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Del and Mladen review ‘Edge of Tomorrow’

Image courtesy of Warner Brothers.

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“Edge of Tomorrow” Starring Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton. Directed by Doug Liman. 113 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Del’s take

Didn’t Mladen, at some point during one of his hyperbolic rants, swear he’d never see another PG-13-rated movie? Didn’t he say they were all crap?

Well, guess what?

He broke his vow and attended “Edge of Tomorrow,” the latest Tom Cruise sci-fi vehicle, and after the movie was over you should have heard him, squealing like a little girl who’d just been given a peck on the cheek by Justin Bieber. He not only saw another PG-13-rated movie but he loved it.

Mladen, you phony.

His enthusiasm, however, is well-deserved. “Edge of Tomorrow” is a terrific summer movie, carrying the right balance of humor, tension, and spectacle. Your ticket-buying dollars will not have been wasted on this one.

In “Edge of Tomorrow,” an alien race we call “Mimics” has invaded the earth and is swallowing up Europe. Unless they’re stopped, mankind faces the same fate he inflicts on so many animal species of this planet. Cruise’s character, Major William Cage, is sent to the fight despite his credentials as a public information officer for the military. During the battle he kills an “alpha,” a particular kind of alien that, in dying, bestows him with the ability to restart the day each time he dies. (Believe me, there are no groundhogs in this movie, and if there were, they’d all be exterminated.) Through repeating his experiences he’s able to learn and survive a little longer, until he meets up with Sgt. Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), who underwent the same experience and learned there’s a very bad alien pulling all the strings. Their mission, which they choose to accept, is to exterminate that alien.

This movie presents so many pluses it’s hard to list them all. The writing is excellent. The dialogue is snappy, at times hilarious, at other times deadly earnest. Pacing, internal logic, respites from tension – they’re all handled with a canniness that speaks to the skills of the writers and the director.

Acting is top notch. Tom Cruise is a sympathetic and realistic character in the bones of the unwilling and frightened Major Cage, and he grows throughout the movie. Emily Blunt is a tough badass who has her vulnerabilities – and might I add it’s a pleasure to see a strong woman in a movie again – and Bill Paxton is funnier than his role in “Aliens.”

Speaking of which, the aliens in “Edge of Tomorrow” are truly alien. I take my hat off to the person who designed them. They look like nothing you’ve seen.

“Edge of Tomorrow” is not “deep,” meaning it won’t be in line for a best picture award. But it’s nice to see Cruise in a winner. It’s nice to see a movie that isn’t based on a sequel or a prequel or a remake of a remake. It’s nice to see a well-written, smart, funny and exciting film again. I was beginning to wonder if I ever would.

I almost clapped at the end of “Edge of Tomorrow,” and if a movie review can make a sound, that’s likely what you hear. Go see the movie. I’d rate it a solid A.

Mladen’s take

It would be easy to dismiss “Edge of Tomorrow” as a trite film because the trailers make it look and sound like “Ground Hog Day” meets “Halo.” But, that would be an error.

Despite its flimsy PG-13 rating, “E of T” is very good. The script and acting – Tom Cruise as Cage and Emily Blunt as Vrataski in the lead roles and Bill Paxton supporting as Farrell – were top notch. Plus, computer-generated graphics were used to enhance the plot, rather than conceal poor writing, silly coincidences that keep a weak story flowing, and crappy, underdeveloped characters typical of summer blockbusters.

Del summed the movie nicely, so I won’t bother. “E of T” is a film worthy of the big screen and big ticket prices moviegoers have to endure these days.

“E of T” is a sci-fi adventure built around its stars. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of gun and grenade play and lots of CV-22-like machines blown out of the sky, but it’s the movie’s characters that keep your attention.

Cage transitions nicely from a selfish and naïve military public affairs propagandist at the beginning of the film to a man clearly thinking about someone other than himself by the end. He dies many times, often in funny ways.

Vrataski is tough from the get-go and the brains behind the operation to whack the Omega, a time-warping brain, that controls the Mimics, hyper-mobile alien troops that have conquered continental Europe.

“Edge of Tomorrow” isn’t perfect, but could have been – yeah, Del, here it comes – if the studio dedicated it to entertainment for adults by going R. Yes, the producers would have made less money, but, in exchange for less change, “E of T” could have gone down in moviedom sci-fi history as masterful. Was “Alien” rated PG(-13)? Was “The Matrix” rated PG(-13)? Was “District 9” rated PG-13? No, no, and no. More realistic battle scenes would have helped “E of T.” Vivid blood spray, graphic skin, muscle, and organ disintegrations after impacts by projectiles or crashes, full-bore cussing, and reproductive urge tension between handsome Cage and beautiful Vrataski would have burnished the movie’s credentials. Instead, we get sterilized deaths and constrained language even when Mimics are running amok and slicing through exoskeleton-equipped human soldiers.

Lukewarm rant aside, I would see “Edge of Tomorrow” again in the theater if I could afford it. And, “E of T” will become part of my Blu-Ray collection when it’s released for home viewing.

Though it troubles me to no end, I completely agree with Del on this one. “Edge of Tomorrow” is a solid A.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical editor. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.

Image courtesy of Warner Brothers.

“Godzilla” Starring Aaron Taylor Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Brian Cranston. Directed by Gareth Edwards. 123 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Mladen’s take:

The obvious first. The new Godzilla film stinks. Don’t let Del’s opinion fool you. He doesn’t know Godzilla from Godthab … the capital of Greenland.

Discussing the movie’s plot and acting is pointless because its star is nothing more than Godzilla-like. For example, I’m Brad Pitt-like because I’m an upright walking biped.

So, let’s talk monster morphology and physiology from a purist’s perspective.

I’ll use Toho Studio’s last major Godzilla type, the one that debuted in the film “Godzilla 2000.” It’s labeled AG for “Authentic Godzilla.” The Godzilla-like animal in the new film is “Poser.”

Godzilla from afar.

• AG: An upright walking monster with distinct body parts, such as a neck, prominent spine plates mimicking curved blades, and contoured limbs. The tail is longer than AG is tall.

• Poser: A hunched garden slug-like silhouette with a small head attached to an anorexic body that terminates in legs with, get this, cankles. Its back plates are stunted and the tail short, almost stubby.

Godzilla up close.

• AG: Sleek, cat-like head large, expressive eyes looking forward and a mouth featuring large, expressive canines.

• Poser: Small head with nearly colorless beads for eyes tucked into a puffy face, as though the animal was dehydrated from an all-night drinking party. Put together, the face is a blur with its major components – snout, forehead, and jaw – blending into each other almost indistinguishably.

