Overview:  

I love the Purge movies, which I didn’t expect.  The first one was so claustrophobic.  I really felt it, being trapped in the house with someone set to kill.  I also liked the concept, as it was one my friends and I posited to each other many times in college, albeit ours was slightly different.  We asked each other what we would do if you woke up one day with a loaded gun and the knowledge that there would be no consequences for what you did that day – including regret.  Purge asks us what society would do if for 12 hours once a year you could do whatever you wanted with no legal ramifications- and shows us the chaos that decision brings.

Purge one was about one family.  It was in the home.  It showed us that through the Purge you can see just how much envy and existential boredom leads to pleasure in murder.  Purge:  Anarchy takes us to the streets and a bit more political:  we begin to see that the Purge is a system to allow those with privilege to outright murder those without, it’s making explicit the way many see the systems implicitly work now, to terrorize and subjugate basically anyone who is not a white male, to the point where we’re all there to be the hunted ‘things’ and aren’t human.

Purge:  Election Year hits far to close to home in that we have a female running for president against old white money male.  The female, Charlie, is young and lost her family in the Purge so wants to rid the country of the dire sociopathic straits it has found itself fallen into by the ‘new founding fathers.’  Old money doesn’t want this to happen, so decides to assassinate her during the Purge.  Thus begins the chase, as her faithful security guard, Leo, attempts to keep her alive long enough for people to vote her into the presidency.  They end up at at old man’s neighborhood grocery store, where she and her guard are the only white people there and. . .neither are afraid of the non-white people because, hey, they’re people too (refreshing!) so they join forces to just try and make it through the night.

The Good:  I about had a heart attack with this film in the good ways, but did have to stop it a few times to breathe.  It gets you, or got me, because I have seen that look of entitlement in peoples eyes or heard it in their voice when they think the world is owed them.  For example:

We first meet Joe, the owner of the grocery store, when two teen girls in a catholic/private school are trying to steal candy from him and they are busted.  They come back on the purge to kill him because if they want chocolate, they’re going to get it and it’s theirs.  That soulless logic got to me, but I’ve seen it and was too believable.  They then get mad at him for defending his store so come back with reinforcements.

Another great example of how I think this could happen, or why it feels real, is a segment in the film on ‘murder tourism’ with people coming to the US on Purge night to kill people because, of course they would.  It’s a no-brainer.  We have sexual tourism, running of the bulls, and probably already do have murder tourism as well so calling it out in the film kind of got to me and was brilliant.  People will travel and pay to openly exploit others for their enjoyment because not all people are created human in the eyes of others, it’s something I see all the time working in a healthcare center that focuses on refugee health.

The Purge is turned into a religion by the ‘old white men and women’ who gather in a church to cleanse themselves by stabbing those they get off the street, and the end scene is brutal but scary and ‘good.’  They really kept my heart rate up the entire time.

The Bad:  I flip back and forth about the race relations here, so I’m not sure ‘the bad’ is great for this but does need to be mentioned.  Charlie is white, blond hair blue eyes white female.  She wants to end the Purge because she recognizes it’s just another way, and an incredibly violent one at that, to abuse the poor and other already marginalized parts of the community.  Everyone in Joe’s grocery store is non-white and they talk about voting for her to help them.  Now, she ends up at that store and they work to save her, which on one end is a great twist of the Mighty Whitey trope, where a white person comes into a community not their own and saves them from themselves and outside forces. Everyone works really hard to save Charlie, even putting aside their own needs (Joe loses his store, Bishop loses his quest to kill King White Man and keeper of the purge) to do so.

BUT, they are doing this because ultimately she IS The Mighty White person who can save them all.  And they die to make sure she survives to do it.  I honestly am not sure how to weigh in on that.

