Early trailers did nothing to allay my concern. I felt a bit better once I saw the clip of Henry Cavill and Amy Adams discussing Superman’s S-logo as a symbol of hope, but then the reviews came out and seemed to be confirming my fears of a dark and dour Kryptonian.

I recently got into an argument on Facebook by writing “If (Superman’s) brooding, you’re doing it wrong.” It was an intentionally flip, reductionist statement, but it got at the point I’ve been trying to make for years, that Superman is an intrinsically optimistic character.

The modern view of fellow crimefighter Batman is that of a grim vigilante inspired by his earliest, pulp avenger adventures and conveniently ignoring the three decades he spent trading quips with Robin and punching aliens. It works because Bats was conceived as a figure of menace who operates at night.

Superman, by contrast, flies overhead in plain view. He wears bright, primary colors. He”s powered by the sun, for Rao’s sake. Possessing the ability to do virtually anything, he chooses to do the right thing.

That’s what I was afraid of losing once I began to see photos of Henry Cavill in the muted colors of the Kryptonian full-body condom he sports for Man of Steel.

So, now that I’ve seen the movie, what do I think?

Let’s be clear, Man of Steel is not the Superman movie that I wanted. However, on the whole I quite liked it. It preserves what I value about Superman…with a couple of major caveats that I’ll get to shortly.

The movie establishes Kal-El/Clark Kent as an outsider among humans, but Cavill’s portrayal was much less emo than that of Tom Welling over on Smallville. His Superman displays the right instincts, and I sensed that he could play the lighter character of the early Richard Donner films if desired.

The script is well-constructed, and carries through its theme of nature-vs.-nurture. Tellingly, Superman has two complimentary fathers in his life, whereas his counterpart General Zod has none.

Zod himself is a more complex character here. He’s by no means a sympathetic figure, but by the end you do understand that his motivations run deeper than wanting people to kneel before him.

My primary criticism of the film–at least in its IMAX version–is that it’s an assault on the senses. It’s achingly loud. Every punch is another jolt to the inner ear. It literally took hours for my hearing to fully return to normal.

It’s also very, very violent and destructive. When brawling Faora and Nam-Ek in downtown Smallville, Superman tells people to take shelter, but what good is duck-and-cover when airplanes are crashing in fiery explosions on Main Street?

In Superman II, the villainous Kryptonian Non–the counterpart of Man of Steel‘s Nam-Ek–was punched through a building, trailing a vaguely Non-shaped wake of destruction but leaving the skyscraper more or less intact. In the new film, buildings tumble into plumes of debris. And while I wasn’t quite as bothered by the imagery as was Bully over on Comics Oughta Be Fun, there’s no doubt that thousands of people were NOT saved by Superman. I do wonder just how much humanity could ever truly trust him–despite his many good deeds–in the aftermath of 9/11 a dozen times over.

And there is one moment which is so completely at odds with the traditional character of Superman that it must be discussed. This is huge spoiler territory, so stop now if you don’t want to know how the movie ends.

Superman KILLS Zod. He snaps the villain’s neck.

It’s an entirely justifiable action, and clearly it is meant to be a moment of failure and anguish.

As Bully suggests, the script doesn’t give Superman the chance to do otherwise. Having already exhausted the plot device that exiled the other super-criminals to the Phantom Zone, Kal is left to fight alone against a Zod who–devoid of any future purpose in life–states his intention to murder every last human. With no strength-sapping Kryptonite or convenient “molecule chambers” around, there’s no way out. Zod has to die.

Again, it’s not presented as a punch-the-air moment, but rather one that is emotionally wrecking for Superman. Unfortunately, the movie is pretty much over at this point, so there’s no room for reflection, no suggestion that this is the beginning of his long-standing moral code against killing.

Now, none of this is truly an indictment of Man of Steel. I thought that it was a well-written, well-acted movie. I could see “my” Superman within it, and I hope that next time they let him come out and play.

(excerpted from Imperial Navy Employee Handbook #DS-ST-1138)

Welcome to your new post! As a Superlaser Technician, you will enjoy a long exciting career!

Answers to Frequently Asked Questions

Why is my work station located within the firing chamber of the superlaser?

Ha! You are hardly the first one to ask that question!

How can I put in a requisition for a chair? Or a railing?

