Started with Atragon on Saturday, Toho's science fiction/fantasy made in 1963 about a flying submarine. The plot is about as far fetched as the submarine. An underwater kingdom called the Empire of Mu has decided it wants to take over the world, so it threatens the major cities of the world with destruction if the world doesn't comply. Meanwhile a legendary World War II Japanese submarine commander is building a futuristic submarine that can drill through underwater mountains, fly through the air and has a freeze ray as a weapon. The submarine is called Atragon.
The submarine commander still holds a grudge about the defeat of Japan after World War II and refuses to help fight the Empire of Mu and the Mu's monster, a snake like creature called Manda which is actually kind of cute and looks like the flying dog creature in The Neverending Story. The Mu's have a bunch of terrorists infiltrating the surface world and one of them kidnaps the sub commander's daughter which finally pisses him off and sends him into action.
This one's a lot of fun.
Written by Shinichi Sekizawa who is responsible for a lot of these Toho monster epics,
The running time is96 minutes.
Sunday evening, the family trekked to the new Star Trek movie which is basically known as, JJ Abram's Star Trek.
This is the reboot of the original series with the novelty being that the characters are all in their 20's and are in Star Fleet Academy learning to be astronauts or whatever they study at the Academy. The plot seemed equally as far fetched as Atragon.
A Romulean space miner in a spaceship that drills holes into planets appears to believe that Mr Spock is responsible for the destruction of his home planet. He goes through a black hole time warp thingy along with Mr Spock in order to change the course of history. Once back in time he decides to destroy Spock's home planet, Vulcan. Lots of plot later, old Mr Spock trapped back in time, meets young Jim Kirk and helps young Kirk learn of his destiny to be the Captain of the starship Enterprise. Even more plot later, young Kirk and young Spock team up to fight the misunderstood but evil Romulean and save the earth from getting a big hole drilled in it.
The time travel stuff allows the writers to slightly change the characters, so we get things like young Kirk as a car stealing juvenile delinquent and young Mr. Spock and young Lt. Uhura falling in love. Young Scotty gets to have a Jar Jar like sidekick, and Leonard Nimoy gets to play old Spock as the Alec Guinness character from the original Star Wars film. One thing that never changes in all of this time traveling stuff is that young or old, Lt. Uhura is still a glorified telephone operator.
Are the films that much different? In 1963, Toho did every special effect with models and some rear projection work so while at times the special effects are effective at other times they look hilariously bad. In 2009, almost every scene in Star Trek has some sort of optical computer trick to it and while computer effects have a leg up on old fashioned model work they also have their limits. Computer effects allow the actors to do death defying stunts that no normal or sane person could ever perform. There is a skydiving sequence which is pretty ridiculous, and the scene on the ice planet with the monsters chasing young Kirk wasn't much of a step up from Manda.
This isn't 2001 A Space Odyssey we're talking about here but both movies are harmless time killers.
127 minutes. Written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.
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