a shooting script was finally selected out of God knows how many false starts. But faulty expectations aren't reason enough to declare The Motion Picture an outright failure. In fact, there's a lot about the movie that works: starting with the selection of Robert Wise as director, easily the most talented man ever put in charge of a Star Trek feature, and at the level of pure cinematic language, The Motion Picture is still probably the "best" movie in the franchise; most of them have the unmistakable aura of TV directors hanging around, but Wise was unmistakably looking to make a real, proper feature film - a Motion Picture if you will, and not just a movie like the subsequent eleven Star Trek pictures - and divorced from anything else, he succeeded. The Motion Picture is a gorgeous movie, with the best visual effects of 1979; it had the pedigree for it, with the visual effects team led by Douglas Trumbull, of the groundbreaking 2001: A Space Odyssey and the exemplary Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Star Wars' own John Dykstra.

In fact, the outstanding visual effects work is directly responsible for one of the easiest and most accurate criticisms of the movie: some much time and energy and money was spent perfect the VFX, and in those days, effects of this kind were so excitingly novel, that a deeply unnecessary percentage of the film's running time is devoted to showing the effects off, in exacerbating long takes and protracted sequences in which the narrative comes to a complete halt to stop and gawk: at the newly re-designed U.S.S. Enterprise, at the massive cloud-covered alien spacecraft V'Ger, at the interior spaces with their blinking lights and shiny readouts (and a really bad case of the late-'70s earthtones, captured with unusual flatness given how extensively visual the rest of the film is), at just plain stars, drifting by.

There's a certain anthropological appeal to all this: in 1979, here's what the state of the art looked like. And even the longest, most indulgent, least necessary sequences are saved, at least partially, by the film's awe-inspiring score by Jerry Goldsmith - in a walk, the best music composed for any iteration of Star Trek, beginning with his adrenaline-shot of bombast in an opening theme so potent and elemental it was re-purposed as the main title theme of TV's Star Trek: The Next Generation, eight years later, and continuing through a martial, atonal motif for the warlike Klingons, itself repurposed multiple times over the years, and into the bellowing, non-musical sounds used as V'Ger's theme. But it is impossible not to concede to the film's earliest critics: yes, The Motion Picture is pretty goddamned boring. And not just because it is slow, lingering over each and ever scene at least a third again too long; not just because it has too many narrative dead-ends scattered throughout far too long a running time - a totally un-functional sequence involving a wormhole is by far the most obvious offender - but because it gives its characters nothing all to do but traipse through the plot, and Star Trek has always been at its best when it lets its main trio of characters interact: brash captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), rigidly un-emotional half-human, half-Vulcan Spock (Leonard Nimoy), irascible doctor Leonard "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelley). They get enough of a chance to play around within movie that you can recognise the personalities from the show, but for the most part, they're props in their own movie, and that's not even talking about how badly the film manhandles the rest of the classic cast. Spock gets a bit of a plot arc that's not well-managed by Nimoy's obvious rustiness with the character, and Kirk has to do a minute amount of soul-searching that serves mostly to mark time before the plot kicks off, but in the best tradition of "serious" movie sci-fi, the human element of The Motion Picture is kept at arm's length, and only the residual warmth of these characters as established by an old TV show keeps the whole thing from being totally and completely sterile.

Simply put, it doesn't tell a story worth the telling. There's too much arbitrary set-up: the crew has dispersed since the end of the series, but not for any reason that's used to such great effect that it had to be the case, especially since the only plausible excuse, to introduce the characters to new viewers, doesn't end up applying (the exposition is almost entirely dedicated to catching up the faithful, not bringing in newbies). The eventual conflict has some interesting ideas, even ideas that would have fit well in a 48-minute TV episode; but it takes much too long to get to the remotely interesting material about the need for intelligent beings to communicate with their gods, with a whole lot of static, dramatically uncompelling space mystery filling it out.