The Female:  There are a lot of men in this film.  A LOT.  There are teams of them coming after Charlie.  There are her bodyguards.  There are those in the community trying to save her.  Doctors, politicians, etc.  There are TWO females with names I remember, not counting the girls who try to steal from Joe’s place.  They are:

Charlie:  The current senator and great hope of the downtrodden.  She will rise up and rid the world of the purge thus making her a target.  To some extent, what she goes through is the every day life of a female.  The outside space is not safe for her because she can be attacked at any time.  She has to have a man, her bodyguard, to protect her from other men, just like a woman has to say she’s ‘taken’ by another to get some guys to leave them alone.  And unintentional metaphor on their part, perhaps. She has lines, she speaks, she’s shown to not care if a person is black or white and to be otherwise saintly (Such as talking to some guy in an infirmary and laughing with him and imploring that her rival not be murdered and become a martyr) but she is the protected one.

Laney:  The bad girl gone good.  She drives around during the Purge night to bring injured people to a volunteer infirmary.  She loves Joe, who helped turn her around, and is loyal to him.  She kicks ass and has agency and is trying to help save her community.  She saves a lot of people during the purge, including Joe and Charlie.

While there are only two women in the film, at least they are prominent and I do believe they talk to each other about silly women things like surviving, so it passes the Bechdel test (2 women, talking to each other, not about a man).

I definitely dug this, even if it ups the anxiety a bit as it seems so close to happening!

Overview:  I love graphic novels, especially graphic novel memoirs.  I miss teaching that class back when I taught English to undergrads instead of the grads I have now – not that I won’t put it into the curriculum in the future.  All that to say, when I saw ‘El Deafo’ in the local independent bookstore, I immediately snatched it up.

El Deafo is the memoir of Cece Bell, a woman who lost her hearing when about 4 years old from what appears to be a meningeal infection.  This chronicles her first few years of limited hearing.  She’s not fully deaf, and uses a contraption strapped to her chest, with earbuds, and then a microphone she gives to her teachers to hear what’s being said.  She learns to lip read, but it’s all frustrating because the world isn’t made for those with limited hearing.  To help her adjust to her new identity, and synthesize what’s going on with her friends around her (like her best friend who becomes scared of hurting her) she invents El Deafo!  The superhero version of herself, and those comics of her internal identity are interwoven with the text about her interactions with the world around her.

The Good:  There is so much good here.  First, I loved that while the memoir is about her learning to adjust to the world around her when her hearing changes, it is, like every good memoir, about so much more.  It’s about forming friendships and finding that great friend to stand by your side.  That’s a pretty much universal theme.  There’s the changing of schools, and the fear there.  There’s also the greatest fear – telling people who you see yourself as internally, and how they will respond to that.  And the story is told with such honesty.

The graphics are bright and vivid and, in the great tradition of graphic novel memoirs, the people are represented by animals with Cece as a rabbit.

The book is a good mix of story and emotion, and shows the range of ways people respond to someone who is hard of hearing.  There’s the person who speaks loudly and slowly, even after Cece says that doesn’t help her.  There are those who want to sign to her, even though she tells them she doesn’t know sign language.  Then there are those who just don’t care that she’s different and think she’s cool hearing aids or no, but there’s still a fear to let them in.  This is portrayed really well.

I also really like the integration of the inner hero she’s creating, ‘El Deafo’, with the super power being her real power – if the teacher leaves the microphone on, she can hear her wherever she may be, even in the bathroom!  Those moments provide great levity and mirth.

The Bad:  Not much that I can think of.  I read it twice in a row because I wanted it to be longer and not end.  It won the Newberry Honor for children’s books, but I think it’s great for readers of all ages.

The Female:  This is where it’s great.  Cece is a young girl going through her life as it changes, not just because of her hearing but puberty and schools and moving and all the dramas of being young.  While she does crush on a neighbor boy, the books is not about him.  She has a sister, parents, friends who are all female.  More of the book is about her wanting her best friend/side kick and how friendships form with other girls than the boy, even if he is the first one she tells about her ‘secret superpower.’  I think it’s a great view of girlhood.

I definitely recommend this book, and now have it on my list of narratives to include in future classes.

