Dec 31, 2010 3
The linear, analog nature of the cassette tape, like the broadcast schedule itself, renders the viewer’s whims impotent; it sets up limits against which we e-watchers are now likely to buck and thrash. Although many of the televised worlds of the ’90s persist, the limits that used to define their reception—their forced contextualization amidst advertisements one another—are all but extinct, except on tape.
Jul 24, 2009 0
Anthony Lane does not like J.J. Abrams’s new Star Trek movie. His substantive comments on it, however, are limited to bashing the excesses that come of J.J. Abrams’s kid-in-a-toy-store enthusiasm for his role as “rebooter” of “old myths and tropes that feel overloaded or fried.” Abrams, Lane says, “gorges on cinema as if it were one of those all you can eat buffets, piling his place with succulent efforts, whether they go together or not.” Setting aside Lane’s jollily unexamined equation of stereotypically working-class suburban food with cinematic crap, he’s correct that this newest Abrams film is, like many past ones, a fumblingly quixotic overreach. But that’s his sole point about the film, and the sole point on which he dismisses it. The rest of Lane’s review amounts to philinistic jokes about Star Trek’s general, indisputable dorkiness and digs at its audience, many of them anchored in Lane’s ignorance of the Star Trek world, an ignorance he wears almost as a badge of honor.
Jan 16, 2009 0
We have ample grounds to consider whether the first Star Trek, rather than any of its derivatives, is actually the worst. The original series is a reliable if eccentric workhorse of cultural critique. But it’s also filled with incredible awkwardness: the redshirt phenomenon; the repetitive “The shields are failing!” battle scenes; Shatner’s incessant prettyboy preening; the indiscriminate one-dimensionality of everyone who isn’t Kirk, Spock, or McCoy. One could argue that such unrealistic silliness is just a result of the primitive nature of science-fiction in general and television in particular in the sixties. But most of these awkward characteristics, though looked back on with nostalgia, are forgivable to the extent that they showed future science-fiction TV, including future Star Trek series, what not to do.
Nov 16, 2008 1
In the world of the Star Trek franchise, Starfleet’s emergency medical hologram (EMH) is designed to supplement or temporarily assume the duties of a starship’s chief medical officer in extraordinary circumstances—such as a shipwide medical emergency or the untimely death of the chief medical officer. The EMH is designed to make diagnoses, perform procedures, and operate; he has self-awareness, a consciousness of a sort, and the medical skill and knowledge of Starfleet’s best doctors. Yet he is still, or at least he is still considered, merely a piece of technology. When he has served his purpose, the EMH is filed away in his ship’s main computer, where he waits, oblivious to the passage of time, until he’s called upon again. He is of the fictional future, but we’re approaching a real future that looks, at least with respect to artificial intelligence, a good deal like it—and far faster than we think. How will we regard our creations?