Godzilla’s fire breath.

• AG: A searing plasma, white-amber in color and liquid in texture, projected from the monster’s mouth. It’s launched with a head movement. AG’s head rotates sideways 30, 40 degrees and then juts forward. The monster sometimes takes a step toward its target, maybe to brace against the death ray’s recoil. When the fire breath hits, it explodes, engulfing the target. It is preceded by the spine plates glowing the same vivid color. They heat the air around them, causing convection currents.

• Poser: A feeble blue that looks like its origin is a LED light someone stuck into Poser’s throat. Come on, the death ray is supposed to be generated by nuclear fission, not your local electric company. The spines glow the same soothing blue. There’s nothing intimidating about Poser’s fire breath attack and it barely damages the critter it’s fighting.

A caveat before I address Godzilla’s signature physiological trait, the one that stays the same no matter the monster’s Toho iterations. It could have rescued the new Godzilla film, though the creature’s morphology was sullied.

I appreciate the director taking Godzilla seriously. The monster isn’t mocked as it was in the other Hollywood re-make of Godzilla starring Matthew Broderick. And, there a couple of deferential nods to the Godzilla franchise’s early years.

That three, let alone one, giant monster, can exist today is treated plausibly and sincerely. The acting wasn’t bad and the plot good. 

It’s just tough for me to accept that there’s not enough imagination out there in moviemaking land despite the graphics computing power available to modern-day producers and directors to render a classic Godzilla as a force of nature by making it look, well, natural and fearsome and indestructible.

Okay, now the one indelible physiological must for all Godzillas: its roar-screech.

• AG: A growling rumble rapidly ascending in pitch to a banshee wail that then trails off. I don’t know, it’s the sound of a titanium spike scraping across a steel ingot with the frequency slowed and amplified. Or, the roar-screech mimics an elephant’s trumpet inside an echo chamber that amplifies lower tones, while distorting all of the sound.

• Poser: A grizzly bear with laryngitis.

I give the new Godzilla an A for effort and C+ for execution.

And, I’m still trying to figure out why Godzilla faints near the end of the movie. Was it tired from its battle against the other monsters, which resembled a cross between the Gyaos in Gamera movies and the alien invader in “Cloverfield.”

Or, was the director trying to build sympathy for the monster by making it look like it had died to save mankind?

If it was the latter, the director failed because he never developed Godzilla’s personality and, believe me when I say, Godzilla in past renditions had a lot of it.   

Del’s take:

I broke Mladen’s heart because I wouldn’t come to his house and listen to a proper Godzilla roar in Dolby SurroundSound.

Sorry, Mladen. Godzilla’s roar, or whether he was fat, or if his head was too small, weren’t on my list of priorities.

What I wanted from “Godzilla” is what I want from every movie – interesting characters who generate empathy, a decent plot, dialogue that works, and a set of rules consistent with the movie’s internal logic.

What I got was boring characters about whom I cared little, a bullet-riddled plot, flat-affect dialogue, and a set of rules that were indeed consistent with the movie’s absurd internal logic.

“Godzilla” opens with a cool segment of backstory: The Pacific nuclear “tests” of the 1940s and ’50s were attempts to kill the giant serpent. The movie then segues to a Fukishima-style disaster at a nuclear facility in Japan. Brian Cranston’s character is the director of the facility, and during the disaster his wife dies in a reactor breach. Jump to today – Cranston’s son, played by Aaron Taylor Johnson, is an explosive ordnance disposal technician who flies to Japan to bail his father out of jail. Seems daddy believes Japanese authorities are hiding something at the reactor disaster site and he’s right – a giant monster has been feeding on the radiation and springs into the world – make that “stomps” – just as Cranston and son arrive at the site.

What follows is a jaunt halfway across the world as the monster makes its way to Yucca Mountain, America’s nuclear waste disposal site (which, by the way, contains no nuclear waste, as its commission was halted by the Obama administration) to meet up with a second MUTO (massive unidentified terrestrial organism) and hatch a batch of monster babies (totally overlooking the two Diablo Canyon nuclear facilities between Los Angeles and San Francisco).

Luckily for mankind, Godzilla is in pursuit as its place as the top alpha predator is threatened by the MUTOs (which bear more than a family resemblance to the monster in “Cloverfield”).

Cranston is able to imbue his role with emotion, but Johnson and Olsen spend most of the film gazing dumbly into the distance. They simply have nothing to say, and it was impossible for me to develop any affection for either. A Japanese scientist, played by Ken Watanabe, is kept by the military as an adviser, but spends most of his time mouthing gassy admonitions about the perils of pissing off Mother Nature.

The characters are wasted.

Special effects are superb, though I grew tired of the gray and brown color palette. The score is at times shrieky, helping the action on the screen to lapse into farce. Edwards’ directorial style is interesting, though I’d say he relied to heavily on foreshadowing. After we’ve seen the monsters, there’s no point in showing us the aftermath of their rampages. Let’s see the buildings tumble!

To me, Godzilla is a metaphor for whatever issue rules the day – nuclear warfare, man tampering with nature, you name it.

But in “Godzilla,” the monster strikes me as a metaphor for the inability of modern storytellers to tell a decent tale.

Overall, I’d rate it a C+.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical editor. Del Stone Jr. is a journalist and author.

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures.

“Avalanche Sharks” Starring Alexander Mendeluk, Kate Nauta, Benjamin Easterday, Eric Scott Woods, and others. Directed (if you can call it that) by Scott Wheeler. Amazon Prime. 82 minutes. Not Rated

Mladen’s take

This is an embarrassing confession. Maybe the error was caused by my growing age precipitating a memory malfunction. It certainly wasn’t caused by me worrying about wasting Del’s time. He needs some sort of life that doesn’t include moping. I asked Del to watch the wrong film. I recommended that we review “Avalanche Sharks,” a movie that was far worse than I recalled – see, there goes the bad memory thing again – but I intended for us to watch “Ice Spiders,” which is a pretty good film. Why the confusion? Well, both take place at ski resorts and both involve unnatural animals. The difference is that “Ice Spiders” has a dose of decent acting lead by Patrick Muldoon. You may remember him as the pilot in “Starship Troopers” who got his brain sucked graphically by a very large, maggot-y bug through its hinged, two-piece, straw-like proboscis.