In 2001, Robert Wise was able to complete a director's cut for DVD, and in fairness: this version is so much better than the theatrical cut (or the borderline-unwatchable VHS "extended" cut, so pokey that calling it "boring" is laughably insufficient) that it really isn't the same movie anymore. The film was rushed through post-production, and neither the visual effects nor the editing had arrived where the filmmakers wanted. To fix things, Wise supervised the insertion of new CGI effects designed to look as much as possible like 1979 model work, numerous scenes were shaved down, and the whole thing flows infinitely better. It's still not a very exciting movie, but at least its slowness feels stately and intentional, rather than out of control and soporific. Prior to this version, The Motion Picture was my second-least-favorite of all nine (at the time) movies; it has since jumped up to be more in the middle. It still has character problems, and it is still far too concerned with staring at spaceships as gorgeous music plays and not with having those spaceships do anything (the set-up phase ends, and the "plot" begins, a solid 45-minutes into the 136-minute director's cut - a huge amount of waiting for a movie with "trek" in its damn title). But at least it has something resembling momentum, and though it still fails to marry the swashbuckling of Star Wars with the thoughtfulness of 2001 in the way it plainly wants to, it's not as grueling in that failure. Still, the film series had nowhere to go but up, and it very quickly went there.

Reviews in this series
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Wise, 1979)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Meyer, 1982)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Nimoy, 1984)
Star Trek (Abrams, 2009)
Star Trek Into Darkness (Abrams, 2013)

PERSONAL CANON: MONSTERS AND GODS

Of the 16 films made between 1949 and 1981 that featured visual effects by the great artist Ray Harryhausen, you could mount a serious argument that not one of them is very good. I would not personally agree with you (at a stone-cold minimum, Mighty Joe Young and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms are both quite effective in ways that completely transcend "good for a B-movie" limitations), but an honest blogger must admit that there many problems that keep cropping up in the various films he worked on: tepid heroes played blandly by empty prettyboys, unyieldingly episodic plot structure, a visible cheapness in all ways that aren't directly related to Harryhausen's personal skill, a distinctly juvenile emotional register. This must be conceded for the simple fact that it's all true: these were programmers, after all, movies whose chief motivation was to keep kids happy for a Saturday afternoon, and plainly not built to be durable.

All that being said, you can't be much of a fan of classic B-movies and not kind of love at least some of his films; they are simple, they are "cheesy" (a word that I hate even when it's being used accurately, but it puts the idea across), and they are not artistically rigorous to speak of, but the best ones - and maybe I'm speaking about B-movies as a whole and not just the Harryhausen ones - have energy, a kind of crackling urgency that you simply do not find in more legitimate forms of cinema all that often. A good '50s or '60s B-movie (a good one, I repeat) is bursting with the need to tell its story in a way that feels much cleaner and purer than other things might; they're the closest feature-length cinema comes to the narrative impetus of fables, or the One Thousand and One Nights. Or even the epics of Homer, which are not, despite their literary importance, sober-minded tales of personalities and human behavior (though they include that), but ripping yarns: "And then Odysseus beat the Cyclops! And then his sailors were turned into pigs! And then..."

So anyway, B-movies. They are unsophisticated as all heck, but we're biologically identical to naked apes scavenging for fruit in the African plains, and some unsophistication can be good for you in the right form. Which brings me back to Ray Harryhausen, because his best films were exactly that, rock-solid, deeply appealing and intelligently-presented unsophisticated bedtime stories. And while it's appropriate to say that the visual effects designer of a movie shouldn't have that kind of importance in our judgment of a movie, the fact is that by the 1960s, these really were his pictures: 1963's Jason and the Argonauts (did I mention that this is a review of Jason and the Argonauts? It will be, eventually) was the first time he took a credit for associate producing a movie, something he'd get on nearly all of his subsequent projects, most of which were based on mythology. And this we can readily credit to Harryhausen, because it is known to be true: the reason the latter part of his career was so overwhelming dominated by Ancient Greece and Sinbad the Sailor was because he was deeply in love with those things, and wanted to give them cinematic life in a way that would make everybody else love them as well.

