YOUNG DETECTIVE DEE: RISE OF THE SEA DRAGON (2013)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

I don't know if the film's title in Chinese specified "YOUNG Detective Dee" or not, but wherever it started, maybe some promoter wanted to stress to audiences that this film was a prequel to Tsui Hark's first movie in the series, PHANTOM FLAME. If so, the third and last film in the Hark series, also a prequel to FLAME, dispensed with that qualifier.

The prequel idea seems to have spawned a continuity problem, though. Wiki says that FLAME transpires in 689 CE, while DRAGON takes place about twenty years earlier, and involves the first time Empress Wu (again Carina Lau) meets Detective Dee (now played by Mark Chao), whose standing seems vague at best. But he must have done something impressive, for the Empress wants Dee to solve the mystery of a sea creature that destroys her fleet. The continuity problem would seem to be that FLAME was saying that Wu ascended to empress-hood in 689, but DRAGON, set in 665, implies that she is already in full authority. The problem might stem from bad subtitles, or it may be that Tsui Hark, focused mostly on providing impressive set-pieces, didn't care about internal consistency.

Like its predecessor, DRAGON always displays fine production values, but the import of the story is hard to follow and to invest with much emotional tone. In contrast to most rationalistic detective-stories, there really is a monster, though the beast, a mutated manta ray, is the product of Chinese super-science. Similarly, the villains who create the sea monster also mutate an ordinary fellow into a two-legged reptile-man. I don't know why the villains do this. However, the  film's only strong emotional moments come from those scenes in which a young woman, in love with the original human, seeks to protect Reptile Guy. The film ends with Dee's triumph after various big splashy set-pieces, and he's given a court position. I don't yet know if the last of the Hark films establishes why Dee has been in prison at the start of FLAME.

                

DETECTIVE DEE AND THE MYSTERY OF THE PHANTOM FLAME (2010)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

FLAME was the first of three films by Hong Kong producer Tsui Hark, whose success spawned various imitators, such as the film I reviewed last month, DETECTIVE DEE: DEMON CURSE (2022). In that review I explained the relationship of the cinematic "Detective Dee" to his earlier progenitors, so I won't repeat myself here.

In the Tang Dynasty, Wu (Carina Lau) is about to be installed as China's first Empress. In line with the occasion, she's having a massive statue of the goddess Kuan Yin erected near her palace in Luoyang. However, a catastrophe occurs; one of the architects spontaneously combusts before the eyes of his workers. The Empress' soldiers investigate but can make no sense of the flaming death. Rumors of divine vengeance circulate, and when another architect perishes in the same fashion, the Empress fears that one of her many enemies is plotting against her. Thus she summons from a prison sentence the renowned Detective Dee (Andy Lau).

I won't attempt to break down the plot of FLAME, because for all the high-gloss production values, the movie's a lot like other Chinese detective-films: introducing many characters so rapidly that I for one couldn't keep track of them. The Empress's attendant Jing'erh (Bingbing Li) retrieves Dee from prison and more or less keeps an eye on him for Wu. Toward the movie's end, she seems to be one of the villains behind the killings-- but then, there's some suggestion that she was obeying the corrupt will of the Empress, and some other mastermind is behind the killings. Despite the strong probability that Wu has done evil things, her iniquity is essentially accepted because she's not only the historical ruler of Tang China, but the representative of Heaven's will. All very well, but the fatalism dampens the dramatic potential.

Speaking of Heaven, as with most mysteries the supernatural as such is not involved; the combustions are caused by what might be termed "weird obscure science." Despite the movie's shortcomings, though, Hark's ability to stage vivid kung-fu scenarios assures that this FLAME never burns dully.      

 

STAR TREK PICARD SEASON 3 (2023)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Two not-overly-funny things happened the week after I got round to watching PICARD SEASON THREE on DVD: two of the actors involved passed away before I did my review. The first was TOS veteran Walter Koenig, who had only a "voice-over cameo" in the final episode of Season 3: he passed on October 26 of this year. The second was Picard himself, the venerable Patrick Stewart, who passed on October 28. Before either performer died, I'd been trying to organize my thoughts on this series, which at present stands as the final teleseries iteration of any series directly launched by Gene Roddenberry.

In my review of Season One I mentioned that during the original run of NEXT GENERATION, I was something less than an ardent fan of the show. However, despite my negative remarks about "the one where Picard talks to an oil slick," I did see assorted episodes that impressed me. Further, long before I viewed any of the PICARD seasons, I had been virtually inundated by podcasts asserting that nobody should even bother with Seasons One and Two, that only the third season, reuniting most of the regular cast and several key guest-stars, was worth bothering with. The Critical Drinker, for instance, reiterated this opinion as if he were delivering the Ten Commandments to a benighted audience of acolytes.

