Then the reins of the franchise were handed over to JJ Abrams, and in 2009 we got a bright, flashy reboot, replete with action, in-jokes and excessive lens flares. It wasn’t quite Star Trek, it erased the timeline I knew and loved, and the more you analysed it, the more flawed it became – but overall, it was pretty enjoyable nonetheless. Would Star Trek Into Darkness offer more of the same?

Well, yes and no. Star Trek Into Darkness is certainly designed to look sumptuous on the big screen, and I’m sure almost everyone else will greatly enjoy it, but since I’m famously hard to please, I came away from the whole thing with mixed feelings at best. The film is deeply flawed, the plot essentially nonsensical, and somehow the whole thing lacks the sheer enjoyment factor that saved the original. What follows is one of my trademark deconstructions of the film, so if you care about spoilers and haven’t seen the film yet, stop reading here.

SPOILERS UPCOMING – THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING

Star Trek Into Darkness begins with the now Captain Kirk up to his usual tricks – breaking the Prime Directive, but in a good cause. Whilst Kirk and McCoy run from the primitive natives and their inaccurately thrown spears, it’s up to Uhura and Sulu to drop Spock into an active volcano so that he can prevent it from erupting and destroying said natives – by detonating a cold fusion device. Now, obviously I’m willing to give Star Trek of all things a free pass on its well-established physics breakers like warp drive and the transporter, but whatever this magical bomb is that freezes all the lava in the volcano, it’s not a cold fusion device. “Cold” fusion is just a hypothetical way of getting fusion reactions to take place at room temperature rather than in super-hot conditions such as the core of the Sun. If anything, such a bomb would surely destabilise the volcano even more.

But anyway, enough physics (for now). The point is, that despite having such advanced technology to hand, it is still necessary for Spock and the bomb to be dropped into the volcano so that he can set it up manually whilst in mortal danger. Of course, things go wrong and Uhura and Sulu’s is unable to retrieve him, forcing the Enterprise, which was mysteriously hiding under the ocean instead of safely in space (can the hull even withstand such pressure) to surface and reveal itself to the natives in order to save him. How did they get it under there in the first place without anyone noticing? Why did they bother? If the civilisation is as primitive as it appears, I’m sure the Enterprise could have plotted an orbit that kept it out of sight.

Of course, the upshot of it all is that Kirk breaks the Prime Directive and interferes with the natural development of a civilisation to save Spock, and Spock being the scrupulously honest Vulcan that he is, writes all this up in a report to Admiral Pike. Having had quite enough of Kirk’s cocky “the rules aren’t for me” attitude, Pike takes back command of the Enterprise, grounds Kirk and reassigns Spock to a different ship. Of course, we all know how long that particular situation will last.

Meanwhile, in London, trouble is brewing. Enter our villain, Benedict Cumberbatch, who for months we were told was playing a villain who “may or may not be Khan”. Let’s get it out of the way right now – he’s Khan, but for the moment he’s going by the name of John Harrison. In return for saving his daughter’s life, Khan convinces a Starfleet officer to blow up a top secret Starfleet installation. Within moments, Kirk is instated as the Enterprise’s first officer by Admiral Pike (who always trusted and believed in him, of course), and they head to an emergency meeting of important Starfleet commanders. During the meeting, Kirk is the only one to realise that “Harrison” might have actually wanted all the top brass in one place so he could attack them, and indeed, no sooner has he voiced this concern than Harrison manages to get a shuttle past Starfleet’s incredibly lax security, attack the meeting, kill Admiral Pike, and transport away. And he doesn’t transport just anywhere – having got his hands on a portable transwarp device, he manages to beam himself all the way to the Klingon homeworld, Kronos. I know transwarp is supposed to be special, but it’s still pretty unbelievable that he could beam himself all that way using a device small enough for Scotty to be able to lift easily.

With Pike gone, Kirk is back in command of the Enterprise, and the commander of Starfleet, Admiral Marcus, has a mission for him. Despite the fact that tensions with the Klingons are high, Kirk is to pack the Enterprise with 72 experimental long range photon torpedoes, head to the edge of the Neutral Zone, and fire them at Harrison’s location on Kronos. It’s all fine, though, because the area Harrison beamed to is uninhabited, so the Klingons will barely notice 72 high yield warheads destroying a significant area of their homeworld, all for the sake of killing one man. And it’s not like Harrison could have changed location once he got to Kronos now, is it?

Fired up by Pike’s death, Kirk seems pretty gung-ho about the whole mission, causing Spock to question its morality, and Scotty to resign when he’s asked to take custody of 72 torpedoes of unknown payload. For some reason, there is no deputy chief qualified to take Scotty’s place, so Chekov of all people is assigned as the new chief engineer. Under his auspices, the warp core malfunctions within moments (although to be fair, it isn’t actually his fault), leaving the Enterprise stranded on the edge of the Neutral Zone.