“Avalanche Sharks” is a nearly perfectly bad movie. I give it a generous D-. Paradoxically, that grade makes it worth watching. It’s the script and the acting combined that render the film so damn crappy and entertaining. The crappiness generated a giggle or two as the movie shifted from portraying one dumb-ass victim to another. In between, I was bewildered by the crappy script and the crappy acting. Am I repeating myself? Have I already said that the script and acting were crappy? Damn memory.

None of the characters in “Avalanche Sharks” were likeable, so who cared what happened to them or their dogs. The good guy was a dork. I didn’t care that he was a Marine on R&R after fighting somewhere. I assumed he had been to Afghanistan or Iraq, which was the movie’s vague attempt to add a sense of the real and create empathy for our hero. The bad guy and his Olympics skiing bronze medal were annoying. The women in the film were nicely configured, but terribly uninteresting as humans. The kook who tells the spring breakers at the ski resort that they’ll all die was among the worst actors I’ve ever seen. There was the nerd always trying to pick up babes, but, to be honest, I can’t remember why he had to be in the movie. Wait, it just came back. About halfway through “Avalanche Sharks” he explained to a gum-chewing snow bunny in tight leggings what they were and who cast the spell that created them. The shark maker was a shaman called Snookum, Skoonum, Spoonim, Spatula, something like that. His sharks existed to avenge the deaths of a native people extinguished by greedy settlers and protect their once-home, the mountain where the ski resort was built.

Snow sharks defending sacred ground is a neat idea for a movie. Had “Avalanche Sharks” been executed properly, like the movie “Big Ass Spider!” Del and I reviewed most recently, I’d be clamoring for a sequel. Instead, because I’m always searching for the slimmest glimmer of good in the very bad such as the Donald Moron Trump poser presidency and its straight-up lying about the risks of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’m forced to conclude the unearthly man-eating spirits in “Avalanche Sharks” were the movie’s only redeeming quality. Some effort and a little bit of computing power was spent to present the light blue predators. Their crystalline and armored dorsal fins looked pretty cool slicing through snow. The fins left narrow ruts. Nice touch. When the sharks lunged from the snow to snack on humans, the special effects, including whole shark bodies and blood splatter, were good. The practical physical effects were misses much more often than hits. Yes, the legs severed mid-chin with boots still on or the disembowelment looked not bad. “Avalanche Sharks” failed miserably when it tried to make snow look blood stained, however. That mattered because there was a lot of snow turning red in the movie. The color of the blood was neither deep red to suggest low oxygenation nor bright red to illustrate oxygen saturation. Rather, it was a semi-fluorescent-pinky-not-quite-chartreuse that looked like the color a kindergartner might choose to draw a tomato.

Look, the bars are closed or should be. Eating at a restaurant is absurd. The shopping mall was long ago buried by Amazon. It isn’t a good idea to visit your grandma or work out at the gym. You’ve already re-watched the Brady Bunch reunion 13 times. Like Del, see “Avalanche Sharks” because you have nothing better to do.

Del’s take

If I croak tomorrow I won’t finish “Away” Season 1, and it’ll be Mladen’s fault for making me watch the dreadful “Avalanche Sharks.” I hope feeling guilty about that keeps him awake an extra hour tonight.

Did I say “Avalanche Sharks” was “dreadful”? I meant “awful” – not the towering awful of a “Plan 9 From Outer Space” or the hilarious awful of its obvious progenitor, “Sharknado,” but a tired, shopworn awful, apparently from people trying to pull off a low-fi cash grab, a Monday morning Yugo of movies.

The story goes like this: A group of spring breakers descends (ascends?) on a ski lodge for some mid-semester fun. Unfortunately for them – and the local sheriff who was hoping for a quiet season – some unknown entity is devouring the tourists. There’s a crazy old coot from the deep forest who warns the sheriff, ski lodge owner and town mayor that they have returned, but the mayor is having none of this talk about theys, thems or any other sinister-sounding pronoun, to the agreement and delight of the ski lodge owner. The sheriff and brother of one of the disappeared set out to solve the riddle of the missing fratboys with their fatty liver disease, and that’s when the fake bloody snow flies.

Where to begin enumerating “Avalanche Sharks’ ” avalanche of sin?

The script appears to have been written by a study hall committee of horny teenage middle school boys. Acting was on par with the displays at Madame Tussauds. Every character in the movie is so unlikeable in some way you hope they end up being chomped in half by the “sharks.” If you took the essential parts of “Jaws” and “Animal House,” stapled them together and made them awful, you’d have the plot.

I mean, throughout the 82 minutes required to endure this crap, I felt like I was watching a version of “Alien” edited for C-Span.

The charm, if that is the right word, of these crappy D-level movies is that their makers usually know they are crappy D-level movies and play off the crappiness for laughs. “Sharknado” is a prime example. But “Avalanche Shark” neither acknowledges its crap quotient nor tries to capitalize on it. It is a long, dreary slide down the bunny run of cinematic stupidness that would not even pass muster on “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”

Mladen gave “Avalanche Sharks” a D- and that sounds about right for me. I am saving my F’s for movies that infuriate me with their incompetence and this one didn’t do that. I just didn’t care enough to hate it.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.

Image courtesy of Epic Pictures Group.

“Big Ass Spider” Starring Greg Grunberg, Clare Kramer, Lombardo Boyar, Lin Shaye and Ruben Pla. Directed by Mike Mendez. 80 minutes. Rated PG-13. Amazon Prime.

Del’s take

I’m shocked – SHOCKED, I tell you – that Mladen consented to review a movie rated PG-13.

Wasn’t it on these very pages he vowed to never again sully his pristine sensory apparati with a lowly PG-13-rated film? Wasn’t he worried that such unwashed entertainment might detract from his snarly joie de vie?

Yet here he is, slumming with “Big Ass Spider,” a PG-13-rated farce that even my cynical ass got a kick out of. I guess Mladen’s moratorium on almost-family-friendly films doesn’t apply to comedies.

Although I wouldn’t call “Big Ass Spider” a comedy per se. It’s more of a lighthearted romp … with a giant, man-eating spider that skewers half of Los Angeles, a military commander who wants to blow up the other half of Los Angeles, and a lowly exterminator who, despite his modest lineage and lack of leading man pecs, sets out to overcome this eight-legged nonsense, winning the girl and the day.

