Of course the original Mission Impossible movie, by Brian Depalma, made Jim Phelps into the villain. Made him responsible for the deaths of IMF agents. Hardly respectable. It also was more of a star vehicle for Tom Cruise than the ensemble cast of the TV show.
It could have been partly redeemed if, at the end, when Tom Cruise's character gets the recording on the plane it had said "Good afternoon, Mr. Phelps.", thus making the name an alias for the prime agent. Instead, it treated the original character very badly indeed.
Nice idea, but it wouldn't have been consistent with the series. The lead agent in the first season was named Dan Briggs. And we know Jim Phelps was really named Jim Phelps, because he was called that by old friends from his youth in more than one episode.
What could've worked to salvage it would be if the Phelps of the movie had been an impostor. M:I lore is full of impostors.
This is true, and if I had been a fan of the show when that movie came out, I probably would've been very upset indeed. And don't get me started on the joke that was M:I2. But I thought that 3 did a very good job of recapturing the format of the series ("caper" operations putting the different talents of each team member to good, dramatic use), while still updating and recreating it to suit the modern viewer. Not having watched any of them in a while, I'd have to say at this point, I think that M:I3 is the one I'm most pleased with (and that's while now being a fan of the show).
I agree. III did the best job of being true to the original, in most respects. (For one thing, it was the one film that made any subtantial use of "The Plot," the Lalo Schifrin musical motif that was an integral part of every episode's score.) However, I didn't like the way it, even more than the rest of the movies, turned the IMF into this massive government operation. It works against the feel of the original series, that this was a small, off-the-books operation being run out of a guy's apartment, recruiting actors and models and engineers and circus strongmen instead of professional agents, so that the government would have deniability for its actions.
It's a shame that a new Trek movie with an original cast would very likely have been less successful. It's hard for me to get excited about someone named Kirk being in the movie when I just can't find that essential Kirkness that Christopher talks about. I guess it's just a fundamental disagreement about what his most essential qualities are.
Well, that's the mark of a good character, isn't it? That he's complex enough that he's perceived differently by different people. Which means that no interpretation of the character is going to be universally liked. Me, I didn't much care for how TUC portrayed Kirk, and I thought TWOK bungled badly by having him claim he'd "never faced death."
So who knows? Maybe the next movie will develop Kirk in a way that will enable you to see more "Kirkness" in him. After all, this movie was the origin story, about getting him and the crew into place. In the next movie, they don't have to deal with all that and can go deeper into the characters.
Disappointed, but not surprised, right? Because the summer blockbuster is the obvious choice for people whose only concern is profit.
Everyone in a capitalist society has to be concerned with profit on some level. Ultimately, no matter how much you may be doing it for the love of the craft, no matter how much you wish you could tell a certain kind of story, you won't be able to tell that kind of story if you can't stay in business. And that imposes limits on what people are practically able to achieve in an expensive field like film or television. So it's rather unfair to assume that just because the people in charge have an obligation to try to make a profit, it means they have no concern for anything else.
The movie industry these days is built around blockbusters. Movies aren't allowed to have long runs and build audiences gradually; everything is judged by how it performs in its first week or two. And that puts pressure on the industry to concentrate on developing blockbusters. That means that anyone who was put in charge of Paramount Pictures would have an obligation to their employers, employees, and stockholders to develop blockbuster properties in order to avoid losing the competition with other studios and thereby losing their jobs.
So I think you're kind of getting the cause and effect backward. It's not that they decided to revive ST and figured they'd go with a blockbuster approach. It's that they needed to develop a new tentpole blockbuster franchise, and they decided that ST had the potential to become one.
And no matter what your opinion about blockbusters, that's a good thing for the franchise. Because it's disproven the myth that ST was dead, and it's brought new attention and profit to the franchise, and that's probably good for the prospects of new TV shows, books, comics, etc. The movies are what raise the profile and create the buzz for the rest.
Even when I was excited about the upcoming movie, and hoping it might have some depth to it, I knew it wasn't really going to be anything more than a big, explosive, action-fest.
I thought it had plenty of depth. The plot was full of logic holes, but I thought there was an effective focus on character and emotion, that the action beats served the emotional beats rather than vice-versa. Abrams has always been good at balancing intense action with character-driven storytelling. One of the reasons M:I:III is so much better than its predecessors is because it humanizes Ethan Hunt, gives him a life beyond the job, and makes his relationship with his fiancee/wife pivotal to the movie.
I mean, nothing shows this better than the
Kelvin sequence. With all that big battle stuff going on, the real focus, of the script, the direction, the cinematography, the music, everything, is on the agonizing emotion of George and Winona leading up to the moment of Jim's birth. When I watched that sequence, I wasn't going "Gee whiz, look at all the bright explodey things," I was bawling my eyes out at the very human tragedy that the film clearly regarded as more important than the action.
And that's paralleled at the end. When Nero is finally defeated, the movie doesn't gloat over his fiery death and treat it as a triumph; rather, the music gets somber and elegiac and we're treated to a poignant close-up of a man who's lost everything and deserves our sympathy. That's just brilliant, emotion-driven filmmaking there, in the middle of intense, frenetic action. That's the work of a director who knows what's really important.
This is why I hate origin movies. The original series didn't have a two-hour pilot showing how everyone get there, and yet, people still watched it. It's another thing I don't understand about the average viewer, this driving need to have all the back-story meticulously explained. The writers aren't to blame, because they're giving the public what they want, but I, for one, don't understand why the public wants it. Not saying it's wrong, but it is very strange to me.
And yet the fans' hunger for origin stories has given us
Enterprise: The First Adventure,
Vulcan's Forge, Mike Barr's superb "All Those Years Ago..." annual from DC, Marvel's
Early Voyages series, IDW's
Crew, etc. It's not just viewers, it's readers.
This is just a bit of continuity-Spackle itself, but I have long held the idea that, after being the first ship to come back from a five-year mission relatively intact, Kirk and crew were mega-heroes, prompting Starfleet Command to juice them thoroughly for PR (which might as well also explain why all of Starfleet adopted the Enterprise delta as its logo).
This is the second time this week that's come up and I've had to debunk it. "Court-martial" showed a number of non-
Enterprise personnel wearing the delta insignia (or arrowhead, as I prefer to call it), and VGR: "Friendship One" established it as a UESPA logo in use in 2067. Not to mention the new movie further debunking it by showing the
Kelvin crew using the arrowhead in 2233.
Besides, the idea of Starfleet adopting one ship's logo to honor it is fannish and ridiculous. Wouldn't that be a huge insult to the valiant crews of all the other ships in the fleet? And I don't buy the idea that the E was the first ship to return intact from a 5-year mission, for one thing because I don't buy the unsupported assumption that 5-year missions are in any way standard. We have evidence that
one ship had
one 5-year mission. One data point is not evidence of a pattern. It's also a bad case of small-universe syndrome, the assumption that the events we were presented with on a television series were the only important things that happened in the entire universe.
So, by the time of TVH, forcing these galactic idols into early retirement would fall under that obscure but oft-used legal loophole, "celebrities are above the law."
We're talking about a military service here with responsibility for the security of the entire Federation. No matter how PR-obsessed they were, they wouldn't give responsibility for a starship capable of razing entire planets to a crew that had proven themselves capable of mutiny and piracy for bizarre personal reasons. They'd give the crew some jobs with a high public profile but no actual access to anything important or dangerous.
But yeah, while I wouldn't call it "a thousand times more believable," I'm sure nuKirk's promotion could be explained just as easily.
You're right. It's at least fifty thousand times more believable.
