A Million Years DC

Most of this was written bloody ages ago. I’ve just been lazy.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you might have noticed that Marvel it absolutely killing it in the movie business. The only competition DC has managed was Nolan’s Batman trilogy, which was mostly fantastic and Man of Steel, which was mostly…something.

DC obviously want to compete, Avengers vs Justice League. They’ve fixed Batman, Superman is generally successful despite a basically equal proportion of bad films to good, so who else do they need? Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern (let’s hope for a reboot, sorry Ryan Reynolds but you did your best), maybe Martian Manhunter, maybe a few others. What have they decided to do instead? Fucking Batman again. It’s infuriating. Before you think I’m just going to complain about Ben Affleck, I’m not. I don’t think he’s the right choice for the part but hey, I thought a Green Lantern film starring Ryan Reynolds would be a good thing, so I’m obviously no better at this than they are.

I think Batman vs Superman or whatever they end up calling it will be pretty good, but I think it’s the wrong direction to take things and a poor choice for a vehicle to set up the Justice League.

Firstly, they just had a fantastic Batman trilogy but instead of using all the build up they’re ignoring it entirely in favour of a new Batman mythos (at least we’re not getting another origin story) and for what? A grizzled Batman? They already did that in The Dark Knight Returns!

Most frustratingly, Nolan et al. just spent years making that trilogy, proving that batman wasn't simply a man, he was a symbol. That it didn't matter who was under the cowl, all that mattered was that there was someone standing up against crime and corruption. Someone standing up for the little guy. Someone holding morality above all else, unwilling to even kill a mass murderer for fear it would make him a monster.

Apparently we’re just throwing that out the window now. Fuck that.

Here's what I would do:
I decided this before the news of Batman vs Superman happened but my ideas work regardless. When Batman shows up, it's Joseph Gordon Levitt. That's already been set up, it doesn't need explaining (we don't need another origin story so soon), and he's been Batmanning around Gotham for a few years now, he's into the swing of things and now he's got to deal with/inevitably end up helping Superman. That film plays out however.*

*Hollywood has now decided Wonder Woman is going to be in this film too. So, that’s a new Batman to set up, a Superman we barely know, who’s new to the game and a Wonder Woman we’ve never met and most fans will hardly recognise. Busy film.

Then we have the other new DC films - The Flash (please make it awesome)
- Wonder Woman (please cast Gina Carano or another woman who actually looks like she can throw a punch while not being a fucking terrible actress and for the love of Fillion don't make it a misogynistic pile of shit Hollywood)
- Maybe a new green lantern that doesn't completely blow

And all this flows into the justice league film. We have Superman, we already know Batman's deal and now we have the others for a fairly well rounded team. Maybe throw Martian Manhunter in to get the team formed, maybe leave him out, I don't care. The new JL fights some bad guy (Darkseid if they're scared they won't be as successful as avengers, someone else if they're confident and can use him later) and in the course of their battle Batman dies. Yeah that's right, Joseph Gordon Levitt (sorry dude I love you but it's for the story!) gets wiped out. Maybe he nobly sacrifices himself, maybe he just dies because, hey, he's a decent Batman but he ain't no Bruce Wayne (ew, but I could see it) or he tangles with someone more powerful and just gets squished. He's only human after all.

This opens the door for all sorts of other stuff, while simultaneously showing DC making a ballsy move, killing off established characters right off the bat (haha, get it?), unlike marvel who will only kill ancillary characters and probably Iron Man in Avengers 2/3. Plus people dying makes the story better. That sounds childish and morbid but you know what I mean, right? Knowing the good guys will win and survive every time is tedious as fuck.

So, Justice League wins but Batman is dead.

Cue phase 2. New films;
- Green Lantern 2 (or 3 now?)
-Flash 2 (maybe introduce some weirder concepts like the speed force or time travel?)
- Wonder Woman 2 (introduce the Thanagarians?)

Then, instead of building into a new Justice League film, have a new Superman film. Doomsday. Superman dies. Fuck yeah.
 The JL turns up at right at the end to help, gets bitchslapped, Doomsday and Supes beat eachother to death in full view of the world. In the credits sequence we hear/see a conversation.
"A world without Superman is a world without hope."
"There are other heroes out there."
"None quite like him though. He wasn't just one man. He was a symbol."
"Any man can be a symbol."