Overview:  We start in Amytiville where are intrepid heroes, those ghost hunters sanctioned by the church, meet pure evil and, as Lorainne Warren says, it was the closest to hell she wanted to be.

Then we jump to England where a single mother has moved into a new home.  I think it’s government subsidized housing, and her daughter quickly becomes possessed. The children are screaming and being flung around and there’s a stuttering child who sees someone in his play tent and a hell of a lot of screaming.  Cue the Warrens, who come to help out despite Lorainne having a premonition that a demon greater than the one haunting this family wants Ed dead.  The rhyme is intentional.

They fight the demon, they doubt, they leave and then dramatically return.  It rains.  I wonder when Sam and Dean will come to end this quicker.

The Good:  Scares for sure.  The actors, too.  I love Vera Farmiga.  She’s just gorgeousness and has a presence on screen.  Very understated acting, gorgeous eyes which the director picks up on because there is a shot of just her eyes at one point.  Patrick Wilson is equally sweet and nice as her husband, Ed Warren, and sings an Elvis song making us all love him, and in case we don’t get that that’s the point of the scene we see Vera standing in a door way adoring him with those eyes of hers, and the camera flips back and forth enough so we feel it, too.

Now, back to scares.  There are special effects scares, a nun that’s evil scares, crosses that turn over scares, kids falling through rooms, levitating, speaking in growly voices scares as well.  I feel I could go all Dr. Seuss with the types of scares – but I’ll restrain myself.

There’s a bit of a story in here too about how the media sets up these events as real and can distort reality, also how people play for a camera.  There’s a slight bit about people thinking the mother of these kids is faking it to get a better house/apartment.  The main theme is that the Warren’s are awesome and stuff, though.

The Bad:  There’s a lot of screaming.  Like- a lot.  It got to the point where I felt it was music and screaming and I wasn’t sure what was going on.  This came to a head at the end when a son ,Johnny, had something happen to him, and I was wondering where a second son came from.  There was the stuttering son, the girl Janet who was the possessed one and her sister.  I swear, I don’t recall a fourth kid until the end when *bam* he appeared.

Which goes into a pacing issue I had.  I gauge movies now by how apt I am to do other things while they’re on and if I want to pause the film or just walk away.  I walked away a bit.  I brushed my teeth, got laundry together, played with the cat, came back and it was ‘yup, still haunted, yup, still screaming’ and didn’t feel I missed much amping of tension, intensifying beats, anything like that.  It’s a movie where there’s a ghost which turns out to be a demon and people come to get rid of it and there are issues and flooding and worry or what not and it’s over.  And have I mentioned the screaming?  Because there was a lot of that.  And a lot of not just leaving the damn house.  At least no animals died that I recall.

The Female:  There are women in this film!  Maybe more females than males, actually.  We have the mother and her two daughters, Lorainne Warren, a female cop, female neighbors.  It’s like, like, like this film recognizes that females ACTUALLY make up approximately 49.6% of the world’s population.  Oh, and the women talk to each other about things other than men.  And they have names!  It’s like, omg, novel and new and stuff only not because it’s what happens in that thing called life.  Oh yeah, and a demon nun.

Now, to talk about a few of the women in this here film:

Lorainne Warren:  The most prominent of the women, here played by Vera Farmiga.  She’s the psychic of the Warren duo who go out to hunt down ghosts, the one with ‘the gift.’  Yes, she loves her husband and that’s a focal point of some of her actions, but I loved a scene where her husband and another man were talking. . .about her!  omg, and positively, with Ed Warren saying if there’s a demon she can’t handle, it’s a first and reason to be scared.  He shows her as an authority!  As a human worth mentioning.  I mean, men talking about woman.  What do I do with the Bechdel on that one?  She’s the one who ultimately figures out how to get rid of the big baddie.