File form #DV-0525-TERM with the Quartermaster. Your request will be forwarded onto Lord Vader for his review.

I’ve heard a rumor that prolonged exposure to such a massive anti-proton beam offers health risks.

Those rumors are being fiercely addressed by our Personnel Office. Rest assured, prolonged exposure has been proven a non-issue by previous holders of your post.

Where is the escape pod located?

Evacuate? In our moment of triumph?

Not only is there an excellent likeness of Christopher Lee beneath Saruman’s hairpieces, but take a closer look at what’s inside the Palantir: a minifig head printed with the Eye of Sauron. That turned it from a “want” into a “must have right now.”

Eventually I can see the Eye doing double-duty in a microscale version of the tower of Barad-dûr, but first I had to get these out of my system…

“Go, Mordor!”

Santa’s sack has a ring in it just for you!

“Sid? Sid? Ever since you touched that radioactive goo, you haven’t been yourself!”

Sure, you thought clowns were scary before…

“Disco Sauron just wants to boogie!”

Dear Diary: Vacation was frustrating. Bought a pretzel, but had no mouth.

Aunt Clara though Sauron was perpetually four years old, and also a girl.

Watercooler conversations were uncomfortable after the new intern arrived.

It was the Sixties. Everyone was experimenting.

He once mimed “grinding all of Middle Earth beneath his booted heel,” but no one really got it.

Hmm. Too “on the nose,” perhaps?

Goodnight eye
Goodnight orc
Goodnight Nazgul by and by

And I’m going to need to see it a second time to be sure how I feel about it.

There’s certainly a lot to like. The old/new cast are back, full of youthful exuberance and familial banter. From the start, they’re the fully-integrated ensemble that the original TV actors only intermittently became.

Chris Pine’s Kirk may be the center of the action, but Zachary Quinto’s Spock effortlessly carries the film’s emotional weight. The core of the ’60s series was a triumvirate with Kirk at its head, flanked by rational Spock and emotional McCoy, but I’d argue that the nuTrek dynamic places Spock in the middle, with Kirk and Zoe Saldana’s Uhura each appealing to different aspects of his human half. The affection between the three fuels Into Darkness even more than its over-complicated, conspiratorial storyline.

There are big laughs and spectacle aplenty. It looks and sounds fantastic. For the first two-thirds, it’s as good a Trek as we’ve ever seen on the big screen.

It’s the final third that left me pondering the whole, and I’m afraid that the rest of this review crosses the Neutral Zone into massive spoiler territory. So, if you don’t want to know more, go no further than the U.S.S. Enterprise spiraling out of control…

For the past couple of years, IDW has published a comic book of the continuing voyages of the nuTrek crew. Early issues were fairly straightforward retellings of ’60s episodes, with minor divergences demonstrating the rippling of the timeline caused by the arrival of future villain Nero in the 2009 film.* As the comics have progressed, the changes have become more pronounced and the stories, while still obviously inspired by specific incidents from the TV series, play out very, very differently.

And that’s what happens in Into Darkness. Except when it doesn’t.

The first rumors about the secretive sequel’s plot involved Khan, the genetically-modified ubermensch played memorably by Ricardo Montalban in the 1967 installment “Space Seed” and the 1982 film The Wrath of Khan. I immediately thought, “Oh, God, no.” Retelling past stories is fine in a monthly comic book, less so in a film franchise with chapters four years apart. Furthermore, both the 2009 movie and its predecessor, Star Trek: Nemesis, already seemed like bald attempts to replicate Khan’s revenge-driven villainy.

There was a final consideration: The Wrath of Khan is largely seen as both the dramatic and emotional high point of  the Trek films. A remake was unlikely to live up to it.

Despite attempts at misdirection and ever-wilder theories about other returning foes,** it turned out to absolutely no one’s surprise that yes, Benedict Cumberbatch’s “John Harrison” is really Khan.

And for a while it works. As with recent issues of the comic book, the storyline is more “inspired by” than “remake.” This Khan has a new backstory and motivation. I was starting to believe that they might almost do the unthinkable and make him Kirk’s stalwart ally against a common foe.

But once Khan does a heel turn and seizes control of a powerful Federation starship, we’re back to Wrath of Khan 2.0. Even some of the dialogue is cribbed from the previous film. The difference here is that it’s Kirk who performs the act of sacrifice to save the Enterprise from destruction, with Spock left to mourn outside a radiation-proof door.