Holyshitwhatthefuck it's the goddam Batman. Bruce Wayne. Christian Bale.

Cue an old looking Christian Bale in a new film -
The Dark Knight Returns.
Fuck yes.
New bad guy
Bruce is too old to fight, needs proper power armour, or fuck, maybe a Green Lantern ring or some shit? Yes?

Gets advice from old enemies. Perhaps a night time visit to Arkham asylum. Perhaps talks to a man in shadow. A man who's voice and mannerisms are unmistakeable. Sure Heath Ledger is dead but there must be some decent voice actors out there, plus with computers you could make it sound even more like him. Would be insane.

New bad guy could even be comic book Bane. Huge dude, super smart, takes venom, wears a silly mask. Any questions? "Oh yeah I named myself Bane after that other guy years ago." Boom, job done, continuity held, everybodies happy, movie goers and super nerds alike.

Bruce Wayne wins but only because his Son shows up! Dun dun dun! Eh, maybe. Maybe he gets a Robin to help him? Maybe not.

Throw Teen Titans in at this point perhaps?

Cue Justice League 2. Damian Wayne as Batman, whatever Green Lantern you fancy, a Flash, Wonder Woman, Hawkgirl, Martian Manhunter. They have to deal with a bunch of superman lookalikes. Shit gets real, Superman comes back. Holy fuckballs.

Next film:
Batman Beyond. Damian Wayne is a dick, gets bored of being Batman. Old man Bale recruits a young whippersnapper to be new high-tech Batman.

More films? Yeah if they're successful, why not?

Other ideas:

Let Nathan Fillion be Green Lantern… please, just for me? And everyone else with a brain and a heart. He could do it for one film, and then die, and you could have Jon Stewart as the new GL and hire a black guy. Don Cheadle’s taken but how about J. August Richards? Piss off Marvel and Joss Whedon all at once. Plus then they’ll upstage Marvel and have the first big Hollywood black Superhero. If they don’t hurry up Marvel are going to get a black human torch and Black Panther first.

Gal Godot might be a good Wonder Woman, despite being skinny. A muscular physique shouldn’t matter too much when you’re magic or a God but look at all the dudes. It’s a bit silly, really.

I still don’t think Ben Affleck is the right choice, but it could have been worse. Nicholas Cage anyone?

Why Star Trek Into Darkness is a good film but a disappointing sequel

I have been a fan of Star Trek for as long as I can remember. If you aren't, go and watch some of the really good episodes and then come back. There are numerous lists online of the highly recommended episodes, The Inner Light, Best of Both Worlds, etc. The sheer wealth of Star Trek related paraphernalia out there means it can be difficult to get into but when it's good it's really really good. It works the other way though, don't watch the Voyager episode Threshold, just don't.

So in 2009 when the big reboot came out I was sceptical but obviously I was going to see it. Generally, it was well received. Which is kind of a big deal for both reboots and Star Trek, since most of the newest Trek (Voyager, Enterprise, Nemesis) has been it's least popular fare and reboots in general, while monetarily succesful are signs of Hollywood's increasing lack of creativity. I've read people claiming that reboots aren't anything new and everything popular has been recreated a thousand times over now but frankly that argument is bollocks. There's nothing inherently wrong with reboots but there has been a noticeable lack of orginial stories making money at the box office lately and I think that is a problem.

The 2009 Star Trek reboot was fantastic for one (I feel) very important reason; it wasn't a traditional reboot. Instead of using the same settings and characters and telling a slightly different story, such as the recent Marvel films, the Dark Knight trilogy, etc, the Star Trek team used the mythos that was already there to create a new story. Time travel already existed in Star Trek, having been used repeatedly throughout many of the series and films. They used it to start over with a new, slightly altered timeline, thus capturing new fans whilst placating old ones. It was genius and it was fucking awesome. Yes there were problems, serious fans will mention the scale of the Enterprise and anyone with eyes will notice the godawful lens flare (so, they're in a cave in this scene, where the only source of light is dim and obscured, huh... why don't... why don't you throw some lens flare on the camera there...) and the Apple store Enterprise bridge but it was a pretty decent film and more importanty a pretty good Star Trek film. Any angry Star Trek fans that disagree are more than welcome to watch the last season of Voyager, the first two seasons of Enterprise and then Nemesis and tell me Star Trek 2009 isn't good.