Nonetheless, it’s mission time, and as it turns out, Kirk doesn’t intend to kill Harrison – instead, he’s going to lead a mission to Kronos to bring him back alive. To this end, Kirk, Spock, Uhura and two red shirts disguise themselves as “nothing to do with Starfleet, honest” and head down to the planet to find Harrison. In the meantime, Sulu is left in command, leading Bones to stage whisper to Kirk (within Sulu’s earshot) that the young pilot is not command material – nice bit of reverse foreshadowing there. Sulu’s job is to get in touch with Harrison and threaten to use the 72 photon torpedoes on him if he tries anything, which he does in a deadpan “I will end you” manner that I initially assumed was meant to be comedic, but which in fact was meant to be taken seriously.

Meanwhile, Kirk’s landing party runs into a patrol of skinhead Klingons with facial ridge piercings, and after their unsurprising reluctance to listen to Uhura’s “help us, honourable warrior” pleas, they have to rely on deus ex machina in the form of Harrison himself, who, as a genetically enhanced superman, is easily able to dispatch all the Klingons before surrendering himself to Kirk and crew on hearing exactly how many torpedoes they have on board. Kirk punches him a few times for good measure, but even that can’t down a man like Harrison/Khan.

Once aboard the Enterprise, the ever calm Khan starts letting slip that he knows far more about the situation than Kirk, suggesting that the captain might like to open up the torpedoes for himself, and even passing on some coordinates where he claims something interesting will be found. Suitably intrigued, Kirk manages to somehow call Scotty back on Earth using his Starfleet issue mobile phone (that is some impressive roaming coverage), telling him to check out said coordinates whilst the crew of the Enterprise takes a look inside one the torpedoes.

Luckily for them, Admiral Marcus’ daughter Carol (yes, Carol Marcus, as in the original Wrath of Khan) just happened to blag her way aboard the Enterprise before they left Earth, and she also happens to be a weapons expert. Since opening a torpedo aboard the Enterprise would be a bit stupid even by film character standards, she and Bones go to a nearby planetoid to do so without endangering the ship (cue lots of jokes about Bones’ “magic fingers”) – although of course they still don’t guard themselves against the warhead spewing out toxic chemicals when opened. Fortunately, that’s unnecessary, as the torpedo casings actually contain cryogenically frozen people. Yes, indeed, these are the supermen of the Eugenics War, found by Admiral Marcus, who awoke Khan so that he could take advantage of his superior intellect and develop weapons to use against the Klingons. Yes, for Admiral Marcus is of the mind that since the galaxy is a dangerous place and the balance of power a fragile one indeed, the best thing to do is provoke a war with the bloodthirsty Klingons. And to force Khan to comply, he kept the other 72 frozen survivors as hostages, prompting Khan not to use his superior intellect to figure out a way to rescue them, but to mindlessly attack Starfleet in a blind rage that, to be honest, achieved very little.

With repairs on the warp core underway, Kirk is ready to take Khan back to Earth to stand trial, but naturally, Marcus just wants this whole sorry mess cleared up – and to that end, he shows up in a massively overpowered warship that was previously hidden at the coordinates Kirk sent Scotty to check out. Which, of course, means that when Marcus tries to use his warship to destroy the Enterprise, Scotty ex machina is able to disable the power and coordinate Kirk and Khan transferring from the Enterprise to the warship using only spacesuits and a tenuously line of sight from one ship’s escape hatch to the other. In the process, Scotty also kills a generic hired guard by exposing him to the vacuum of space, but he’s an ugly goon so no one really cares about that.

With Khan’s help, Kirk and Scotty get to the bridge, but even though Kirk is fully expecting it, Khan’s superhuman ability to resist phaser stuns lets him betray the captain, kill Marcus and take command of the warship – which of course has conveniently been engineered so that, at a pinch, it can be controlled by just one person.

In the meantime, however, Spock has contacted New Vulcan to allow for a gratuitous Leonard Nimoy cameo in which old!Spock warns his younger counterpart that Khan is the most dangerous enemy they ever faced in their timeline (well, the most dangerous alongside all those other equally dangerous foes they encountered). Armed with this vital knowledge, Spock is able to bluff Khan into believing he will trade the 72 frozen survivors for Kirk’s life, only to instead just beam 72 live torpedoes aboard Khan’s ship and blow it up.

By this point, judicious application of the warp drive has brought both ships almost back to Earth, so the explosion sends them both into free fall. The shoddily constructed Enterprise starts burning up in the atmosphere whilst the apparent gravity in the ship in no way reflects either the gravitational systems or its spinning descent towards Earth, but since the warp core is ‘misaligned’, it can’t be pulled out of its spiralling descent. Instead, Kirk has to sacrifice himself by entering the radiation-flooded core area and kicking the warp core back into alignment. Yes, he fixes a powerful matter-antimatter reactor simply by application of percussive force, before dying of radiation poisoning in a reversal of the Kirk/Spock scene in the original Wrath of Khan.