Back to my opening claim, then: most of Ray Harryhausen's films aren't "good", by any objective rules we might have - lucky, then, that the analysis of art is subjective - and even if we were to throw out the question of absolute quality, Jason and the Argonauts still isn't nearly his "best" film - there's more emotional depth in Mighty Joe Young, a far more coherent narrative in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, stronger characters and more sustained world-building in Mysterious Island, Raquel Welch's awe-inspiring cleavage in One Million Years B.C. But Jason and the Argonauts is my favorite, no contest, don't need to think about it. It's not because it was my very first Harryhausen film (7th Voyage), nor did I first see it at a deeply impressionable age (16, which is pushing it on the old side of things). It's because it's this film of all of them that gets it - gets the deep, lingering awe that continues to make reading ancient mythology such a compulsively easy thing to do millennia after the cultures that produced those myths have ceased to exist. It's a complete mess, even a disaster in some totally unforgivable ways, but I cannot name another adventure movie in the whole long annals of escapist cinema that works so nearly in the same register as those short, punchy fantasies in heavily bowdlerised anthologies that are how most of us, I suspect, first encountered Greco-Roman mythology. It only shows the broad strokes and invites us to fill in the rest with our imagination, or not; perhaps we're only there for the hair-raising accounts of monsters and the dark, unknown places in the world, places that were so much more alive in the ancient centuries that originated those stories than they can be now. Much is made in Jason and the Argonauts of "the far side of the world", with the kicker near the end that the people found over on the far side speak in just the same dazzled phrases of the "real" world back in Greece. Jason and the Argonauts is about plunging recklessly into the unknown, and finding wonderful things there: wonderful things created by Harryhausen, of course, which means that unlike most movies, they really are wonderful.

The film is a tolerable adaptation of the Jason myth, much closer anyway than Clash of the Titans, from 1981, was to any version of the Perseus story, to say nothing of the heavily Greekified Sinbad movies. Herein, the craven Pelias (Douglas Wilmer) acquires the throne of Thessaly through murder, and having received a message from an oracle that only the king's children can unseat him, he attempts to kill them. In this, he is only one-third successful, and his crime greatly angers the goddess Hera (Honor Blackman), who cajoles her husband Zeus (Niall MacGinnis) into letting her intercede in knocking this tyrant off his throne.

20 years later, the old king's son Jason (Todd Armstrong) is put into position through Hera's machinations to encounter Pelias, saving him from drowning. The usurper instantly recognises his savior, but knowing he can't kill the young man himself, suggests a sure-to-be-fatal quest for Jason to undertake: in order to prove to the people of Thessaly that he is a worthy heir to the throne, he should sail to the unknown parts of the world and the magnificent golden fleece, bringing it back as trophy and sign of his courage. In order to complete this quest, Jason must gather the finest heroes in Greece, and put them all on the finest ship ever built, by the great shipmaster Argos (Laurence Naismith). All of this takes us about 35 minutes into a 103-minute film, and this is the last time that Jason and the Argonauts pretends that it's anything other than a series of incidents presented largely independent of any greater narrative arc for our amusement (in which, honestly, it's a pretty fair approximation of the digressive structure of the Argonautica, the most famous retelling of the myth).

In fact, the film is so loose and episodic that it rather spectacularly falls apart as anything resembling a self-contained narrative by ending without having so much as genuflected in the direction of resolving its only established conflict. Oh, Jason gets the fleece, no spoilage in that; but that's all he does. He doesn't come back to Thessaly, doesn't confront Pelias, doesn't end the story at all. There's a vague implication of more adventures that would likely make up a sequel that nobody seems to have ever intended to make, and the whole thing is really just too frustrating for words, if you let it be. So don't let it be, I say: the intended spirit of the movie isn't of a much more frivolous cast, with the fun being in the excellent B-movie adventures that happen along the journey, not the journey itself. It's surely not an accident that the abrupt ending-that-isn't comes hard on the heels of the film's last big FX setpiece - literally just 90 seconds after it ends - meaning that any viewer who has it in their soul to be riled up by human heroes fighting sword-wielding skeletons (and if you're not that view, then boy, stay away from Jason and the Argonauts) will be too exhilarated by what just happened to give much of a shit about the film's dramatic incoherence. What can I say, it's always worked for me; perhaps that's a side effect of genuinely believing the skeleton sequence to be one of the absolute best setpieces in the history of cinema, good enough that I would forgive any movie anything that happened in its immediate aftermath.

The effects in the movie are pretty amazing, at any rate. There are four big stop-motion sequences, along with a few other shots with miniatures and optical effects and such (which are not, as a rule, as good; though the work in the "cliffs that crush you to death" scene is hard to complain about, given the budget and the period), and the worst of these four sequences can stand against anything else in Harryhausen's career. Custom generally holds that the first and last are the best: the giant bronze sculpture Talos, who moves with creaking metallic stiffness (great sound design), and boasts easily the best compositing work Harryhausen had demonstrated to that point. The Talos sequence overall is absolutely great, even from the moment that he's nothing but a single massive statue in an abandoned valley, surrounded by other massive statues; a touch of otherworldly menace just by virtue of being so inexplicable, like something out of Lovecraft almost. But it's the ponderous menace of the moving statue that is really impressive, fantasy and G-rated horror at their most exciting.