I had cause to doubt this pronouncement when I actually liked most of Season One. I'd even say that showrunner Michael Chabon *may* have been responsible for bringing a little more depth to the season's main trope, "androids are people too." This was a trope that had often appeared in TNG episodes but not always with great execution. After Season One ended, Chabon departed the showrunner position and was succeeded by the team of Akiva Goldsman and Terry Matalas, and for Season Two the duo produced a pile of steaming politicized garbage. Then for Season Three, Matalas assumed the billing of sole showrunner.

And where does the third season wind up on the merit-meter? Well, since I wasn't a huge TNG fan, the "gang's all here" reunions here are -- okay. Just like the previous two seasons, the ten episodes of PICARD THREE depend on introducing some overarching plot-conflict, against which tapestry the various characters, whether brand-new or previously established, must react dramatically. Naturally, since so many characters in Three have detailed histories from the teleseries and from movies, the writers' main focus was on getting the character beats of those established players right. The second consideration was then having those fan-favorites interact with a handful of others, either new characters like main villain Vadic (Amanda Plummer) or alumni from PICARD's first two seasons.

Unlike many TNG episodes that were built around a major "A-plot" and an often-unrelated "B-plot," the two plotlines of PICARD THREE are meant to dovetail. The guy whose name is the title naturally gets the A-plot. Admiral Picard (Stewart) is summoned back into action by a distress call from his former ship's doctor Beverly Crusher, being menaced by the aforementioned Vadic. What Picard doesn't know is that he's also being summoned to rescue Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers), a grown son he never knew he made during a liaison with Beverly. Picard pulls Riker, his old second-in-command, into the rescue effort. Over the course of the show, the majority of "old faces"-- Riker, Beverly Crusher, Deanna Troi. Geordi LaForge, and an amalgam of Data and his brother Lore-- are also assembled in Picard's A-plot. The B-plot focuses on TNG alumnus Worf teamed up with PICARD alumnus Raffi, both of whom are investigating terrorist activity against Starfleet. Over the course of the season, that activity is intrinsically related to the motivations of the main villain. Vadic initially seems to be a bounty hunter, seeking to capture young Jack Crusher for assorted space-crimes, but all is not as it seems.

The upshot of all these mysteries is that Starfleet is being menaced by a rare "super-villain team-up" between two old enemies of the Federation: the techno-organic Borg and the shapeshifting ETs known as the Changelings. This was one of the better ideas of PICARD THREE. Still, the writing-staff neglected to play off the origins of this alliance of entities who'd not been previously associated. The Borg's motive remains what it always is: assimilation of all races into their collective. The Changelings get less attention, even with the caveat that Vadic and her comrades are described as a "splinter-group," rather than representing the totality of whatever metamorphs still exist outside the frame of the story. Still, even with Vadic's typical villain's-motive-- "Starfleet done me dirt"-- the splinter-group seems conveniently sanguine about the possibility that their whole race might find itself servicing cyborgs down the line.

And what's the one thing the villains really need to bring off their evil plan? Why, it's Picard's brand-new adult kid Jack. And here's another place where the writers, busy attending to all the callbacks needed to explore the marriage of Riker and Troi, or Data's new impressions of humanity, fell short of the mark. I know it's not easy to make a new character compelling amidst a flock of fan-favorites, but-- Jack Crusher's seriously lame. There's an initial attempt to make him seem like a roguish rule-breaker, and this might have worked had Jack been forced to shift from Mister Selfish to Mister Altruism. But since he's the son of two heroes, his apple can't fall from the tree. The viewer is told that Jack's mother discouraged him from meeting his father to avoid the Admiral's many enemies, and this excuse is so old and hackneyed as to have Silver-Age Superman's whiskers on it. So Jack's alienated from his father, but has no justification for being so alienated-- where's the drama in that?

Actually, of the many emotional spotlights in PICARD THREE, the only one that grabbed me was the one between the Admiral and his "surrogate daughter" Ro Laren (Michelle Forbes). Ro only appeared in eight episodes of TNG, but the talents of Forbes and the TNG writers made Ro one of the show's most praised "featured players." The PICARD THREE writers gave this character a kick-ass finish to her story-arc-- while Jack Crusher, one of the figures most important to the whole narrative, comes off as "Wesley Crusher with a Big Secret That the Borg Need." Still, I guess I should be pleased that the emotional spotlights of the series regulars are at least decent. They all could have been as badly conceived-- and as badly performed-- as Amanda Plummer's Vadic. Every time she was on screen, I found myself missing the "God-alien" from STAR TREK: THE FINAL FRONTIER.