The gossamer-thin plot goes like this: A spider escapes from an experimental military facility and starts eating its way across LA. The more it eats, the bigger it gets. It takes up residence in a hospital – a veritable buffet for a large carnivore – which draws the attention of nice-guy exterminator Alex Mathis (Greg Grunberg), who is a patient at the hospital after being bitten by – can you guess – a spider. The hospital agrees to write off his bill if Alex will write off whatever critter just sank its chompers into the staff mortician. Meanwhile, the military swoops in and declares martial law, allowing Alex to fall for a cute L.T., Karly Brant (Clare Kramer). Alex is determined to win Karly’s heart, despite her withering disdain for his, and sets off with sidekick Jose Ramos (Lombardo Boyar), a hospital security guard, to kill the now house-sized spider, save Los Angeles and make an impression on Karly.

“Big Ass Spider” is like “Godzilla” on helium. It’s all silly fun – except for the thousands of people who die – which lands the movie in the not heavily populated science fiction-horror-comedy category. You’ll find yourself giggling because the movie makes no attempt to take itself seriously, except for the pretty good special effects, and you’ll be rooting for Alex because he strikes you as the kind of guy who might park his battered van in your driveway to clean out the trap in your kitchen drain. He’s just a regular Joe, overweight, overworked and underpaid. Boyar is pretty funny as Ramos, the timid security guard who grows a pair of cojones over the course of the movie, though I’m surprised the Thought Police haven’t protested his caricature of Hispanic males. The other performances made less of an impression on me. They fit the standard models for their characters.

I had never heard of this movie until Mladen suggested it, and when I looked it up I also found several TV episodes of the same name. Don’t be confused – this is the 2013 movie by director Mike Mendez.

“Big Ass Spider” was favorably received by the public but of course, movie reviewers trashed it as schtick. I might have thought the same before I had that corncob removed from my ass. “Big Ass Spider” is not high art, not that high art is very entertaining. Like I said, it’s silly fun. I can think of far worse ways to spend 80 minutes of my life.

I give it a B.

Mladen’s take

Leave it to Del to try to upend my unfettered enthusiasm for a movie. Until I read his review, I had no idea “Big Ass Spider!” was PG-13. There’s at least one face melting and shots of faces that had already been melted. There’s blood splatter. But, there wasn’t big-ass swearing or, unfortunately, nudity. So, yeah, no R-rating.

Until Mr. Corncob Now Removed dropped the rating thing in my lap, my only beef with “Big Ass Spider!” was the spelling. Did the filmmakers want the movie’s title to be descriptive or reflect the fact the arachnid is a new species? The spider is large. It eventually grows a few building stories tall and wider than a boulevard. So, should the film title have included a hyphenated compound adjective, as in “Big-Ass,” to let the viewer know from the get-go that the movie is about a huge beast. If the goal was to simply name a specimen fresh to nature, “Big Ass Spider!” remains acceptable. I contend the movie title should’ve been hyphenated because the beast is a man-induced mutation, a combination of Martian DNA and a black widow-like (note the hyphen) spider native to Earth. “Big Ass” describes the spider, rendering the hyphen necessary. “Big Ass” isn’t the spider’s scientific name, which would have disallowed hyphenation.

“Big Ass Spider!”, hereafter referred to as “BAS!” to shield our moral readers from the cuss word “ass,” is a delightful farce that mocks sci-fi horror films by incorporating many of the tropes of the genre. Examples are:

The advantage of a farce is that it can pull off the tropes by making them amusing. “BAS!” does that very well. The script is solid and the actors do the dialogue sincerely and mirthfully. They were enjoying themselves. The visual effects, both computer-generated and of material substance such as monster goo and webs, are surprisingly pleasing and when they’re not such as the “BAS!” fires, you don’t care because the film is a farce by design. 

“BAS!” is not a B-movie, though it cost, I’m guessing, $8.37 to make. It’s significantly better than at least a couple of expensive A-movies and by those I mean Alien3, Prometheus, and Alien: Covenant. Sure, “BAS!” steals a little bit from the very good “Starship Troopers” and the excellent “Aliens,” but that’s the point. By mocking the good and the bad of sci-fi effectively, “BAS!” fulfills its purpose.

The movie also made the best of shooting in real-world locations that fit inside its, ah, limited budget. There was no travel to exotic locales to get the background of a lush tropical forest or towering mountains. When the action was outdoors, it was filmed amid the brownish hue of what I took to be Southern California. The spider’s raid on a park full of people was darned entertaining, including the child in jeopardy. I detest when movies put children in danger. With “BAS!” I was OK with it for some reason.

“BAS!” has a sparing run time of 80 minutes. In moviemaking these days that seems an unfathomably short duration. And, it’s also one of the reasons I give “Big Ass Spider!”, despite its misspelled title and PG-13 rating, an A. Everyone tied to making the film stayed true to its character, including length. One minute longer and the movie would’ve failed.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.

Image courtesy of Warner Brothers.

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“Gravity” Starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Directed by Alfonso Cuaron. 91 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Del’s take

“Gravity” is a stunning spectacle of special effects and a riveting depiction of the human will to survive. But its characters are thinly sketched and their motivations contrived, which pulls the movie from the lofty realm of a classic to the merely good, despite the “buzz” and Oscar talk.

In “Gravity,” Sandra Bullock plays Dr. Ryan Stone, a mission specialist, on her first space shuttle flight. She and old hand astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) are part of a Hubble Space Telescope repair team which falls afoul of a Russian anti-satellite test gone wrong. The ensuing cloud of orbiting debris, traveling at thousands of miles per hour, destroys their shuttle and leaves Stone and Kowalski in orbit – alone.

They must make their way to the International Space Station, and from there a Chinese space station, all the while dodging a killer cloud of orbiting junk and racing against the clock before their oxygen is depleted. At every turn their efforts are thwarted by the expected and unexpected perils presented by spaceflight.

The star of “Gravity” is not Bullock but the special effects. We did not see the 3-D version but I expect it is spectacular. Even in 2-D you feel as though you’re floating above the earth with nothing between you and the ground but 150 miles of vacuum and 50 miles of air. For sufferers of acrophobia (like yours truly) the view was sometimes sweaty palm-inducing. Never in a movie did I feel as though I were actually there, and the claustrophobia of being confined to a spacesuit with no option to pop the helmet and take a breath of fresh air was so pervasive it almost became a third character.

And “Gravity” is an edge-of-your-seat thriller to be sure. Pauses in tension are few, and you’ll come out of the theater with aching muscles as you tried to help Bullock push this way and pull that. In that respect “Gravity” strikes me as more of an “Armageddon” and less of an “Apollo 13.”