By this point, Kirk has beamed down to the Earth’s surface, and since the Enterprise can’t pinpoint him to beam him back up, all they can do is beam things down to his position. At this point, they should have beamed down some sort of restraining cage or perhaps even dropped a large anvil on top of Khan, but instead Spock beams down to chase Khan and start beating him up on top of a floating car in a scene more reminiscent of Ratchet and Clank than Star Trek. In a very un-Vulcan fit of rage, Spock is ready to kill Khan, but Uhura quickly shows up to make sure he gets taken into custody instead.

Once again, the day is saved, but wait – Captain Kirk is dead! Will the next film be “The Search for Kirk”? Well, no, because this film’s Chekhov’s gun (and I’m not talking Pavel) has already been established – the amazing regenerative powers of Khan’s blood. Having injected it into a tribble earlier in the film, McCoy sees the creature return to life, prompting the realisation that they need to take Khan alive and gather more blood to give to Kirk. Of course, the magic mutant blood works just fine, and Kirk awakens two weeks later, ready to segue into the epilogue, in which the Enterprise finally commences its epic five year mission.

And thus, we reach the end of another epically long review of a science-fiction film, and one in which I didn’t even have a chance to touch on so many little things – like the relationship ups and downs between Spock and Uhura, the constant need to cram in fanservice for fans of the original Star Trek, the flimsiness of the Enterprise and the never-ending fascination with lens flares. Is the film worth seeing? For most people, probably. Maybe after a few more viewings even I will come to view it more forgivingly. But for now, all I wish to do is revisit the old episodes and films, wrapped in the glow of rose-tinted nostalgia.

Alley Cat

A not-so-classic from the DOS days, Alley Cat saw you take control of a cat whose main goal was to jump into apartment windows and win mini-games until he finally got the chance to reunite with his love. Naturally, all kinds of hazards awaited him, and death was a frequent companion in this game, which combined eye-bleeding colour choices and simplistic PC speaker sounds with feelings of tedium and impossibility. And yet, even after all these years, I can’t shake off a bizarre fascination with this game.

Cats

Although one of the weaker games available on the fabulous Orisinal, Cats is still a fun diversion. The aim of the game is to have all the cats imitating the one in the shaded row by mousing over them to toggle between sitting and standing. Of course, cats being cats, they’ll only reluctant do what you want, sitting down just after you asked them to get up and vice versa. As the game progresses, more and more rows of cats are added, until it becomes impossible to keep them all doing what you want to.

Cats is available to play here.

Fat Cat

The folks at Nitrome know how to make great games, and it seems that at least one person on their staff also really likes cats, because felines feature in quite a few of their titles. Fat Cat is an insane top-down shooter that re-imagines the tale of the owl and the pussycat as an alien-filled excursion to the fabled galactic picnic area. The invincible owl is the guardian of the pair, firing ammo to take out enemies, whilst the slower and more vulnerable cat must stay safe, eat cake and unleash a massive laser belch when required. What makes the game so challenging is that the player has to control both characters simultaneously – the owl with the mouse, and the cat with the keyboard. It’s crazy, but it’s great fun, and every death just leaves you more determined to beat the game.

Fat Cat is available to play here.

Flash Cat

Another game from the good people at Nitrome, Flash Cat sees the eponymous feline riding a giant caterpillar through a series of tricky and twisting courses, where one wrong move can send you plummeting into nothingness. Although no pushover, it’s probably one of Nitrome’s easier games.

Flash Cat is available to play here.

Monster Hunter Diary: Poka Poka Airu Village

Instead of playing as a human, this Monster Hunter game sees you take on the role of an Airu (Felyne) and complete quests for the sake of an entire kitty village. Unfortunately, the game was never released outside of Japan, but true devotees can go the extra mile and import it.

Purr Pals

A game I reviewed some years ago, Purr Pals is just one of a slew of Nintendo DS titles about taking care of animals. Although ever so slightly entertaining to start with, like most entries in the genre, Purr Pals rapidly becomes tedious and repetitive, especially as the save data has a tendency to corrupt after a while, forcing you to start over.

Rockitty

The third entry from the Nitrome stable, Rockitty sees you take control of a space kitty looking to get back to her cat cruiser. Set kitty off by clicking the mouse in the appropriate direction, and try to make sure she make a safe landing instead of veering off into the vastness of space. Like most Nitrome games, it’s easy enough to start with, but soon becomes challenging, requiring precise timing.

Rockitty can be played here.

Sushi Cat

A series of five games, Sushi Cat is a Peggle clone with a slight twist – as Sushi Cat is dropped through the stage to collect sushi, he slowly gains weight, making him larger and squishier. Cute, well-made and even a little amusing, Sushi Cat won’t hold any particular challenge for Peggle aficionados, but it’s still an entertaining diversion.

The Sushi Cat games can be played here.