And how about the star of the show? As mentioned, Walter Koenig's cameo was little more than an affectionate toss-off. However, the third and last season of PICARD certainly needed to emphasize the immense charm and forcefulness of the actor who brought to life the successor to James Kirk. I might not have thought much of the Jack Crusher character, but Stewart's nevertheless impressive seeking to negotiate a relationship with a grown son. A short-lived quarrel with Riker doesn't add up to much, but the two performers still play well off one another, and the same principle holds true for the Admiral encountering one more iteration of his artificial crewman. Stewart's emotional palette was much broader in Season One, but PICARD THREE doesn't contain any false notes, which is more than I can say for Season Two.

PICARD THREE knows its audience and certainly seems to have pleased those viewers. Frankly, I don't know that the season would have been much better had the writers shown more attention to the shortcomings I perceived. Robert Frost said, "Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in," and the three seasons of PICARD are a TNG homecoming, just as the first six STAR TREK movies are to The Original Series. "Home" may include some very bad experiences as well as some very good ones. But since no one gets out of life without a heaping helping of both goodness and badness, there are worse fates for a fictional creation than to run the gamut of both experiences.    

   

             

      

STAR TREK: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY (1991)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

When I first saw COUNTRY in the theater, I was less than charmed with the script, primarily by Nicholas Meyer and Leonard Nimoy. I concede the argument made at the time, that the eighties movies needed to reflect the culture of their time, just as the original series had reflected that of the sixties. What I found problematic was the one-to-one correlation between modern events and those of a far-flung space opera. Gene Roddenberry-- who died shortly after having seen rushes of this movie, whose politics he did not embrace -- executed some very bad TREK scripts based on overly close resemblance between "the reality" and "the fictional." Yet even a ham-fisted story like "The Omega Glory" has more of the quality of a thought-experiment than anything in COUNTRY. Director/co-writer Meyer is a little too literal in transposing current history upon the TREK universe.

It's more than lame jokes like, "Only Nixon could go to China." COUNTRY starts out with a "big bang," supposedly an analogue to Chernobyl, which is made the proximate cause for the dissolution of the Klingon Empire-- which presaged the dissolution of the Soviet Union in reality a few weeks later. A Klingon diplomatic mission, headed by Chancellor Gorkon (David Warner), meets to discuss the Klingon version of perestroika. Captain Spock (Nimoy) shows little of his father's diplomatic tendencies by high-handedly volunteering the Enterprise for the duty, and Starfleet, with logic more dubious than Spock's, agrees. 

With the exception of Captain Sulu, who's off commanding his own vessel, most of the Enterprise regulars are up for the new task, but Kirk (Shatner) is something less than pleased. Roddenberry reportedly did not care for Meyer's imputation that Kirk was racist against Klingons-- which, whatever Roddenberry's reasoning, is also not supported by the characterization of Kirk in TOS. Meyer over-emphasizes Kirk's lust for vengeance due to a Klingon's having killed the captain's only son, and even stacks the deck by giving Kirk the self-denigratory line, "How on earth can history get past people like me?"

Kirk and his crew meet with the diplomatic entourage, including Gorkon's chief of staff Chang (Christopher Plummer). Following a tense dinner, the Klingons return to their ship-- and are apparently attacked by the Enterprise. Kirk and McCoy beam to the ship to render medical aid, find Chancellor Gorbachev-- er, Gorkon-- dead, and are summarily arrested by Chang. While the rest of the Enterprise crew labors to figure who masterminded the assassination and framed the captain, Kirk and McCoy are fast-tracked through a trial and sent to an icebound prison planet.

I'll give Meyer and his scripters due credit for keeping things hopping. Whereas FINAL FRONTIER looked like a patchwork of clumsy scenes despite having a higher budget, COUNTRY looks admirably streamlined, and all of the actors, even Shatner, are given valid bits of emotional business. Kirk and McCoy's escape from the Klingon prison adds a note of much-needed exoticism, and the detective-work needed to uncover General Chang as the mastermind is efficient if not much of a thought-experiment. There's also a decent space-opera battle at the end, just so that no one forgets that it's not just an episode of MURDER SHE TREKKED. And Plummer gives a lip-smacking performance as the Shakespeare-spouting conspirator; he may be the best villain to come out of any of the TREK features.