Peggy Hodgson:  She’s the mom.  She screams a lot.  She gets bit.  She stands up for her kids and is the single mother of three (and possibly four, still fuzzy on where that last boy came from) kids.  She has feelings and stuff, protects her kids but is frustrated while doing it, and is overall kinda human.

Janet Hodgson:  There’s definitely a thing in the film about little girls getting possessed, isn’t there?  The Exorcist is the prime example, but there’s also The Last Exorcism (I and II, hahaha with that name), Exorcism of Emily Rose, Poltergeist, etc.  There’s something cultural too it, I think, almost sexual – especially when the possessers are male ghosts. Like, the stripping of innocence and thrill of making prepubescent girls do ‘bad’ things and say ‘bad things’ and the like.  I think as a societal look on things it’s creepier than the actual movie portrayal.  They have her laugh, wreck a kitchen, talk about killing people, threaten others.  Thinking about it now, it is a weird fetishization linked to virginity and ‘purity’ of sexuality in little girls, it seems.  huh.

As I mentioned before, there are other females as well – neighbors and a cop and the like.  So that was cool.

Overall, not a bad ‘I’m too tired to move’ movie or, if you like the sound of screaming, background movie to catch snippets of.  Nothing earth shattering, but entertaining.

 

Overview:  There is a narration that tells us a bit about the first movie, and how Snow White killed Ravenna with the help of the Huntsman, then we go into backstory for the new film.  So, double backstory!

Ravenna and her sister, Freya, live in a castle together but Freya hasn’t come into her powers.  Ravenna thinks it’s because love is in the way, you can be powerful or you can be loved in this world.  She kills Freya’s child, blames it on someone else, and BAM, Freya is suddenly Elsa from Frozen.  She freezes everything and runs off to build her ice castle.  Once there, she starts stealing children to become her army (the awful narration says, “If she can’t have a child she’ll give birth to an army,” or something equally trite.)  They are called her Huntsman and taught ‘the greatest gift, to not love.’  There is one black child among the throngs of others because – diversity.  He is important, part of the triangle between loyalties.  Are you loyal to the queen or the lovers Eric (Hemsworth “The Huntsman” this movie is really about) and Sara (Merida from Brave, basically).

Stuff happens and the lovers are separated, then reunited years later while on a quest to find the magic mirror and destroy it so the Ice Queen doesn’t get it’s power.  They, of course, are mad at each other so there can be angry banter melting into sex.

There’s other stuff, too.  Ravenna comes back, Freya learns of her trickery, blah blah The Huntsman show’s how good he is, destroys the mirror, he gets everything a hero wins in these things.

The Good:  The reason why I watched this wasn’t the story.  I saw the first one and it was pretty damn bad, but it was pretty.  I like pretty, sometimes.  Some movies are made for plot or story and some for special effects, some to show things blowing up, etc.  This one had lush scenery and even more lush outfits for the two queens.  The special effects, in the beginning, were also beautiful.  A lot of ice stuff and the sound of crystallization that goes with it, a sound I find oddly soothing.  There was a lot of oozing cloth like stuff that was beautiful and first, then just became a vision of Nickelodeon Slime getting its own movie.  Seriously, they could have pulled back on that.

The music was also top notch.  I listened all the way through the credits.  In fact, half the time I was away from the screen (Getting bored) but loving the music as I cleaned or read or made my bed or many other things.

Oh, and Hemsworth (Chris) was his charismatic self here, winking and half grinning his way into all our hearts.

The Bad:  Pretty much everything else.  The story is . . .all over.  It starts by rehashing the first movie, then goes into the two queen’s fighting and the ice queen building her army, then to the Huntsman hunting the mirror, then the love story.  It reminded me of when I first taught my fiction students modular stories.  They loved it, and tried it, but there was no specific weight given to a story line to let us follow through – not in the early drafts.  This was a story in its early drafts.

The dialects- like, really?  I had no idea what was going with those.  If you’re going to have an international cast and a fairy tale setting, at this point just let them all speak naturally and blame it on ferries.  There wasn’t a rhyme or reason.