Reversing the roles is sort of clever, but it’s not enough to save the scene from feeling like a lesser imitation. We know that Kirk’s not going to die, and not just because he has script immunity. We were shown the solution–the regenerative power of Khan’s blood–in the first act. The stakes just aren’t there.

Fortunately–aside from an ill-considered shout of “Khaaaaaaaaannnn!”–the rest of the movie plays out differently, with Spock and Uhura tag-teaming the villain in an exciting climax set in future San Francisco.

Perhaps now that the production team have gotten out their remake ya-yas, the next time we’ll finally go where no Star Trek film has gone before.

*While both the films and comics suggest that the timelines of old and new Trek began to diverge when Nero killed Kirk’s father, I’d argue that Nero arrived in an already-altered reality. The changes in costumes, technology and even species (the reptilian Gorn in the canonical Star Trek video game appear nothing like their classic counterparts) strike me as more than reasonably can be pinned on the “butterfly effect” created by the destruction of the U.S.S. Kelvin. (On the other hand, the inclusion of models of the Phoenix from First Contact and Jonathan Archer’s Enterprise suggest that much of this new timeline’s history played out as before.)

**The goofiest was the fan theory that John Harrison was one of the androids seen in 1967′s “I, Mudd.” I can see where they got the idea, as con man Harry Mudd’s daughter showed up in the comic book prequel; it’s her commandeered ship that Kirk pilots on the Klingon homeworld in Into Darkness. The theory was that the android’s pseudonym was a bastardization of “Harry’s son.” Urg.

…

I can recall one time–I’m guessing that it was sometime around 1978–sitting down with a big sheet of paper on a kitchen table and meticulously drawing a mural that included at least one monster from every one of Harryhausen’s films. I thought that it was pretty good at the time. I wish that I still had it.

Growing up a fan of monster and sci-fi flicks, Harryhausen loomed large. It wasn’t just because of his talent or because of the near monopoly of his chosen profession he enjoyed throughout the ’50s and ’60s. He made quality fantasy films, and he made a lot of them. After apprenticing on 1949′s Mighty Joe Young, he worked on fourteen more, from 1953′s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms to Clash of the Titans in 1981. Twelve of them were with producer Charles H. Schneer, whose own contributions should not be underestimated. If there was a science-fiction or fantasy spectacle made during the middle of the 20th Century, odds are it either came from producer George Pal–who also started out as a stop-motion animator–or from the team of Harryhausen and Schneer.

Harryhausen wasn’t just the special effects guy for hire, he was the one dreaming up the action set-pieces around which those stories were built. Admittedly, the scenarios tended to be episodic, with dramatic scenes existing mostly to fill the time between monsters. But what monsters! The seven-headed hydra, the cyclopean centaur, the tragic Venusian Ymir, and the vicious dinosaur Gwangi were only a fraction of his large and varied menagerie.

Ray retired after Clash of the Titans, and never returned to filmmaking. I’m sure that he could tell that the days of the lone animator meticulously animating puppets by hand over a period of months would be ending, due in no small part to the incoming generation of people that he had inspired.

These days, there are vast hordes of anonymous effects artists filling out the endless credit rolls of our modern blockbusters. And this is not a knock on them, but none of them can ever be Ray Harryhausen. For a time, he wasn’t just one of a few, he was one of a kind.

I came away from it with a much greater appreciation for D&D co-creator E. Gary Gygax, who–if not the sole progenitor of the role-playing game–was clearly the chief architect of the classic dungeon crawl. But what impressed me most about this account of Gygax was his work in classifying and codifying the monsters of our shared mythology.

Allow me to backtrack a bit. I’d been doing some research into creatures of legend in an effort to create a bestiary for the Dungeon World RPG. My first step was to consult my treasured copy of Mythical Monsters. Published in 1973 by Scholastic Books, I bought this cartoon guidebook in grade school and have kept it to this day.*

It drew heavily on Jorge Luis Borges’ 1957 work Book of Imaginary Beings, so I sought out that volume as well. From it, I learned two important things:

• Many mythological creatures took no definitive form. Accounts of their appearance and attributes varied wildly depending on who was telling the tale.**
• Pliny the Elder would believe pretty much anything. You could walk up to him and claim that a hippopotamus breathed poisonous gas and foraged for pearls at the ocean’s bottom, and he’d write it up for his Natural History, no questions asked.