COUNTRY is far from the best of the TREK movies. Yet as a fan, I'm certainly glad the film franchise did not end with FRONTIER. Reportedly some executive helped to greenlight this film not out of any deep love for the concept, but because he knew that 1991 could be heralded as the 25th anniversary of the TV show's 1966 advent. I don't know if Meyer would have celebrated the exceptionalism of Western history as Roddenberry did-- though admittedly Roddenberry had his socialist moments. But to me it's still appropriate that the original TREK cast was allowed to shine together thanks to good old-fashioned capitalism.

                

PRINCESS ROUGE (1997)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

According to one IMDB review, this two-part OVA was supposed to have had six installments, but for unknown reasons PRINCESS ROUGE was interrupted and never finished. Another review asserts that the two episodes were handled by two different animation houses, and I suppose this is true, as the second part is a little more professional looking. Since ROUGE didn't derive from any prior source, its plotlines would never be resolved.

The emotional core of ROUGE is a very simple love comedy, much like the more popular OH MY GODDESS. Orphaned high-schooler Yusuke lives alone until a strange young woman literally drops into his lap. She wears an exotic costume but suffers from amnesia, remembering nothing about her background, save that her name is Rouge. Yusuke doesn't take Rouge to social services but instead invites her to live in the little shed he rents from a landlady. There's an odd moment in which Yusuke thinks that Rouge looks like his mother, though this might have been thrown in to establish his loneliness, and to motivate him to keep the pretty young thing in his personal orbit. In the course of ten narrative minutes the two young people fall for each other.

Then the "in laws" move in. Two exotically garbed women named Meige and Kaige, the latter wielding a sword, come looking for Rouge, claiming that she is their sister. They appear just as Rouge disappears, so Yusuke joins the sisters in looking for their sibling. It comes out that all three sisters were cast out of their unidentified domain by a tyrant's usurpation, and one of the tyrant's agents, female warrior Vega, has taken Rouge prisoner, keeping her in an energy-bubble. Yusuke shows his feeling for his lady-love by attacking and getting swatted aside, and Vega similarly defeats the sisters. She also reveals that all of them came from "the underworld," by which she seems to mean the Japanese afterlife, which would seem to imply that the three sisters and all their enemies are spirits of some sort, rather than denizens of some faux-medieval realm. Anyway, seeing Yusuke in trouble sparks Rouge's secret powers, so that she breaks free and kills Vega. 

The second half is much more slapsticky in tone. Once all three sisters are shacking up in Yusuke's shed, Yusuke's female classmate decides that he's doing something scandalous with the girls-- presumably because said classmate is jealous-- and she gets her brothers (I think) to beat up Yusuke. Yusuke manages to soft-soap the irate citizens by claiming the girls are cousins or something, but then Kaige (the more obstreperous sister) thinks Yusuke's making a move on Rouge, so SHE beats on Yusuke. The whole matter of whether they hearken from the Japanese underworld seems to have become irrelevant. The tyrant of that realm sends a male swordsman and some random monsters to the Earth-realm, again seeking to kidnap Rouge-- because she's the heir apparent, I suppose. The male swordsman duels Kaige, and there's an odd flashback in which the two of them are showing dancing together at court. In a confusing subtitle, when Kaige kills the guy she calls him "brother," though Rouge and Meige don't recognize him as such. I suppose it's some pet name, like using "onee-sama" figuratively rather than literally.

And so it ends with Yusuke stuck with three women in his dwelling, which actually ensures that he's not going to get any illicit action from this "harem." The only reason I grade ROUGE as "fair" is because of the unresolved "underworld" plotline, though that might have proven as average as everything else in the story.

           

STAR TREK THE FINAL FRONTIER (1989)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

One might have thought that after the box office debacle of 1987's SUPERMAN IV THE QUEST FOR PEACE, Hollywood producers would have learned one lesson-- even in the short term-- that they should not allow actors to conceive story ideas unless said actors had proven histories of professional writing.

Just as QUEST was hobbled from the beginning by Christopher Reeve's idea of the Man of Steel enforcing nuclear disarmament, FRONTIER is just as compromised by director William Shatner's lamebrain notion of using a TREK movie to satirize televangelists. I'm tempted to think that none of the Paramount suits in the late eighties had any cognizance of what sort of stories had transpired in the run of the Original Series, not least "Who Mourns for Adonais," in which the Enterprise crew met an ET masquerading as one of the Greek gods. If any of them had possessed such knowledge, wouldn't one of them said to Shatner, "Let's not repeat old plot-ideas like having the TREK-heroes 'meet God.' Bad enough that they started calling the 1979 movie 'Where Nomad Has Gone Before!'"