The oozing became so overdone.  I get it, women ooze.  How many times does that fetish/horror need to be played out on screen?  Poor Charlize Theron/Ravenna, her main power was to have her dress ooze some oily stuff that then became phallic.

The other bad thing is in the next section – everything female.

The Female:  There are a few women in here, who either get killed or paired off because in THIS world you either love a man or become a power crazed b– and die.  Simple mechanics.

And the film is a tease.  I remember the ads and stuff saying it’s about the sisters and it starts with them, but they’re just a frame for Hemsworth’s Huntsman and they’re pretty much not important except to set the quest in motion.  Tease tease tease.  Then they try to bring it back at the end with Freya finding out what her sister did but too late, man.  Way too late.  It’s not a story about sister’s, it’s a love story with Hemsworth at the Helm.

Freya:  She is the sister of Ravenna and longs for love.  She has love but then her baby is killed so she does what all women do when their children die- kidnaps everyone else’s and kills them if they so dare as love.  She’s pensive at parts, when she sees dwarves and realizes they are like children.  Poor Emily Blunt is trying to make this character more than an Elsa prototype, or Elsa fan fiction with no sex (if there’s such a thing).  Of course, since she still loves and yearns for a child she can help and redeem herself.  Go you, woman.

Ravenna:  She has some line about wanting to find love too, have a child, but- eh.  She’s in it to be the bad guy who gets the ball rolling but that’s about it.

Sara:  “Look women, we gave you a tough chick!  She goes toe to toe in combat with the others” – uh-huh, right.  Her role is to fall for Hemsworth, pretend to not love him until he grabs her and kisses her because women have wills only until they’re kissed then they’re owned, if not before.  So, there’s Sara.

The Dwarf Women:  There are two, they also pair up.  One also plays the ‘I don’t like you game’ with the guy, then goes for him.  The other’s are the simpleton’s, so they don’t have to pretend to hate each other and can just tell each other they like them and kiss and have babies.

The other thing here, every woman except for the dwarves has their waists cinched to within an inch of their lives.  Even the ‘strong warrior woman’ has to go around looking like she she has a waist that can snap in two with a strong breeze.  Breathing is for men, anyway.  No one wants to marry a woman with full lung capacity.

Overall – beautiful if not engaging and becoming tedious by the end and ultimately formulaic in story.  At least the chemistry between Chastain and Hemsworth was way better than when The Huntsman was supposed to fall for Snow White.

Overview:  I did not see Cloverfield.  I cannot medically see Cloverfield as shaky cam makes me nauseous beyond belief.  I found out that movie theaters refund your money thanks to Blair Witch Project and things have been limited since then, with even Where the Wild Things Are making me run into the hallway to hyperventilate in an effort to not vomit.

So I was happy that this movie was not the ‘found footage to create immediacy and detract from production values’ style like so many recent ones.  I was also happy that John Goodman was in it.  I love him.  He’s amazing in so much that he does.  He’s awesome and an actor who acts, who very quickly is no longer John Goodman but the character he’s portraying.

And thanks to Brain Dead (an awesome show everyone should be watching) I love Mary Elizabeth Winstead.  Two actors I like in a movie? Score.

The basic premise is that a woman, Michelle (played by Winstead) is in a car crash.  She wakes up chained to a wall in the basement of a man named Howard (John Goodman).  She tries to escape and he tells her the world has basically ended.  The air is contaminated and the end is nigh, she is in his bunker.  It turns out he has opened his doors to another survivor, a man named Emmett.  Is he telling the truth or is there something more sinister at play?

The Good:  The tension.  How it plays off the fear of a man kidnapping a woman because- how many movies are like that?  How many news stories?  It’s got shades of the Lovely Bones with the woman trapped in the basement, chained.  You never know if Howard is fully good or bad.