As I said, the characters are thinly sketched, which may have been a necessity given “Gravity’s” narrative structure. Still, we get to know Dr. Stone somewhat but nobody else, including astronaut Kowalski. As you might expect under the circumstances Stone has a fatalistic view of her outcome and it is amplified by the loss of a child, requiring that she be coached and encouraged by Kowalski. That struck me as contrived and unnecessary. No matter how highly educated and motivated astronauts can be, and no matter what their burdens, when the issue at hand is survival every individual will behave predictably, and try to live. Bullock’s character does evolve during the movie, and that’s what all good characters do: They change as a result of their experiences. But in Bullock’s case the change seemed forced.

I found it puzzling Cuaron chose to abide by some scientific principles and ignore others. After reading astronomer Neil Degrasse Tyson’s enumeration of the scientific errors in “Gravity,” I came prepared to ignore them for the benefit of watching a great story. But during the movie I found myself distracted by the implausibilities.

Is “Gravity” the best movie of the year? Is Bullock’s performance worthy of an Oscar? I would say no on both counts. While “Gravity” is entertaining, and Bullock’s performance commendable, I didn’t come out of the theater with any lasting impression of either.

Still, it’s nice to see a film that isn’t a sequel and isn’t based on some “blockbuster” premise make its way to theaters and do well at the box office. Maybe Hollywood can take a lesson from “Gravity” and return to making films from original stories.

Mladen’s take

(Spoiler alert)

“Gravity” is one of my worst movie-going fears realized, a film promising action but delivering little more than maudlin introspection.

The movie betrayed me. It also betrayed Del, though he doesn’t fully accept it.

Del summed the plot nicely. A series of improbable events sires both the prospect of our heroine dying alone in space or surviving despite implacable odds.

Had “Gravity” fulfilled its promise, what I would’ve seen was an intelligent, nicely configured middle-aged woman give fate the middle finger as she demonstrated what training, technical prowess, and a will to live can accomplish.

In response, fate would’ve contributed not only dumb-ass Russians inopportunely blowing up one of their own satellites to create a hypervelocity constellation of space debris holing everything in its path, but also micrometeorites, sun flares, gravitons, an atmosphere salient jutting far into space that threatened incineration if entered, and an interesting sidekick for Stone rather than the quasi-cowboy-like character portrayed by Clooney.

Instead, the film yields sequences of free-floating, spin-induced disorientation and bodies slamming into solid objects such as space modules. Each bit of extra-atmospheric action is followed by moments of a person talking to herself about staying hopeful and alive. Hell, Stone even references Heaven at one point, though earlier she had said to herself that she never prays. This “no-one-in-a-foxhole-is-an-atheist” triteness only added to the movie’s superfluous feel.

Efforts to convey the spiritual impact of what Stone and Kowalski, and then Stone alone, faced were as empty as the vacuum of space. Kowalski’s seemingly unselfish and chivalrous suicide was nothing of the sort because it was unnecessary.

Suicide comes along again when Stone, ensconced in a Russian – there they are again – Soyuz vehicle, decides there’s no chance of surviving. She turns off the capsule’s oxygen supply and begins to pass out when there’s a knock on the capsule’s door. It’s handsome Kowalski waving to her through the door’s portal. The silliness of it just about exploded my head.

Kowalski, of course, is a figment of Stone’s oxygen-starved imagination. The apparition, after he takes a swig of vodka craftily hidden aboard the capsule by one of Kowalski’s cosmonaut friends, tells Stone how to make the best of a very, very, very, very, very bad situation. Yes, the capsule’s main engine is out of fuel, but its soft-landing thrusters have the juice to get her to the Chinese space station, which has a fully functioning return-to-Earth capsule.

A fiery atmospheric reentry scene and near-drowning later, Stone swims to the shore of a pristine lake surrounded by an idyllic land, not a single artifact of humanity in sight. Stone is going to get a fresh start was the message of the film’s last scene.

Who cares?

Not me.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical editor. Del Stone Jr. is a journalist and author.

Image courtesy of Roger Brown at Pexels. https://www.pexels.com/@roger-brown-3435524/

I got up this morning about 3:30 to use the bathroom. When I turned on the light I saw something move.

There, on the bathroom floor, stood a cockroach – not one of the cute TV commercial cartoon roaches that checks into the roach hotel but doesn’t check out. This was a bull, so big it didn’t care about its surroundings or the fact that I’d turned on the light.

I was paralyzed by fear. What to do? If I sprayed it the thing would go crazy, probably start flying around, crawl into a hidden nook then emerge once the lights were off to crawl into my mouth.

But I couldn’t squash it. When squashed roaches release a chemical marker that attracts other roaches – I read that somewhere. Besides, I didn’t want to get close enough to the infernal thing to squash it. And I no longer had a cat I could sic on it.

I decided to take my chances with the spray.

I went downstairs to fetch a can of Raid. When I came back, the roach was gone. I searched for it – from a distance – when suddenly it scuttled between my feet. I did the Crazy Dance; the roach did the Crazy Dance and scurried under my bed. Great. Now I’d never find it.

I circled the bed a few times, hoping it would come out, but when it didn’t I mustered the courage to get on my hands and knees and peer under the bed. There it was, nonchalantly marching across the carpet. I gave it a shot of insecticide and the thing went berserk. It headed for the other side and I jumped up and ran around the corner of the mattress to intercept.

When it came out I hosed it. The thing went bonkers and started running everywhere. I kept up my attack and its wings began to flutter. I took off for the door, ready to bail out of the second floor if that thing launched itself into the air.

I lost track of it for a moment, then BAM! There it was, skittering past my feet. I gave it another blast of Raid and it finally rolled over on its back and started doing one-legged backstrokes in circles.

God, what a nightmare. I soaked it again and it finally lay still.

Then I was faced with the problem of getting rid of it. No way was I going to touch it, not even with a wadded up paper towel. Roaches have a habit of springing back to life when disturbed from their death knells.

I went downstairs and got the vacuum cleaner. Plugged it in, detached the hose, turned it on and sucked that disgusting creature into the dust bin. Except I couldn’t see it in the dust bun.

Later that morning, I took the vacuum cleaner outside and dumped the dust bin in the trash can. No roach. And it wasn’t trapped in the filter, either.

That means it’s somewhere inside the vacuum cleaner and one day in the near future it’ll come tumbling out, giving me another fright.

With luck it won’t came scrambling out!

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, Ello and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures.

—

“Elysium” Starring Matt Damon, Alice Braga, Jodie Foster and Sharlto Copley. Directed by Neill Blomkamp. 1 hour, 49 minutes. Rated R.