Time 4 Cat

As a time-travelling cat at a busy intersection, your goal is to pick up treats whilst avoiding getting trampled by passers by. The “time travel” aspect basically means that the humans only move when you do, whilst everything stops when you stay still.

Time 4 Cat can be played on various sites, including Facebook.

Twin Shot/Twin Shot 2

Appropriately enough, we’re rounding off with yet another pair of games from Nitrome – Twin Shot and its sequel. This game lets players take control of ultra-cute chibi angel cats and use them to shoot all manner of monsters. The sequel is more of the same, albeit with both “good” and “evil” level sets, and different skins for your cats.

Twin Shot can be played here, with the sequel here.

Time travel is inherently paradoxical, and with that in mind, I’m often quite lenient on time travel movies when they do things that either induce a headache or just don’t make sense. Sometimes, though, a movie comes along that is simply so terrible that I simply cannot stay my hand any longer, and Looper is one of them.

Looper begins by having present-Joe (where ‘present’ = 2044) get us up to speed on how things are done in his time. Apparently, disposing of bodies in the future is so difficult that the only viable option is to send them thirty years into the past to be blown to pieces and then thrown in conveniently unguarded incinerators. Now, why would this be the case in the first place? If the mafia have the resources to capture someone and send them back in time, why do they not at least have their own incinerators? If the problem is that everyone is chipped with some kind of indestructible tag, wouldn’t that survive the 2044 incineration and still show up in 2074? I suppose, at a stretch, these tags might degrade over thirty years, but even so, it seems a bit far-fetched for this to be the only way of disposing of a body. Equally, if the problem is disposing of the body, why go to the effort of capturing someone, holding them prisoner, and then sending them back to be killed? Why not just kill them in 2074 and send the bodies back to the past to be disposed of? This would prevent future-Joe from escaping, at least.

But even if we suppose that this ridiculously elaborate method of killing people was indeed the only option open to the mafia of 2074, they still manage to go about it in a pretty incompetent fashion. For example, when a looper is to retire, he is sent his future self to kill, plus a bonus payment and an implied 30 years of living off the riches until his number’s up. As we see early on in the movie thanks to some Dramatic Foreshadowing, actually having to kill yourself is not the easiest thing to pull off – but why would the loopers need to? Why not send the future looper back to some other past guy to kill, thus preventing any incidents where the looper fails to close his own loop?

Anyway, to get back to the plot at hand, it’s business as usual in 2044, until the loopers start noticing that more and more of them have been tasked with closing their own loops. Rumour has it that this is because there’s a new boss in town – the Rainmaker – and it seems he’s too stupid to grasp the possibilities that time travel has to offer. Even if he wants all these guys dead at roughly the same time in the future, unless his time machine can only send things *exactly* thirty years into the past, he doesn’t need to send them all back to the same few weeks in 2044. Why not spread the killings out a bit, so no one in the past spots his pattern?

But still, having failed to do this, there is of course one minor who fails to close his own loop, in the aforementioned piece of Dramatic Foreshadowing, leaving his future self to run off into the night. He tries to hide out with Joe, of course, but Joe is far too corporate to do anything other than give him up. Minor character is captured by the 2044 branch of the mafia, who slowly torture him such that the scars appear on his fleeing future self. Future self tries to turn himself in, but by the time he gets to where his past self is being held, he’s basically lost all his limbs and ends up dying outside and being dragged away like a lump of meat. Except, of course, that this whole scene is completely nonsensical.

Let’s think for a moment. In most time travel films, we would probably accept that future self was from a different timeline (one in which he closed his own loop successfully), and that we have now moved into a different timeline – but this would mean that the torture of past self would have no direct physical consequences, and he probably wouldn’t feel morally obliged to do anything about it. But, if everything occurs within one timeline, then, as soon as the scars and missing limbs resulting from the torture of his past self appear, he should not act surprised in the way he does in the movie. He should remember that torture session, and having lived with those scars for thirty years (all this, of course, assuming he had escaped and lived that long). If he has no feet now, then he’s lived the past thirty years without feet, and wouldn’t have been able to run away in the first place (since no prosthetic replacements appear in their place). In fact, if we take this thought to its logical conclusion, if past self was killed by the mafia, then the future self whose mutilated corpse is dragged away at the end of the scene never actually existed, hence not only should there be no corpse, but he should never have appeared in 2044, hence he would never have escaped and this whole sequence wouldn’t have actually happened. Yes, it’s a big headache inducing, and that’s why I allow some liberties to be taken in time travel films, but there’s a different between edging over the line and blatantly throwing up all over it.

Anyway, having seen what happened to his friend, Joe has every intention of closing his own loop, and in the first timeline we see, he does just that, growing up into Bruce Willis, finding love and settling down to a happily ever after. Well, at least until 2074, when he’s sent back to die – only this time, he has no intention of going quietly. After disabling his guards, he arrives late to his own death (even though any delay in the future shouldn’t prevent him from appearing in a specific past time and place), escapes present-Joe and heads into the night.

