Star Trek: Beyond

How to tell that JJ Abrams was not directing or scripting the third of the rebooted Star Trek movies - it's not as good as the previous two. 

How to tell that Simon Pegg was involved in scripting the third of the rebooted Star Trek movies - his character, Scotty, gets more action than in the previous two and steals focus from the two supposed stars, Kirk and Spock. Oh, and the script isn't as good as anything Pegg's produced with regular cohort Edgar Wright. And don't even get me started on the fact that Pegg is the only piece of casting in the entire reboot that I completely disagree with: James Doohan's corpse would have been better.

Suffice to say that Beyond is not up to scratch. It has its moments, not least when Sofia Boutella kicks butt and delivers the only truly comic lines in the piece, and there is merit in examining the tedium that would come from a five year mission exploring strange new worlds. Because it isn't all exploring strange new worlds, lots of it is routine crap to do with making the ship move about from one place to another while you're stuck with the same faces the entire time

Merited this may be but while I suspect Abrams could have summed up the ennui and self-doubt of Kirk and Spock in a line or two, Pegg clumps away at it with all the subtlety of an Emmerich-wielded sledgehammer. Minus a billion points for emotional manipulation and dull dialogue, Simon.

Idris Elba's villain could be more than the stereotypical malcontent grinding his axe, too, but again poor exposition and a preference for letting some twat who previously made goddawful Fast And Fucksake movies take over the director's chair and thus ensuring spectacle would drown out the more human complexities of such a storyline was as bad a move as letting Pegg drive the script.

I sound like I hate this movie. I don't hate it but I don't love it and that is very telling given that I had indeed loved the previous two. I grew up with the original TV series then spent my late teens and early twenties watching the big screen versions lurch from brilliant to mediocre only for TNG to revive the entire concept and lead to other sequels including the inimitable Voyager. When Abrams brought the original concept back and opened up endless new possibilities with the alternate timeline twist there was hope that this time around a combination of amazing special effects and a plethora of skilled directors and scriptwriters ought to ensure the franchise stopped skipping so many beats back on the big screen. Hopes dashed. 

I can only hope that Chris Pine, Zoe Saldana and Zachary Quinto have not been put off continuing with the Star Trek future as they, like everyone else but Pegg, are perfectly cast and totally bedded into their roles in the minds of old and new fans alike. Just have a care, Roddenberry estate-holders, don't let some brilliantly sarcastic British cast member write any part of the script again and for Vulcan's sake don't let anyone near the director's chair who is only capable of making vacuous, action-and-explosions-as-porn films.

Doctor Strange

He isn't Sherlock. He isn't Khan from Star Trek Beyond. He isn't that rubbish siege negotiator from Four Lions. He's strange. With a capital S. But he's kinda small S strange too.

Yes, Bendyback Cumblebath has entered the Marvel fray as the franchise's biggest oddball. The original comics were a sixties take on a normal human being acquiring superpowers not through exposure to radiation or technological genius but by delving deep into the world of mysticism. Like wow, dude, that's so hippy.

But he's not a hippy. No, he's an arrogant son of a bitch who also happens to be one of the greatest surgeons on the planet. He doesn't HAVE to be American even though he is in the source material, but he is played American so we know he isn't Sherlock. Or Khan. Or that negotiator. Or because Stan Lee would have had a heart attack if they'd messed with his counter-culture baby too much for its big screen debut.

One car crash and two fucked up hands later Dr Stephen Strange is so desperate to cure himself and return to arrogantly saving people's lives in an operating theatre that he alienates his former girlfriend (a disappointingly male-gaze empty shell of a character played, presumably with little enthusiasm, by Rachel McAdams) and heads to the Orient in search of salvation.

What he finds is Tilda Swinton as an ancient guru type. Oh she's allowed to have a British accent. She's allowed to be a woman which she most certainly was not in the graphic novels. She's also awesome, both as a character and as the actor playing that character (sorry, did I break the fourth wall? Geek off, you'll be complaining about spoilers next).

Tilda teaches Bendyback how to do the warping space in on itself stuff from Inception only more magic mushroom stylee but Mads Mikkelson can also do this and he's a bad guy. He's stolen bad naughty knowledge from Tilda's special books and is going to summon up ultimate evil to eat up this universe. Luckily there are, we learn, an infinite number of universes but we're humans so we only give a shit about the one we're in and Comfybath has to save everything and everyone. With some help from the Ancient One's non-bad disciples.

Do they succeed, you wonder, if you haven't seen the film. Let's just say a sequel is in the pipeline, shall we?

Cumblepatch is suitably strange to be Strange and suitably different from Mr Downey Jr not to make the character seem too much like a riff on Iron Man (with hocus pocus instead of a big metal suit). Mikkelson is a heavyweight enough villain to ensure the self-centred Strange rises to the occasion when required. The visuals are astonishing without overshadowing the action or the plot.

Plot - it's not the best and it's not the worst in the celluloid Marvel universe. It's a prolonged setting of the stage for the weird doctor to presumably get completely fruitloop on us next time out. It works well enough. I'd watch it again. I watch most things more than once if they have Tilda Swinton in them, though. And so should you.