Mladen’s take

It’s tough to criticize a movie where the poor and luckless prevail, because that’s the way the sentimental slugfest “Elysium” ends.

Elysium, derived from the Greek phrase for ideal happiness, is a space station orbiting squalid Earth. The planet in 2154 is a vast slum teeming with poverty, crime and illness. Elysium is a skyborne paradise for wealthies and their “med bays.”

Medical treatment is at the core of this film by the director of nearly perfect “District 9,” which was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar a few years ago. The med bays are scanners that detect bodily maladies and then heal them.

And it’s a med bay that our not always heroic hero Max, played by Matt Damon, has to reach. He can’t buy access to the off-planet treatment, so he becomes part of a grand scheme.

Max, a reformed car thief, has been exposed to a lethal dose of radiation at an Earth-located police android factor where he works. A med bay is the only way to repair his cells. From internally fried body to death is only five days, the extraction droid that pulled Max from the spot he was nuked tells him.
“Elysium” is a movie that requires that you pay attention because there are at least three subplots. The film also asks that you accept at least one far-fetched coincidence.

There’s a villainess, Elysium’s defense secretary Delacourt, played by Jodie Foster.

There’s her Earth-planted, off-the-books paramilitary spook and sadist Kruger, who develops an ambition of his own.

And there’s the other reason Max has to reach Elysium, the daughter of a not-quite love interest, Frey, portrayed by Alice Braga. Frey’s daughter, actress Emma Tremblay, has leukemia and needs access to a med bay, too.

Add a computer hacktivist, machine-to-brain data storage, exoskeletons fused to bodies, solid cussing and graphic violence, much of it the result of miniaturized smart munitions designed to take out individuals, and the result is a sci-fi fairy tale of a selfish man becoming selfless, of the masses finding what the wealthy had been enjoying for some time, eternal life.

In a med bay, not even the blown off lower part of a man’s head is immune from repair. As long as the brain is ticking and the body sufficiently intact, tissue can be repaired.

As with “District 9,” Blomkamp maintains control of CGI. It exists to enhance the story, not supplant it. And, as with District 9, the South African director likes to blow apart bodies.

“Elysium” tries to, and at the end, succeeds in tugging your heart. Its plot pulls you through the sometimes choppy story-telling.

But, the film’s real strength is the vivid portrayal of lives differentiated by access to money, health care included.

When the most recent United Kingdom royal was having a baby, she had it at an exclusive hospital with, no doubt, the best doctors and technology at her side.

The frenzied attention television and Internet paid attention to the birth in pristine conditions was appalling.

So, while the globe was fed imagery of a hospital in a fashionable neighborhood of London, I was wondering what it was like to give birth in a Syrian refugee camp on the border with Lebanon or Turkey or Jordan.

The precursors to med bays are here, now. Welcome to Elysium 2013, if you can afford it.

Del’s take

Mladen was right about one thing: “It’s tough to criticize a movie where the poor and luckless prevail,” … But that’s precisely what I intend to do. I found “Elysium” to be a simple-minded polemic about class warfare, a story that has been told more skillfully and entertainingly many times since the dawn of storytelling.

“Elysium” is a contrast in extremes. Reality as we know it is black, white, and all the shades in between. That quality is missing from Blomkamp’s stark vision of the future. What’s good is deliriously utopian, and what’s bad is worse than awful. As a result, it’s hard to take any of it very seriously.

Mladen has given you the basics of the setting, but I’ll elaborate: Earth has indeed been overrun by poverty, crime and illness, but it’s worse than that. Los Angeles is a slum built on a garbage dump, a Third World shantytown where even the basics of infrastructure don’t exist. People are subjugated by a violent police force of androids who arbitrarily beat and arrest people for minor infractions. Even Matt Damon’s parole officer, a robot, threatens him with arrest for being sarcastic (one of the film’s sparse light moments).

Then you have Elysium, the orbiting torus where the grass is green, every home is a mansion, and the citizens possess a gentility conveyed by wealth, status, and comfortable living, abetted by their medical bays that can cure every disease by simply “re-atomizing” the person’s cell structure. I’ll bet the folks behind Obamacare would like to get their hands on that one.

The price for admission is money, something the unwashed masses don’t possess. So in a crude parable of illegal immigration, people pay smugglers to get them aboard Elysium.

Except it isn’t a better life these people are seeking. It isn’t freedom from tyranny, clean water, fresh air, and opportunities to improve themselves that drive these people to Elysium. It is: health care.

Don’t get me wrong. Health care is important, especially when you’re terminally ill, as is Damon and the daughter of his former love interest. But in the sweep of human motivation, where empires hang in the balance, isn’t health care a tad farther down the list behind freedom and hope?

I’m not buying it. I’m not buying that rich people are evil, as the film seems to suggest. For every snooty scion who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, there’s another fellow who earned his wealth by coming up with a better idea and working his backside off to make it happen. For every rich snob who looks down his nose at folks in the lower tax brackets, there’s a Warren Buffet or Bill Gates who uses his wealth to better mankind.

Nor am I buying that people less financially endowed are hapless victims, doomed to suffer the whims of the wealthy. In fact, I find it insulting Blomkamp thinks so little of us. In “Elysium,” people who try to better their lives are beaten into submission, which serves neither the rich nor the poor. It doesn’t make any sense.

My biggest gripe with “Elysium” is it ignores the real problem. The film asks, “Wouldn’t life be better if the poor had access to the same level of health care as the wealthy?” I ask, “What about overpopulation?” “What about violence?” “What about pollution?” “What about all the awful oversights and neglected problems that caused the earth to become a foul wasteland?” All the health care in the world amounts to nothing if humanity is starving, living in a toxic environment, and deprived of hope.

In “Elysium,” the answers are simple. In the world I inhabit, they are far more complex. I could wish for a utopian fantasy, but that’s all it would be: a fantasy.

I’d rather my stories offer hope in a way that’s believable and realistic. “Elysium” offers neither.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical editor. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.

Last night I was talking to Mom about my visit today with Dr. Norman Friedman, a local dermatologist. I had several objects on my face I wanted removed, plus my family doctor recommended I have him look at a mole on my cheek.

Mom said if I had procedures done and needed a ride home to give her a call. “Don’t worry, Mom,” I told her. “He’s not going to do anything (today) except look at everything and schedule an appointment for me to come in and have things cut off.”

Well.