But no one told Shatner to go back to the drawing-board; they just handed off his ramshackle notion off to journeyman writer David Loughery, and what emerged wasn't close to being any sort of commentary on televangelists' hubris, or whatever that would have looked like in the TREK-verse. The publicity attempted to sell the film on the idea that FRONTIER toyed with the possibility of the space-travelers might actually encounter the Judeo-Christian deity. Yet one didn't have to have seen a single TREK episode to know nothing like this would transpire. Even a basic knowledge of science fiction would have told anyone that metaphysically valid deities simply don't appear in the genre; they're always just alien impostures or psychic constructs. At least "Adonais" plays fair: from the first the Enterprisers don't believe that Apollo is the genuine article. And because that writer played fair, he was able to make the "false god" resonant in ways Willaim Shatner never dreamed of.

Before Shatner made his directorial deal with Paramount, the only cinematic direction he'd accomplished were episodes of T.J. HOOKER. While he may have only kibitzed on the finished script, FRONTIER has the piecemeal construction of a TV show-episode. The action starts when Sybok (Lawrence Luckinbill), apparently a terrorist of Vulcan heritage, takes three diplomats-- human, Klingon, and Romulan-- as his hostages. However, this is just a feint, so that he can lure a Federation starship into his clutches and dominate the crew with his weird "let me heal your pain" power. The Federation responds to this diplomatic emergency by sending to the site the newly reconstructed Enterprise-- though it isn't even fully functional.

Needless to say, after a very cheap-looking action-sequence, Sybok and his buddies take over the Enterprise. Sybok then reveals to Kirk his purpose: to penetrate a mysterious "barrier" at "the center of the galaxy," where, according to this illogical Vulcan's vision, they will meet some sort of "God of all people." Oh yes, and Sybok is Spock's half-brother, which merely distracts from the main theme: the risks of claiming to have revelatory experiences. The script tries to goose this static situation with some failed escape-scenes and a Klingon ship tailing the Enterprise, but it all leads to a depressingly predictable resolution: the travelers meet an alien who's just pretending to be God, Sybok dies, and all the regular characters escape.

About the only thing salvageable from this farrago is the opening scene-- before all the nonsense gets started-- wherein Kirk, Spock and McCoy are camping out in Yosemite National Park. Shatner might not be any kind of real writer, but here he does manage a good chemistry with his colleagues Nimoy and Kelley. (The latter is the only performer to contribute any decent humorous moments.) All the other regulars, though, have to get by on random bits of unimpressive business.

About the only thing Shatner accomplished here was to make STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE look a whole lot better by comparison.

  

SHINESMAN (1996)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

This 2-part OVA, based on a manga I've not read, has a longer title in Japanese, seen in the illustration above. Long ago I copied a subbed copy off the International Channel, and rewatching it now confirms my recollection: it's a cute one-note premise. SHINESMAN the OVA might have been intended as a pilot for a prospective TV show, given that it reputedly introduces a character that wasn't in the manga. But (most of) the world will never know.

The premise: aliens, led by an unseen overlord named "Voice," plan an invasion of Earth. However, the aliens, led by Commander Sasaki and his aide Seki, aren't launching a military invasion, but a hostile business takeover. For reasons that I found elusive, Voice has his servitors infiltrate Earth businesses to conquer from within-- although the only business concern depicted is a kids' TV show, GREATMAN, transparently patterned after SUPER SENTAI/ POWER RANGERS. And some representative of Earth (I guess) has another corporation, Right Trading, come up with a rival team, Shinesman, consisting of six color-themed warriors who wield weapons like "explosive tie clips" and "business-card shuriken." The joke, such as it is, is that the five guys (and one girl, of course) live the lives of ordinary salarymen while waiting for their first summons to fight alien evil. (I'm not sure if the Shinesman characters are also being merchandized as TV characters at the same time.)

The original-to-OVA character is the most enjoyable element of SHINESMAN. Sasaki and Seki don't actually do very much, but Sasaki's ditzy girl cousin Shiina involves herself in taking action against the Shinesman team, leading to some modestly enjoyable TV animation-fights. While she's in disguise as an Earth-girl, Shiina also meets and falls "in like" with the Shinesman leader in his secret ID of Hiroya, and by the OVA's end she's figured out that he's also Shinesman Red.

SHINESMAN is an amusing trifle but its jokes on the commercial world make it stand out a bit from the crowd.