“No! Really! You say that one look into its eyes would kill you stone dead? Yet you’re still alive and telling me this? Why, I believe every word of it!”

Returning now to E. Gary Gygax, it’s well-known that he drew on many sources in developing his extensive list of dungeon denizens: Tolkien, Conan the Barbarian, Ray Harryhausen films, comic books and dime store toys. But as Playing at the World describes, Gygax went one step further than Borges: he pinned down these mutable myths. He distinguished the cockatrice from the basilisk, the gorgon from the medusa, the goblin from the kobold. Much of what we think we know about the catoplebas, the peryton and the manticore came by way of the Monster Manual.

As a fan of all things dark and dangerous, I tip my flagon of ale to you, Gary, for your role in preserving and cataloging our heritage of horrors.

*Unfortunately, in scanning the artwork for this article, I broke the binding of my beloved 40-year-old paperback. You may now feel sorry for me.

**Reading the wild descriptions of beings widely agreed upon as purely fanciful, I was struck by how similar they were to those found in the core beliefs of accepted, mainstream religion. Which of these is the myth?

• “(It) was larger than a mountain. Its eyes shot forth flames and its mouth was so enormous that nine thousand men would fit inside..the beast had three gullets; all vomited forth inextinguishable fire.”
• “(I) saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns…the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion…”

Trick question. They both are.

Last week I was introduced to The Ghastly Love of Johnny X, one of the least commercial–and most joyful–films I’ve seen in some time.

It achieved notoriety by being the lowest-grossing film of 2012, though that’s a technicality. According to director Paul Bunnell, after winning an audience award at the Kansas International Film Festival–which is apparently something that exists–it received the prize of a one-week run at a single Kansas theater, where it made $117. Admittedly, there weren’t a lot of people at the midnight screening I attended, but surely we doubled that gross.

Johnny X is a pastiche of ’50s drive-in fare, specifically 1959′s Teenagers from Outer Space. But it’s more ambitious and entertaining than that low-budget junk, a semi-musical with song stylings ranging from surf guitar to rockabilly to Sondheim.

It concerns a gang of alien punks, led by the eponymous Johnny, who are “sentenced to Earth.”  (The Grand Inquisitor is genre veteran Kevin McCarthy, wearing a Devo hat in his final performance.) In addition to his non-comformist ways, Johnny is being punished for his theft of the powerful Resurrection Suit. Oddly enough, he still has it when he’s sent to Earth, but it’s best not to think about that.

His on-again, off-again girlfriend is Bliss, played by De Anna Joy Brooks, who steals the show with the vamp number “These Lips That Never Lie.” She grabs the suit and runs off with a soda jerk, with the Ghastly gang in pursuit.

Reggie Bannister (from the Phantasm film series) shows up as a club promoter looking to score with a concert by legendary rocker Mickey O’Flynn (Creed Batton, formerly of the band The Grass Roots) who is, unfortunately, dead. Did I mention that there’s a Resurrection Suit?

The Ghastly Love of Johnny X could’ve used a trim: at 106 minutes, it’s a good twenty minutes longer than the movies to which it pays homage. Still, the music is catchy and the whole affair is fascinatingly weird.

In a not-entirely-dissimilar vein comes The Whisperer in Darkness, the second feature film produced by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Like Johnny X, it was a long-gestating project kept alive by passion. And it too is an intentionally retro flick.

In 2005, the HPLHS released The Call of Cthulhu, their adaptation of the core work of horror author Lovecraft’s mythology regarding slumbering alien gods. In a clever conceit, they filmed it as if it had been a “lost” film produced in 1926, the year that the short story was published. As a silent movie utilizing impressionistic sets and low-fi special effects, it effectively disguised its low budget and amateur crew.

For their follow-up they went bigger.  The Whisperer in Darkness was published in 1931, so they intended to approach it as a sound film of the same era as the early Universal Studios horrors. And while Cthulhu was a brisk 47 minutes, Whisperer more than doubled that at 104.

In one sense, it’s less successful than its predecessor: as a 1931 pastiche, it fails. Keep in mind that ’31 was the year that the Bela Lugosi Dracula hit theaters. Dracula, for all its cultural influence, is crude and stagy, with sparse musical accompaniment provided by a couple of classical music pieces, notably “Swan Lake.” Whisperer appears considerably more polished, and features a full orchestral score of the type that wouldn’t be introduced until two years later when the original King Kong debuted.