The other great sequence is the fighting squad of seven malevolent skeletons, one of the most iconic and beloved setpieces in English-language popcorn cinema. I'm not even going to bother explaining why it's great, because everybody who's seen it knows, and I wouldn't want to give it away for everybody else.

The less-beloved monsters (a pair of harpies, and the Hydra) aren't quite up to level thus established, though they'd be undeniable standouts in literally any other fantasy movie. The Hydra isn't necessarily as smooth as it could be, but in both cases, the creativity of the design and the excellence with which the animation is married to the live-action footage is as good as anything Harryhausen had achieved by 1963, with perfectly matched lighting and non-stop choreography doing a lot to cover up any little sins.

It's all just such a great adventure movie; totally about the experience of the moment, completely imaginative, absolutely free of any characterisations to speak of that might make the material too specific and thus unable to tap into a sort of Jungian universalism. The film came after the glut of Italian Hercules pictures, and perhaps in retaliation, the film depicts Hercules (Nigel Green) as a comic middle-aged buffoon; that, and Patrick Troughton's anguished cameo as the blind harpy victim Phineas, are pretty much all the farther the film goes in differentiating characters. The film would much rather present spectacle in the most wide-eyed, awe-inspired register, using the people onscreen as vessels to funnel that through rather than people to whom it happens; it is fundamentally about realising one man's visions of what Greek myths ought to look like, and luckily for all the people who've watched in the intervening half-decade, that man had visions as exciting and playful and richly detailed as anyone else who ever worked in fantasy cinema.

BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: PARDON ME, BUT YOUR TITLE IS A DAMNABLE PUN

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: there has not been one second since the title was announced that I have felt anything but dull rage about the name of Star Trek Into Darkness, especially with that despicable lack of a colon. With a more robust Star Trek marathon in the wings, and since the theme "I Will Fucking Punch Your Lens Flares in the Cock" would just take us right back to the 2009 Star Trek reboot, it seemed alright to stretch a point.

Almost as ancient as the buddy cop movie itself, is the transplanted buddy cop movie; in which two comically mismatched heroes bicker and snipe while fighting a totally generic bad guy, but instead of doing it contemporary Los Angeles, they've been removed to some wacky genre or setting. The standard-bearer for this kind of thing is unquestionably the 1997 buddy cop movie with aliens!, Men in Black, and that's maybe even the best example of its generation of filmmaking, but there are many, many other examples of the things, in a wide gulf of quality.

Here, for example we have buddy cop movie in the Old West! with martial arts! Shanghai Noon, with the bickering heroes played by Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan, making only his second U.S. film: the first, Rush Hour, was a more generically classic buddy cop movie with Chris Tucker, and it does well to point that out right at the onset, because for all of the problems that Shanghai Noon has, it has one of them to the same degree as Rush Hour, let alone its gigantically awful sequels. If that means that I'm inclined to overvalue Shanghai Noon simply for not being outrageously bad, well, the critic is a human being like anybody else.

The ephemeral plot begins in 19th Century China, where Princess Pei Pei (Lucy Liu) is being forced by her father the emperor to marry an unpleasant nobleman, and in a fit of anachronistic feminism, she arranges with the court's American tutor, Andrews (Jason Connery), to spirit her into that land of freedom and democracy. In a stunning twist, he ends up betraying her, turning her over to former imperial guard Lo Fong (Roger Yuan), who has made his business in the States by selling out his countrymen into virtual slavery working on the railroad. He's abducted the princess for money and revenge, and so he sends back to China a ransom, which is to be delivered by the emperor's three greatest warriors - and, tagging along, hapless guard Chon Wang (Chan), mostly on the hopes that some American outlaw will kill him and make things easier on everybody else.