The pacing is actually good, as well.  The tension gets amped up as we go along.  As do the questions.  There are beats to keep the story from being stagnant.  You meet the other survivor.  Michelle attempts to escape and sees part of Howard’s story is true- an infected woman slams up against the window.  She begins to relax, we relax for a bit, then Michelle finds an SOS message scratched in blood into the surface facing window.  And it keeps ramping out.

And it doesn’t end there.  The escape montage, like so many movies, the finding out.  The final struggle.  The escape to learn – some truths can’t be escape.  This has you question a heck of a lot of what happened in that bunker.

The Bad:  There are questions that we’ll never get an answer to.  To some degree, I like that.  To others – I can’t help but wonder what happened to certain characters.  We don’t really learn much about the characters to see character growth.  Howard, we learn he gets creepier but as a character he is the same from beginning to end.  The other guy in the bunker is. . .the other guy in the bunker  I don’t quite remember his name.  He’s there as final motivation, to show us Howard’s temperament in black and white.  And at the end Michelle has to make a decision.  The clenched jaw tells us it’s a turning point for her, that she’s developed as a person, changed.  But it came across a bit over the top for me.

The Female:  This won’t pass the Bechdel test (two women, talking to each other, not about a man) because besides the woman who is infected and tries to get inside the bunker, Michelle is it.  She is the main character.  I do like that the tension is based on the fact that men. hurt. women.   A woman picked up by a man, in Disney it’s for saving, in the real world it’s for hurting and that is given room to breathe here.  Michelle is allowed to be her own woman in the film, make decisions, and figure the rules out.

Granted, part of the premise IS around the woman in peril and the ending can make some think differently of Howard and the motives.  I was thinking of Misery for a bit, because in that a man is kidnapped by a woman, and that’s part of the shock, that a man could do that to a woman.  It’s not really shocking in cinema for the opposite to happen.

Overall though, I enjoyed watching it and it kept my attention.  AND, I didn’t get motion sickness.

 

A while ago, Jacob Haddon of Apokrupha and I were chatting on Facebook, as we do, about the rhetoric around women in sci-fi and fantasy.  How few there are in the field, that there is a backlash when women speak out, and the Hugos.  The talk turned somehow to Godzilla (as it can) and a rant, probably from me, how even big monster narratives were being taken away from those who created them, in this case Godzilla being created as a response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and turned into another vehicle to show how amazing white males are.  I likened Jurassic Park to a continuation of the motif.

Then I asked, “If a woman’s place is in the kitchen, what happens when the kitchen attacks?” and the joke suddenly began to form into a reality.  What if women DID own the apocalypse?  What if we took those marginalized by society, the cat lady, the female engineer, the fat woman, and showed how they can kick ass just as much as everyone else?  What if we didn’t flip the script as much as just show how strong women can be and how they can fight off big monsters just like the boys can and not just be the prize at the end of the battle?

Thus was born Kaiju Revisited, a series of big monster novellas wherein women kick ass.  There is an awesome line-up of female authors on board, which thoroughly excites me.

As does my novella, my first non-short story, kicking off the series.  Wherein the kitchen DOES attack and the female engineering student, and her cat, go out to save the world.

Marta Martinez Saves The World was a lot of fun for me to write.  I just let myself loose, let my influences shine, and let Marta Martinez, a marginalized female engineering student, take center stage.  I hope the fun shines through and you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.  And I hope you read the rest of the issues, and clamor for more so we can keep it going.  Because the big monster sandbox is big enough for all of us, and baby it’s time to start playin’.

Synopsis:  After a failed diplomatic attempt by Capt. Kirk that looked straight out of MIB, the Enterprise takes on a mission past the nebula to rescue a ship.  Once they get through the nebula they are attacked viciously be a swarm of ships that move like bees and the Enterprise is destroyed, landing on a nearby planet, and the crew taken hostage.

Because this is an action movie, and a male one at that, Kirk finds a motorcycle on this abandoned planet.  Scottie finds a female engineer who has fixed up a former federation ship, the USS Franklin, and together, motorcycle and engineer girl (who can kick ass) save the crew, find the bigger plot that the big baddie named Krall wants to do, and save the federation.