Unlike the intentionally-jerky stop-motion animation employed for Cthulhu, the filmmakers this time opted for CGI. It’s an understandable decision, as the monsters are on-screen quite a bit and would’ve taken months to film by traditional methods. Yet, despite an attempt to “dumb down” the effects to make them appear more like stop-motion, they’re simply much smoother than would’ve been possible two years before (or really, twenty years after) Kong.

Most damning of all, it’s in widescreen. While that format existed in the early ’30s, it didn’t come into common usage until 1953, when it was seen as a way of bringing television viewers back to the theaters.

Aside from the opening titles, the entire film looks much more like something that would’ve emerged from the sci-fi boom of the ’50s. And honestly, that’s okay. The HPLHS might not have achieved their stated goal, but they made something that’s as good as some of the better genre flicks of the mid-20th Century.

Matt Foyer is appealing as the central character Albert Wilmarth, who travels to rural Vermont to investigate a farmer who believes that he has been beset by buzzing aliens emanating from a nearby mountain lair. The stories of the Mi-Go are just folklore, right? Right?

Whisperer incurs the potential wrath of Lovecraftians by extending the film past the end of the short story. The original tale concludes with a twist that would normally ring down the curtain on Act Two. Instead, there’s an action-packed third act which sees Wilmarth infiltrate the Mi-Go caves and attempt to escape their wrath in an old plane. Ultimately, it goes to a place no less bleak than Lovecraft’s own writings.

The only real downside to it is a mustache-twirling human villain who wears a cultist get-up that charitably can be called “unfortunate.”

Still, grouses about the authenticity of its alleged time period aside, it’s still a fine film straddling the line between fan effort and something more professional. I hope that the HPLHS will tackle The Shadow Over Innsmouth next!

Then I thought, “Fuck it, you self-absorbed fuck.” So, look forward to some of these wonderful bursts of insight, coming soon to an RSS feed near you.

But first, an update on that whole Bevheads thing from a few weeks ago. A reader pointed out that some of my old web pages had been archived on the Wayback Machine. Here’s my original homepage, circa 1997. Here’s the Bevheads site as the crawlers found it in 1999. (Some of the photos are missing, but the text is still there.)

Then last week I heard back from the blogger who wrote that lovely tribute to Bevheads. She went as far as to write a follow-up post!

Meanwhile, the real Gates McFadden continues to post her own action figure photos to her Tumblr feed. Tiny Bev* has been on a European holiday for the past couple of weeks, but the entry that really amused me was this nightmare sequence featuring various Beverly Crusher merchandise, some of which I used to own.**

*McFadden refers to her plastic avatar as “1/8 Gates,” which only makes sense if the actress is 3 foot, 4 inches high. 

**I sold off the collector’s plate, but I still have the mug.

Remember last week, when we learned that Scooby-Doo was descended from interdimensional aliens? And he visited the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks? Well, this week’s run kicked off with the entire Scooby gang venturing into that same sinister Red Room to meet up with the dancing dwarf, played once again by Peaks‘ Michael J. Anderson.

Oh, and later this week, this happened…

Yes, that’s Scooby-Doo blazing away with arm-mounted gatling guns. And check out the weaponized Mystery Machine.

The whole thing wrapped up in apocalyptic fashion, with a tentacled, Lovecraftian entity collapsing the town of Crystal Cove and eating…well, pretty much the entire supporting cast. If all of this seems rather dark for a show about a mystery-solving Great Dane, that was rather the point. The metaplot of the series was that the entire town–including and especially the various “four investigators and a talking animal” teams throughout the centuries–was tainted by this ancient evil.

It occurred to me about midway through this week that by turning the Mystery Incorporated kids into the latest iteration of an archetypal monster-hunting team, the writers were treading close to The Cabin in the Woods. I began to wonder which of them was The Virgin. (My conclusion: Scooby.)

While the ultimate ending leaned heavily on the reset button–which, come on, it had to once the whole community was fed to a titanic octopus-parakeet–it was a satisfying wrap-up that set those meddling kids back to the beginning and firmly onto the path they’ve traveled since 1969.

The first segment will play in the window above, but here’s the entire thing.