Now, from the trailers, I had assumed that present-Joe and future-Joe would team up against the evil mafia to Bring Down the System, which would have been an acceptable if not particularly inventive plot direction. Instead, however, they each have their own agenda, which they faff about with through the painful remainder of this film. Future-Joe wants to save himself, his wife and his happily ever after by killing the Rainmaker while he’s still a child, whilst all present-Joe wants is to close his own loop and enjoy his thirty years. His attitude to the issue at hand is that future-Joe has had his day and should let present-Joe get his own chance, failing to grasp that they are, in fact, the same person and he’s really just telling himself to get on and die.

After an altercation with their pursuers, however, the two go their separate ways – future-Joe to find out about the child Rainmaker (which he mainly accomplishes by staring creepily into windows like a pervert), and present-Joe to take refuge on a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, home to a generic blonde woman and her creepy child. Since generic blonde woman is of course the default love interest of this film, Joe wastes no time in getting close to both her and her kid, which ties in to what seemed like a minor and pointless plot thread earlier in the film. As we learned in a Chekhov’s gun moment towards the beginning, some of the population have developed telekinetic powers, and although it’s mostly used as a party trick, Creepy Kid just happens to be the most powerful TK (as they’re known) ever, with a tendency to throw all sorts of things around with his mind whenever he gets into a tantrum. A previous loss of control caused him to kill his aunt, and although his mother believes in him, we all know it’s going to end badly – specifically, he’s going to become the Rainmaker.

Of course, anything that present-Joe thinks, feels or does becomes a memory of future-Joe’s, so once he realises who the Rainmaker is, future-Joe shows up to dispose of him. Some mafia bad guys show up too, but they’re largely annoying and relatively unimportant, so I won’t dwell on those. Anyway, everything heads towards a Final Showdown out in the fields, as future-Joe prepares to kill Creepy Kid, who is being protected by his mother. Upon seeing the situation, Present-Joe realises that seeing his mother get shot is what turns Creepy Kid into the Rainmaker in the first place – even though future-Joe comes from a timeline where none of these events happened and therefore this trigger should not have occurred. Of course, it could be that Creepy Kid is probably going to become the Rainmaker no matter what – given his personality, it doesn’t seem like it would take anything near as dramatic as the death of his mother to set him off.

With this situation unfolding, what is present-Joe to do? Well, the only thing he can – escape the awfulness of this movie by shooting himself in the head. His death in the present-Joe causes future-Joe to disappear – but wait. If future-Joe was never here, none of this should have happened anyway! Generic Blonde and Creepy Kid should be back in their farmhouse, and present-Joe wouldn’t have needed to kill himself, and…my head hurts.

Right from the moment I first saw the trailer for it, I knew I would have issues with this movie, but even I couldn’t predict how deeply flawed it would be. Any time travellers reading this should take the opportunity to go back and stop it from being made. But then of course this review and said advice wouldn’t exist, so it would be made anyway, and…oh, what’s the use any more?

Total Recall takes place in a future where much of Earth has been rendered uninhabitable, forcing humanity to take refuge in one of two places – the Colony (Australia) and The United Federation of Britain (UFB) – linked to each other by a tunnel bored through the very planet itself (trust me, we’ll come back to this). Douglas Quaid is a factory worker who spends his days commuting from the Colony to the UFB to help build robot soldiers. He has a stable job and a loving wife, but his nights are plagued with recurring dreams about a fraught escape from the authorities with a mysterious woman.

At this point, much pain could be saved if Quaid just forgot all about his dreams, packed up, and went home. Instead, he finds himself intrigued by a co-worker’s recommendation of a session at Rekall – a company who specialise in implanting false recollections far more exciting than the humdrum memories of working in a factory. Quaid decides he’d like to “remember” being a secret agent, but reacts badly to the whole Rekall experience when it turns out that he actually *is* a secret agent, and the life he’s currently living is just a sham. Cue chase scenes, explosion, and more bad physics than you can shake an infinitely long rod at.

And now, with that introductory material under our belt, we can get down to just why this movie is so laughably bad. As the Rekall process goes wrong, a bunch of generic goons conveniently flood into the Rekall facility to stop Quaid before he starts remembering his past life and presumably becoming a danger to whoever erased his memories in the first place. Fortunately, Quaid automatically recalls enough of his advanced training to dispatch all of them without a hitch and return home to his wife Lori. By this point, it’s all over the news that a terrorist has killed 20 men at the Rekall facility, and Quaid confesses to his wife that it was actually him. He’s quick to add that it’s not as ridiculous as it sounds – it was only a modest ten men, hardly worth bragging about.

Naturally, Lori isn’t what she seems either – the factory worker life that Quaid has been living for the last six weeks is a lie, and she is actually a police officer set to watch over him. Now that the sham marriage is over, she’s a bit ticked off by the whole thing, and immediately sets about trying to kill him.