There is, meanwhile, an entirely separate plot, in which hapless American outlaw Roy O'Bannon (Wilson) is losing control over his gang, with the psychopathic Texan Wallace (Walter Goggins) having recently joined in, and solving every problem with a bit too liberal an application of gunfire. It so happens one fine day that O'Bannon's gang is robbing the very same train that the Chinese guards are riding on, and Chon's beloved uncle ends up dead as a result. So it is that, in due course, Chon and O'Bannon both end up stranded in the Nevada desert, with a healthy measure of intense dislike for one another: it's not until they end up trapped in jail together, from which they are freed by Chon's accidental Sioux wife Falling Leaves (Brandon Merrill), who arrives in the plot via a farcical complication that feels enough like a parody of The Searchers that it might actually be deliberate; the film has quite its fair share of references to classical Westerns, including a villain, Van Cleef (Xander Berkeley), named after the co-star of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly among other films.

At this point, Chon and O'Bannon finally decide to drop their feud and become allies, staying just ahead of the law while hunting down Lo Fong and saving the princess. This, then, brings me to what is easily the biggest flaw with the movie on its own terms (rather than the terms of cinema as an art form; for of course, you hardly need me to point out that a Western buddy cop movie called Shanghai Noon isn't looking to tap into the Resnais or Bresson crowds): at 110 minutes all told, it takes almost exactly half of the film's running time before it sets Chan and Wilson in the same room and gives them more than a few lines of dialogue to banter with. There are really only two things that the film promises, one of them being the wacky antics as the drawling American and the heavily accented, slapsticky Asian have to fight crime together, the other being Chan's acrobatic stunt work. For it to take almost a full hour before the first of these even starts to make its presence felt is a betrayal of the Buddy Cop rulebook; the ur-text of the genre in its modern form, Lethal Weapon, only gives us one scene to establish each of the two protagonists before throwing them together, where Shanghai Noon has an act and a half. And frankly, Shanghai Noon isn't a good enough movie to hold attention for that long: the plot is obviously perfunctory, and Tom Dey's direction utterly quotidian and in some places actively bad (he uses some pretty questionable camera set-ups in filming Chan's various physical exertions).

It's a good thing, then, that Chan's action sequences here do work, because for a long time, that's absolutely the only thing the movie has going for it. This is a fairly empty statement to make, but it's easily the best fighting in any of his American films (which fairly quickly degenerated into family-friendly tosh that didn't exert the aging martial arts star too badly; indeed, assuming from the example of his later films that Shanghai Noon was itself a bouncy family-friendly cartoon, I was thrown to find that it's actually quite naughty-minded in spots), blending the comic and the brutal far more effectively than he'd be able to do again in Hollywood's neutering bosom. Beyond question, you're better off with just about any one of his '90s Hong Kong productions, but equally beyond question, he's able to play here to far better effect than in e.g. Rush Hour 2 or The Tuxedo.

When, eventually, the "Jackie Chan fight scenes peppered throughout a mostly insipid Western comedy" picture morphs into the "Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson toss dialogue at each other" picture, the improvement is massive, though perilously close to too little, too late. At no point does Shanghai Noon fail to subscribe to the most vanilla possible '80s action movie plot tropes, but at least the actors have enough chemistry that the plot seems more like the pretext for a movie that it is, than the driving purpose of a movie that it is far too weak-kneed to be. I will not go s far as to say that the Chan/Wilson pairing is one for the ages, but they're equally silly in different ways, and especially compared to Chan's previous and subsequent teamings with Chris Tucker, the actors' comic tones mesh really well, with no sense of scene-stealing or one-upping each other. You can't get a whole lot less substantial than this, but well-played, friendly banter is tough to do, and Shanghai Noon hits its mark perfectly on that front: the leads are enough fun, and both irreverent to just the perfect degree, that it would be worth watching them plugging through even the most inane nonsense. Which is good, because that's exactly what the film asks them to do.

HARRYHAUSEN WEEK: RELEASE THE KRAKEN

You can just about watch an era snuff itself out with Clash of the Titans, the final film for producer Charles H. Schneer and effects artist Ray Harryhausen (who also took a producer credit on what is frequently held to be the great labor of love of his career), and the first of those men's collaborations to be produced in the wake of the epochal Star Wars. There obvious (and infamous) attempts to adjust for that mammoth box office hit, which inspired so many cash-in attempts across so many genres, but the heart of Clash of the Titans was still pretty unabashedly old-fashioned, and when it passed, so did a much more playful, swashbuckling age of light cinematic entertainment. It was the latest and last in a cycle of films that the Harryhausen/Schneer partnership had been releasing for 23 years: episodic fantasy films based on classical mythology, either explicitly Greek (as in 1963's Jason and the Argonauts), or Arabian with a monstrous dose of Greek to it (as in 1958's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, less so its two sequels from the '70s). Clash of the Titans, written by Beverly Cross and nurtured for many years until it was finally produced, is taken from perhaps the granddaddy of all Greek myths: the story of Perseus, rescuer of the princess Andromeda and slayer of the fearsome gorgon Medusa. It has as sprawling a plot, and as many stop-motion creations, as any of the Harryhausen fantasy films, and a vastly more impressive cast; it is in every way a career-capper, a work of the grandest ambition, and it only spoils things a little bit that it's not very good.