There’s also a bit of stuff about both Kirk and Spock getting offered jobs off Enterprise.  Nods to the original spock, Leonard Nimoy dying and this causing a crisis for current world spock as the last Vulcan, and a dedication to Anton Yelchin.

The Good:  Action!  Humour!  It’s funny, with self-referential jokes that had some people laughing way harder than I was.  For instance, Kirk says that his life feels episodic, and Star Trek was episodic TV and these movies are episodic, get it?  That opening scene when Kirk tries to be an ambassador to little puppy aliens and fails is funny!  He’s attacked by puppy aliens, and one gets named and stays on the ship.  Did I mention the action?  Things get blown up, a lot.  There’s hand to hand combat.  Aliens.  The main bad guy, Krall, wants to destroy the federation and all the aliens speak English, which is awesome.  Because in the future all aliens speak English all the time.  It just makes things easier.

The cast, as always, is having fun.  Especially Karl Urban as Bones, Chris Pine as Kirk, Simon Pegg as Scottie, and Zachary Quinto as Spock.  Those far are digging it and it shows and it makes them fun to watch.

The Bad:  This film doesn’t think it has enough to stand on its own yet.  As a franchise reboot, the film is trying to tell us that it’s good, which makes it – eh.  They talk of Spock and show a picture of the original Star Trek crew.  There are a lot of callbacks to legitimize themselves, and not only wasn’t needed it didn’t let the cast get out of the shadow and fully into their own groove.

The camera work was one twirl away from shaky cam.  While I didn’t vomit and leave the theater as happens with full on shaky, I found myself getting dizzy.  Half the time I wondered if they thought this was the interactive write at Universal Studios that was being filmed instead of a movie.  Really, it turned a LOT and made it hard to see the action.

They had Idris Elba in the cast and squandered him.  I can go all objectify-y and say when you have someone that fine keep him out of make-up, or I can say that when you have an actor that awesome why just make him grunt his lines out and so one note?  There was no room for range in the character, and Elba got the range.  I’m sure for him it’s a great paycheck, for this gal it was a waste of an awesome actor.

The story was basic- it was a draft story, not a fully fledged one.  “Let’s – have them crash on a planet.  Yeah, yeah, do that.  Maybe have Spock and Uhura fight. yeah, yeah, that.  And then she’s captured, and he finds her, but we have her save him because – twist, she’s the girl, right?  yeah – that.  okay, then let’s make the bad guy- I Know!  a twist at the end about who he is.  Let’s Shyamalan this motherf*cker of a film.”

And that’s how it was made.   Ideas thrown and what stuck to the wall stuck.  There was the potential for great commentary on the creation of the federation and implications of its creation in the future.  For talk about the price of peace and what happens to those indoctrinated to war for peace when there are no more wars.  But that went to the wayside for explosions and. . .more explosions.

The Female:  This film really made me realize that modern media just cannot have women talk to one another.  Each group had a woman in it, among many many men, but no group had more than one who could speak.

Uhura:  Of the Enterprise group she’s the female.  A love interest to Spock.  A communications expert who wasn’t needed because everyone spoke English.  She’s captured, Spock is motivated to save her, she finds him first, they kiss at the end.

Jaylah:  Some white alien with white hair (long and flowy, because we have to find her attractive) and black markings on her face who speaks English but with an accent.  She’s of the crashed team along with Scotty and Kirk.  She is the Deux ex femina leading them to the deux ex machina- the USS Franklin they can fix to free everyone.  Her  parents are dead, she’s alone, she knows how to fight and is good with electronics.

Commodore Paris:  She’s of the Space Station team. She speaks mainly with Kirk and doesn’t exist elsewhere.

And never the woman shall meet.

Overall:  It was like a good episode of the old show.  A dizzying popcorn flick of motorcycles and man rescues and tons of jokes between friends that we all get because, having grown up on Star Trek, they’re our friends, too.