At this point, you might wonder, as I did, why Quaid was kept alive for six weeks under an elaborate charade if all that was going to happen was that he would get killed eventually, but in fact, Lori is acting on her own on this one. Quaid is meant to be kept alive, but for some reason, this just isn’t good enough for her. It may just have been that the sex was particularly bad during the fake marriage, but whatever the cause, Lori spends the entire film pursuing Quaid with lethal intent.

Anyway, before we continue, there are already many points to be raised (and bear in mind I still haven’t started on that tunnel through the Earth yet). Quaid has only been working at the factory for six weeks, and yet as far as he is concerned, he has done this job for years. True, his best friend seems to be in on the ruse, but what about everyone else working there? Wouldn’t they have treated him like a newbie rather than an experienced worker? As an aside, if all his training and expertise for the job came from fake memories (which I’m not going to rip apart despite their own issues), why bother training anyone? Instead of letting the new guy who Quaid has to mentor risk his life not knowing how to weld properly, why not give him the memories of an expert worker? It might be a bit expensive, but it would probably pay for itself in time.

Equally bemusing is a scene early on clearly included only to raise our suspicions, in which Quaid is called into his boss’s office to sign a piece of paper saying that he knows he’s working on classified robot soldiers, and that he has no ties to the organised resistance group fighting against the UFB. Surely any worker would have to sign the robot soldier NDA before starting work on them, not at some random point during their contract?

But anyway, enough digression. Given that no one bothered to tell Lori that her charge had advanced combat skills (not to mention main character levels of luck), Quaid is able to escape from her and flee into the town. Indeed, there is a lot of fleeing in this film, and much of it involves smashing and crashing through all manner of things, from elevators to walls. Given how easily it all gets broken, I can’t help feeling that the buildings of the future are extremely shoddily built. Unlike the people, of course, who regularly stand near explosions but never get so much as singed.

Lori isn’t too worried about chasing after Quaid, though – all she needs to do to track him is activate the phone that he has embedded in his hand. Aside from this being an extremely inconvenient place to store a phone (and it also looks bulky enough to be noticeable and uncomfortable), it seems that Quaid has gone these last six weeks without even noticing its presence. But now that it’s back online, he has to press his hand against a piece of glass to receive a video message from an ally, telling him he has to deactivate his phone and get “the key”. Way to be cryptic and vague, Random Ally.

For some reason, I was expecting there to be handset removal (pun intended) stores on every street corner (akin to all those shops that advertise phone unlocking in the window), but in fact, the procedure seems to be to dig the phone out of your hand with a sharp object. Luckily, this has no long-term detrimental effects on his hand; then again, in his past life he also took a bullet right through the hand, and if that didn’t shatter the bones, ruin the nerves and generally require extensive reconstruction, what would?

Suitably stripped of mobile communications device but armed with the number of a safety deposit box, Quaid heads over the bank to recover his stash of Convenient Plot Items. Amongst them is a recording from his past self, directing him to go to his old apartment. Given that this was recorded by past-Quaid after he was captured, how did it even get to the safety deposit box? Was it the convenient work of Random Ally (who, incidentally, gets killed towards the end of the film, long after I’d forgotten his significance)?

Unfortunately, Quaid messes this up, attracts police attention and has to be conveniently rescued by the arrival of Melina, the mysterious woman from his dreams. After some chase scenes ripped from inspired by Minority Report, Melina and Quaid escape Terminator Lori and her relentless pursuit and make it to the Apartment of Exposition.

Luckily for all concerned, Quaid feels inspired to play the piano, and discovers a secret recording from his past self that was designed to answer all his questions. Apparently, Quaid was once Carl Hauser, a UFB agent working for the evil Chancellor Cohaagen – you can tell he’s evil because a) he’s a chancellor and b) he has a double ‘a’ in his name. Quaid/Hauser’s role was to infiltrate the Resistance, but when he found out that the UFB had nefarious plans to use robot soldiers to invade the Colony and claim its living space for the British, he switched sides and instead vowed to help Resistance leader Matthias by delivering a kill-code that could switch all the robot soldiers off. This highly convenient kill code is now lodged somewhere in Quaid’s brain, and it’s up to Melina – who is of course a Resistance member and Quaid’s lover – to take him to Matthias so that it can be extracted.

Now, at this point, you might be wondering why Cohaagen didn’t just have Quaid killed instead of going through the whole memory erasure thing (not to mention why such a kill code even exists), but in fact, all of that was just an elaborate ruse to get Quaid and Melina to lead the UFB forces to Matthias’ secret lair in the poisonous wastelands of “somewhere else in the world”. For reasons that defy simple strategical sensibility, the Chancellor himself heads up this mission to capture Matthias, which, given his important role as head of government, seems unlikely in the extreme. Why would he risk himself like this, instead of sending in highly trained agents? Oh right, it was, of course, to gloat at Matthias, and reveal to Quaid that, as Hauser, it was his idea to get his memories wiped to make his kill code story more believable. Quaid naturally denies having anything to do with this headache-inducing plot, later claiming that the fact he didn’t completely forget Melina means his feelings for her (and hence sympathy towards the Resistance) must have been real. I’m not sure I buy it myself, but whatever – this film isn’t about exploring the deep complexity of its characters.