Since I felt this way about the first film, I sat down to watch the second knowing it was going to be decent. I didn't need it to be great, just good, that way we'd have more Star Trek to look forward too in the future. And you know what, it was good. My incredibly non-trekkie girlfriend enjoyed it, which means lots of people will probably pay money to see it and we'll get a threequel or a new series but either way more Trek, excellent stuff.

Except it was bullshit.

SPOILERS for lots of Star Trek coming up, not just the new film, but plenty of old stuff too.

After paving the way for a really interesting new take on the Star Trek mythos, do you know what they did? They just fucking rehashed Wrath of Khan. The most popular and well known Star Trek storyline. I'm still slighly in awe of how momumentally pathetic that is. Seriously, Abrams? That's what you did? That's the decision you made? You could have taken it ANYWHERE, and you took it to the most obvious place imaginable, and not only that, you did a worse job than they did the first time around. Fuck.

There was a lot of speculation before the film came out about who exactly Benedict Cumberbatch would be playing, and it was clearly either going to be Khan (nah, they wouldn't do that would they?) or Gary Mitchell, two already known Trek baddies. Except his character was listed as John Harrison, so who the fuck was that? Well, the Internet speculation about him being a new version of Mitchell, a compatriot of Khan's rather than the man himself or, hey, an entirely new entity all on his own was infinitely more interesting than the reality. He's Khan Noonien Singh. Sound like a white, English guy to you? Fucking Hollywood.

If you don't know (why would you be reading this?) Khan is a genetically engineered superhuman created to fight alongside other genetically engineered superhumans who decided that since they were clearly superior beings they weren't going to take orders and started fucking shit up instead. That immediately sounds like a better film than Into Darkness. This happened long before starfleet became a thing and they were stopped, frozen and fired into space aboard a crappy tinpot ship left to drift for centuries. Until the original Enterprise finds them, thaws Khan, gets their shit fucked up by him and they defeat him (TOS: Space Seed) only for him to turn up again later on and do the same thing all over again on a larger scale (Wrath of Khan).

It was awesome. The first time. So here we are doing it all over again, except with more lens flare and a sillier plot. This time, starfleet's secret police 'Section 31' find Khan's ship, thaw him and force him to work in secret to design cool new weapons (why a 300 year old man can design better weapons than current generation scientists and engineers is obviously never addressed. Yes he's super smart, but aren't all of star fleet's best and brightest super smart anyway? Kirk's an arrogant thug but they still call him a genius. Doesn't Khan have 300 years of scientific advancement to catch up on? It would be like bringing Sir Isaac Newton to the present and asking him to design a more fuel efficient car. I don't think it's a very good idea) because Admiral Robocop believes war with the Klingons is inevitable. Now, he says that it's inevitable because the Klingons are a relentlessly aggressive species but the entire plot of the film rests on him forcing the first real confrontation (and being willing to execute hundreds of innocent crewmembers as well as lose star fleet's flagship) and igniting the conflict. Why he wants to do this is, again, never addressed. He's angry (probably due to the upcoming Robocop reboot, I feel his pain) and he's an Admiral and he just really wants to blow up the Klingons. I know it seems petty, but they couldn't have added one line where someone mentions his son being killed by a Klingon or some silly shit like that? Any reason at all, could have just been one throwaway line.... but no, he just wants to fight a war for some reason.

So he's using Khan, Khan doesn't like it, decides to start fucking shit up (apparently starfleet is somewhat ignorant of history because they didn't see this coming) and thus we have the film. I sat there trying to guess at where it was going, hoping each new scene would bring an unexpected twist, but it never happened, they just got closer and closer to the plot of Wrath of Khan. When they turned up on Kronos I thought maybe he was going to be some sort of Klingon spy, genetically engineered to appear human (that would have been cool, huh?). Nope. Didn't happen, in fact, it's unclear how or why Khan even decides to travel to Kronos in the first place. Is he continuing the Admiral's plot to ignite a war between the Federation and the Klingons? Even when he believes that Admiral has betrayed him? Was that all a lie, and instead he's working with the Admiral right up to the part where he decides to kill him instead for some reason? It's weird, I'm not sure it really makes sense, but whatever, that isn't even the part that annoys me the most.