After all, lots of Ray Harryhausen films aren't very good, when you filter the Harryhausen out of them. At any rate, Clash of the Titans isn't the worst movie he was associated with (at a minimum, It Came from Beneath the Sea is stupider and First Men in the Moon is leagues more boring), and where it counts, it could not possibly be a bigger triumph: the stop-motion animation with which the great artist ended his career includes some of the most astounding work he ever did, including my single-favorite monster in the Harryhausen bestiary. That is, after all, the biggest reason anybody could have for wanting to see the movie. It's also the only reason that actually pays off, is the problem, and while none of the myth films of Harryhausen's career exactly had a robust, unimpeachable script, the storytelling is Clash is really quite tepid, and it is made far worse by the reasonable-in-1980 decision to cast up and comer Harry Hamlin as Perseus. Say what you want about Kerwin Matthews and John Phillip Law, for I will probably chortle as you say it and encourage you to go on, but at least they both had a certain fusty quality to their cardboard acting that adds to the nobly old-fashioned kiddie matinee feeling of their films. Hamlin is simply a bad actor, totally undone by the script's requirement that he play a stagey ancient Greek hero, lucking his way into a register of intense, constipated seriousness that sometimes is exactly right, though never enough to pull your eyes away from his feathery '80s hair. He's a hugely ineffective hero, that is to say, and his lead performance is a handicap that Clash would have a hard time recovering from even if it didn't have massive script problems along the way.

How about that script, anyway? "Taken from" the Perseus myth, I said, but "borrows character names and a couple scenes from" is closer to the mark. We'll keep it short: Perseus is the exiled heir to the throne of the ruined kingdom of Argos, destroyed in anger by Perseus's godly father Zeus (Laurence Olivier), when the boy's human grandfather sent him and his mother off to sea in a wooden casket to die horribly. 20 years on, Perseus wants to restore his position, but he gets sidetracked by stories of the beautiful Andromeda (Judi Bowker, bad enough to make even Hamlin look good), princess of Joppa. Joppa, the Israeli seaport, where Assyrian designs are all over everything, and Greeks wearing Roman headpieces walk the streets. Where the minor Greek deity Thetis (Maggie Smith) is worshipped above all else, and that's where the problems start. See, Thetis has a bit of a beef with Zeus, thinking that the leader of the gods is too quick to abuse his power and play the hypocrite when it comes to protecting his demigod children. She's particularly offended that Zeus hasn't been similarly indulgent to her own mortal offspring, Calibos (Neil McCarthy), Andromeda's former fiancé, now a horrible devil-lizard monster because of Zeus's whims. Thus, prodded own by Andromeda's mother, Cassiopeia (Siân Phillips), who idiotically praised her daughter's beauty above Thetis herself in Thetis's temple, the goddess orders that Andromeda be sacrificed to the dreadful Titan, the Kraken, the same beast that razed Argos. Perseus isn't terribly keen on this idea, but he's able to trick the cannibalistic Stygian witches into telling him how to stop the Kraken: by showing it the severed head of Medusa, which can turn any living being into stone (the film misidentifies Medusa as being a Titan, thus feebly justifying the title).

Okay, that sounds like the Perseus myth, but only because I cleaned up the plot in transcribing it. In point of fact, Clash of the Titans is a monumental fetch quest, in which Perseus is spurred on by the old actor Ammon (Burgess Meredith), in the role of the old man in the cave who gives the hero advice one dungeon at a time, and whose absolute all-time favorite gambit is the "Impossible! ...unless..." trick. And the "...unless..." invariably sends Perseus off to find some damn thing: the winged horse Pegasus, the stygian witches, the shores of the underworld. That the film is episodic is unfortunate, but not fatal; that it uses the most obvious framing device in the whole world to make really certain that we notice the clunky "The princess is in another castle" transitions between episodes, now that's fatal.