Anyway, Matthias dies, Melina is captured, and the stage is set for the final confrontation in The Fall – the tunnel connecting the Colony and the UFB. Yes, the time has finally come to discuss this infamous tunnel, which apparently allows passage from one side of the Earth to another through both mantle and core in just 17 minutes, with normal gravity at both ends and a ‘gravity reversal’ near the centre. Even assuming such a tunnel could be built, there are several problems with this that mean it would be far, far easier just to fly around the globe. That would also spare us the pain of a final battle where Lori refuses to die, Cohaagen launches his invasion by personally being on the one vehicle seemingly carrying all his robot soldiers to the Colony (almost as stupid as the whole kill code thing) and, worst of all, Quaid and Melina actually blowing the escape hatch on the Fall whilst still inside the Earth’s core. Even if the mysterious and magical material that the tunnel is made of protects them from the heat and pressure, the velocities and accelerations involved in this journey would mean that sticking your head out of the window would be a bad idea indeed.

Still, our heroes being heroes, they manage to defeat all the tricks the bad guys have up their sleeves, defy the laws of physics, destroy the Fall (maybe the tunnel isn’t that resilient after all) without incinerating all the gawking crowds in the Colony (maybe they all died of radiation poisoning later) and live happily ever after – probably. Of course, the whole thing could have been just a dream – but if I had to suffer through these events, I don’t see why the characters shouldn’t have to as well.

So once again, my two hours of experiencing this film means that you have been warned – you don’t have to make the same mistakes. As necromancer1983 remarked when I mentioned I would be seeing it “I hope you have a good night tomorrow, though I doubt it when that’s the film.”

Over the past few years, live action adaptations of fairy tales seem to have come back into fashion, and so it was that 2012 saw yet another adaptation of the classic tale of Snow White. With Kristen “Bella Swan” Stewart in the starring role, my hopes weren’t high for much in the way of quality, but Snow White and the Huntsman fails to even be amusingly bad, settling instead for a tedious mediocrity.

As in the fairytale, our tale begins with the birth of the destined princess Snow White, followed soon after by the death of her mother. Despite being distraught with grief, the king soon perks up when he rescues a beautiful woman from an evil army, and marries her the very next day. Naturally, this is all a ruse on the part of his new wife Ravenna, who is in fact an evil sorceress with a bee in her bonnet about remaining young and beautiful. Barely has she been in the palace a day before she kills the king, takes over the kingdom with the help of her brother and various assorted grunts, and imprisons Snow White in a tower for however long it takes for a little girl to grow into Kristen Stewart.

Now, with Snow White being the rightful heir to the throne and the one real threat to the queen’s position, you might think it would be best just to kill her quietly, but no – that would be too simple. In the meantime, life under Ravenna’s rule is so miserable that the land itself withers and dies, whilst peasants are oppressed and women have their life energy sucked away to keep the queen and her brother eternally young.

Magic, it turns out, is expensive, but there is one way to remain beautiful forever – eating the heart of Snow White. Here at last is a reason to keep her alive, except that not only did the queen not know about this up until now, but she had also been warned many years that Snow White was the only one who could break the spell that lets her remain young. So the best thing to do now would be to dispatch her quickly and efficiently, thus sparing us all the remainder of this film, but naturally, this doesn’t happen. Instead, the queen’s brother (I have no idea if he has a name) decides to go and gloat over Snow White in her cell, conveniently leaving the door open so that she can overpower him and escape.

That’s not the end of the convenience, for despite being a high value prisoner, Snow White encounters no guards on her way out. Indeed, she even finds a strategically placed Plot Horse waiting in the castle grounds, which, despite a complete lack of equipment or training, she is able to ride it out into the Dark Forest, where it immediately gets stuck in a bog and dies. Poor Plot Horse.

Of course, this doesn’t sit well with the queen, but since the Dark Forest is an uncharted and hazardous place, she has to hire a tracker to help her men navigate it. Enter the titular Huntsman, a trademark friendless maverick who has descended into misery and alcoholism since his wife died. Using the same lifeless, wooden dialogue that permeates the entire film, the queen tries and fails to coerce him with threats to his life. Eventually, she has to concede and instead say that she will use her powers to resurrect his wife. Even an idiot could tell that she’s lying, but somehow it’s enough to get the Huntsman to agree to lead the queen’s brother and some generic guards through the forest.

