I went to see Star Trek, for the second time, at the AMC Hoffman in Alexandria.  We went there because we wanted to see the movie on an Imax screen.  Sadly, the AMC Hoffman offers Fake Imax.  Now, it wasn’t a complete rip-off.  Fake Imax still looks better than the digital projection screen we’d seen it on the first time.  But it was a long ways from being a real Imax experience.

The movie itself holds up magnificently.  There is one long section, beginning from Kirk’s exit from the Enterprise, and going at least until he meets Scotty, that is just painfully bad.  A mish-mash of un-motivated action, stunning coincidence, and exceptionally bad physics/astronomy, I just had to bite my tongue and wait it out.  When the movie gets it’s feet back underneath it, the awesomeness returns.

One version of the story was the movie, Colossus, that came out in 1970.  Steeped in both cold war paranoia and 50s-style scientist-hero myth, this could have been done as a Twilight Zone episode.  A really good episode.  This is not an action movie, or an atmospheric horror piece.  It’s more of a deconstruction of the confident, proud scientist soldier, holding up under the pressure of a creation gone bad.

Colossus is a giant computer, designed to take over control of all the country’s strategic missiles.  Thus, there would be a precise, objective response to any attack.  Viewers may instantly think this is a bad idea, but the confidence of the scientists seems very reassuring.  Even though we know things will go wrong, we sort of believe they did the right thing.  They figured it out, and they have excellent vision.  But Colossus finds a buddy, the Soviets have built one also.

The progress of bad things is done without the usual pyrotechnics, but feels real and inexorable.  After nuking one town in Russia, the computers can order humans to do pretty much anything.  How the good looking, super-smart scientist tries to fight this takeover is a fairly well-grounded game between humans and computers.  No “24″ style plot-magic here, almost every move and counter-move sounds like what people would really do.

The direction this movie takes at the end raises it to a higher level.  This is a movie that pulls no punches, and may reflect our relationship with many of the great technologies we’ve created, then become dependent upon.  Twilight Zone had some pretty damn good stories, stories that didn’t just scare us, but looked a bit closer at our relationship to the world around us.  This movie, though not a big-budget masterpiece like 2001, really gets to the relationship between creator and created, much like Mary Shelley did.

At some point, when a shoot-out in strip club is the obvious next scene, there are, for no apparent reason, strippers shooting automatic weapons.  It’s not the last time strippers show up to a firefight, and no explanation is given.  You don’t need one in a movie like this.

This is the kind of movie where you can take a living head out of the tank of fluid in which it was living, and drop kick into the pool.  It makes perfect sense.  And, when Chilios calls the doctor and finds out that one way he can re-charge the internal battery that is powering his temporary artificial heart is by rubbing up against someone else, you think: of course.  Of course that would be it.

The movie may not be a great movie, not in terms of storytelling anyway.  But it is art.  There are so many moments here, like being trapped in a police car by protesting porn stars.  These are the moments I can talk about.  But the greatest scene, for me, was the completely incomprehensible shift to classic Japanese monster movie.  No reason, it’s just that they could, and it works.

Two final words: Chicken and Broccoli.

First, manly implies toughness.  Adventure is manly.  Heroics are manly.  Horror isn’t manly.  To enjoy horror, you have to let yourself be frightened and vulnerable.  Die Hard is manly.  Braveheart is Manly.  Gladiator is Manly.

Boobies, while awesome in almost every way, are not manly.  Even Woody Allen likes boobies.  A movie with boobies is a guy move, but not necessarily manly.  Porkys is not manly.  It’s funny, it’s a guy movie, but it’s not a manly movie.  Gator is a manly movie.

Also, really bad movies are not manly, not matter how much blood and gore is involved.  The remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre just sucked.  Boondock Saints is just ludicrous.  Not manly.

The latest Bond movie, for instance.  We walked out of the theater, to a nearby restaurant, without anyone commenting.  Once seated, I said “I’ll open with a bid of ‘Awesome!’”  My snarkiest friend said she’d open with “pretty good.”  We turned to another friend who seemed to be resisting the urge to say anything.  Finally, “I did not like it,” he said.  He did not enjoy it in the least.

Talking about it, I realized I had seen many flaws, but had buried them while watching.  The plot runs on, there is an inconsistency in how the scenes are shot.  Some are over the top bids to be great art, and much of the action is too close up, like the Bourne Identity but without the intensity.  There is at least one character who is a complete throw-away.

But I had enjoyed it, hadn’t I?  I love the story between Bond and M.  The story started in Casino Royale, is carried forward here, and promises much more.  So I’m still loving the new Bond series.  Maybe that’s it.  Perhaps, even though this was not a good stand-alone movie, it still gave me the pleasure of being part of the ongoing story.  Like an average episode in a great television series, it still keeps you moving towards the next.