After the Klingon business and a bit of space stuff the plot basically aligns with Wrath of Khan, two busted ships attempting to fight, doesn't work out, explosions, broken warp core, sacrifice (oh, it's slightly different this time!), KHAAAAAAAN!. Then  they change it up a little, which was fairly interesting in that because Kirk obviously couldn't compete physically with Khan and they needed a big fight scene what were they going to do? Send the super strong Vulcan. It was a decent fight, up until Uhura showed up. Couple of things here - Hollywood is bad at feminism, occasionally they notice and shoehorn in a woman doing something helpful because she's only been sitting there looking pretty for ninety minutes and it comes off ok, occasssionally it comes off badly. This was badly. Additionally, they fucked up their own shoehorning. Uhura goes to help Spock. Someone needs too, sure, but rather than send someone with combat ability (Sulu is RIGHT THERE) or another species with more stength than a human or, fuck, a few security officers (it's what they're for) they send the xenolinguistic expert since she and Spock are fucking, which is always a helpful attachment in a life or death fight scene. She turns up, stuns Khan a few times since they need him alive now, but he shakes it off. Then Spock rips some metal from the ship they're fighting on and hits Khan in the face with it and proceeds to pummel the crap out of him. So, woman shoehorned in but she still can't win the fight until the man helps her with his superior strength. I mean, fuck, Hollywood, really? What utter dickhead wrote that scene? Whatever.

The whole fight scene annoys me even more since the whole reason the original Trek was covered in shitty hand to hand combat was because (and correct me if I'm wrong here) they didn't have the technology or the budget for realistic space combat. I'm ignoring the fact that starfleet are supposed to be about diplomacy and focusing on the other half of the episodes that had sweaty Shatner fight people. As the budget grew and special effects started nailing space scenes we had more and more cool looking space combat instead of sweaty dudes. Look at TOS versus Deep Space Nine. There's still the fighting, sure, because by now it's become part of Trek, people expect that double handed axe chop but with half the new films being CGI, they couldn't have given us an epic space battle? Sure, it would have made it even more like Wrath of Khan but they already did that so it obviously wasn't a problem. How cool would it have been to watch the Enterprise have to systematically take down the prototype USS Vengeance, knowing they needed Khan alive, outgunned, and having to use their space combat starfleet know how to disable the larger, more powerful ship? They'd have to use every trick in the book to hit the Vengeance in just the right places to disable it's weapons and engines while maintaining life support and hull integrity. That sounds fucking cool. That sounds like it's exactly what starfleet is about, preserving life, doing good, even as it costs them. Instead, we have unhelpful helpful woman and some pummelling.

Oh, and just for really good fucked up Trek stuff measure, the ending turns it into a fucking reset button episode. Reset buttons are a huge trope in television - a bunch of stuff happens in your favourite tv show but by the end of the episode it's all been fixed to the point where it may as well not have happened. It's not always a bad thing, often in episodic television it's a necessary evil otherwise you couldn't watch your favourite characters for ten years since they'd all have died or been mutilated fifty thousand times over. But it can be lamentable when something seemingly important happens in a fictional world. Star Trek, being comprised of several television shows and films over the course of the last fourty seven years has a metric shit ton of reset button episodes. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. Many of them are annoying. Making an entire film into a reset button episode is really shitty. At the beginning of Into Darkness, the crew are hoping to be given a five year mission to explore deep space, at the end of the film, despite Kirk being demoted, dying and being resurrected, despite Scotty resiging his post, despite Spock being reassigned, despite Chekov being promoted, despite most of Starfleet's top brass being wiped out, despite San Francisco being driven into by a massive starship, despite insane Admiral Robocop manipulating secret starfleet operations to start his own personal war, despite relations with the Klingons presumaby being at an all time low after dicking around in their system, nothing has changed, nobody seems to have learnt anything and they are off on their five year exploratory mission.

For fuck sake Abrams.