Clash of the Titans is thankfully busy enough with incident that it doesn't drag - it's Harryhausen's longest film, but it clips by well - but it never builds up any kind of dramatic flow or stakes, and while the story is interesting in the most primal way (myths, after all, hold up because something in our lizard brains responds to the simple characters and elemental, otherworldly setting and incidents), it's not terribly compelling on any level besides, "ooh, spooky! ooh, exciting!". Both of which, to its credit, the film nails: indeed, the Hades sequence, with its terrific skeletal ferryman and misty settings and just-out-of-sight monsters is pretty great PG-rated horror, from a time when PG let you get away with a lot more (including naked boobs and ass, both of which are found here). It's a good popcorn movie, as long as you don't need to have remotely credible characters with your popcorn: in the whole cast (further including Claire Bloom and a non-speaking Ursula Andress as goddesses), only Meredith and Phillips can really be accused of "acting", while the particular brand of non-acting perpetrated by the distracted, patrician Olivier and the empty-headed narcissist Smith is especially grating.

The visual effects are clearly the only thing here that's worth bothering with, and even they're wildly inconsistent for a Harryhausen film: for the first time (owing to schedule or budget or age, I do not know), the animator worked with a team of assistants, and it's tempting to blame them for the problems, but I don't know if that's fair. Anyway, Pegasus is almost totally without merit on the level of animation, and the giant vulture that spirits away Andromeda's spirit to be tormented by Calibos is pretty shaky itself, in addition to be consistently over-lit for the scenes it occupies. Meanwhile, the matte work used to composite even the very best animation in with the action is absolutely shocking: the worst of Harryhausen's career, even going back to the days when he had pocket change to make B-movies at Columbia.

But the good stuff is fucking marvelous, and makes up not just for the weak effects, but the movie as a whole. Calibos, when not being played by a human in wide shots, is a great demonic monster, especially his writhing tail; the Kraken, though not at all the giant squid monster described by Norse myth (and thus no better suited to ancient Greece than the obvious reference to Caliban from The Tempest is), is a pretty fantastically-designed creature, with tentacle-like arms and a meaner version of the face of the Ymir from Harryhausen's 20 Million Miles to Earth. There's a battle with giant scorpions that suffers badly from being awfully ill-matted, but given the incredible quality of the arthropods' design, and their nightmare-fuel movements, it's really hard to complain.

But I've saved both the best and the worst for last.

On one hand: Bubo. A tetchy Athena (Susan Fleetwood) doesn't want to give her precious owl to Perseus, despite Zeus's command, so shoe commissions Hephaestus (Pat Roach) to fashion a clockwork metal owl. And he sucks. He is the absolute worst ever. A blatant rip-off of Star Wars's R2-D2 - the filmmakers have always denied this - the beeping little comic relief thing is introduced by comically falling off a tree branch, hitting his head and looking around groggily. No doubt about it, the animation of Bubo is terrific, and full of personality. That makes it worse. The only thing that could make the thing palatable is if the film hated him as much as I do, but that's not the case at all: the film loves Bubo, and keeps giving him stone-faced, anti-funny business to do, constantly trusting that we are adoring his scrapes and antics, however much they might be ruining any kind of mood the film is able to scrounge up.

On the other hand: Medusa. The best depiction of Medusa, for my money, in any artform. A decaying perversion of the female form, like a mermaid with a snake's tail and rotting skin and a perpetual look of evil rage, she is terrifying, and the animation is easily the most complex in Harryhausen's career: everything on her moves, constantly, subtly, precisely, and in a room lit by torches (firelight is much harder in stop-motion than any other kind of lighting), and for once, the matte work is even top-notch. Frankly, I suspect the reason that so much of the effects work in Clash of the Titans is shabby is because Harryhausen and his team spent so much time and money getting Medusa right, because she is perfect in every way, a blast of horror perfectly executed and impossible to forget. The sequence in which she appears is an unmitigated triumph, it makes even the worst parts of the film worth sitting through to get to them (and I am anyway exaggerating how bad the movie really is: frequently dysfunctional, but virtually never unpleasant), and a finer climax to a life's work could not be imagined. There's more bad than good in Clash of the Titans overall, but Medusa is essential viewing, pure and simple. By the logic that dodgy genre movies and die on their monsters, it just doesn't get better than this.