As I sat in his examination room he began looking me over. He paid close attention to an object on my lower back, something I hadn’t known was there. He said he was certain it was a skin cancer, but the good news was that in removing it for a biopsy, it would be gone and no follow-up treatment necessary. Then he asked why I’d come to see him. I told him about the objects on my face. He checked them and said, “We’ll remove those just for fun, though I warn you, the procedure is painful.” Great.

First, he took off the offender on my lower back. Then he used some kind of cauterizing device to burn the area. “Phew, that stinks!” I told him. “That’s the aroma of roasted Del,” he answered.

Then he laid me on the examination table to go after the facial objects. He warned me again it was painful and said he’d do one just to test my pain threshold. I’m already a big baby when it comes to doctors, and a bigger baby when it comes to pain, so I was expecting something akin to a root canal. He took a stylus-like object and began tracing it over one of the areas. It was painful, yes, but not so painful I couldn’t stand it. I’m thinking it applied an electric current to the area, scorching the flesh – heck, I don’t know. He did the rest of the areas plus a couple of others for good measure.

As his nurse explained to me how to care for the area on my back, she noticed another area that looked suspicious. She thought about it for a minute, then went to fetch Dr. Friedman for another look. He debated removing it, then finally decided it was better to be safe than sorry. Another Novocain shot, more scraping, more burning. All the while we chatted about the joys of kidney stones.

My face feels like I’ve got a sunburn, but I’m very happy to be rid of these things. I’m even happier to be rid of the one I didn’t know about, the one that was likely cancerous.

So I encourage you to visit your local dermatologist if you haven’t been in awhile. I hadn’t seen Dr. Friedman since 2006 and that was clearly too long to wait. I plan to make it an annual affair.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

Image courtesy of Paramount Studios.

—

“Star Trek Into Darkness” Starring Chris Pine, Benedict Cumberbatch, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Peter Weller. Directed by JJ Abrams. 132 minutes. Rated PG.

Mladen’s take

After watching “Star Trek Into Darkness,” I decided to produce and direct my own movie. It’ll be titled: “Mladen Rudman Into Frustration.”

The most recent version of Star Trek left me feeling unsatisfied, as though I had ordered a steak but gotten cotton candy.

A few parts of the film were good; most others stank. The circumstance that allowed Scotty to stay alive to open the door of an air lock that permitted a commando raid on the bigger and badder version of the U.S.S. Enterprise was all stinkiness.

The scene was all the more stinky because it was crucial. Had Scotty not stayed alive, the film would have had no place to go. The End. An implausible scene that keeps a story going wrecks a movie’s authenticity.

And, there’s too much crying in the movie.

Here’s a rule all producers and directors should follow when building a science fiction adventure film.

A man cries only when he’s enduring extreme physical pain. Your large intestine twisted into a half-hitch knot being chewed by a pit bull is an example of extreme pain. Tears are warranted in that case. Everything else – a friend dying from exposure to radiation – is a prompt for murderous revenge without tears intervening.

“Into Darkness” suffers from the Great Malaise of Hollywood, which Del addresses indirectly. He wonders if “Into Darkness” would appeal to everyone but Trekkies, which is precisely the point.

The studio should have stayed focused.

The studio should have made it a movie that would be liked only by Trekkies and guys like me who appreciate a good sci-fi film though mostly unfamiliar with the lore of Star Trek.

Look, all I need to know is that the crew of the Enterprise has been tasked with boldly going where no one has gone before and, when necessary, blowing the hell out of nasty indigenous life forms.

That friendships exist can be established by the way an away team dodges death rays and demolishes starships. Or by the fact that a crew stuck on an interstellar vessel for months at a time hasn’t torn itself apart.

We all know that humans like to couple and endure the emotional ravages of relationships going awry. Who cares about Spock’s and Uhura’s dating woes when you’re at the edge of the Neutral Zone violating the Klingon empire’s sovereignty? If I want a dose of the touchy feelies, I’ll see a “Twilight” movie.

In fact, I resent their squabbling and I’ll tell you why. It happened aboard a shuttle approaching a Klingon planet. The shuttle scene should have been replaced by something “Into Darkness” sorely lacked – open space battles among ships floating in a vacuum. What I wanted to see was a cloaked Klingon warbird suddenly materialize to fire on the Enterprise.

Remember the Romulan starship Narada in the very good 2009 “Star Trek”?

Narada was massive, looked like a multi-bladed serrated knife and fired missiles that fired smart submunitions targeting an enemy’s most sensitive systems. Watching U.S.S. Kelvin wither under its fire, the scenes of obliteration outside the spacecraft were silent, was impressive and accurate.

Abrams tried to make “Into Darkness” a movie that pleases everyone – women, men, teenagers, dogs, sea cucumbers – and will likely end up pleasing almost no one.

Del’s take

What I would say about “Star Trek Into Darkness” is: Yet another movie ruined by writer Damon Lindelof.

How long will it be until studios bar their pitch room doors to this person? If M. Night Shyamalan is any indication, I guess we can expect a long and dismal tradition of “Prometheuses” springing from the keyboard of the overrated Lindelof, who seems to understand nothing about story structure, character interaction and pathos.

It’s a shame, really, because “Into Darkness” could have been a fine summer movie. Instead, it is a collage of spangly images held together by a thin gossamer of story, a web so insubstantial that very little gets caught and the audience leaves hungry.

Its saving grace is a script that allows for a little self-deprecating fun, and command performances by at least three cast members: Chris Pine, Benedict Cumberbatch and Peter Weller. Others praised Zachary Quinto’s turn as Mr. Spock (though he and Leonard Nimoy assemble a much better performance in an Audi commercial) or the ensemble Star Trek “family” members (Saldana, Anton Yelchin and John Cho).

I’ve never thought much of Pine as an actor but I admit, he seems to capture my notion of a younger, friskier James Tiberius Kirk, whose disregard for protocol and willingness to indulge in gut instinct chafes the collective neck of the powers that be.

Peter Weller walks a highwire between bad and good, what I call “reasonable evil” – a person who’s able to convince others of the righteousness of his cause without sounding like a lunatic. For me he evoked a memory of Sterling Hayden in “Doctor Strangelove,” a man who, when you stand back and look at the cold truth of his worldview, is obviously insane, but sounds somewhat reasonable – his words make a kind of sense that doesn’t bear close inspection.

Better, “Into Darkness” isn’t just dominated but overwhelmed by Benedict Cumberbatch, the mysterious trenchcoated figure in the posters and trailers. Had Cumberbatch been given room to move he might have become the most insidious movie villain since Hans Gruber of “Die Hard” infamy. Unfortunately, his screen time is limited, to the movie’s detriment.

The movie ties together some loose threads from “Star Treks” that preceded it, and I won’t discuss them here for fear of spoiling the surprises. Suffice it to say you should brush up on your Trek lore before venturing into the darkness.

Weaknesses? The real plot of “Into Darkness” orbits Weller and Cumberbatch, who are given the short shrift in favor of the unconvincing bromance between Kirk and Spock, the wildly unconvincing romance between Spock and Uhura, and the silly notion Kirk should be allowed to run amok and do as he pleases, disregarding the accumulated wisdom of the human race. It’s a wonder we ever got into space without him.

Special effects are first rate. London and San Francisco get a 23rd century dressing up, and Enterprise interiors look less like a deep space-going craft than a 21st century corporate high-rise – that is until you venture into “Engineering,” which resembles nothing more than a glue factory.

Overall, however, I couldn’t escape the feeling I was watching a fleshed-out TV episode of a show based loosely on the original “Star Trek.” Gone is the wonder of discovery, the “new worlds” and “new civilizations” that made the original series such a unique experience, replaced by an irritating Millennial approach to work and life: To hell with your rules and institutions; I’ll do what I want, when I want.

Trekkies will probably be disappointed, which is OK if you can deliver a product that pleases everybody else. It’s the everybody else I wonder about. Is there enough meat on the bones of “Into Darkness” to please the larger movie-going audience?

At this point I can’t say there is. Its skimpy storyline, which I place squarely on the shoulders of writers like Lindelof, doom it to mediocrity.

As Hollywood struggles to woo fans into theaters and away from Netflix, it does not need a $190 million tentpole that underperforms at the box office. “Into Darkness” may not do as well as the 2009 rendering of “Star Trek,” which would be bad news for hosting studio Paramount and JJ Abrams.

Let’s hope he keeps Lindelhof in a galaxy far, far away from “Star Wars.”

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and public information officer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.

Life has changed dramatically since I was a boy, so dramatically I sometimes must remind myself I’m the same person who got up to change the TV channel, then tune the correct color balance. The world of my childhood was much different than today, in some ways better but in many ways not.

When I was a boy, American cars ruled the road – not just Chevys, Fords and Chryslers, but Nashes, Ramblers and other makes from companies that no longer exist. “Foreign” cars consisted of Volkswagen Bugs, MGs and the occasional Triumph. There were no Japanese cars. Also, people tend to think of extended cab pickup trucks as a recent development, but Dodge made extended cabs back in the ’60s for the U.S. Air Force. And Ford produced a large van called the Falcon (not the car) that rivaled anything built by Chrysler these days.

TV sets were giant boxes that sat in the corner of the living room. They were furniture, not cute little devices that could be put anywhere, and they were filled with tubes that often burned out. When a tube burned out you had to take off the back of the TV, find the offending tube, take it to a hardware store and plug it in to a machine called a tube tester. Once the tube tester confirmed it had burned out, you bought a new tube and plugged it into the TV. If you were lucky, the TV would start working. If not, you had to find the other tube that burned out.

There were no remotes. You had to get up, cross the living room and manually switch the channel with a knob. Sometimes the contacts on the knob would wear out and the TV wouldn’t tune the channel. If you had a color TV – and we didn’t get one until 1966 – you had to manually adjust the color between each network, which at the time consisted of ABC, NBC and CBS. ABC tended to produce “hot” colors, lots of reds and oranges. CBS was in the middle and NBC produced “cold” colors, bland flesh tones that always needed warming up. My sister Sandie was the champion of color balancing the picture.

Telephones were hunks of metal sitting on their own table in a strategic location. Later, we graduated to Bakelite phones mounted on the wall. Rich people had extensions in their bedrooms. It was not unusual to share a “party line” with other houses in your neighborhood. You would pick up the phone and hear other people talking. Sometimes, you had to tell them to get off the phone so you could use it.

We didn’t have icemakers. We had ice cube trays – and not the bendable plastic trays where the ice cubes pop out. These were metal contraptions with a lift arm that bent the dividers, creating fractures in the ice. You dumped the cubes into the bucket and filled the tray with water and put it back in the freezer. It was a rule the last person to use all the ice was responsible for filling the trays. This produced violent arguments about which miscreant hadn’t filled the trays.

Only the better-off families could afford a dishwasher. We washed and dried dishes by hand. Again, whose turn it was to wash dishes became a source of friction in the household.

There were no video games but plenty of board games – Monolopy, Life, Yahtzee, CandyLand, and card games.

Microwave ovens came out in 1966 and we thought they were magical. Still, we wondered if they weren’t irradiating our food. In the early ’80s, cordless phones arrived. Again, we thought they were magical. I used to brag about being able to talk on the phone and do housework at the same time. We got cable TV in the mid-’60s and it was a gift from the rabbit-eared god – until the cable went out. I remember waiting all summer for a critical scene in the afternoon soap opera “Dark Shadows,” only to have the darned TV cable crap out just before it happened. VCRs and 8-track tapes came out in the late ’70s and early ’80s. You could buy a blank VCR tape for $20, while a pre-recorded movie cost between $80 and $90. Our first home computer was a “Trash 80” that you hooked up to your TV so you could have a “monitor.” Digital calculators emerged in the early ’70s but cost anywhere from $50 to over $200. I worked for Texas Instruments building calculators in the summer of ’74 – one of the best jobs I’ve ever had.

I got my first home computer in 1991, an IBM PS1, and you could access AOL or another online “community” whose name I’ve forgotten. Problem was internet usage cost by the minute, so going online was a costly affair. I sent my first e-mail in 1990 and was amazed when I got a response. It was to a friend who worked at Eglin Air Force Base. I thought it was the stuff of science fiction. In 1995 I purchased my first cellphone, a Motorola flip phone. The thing barely worked because the network of cellphone towers didn’t exist.

And that’s the way it went. Eventually ATM cards, satellite TV, smart phones, terrabyte hard drives, fuel injection and HDTV replaced the world I once knew. I confess it’s been a struggle trying to keep up with everything. Bulletin boards, Usenet and Gopher Space have been supplanted by Facebook and other social media networks. Frozen food tastes as good or better than fresh, despite my beloved “TV dinners” of Salisbury steak, peas and carrots, and mashed potatoes and gravy. On twitter I communicate directly with scientists, whereas in the past I would’ve mailed a typewritten letter and hoped for a response.

The new world has better technology. What I liked about the old was its innocence and focus.

But I feel lucky to have lived in both.

About the author:

Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”

Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.

As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.

Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .

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