Out in the forest, Snow White is easily found, but as soon as the Huntsman captures her, the queen’s brother stupidly admits that there’s no way the Huntsman’s wife is coming back, prompting the Huntsman to switch sides and flee into the forest with Snow White. Cue the usual tension between the feisty yet clueless young woman and the grizzled, streetwise older man, that we all know will end with them falling in love. In the meantime, though, they meander through the forest for a bit, the Huntsman randomly shows Snow White how to defend herself with a knife, and then they get picked up by some villagers.

These pointless villagers have managed to live in relative peace by giving up sacrifices to keep the queen young, but after telling Snow White that her time will also come, the entire village gets burned down. Presumably this is to show Snow White the horrors of the queen’s rule, but it’s not as if any of the cardboard characters in this film can inspire any kind of emotion in the viewer.

Anyway, moving on, and with that behind them, it’s time to encounter the other famous characters of Snow White – the Seven Dwarves. In this case, six of them are grizzled old-timers, and one of them is a young optimist who quickly befriends Snow White. Guess which one pointlessly dies later in the film?

Before that, however, the dwarves accompany Snow White and the Huntsman (who, by this point, is considered to know her well just because he spent a few more hours with her than anyone else) to the land of the creepy-looking fairies, where everyone waxes lyrical over how Snow White’s very presence has a healing effect on all around her. Clearly, these are just the usual urges felt by a bunch of men who haven’t seen a woman in a while, and it was at this point that I realised how much better this film would be if it was just a straight porno.

Unfortunately, it isn’t, so instead we plod onwards. Snow White and her entourage meet up with her childhood sweetheart Duke William, whose presence is more damp squib than love triangle igniting firecracker. It does allow the by-now desperate queen to disguise herself as William and offer Snow White a poisoned apple, thus shoehorning in a pointless scene where our heroine appears to die, only to be revived by the true love’s kiss of the Huntsman. Yes, the same Huntsman who spent years grieving over his wife and two days looking after the bland Snow White. Fear not, though, for it’s not as if he doesn’t get closure; the queen’s ever garrulous brother admits that he killed the Huntsman’s wife, thus sealing his fate.

The queen herself remains to be dealt with, however, and even as she sits in her castle growing ever older and uglier, narrative convenience triumphs over Snow White’s blandness, enabling her to raise an army. Despite the castle’s superior defences, the powers of destiny enable the rebel troops, with the untried Snow White at the forefront of battle (dressed inappropriately in a short grey skirt), to overwhelm the queen’s defences. Once inside the walls, the older, more experienced warriors stand aside to allow Snow White to use the Chekhov’s gun of the Huntsman’s self-defence lesson to undo the queen’s magic, kill her, and take her rightful place on the throne.

If you’ve read this far, then I must congratulate you on getting this far, but now imagine not just reading a summary of this film here, but sitting down for two hours and watching it for yourself. A journey replete with lacklustre dialogue and wooden characters, Snow White and the Huntsman is a film best left well alone.

Over the course of the three series aired so far, Spiral follows the lives of three Parisian police officers and three members of the local judiciary system as they become entangled in various cases, some resolved within an episode or two, others stretching across an entire series. Each series begins with our protagonists discovering a horrifically mutilated body, which leads into the main case that they must unravel whilst also dealing with minor storylines about rape, incest, infanticide and any number of other equally pleasant topics.

As you might infer from the above paragraph, Spiral is not a series which concerns itself with pleasantness. Forget about Paris the bright, sunlit city of tourist attractions, shops, cafés and restaurant; this is grimy downtown Paris, where the weather is always bleak and the inhabitants invariably up to some kind of criminal activity. And it’s not even as if our main characters are brave heroes boldly dealing with the problems of this corrupt city, because, when it comes down to it, they’re as depressingly crooked as the rest.

In fact, let’s examine Spiral’s main cast a bit more closely. On the police side we have Captain Laure Berthaud and her two trusty lieutenant Giles “Gilou” Escoffier and Frédéric “Tintin” Fromentin, who spend their time lurching between utter incompetence to being outright dangers to themselves. Remember Sarah Lund and Sage Noren? Like Laure Berthaud, they weren’t exactly known for their outstanding social skills, but the key difference was that they channelled their intensity into solving their cases, and they managed to do it in an intelligent and reasoned way. Laure, on the other hand, is a bit of a loose cannon whose first response to most situations seems to be to sleep with any men who happen to be involved – fair enough, one might say, except that she lacks the professionalism to keep her pants regardless of any conflicts of interest with whatever case she’s working. She does apparently have a long term boyfriend, but the poor sod never appears on screen, and he certainly doesn’t put the brakes on Laura’s sexual ambitions.

We’ll come back to Laure in a moment, but just to prove that this is indeed an equal opportunities series, it is vital to point out that Lieutenant Gilou is, in his own way, equally messed up. He spends almost the entirety of the first series snorting cocaine and indebted to a notorious drug dealer, although a single episode of Laura and Tintin forcing him to go cold turkey seems to cure this in time for series two and three. For his own part, Tintin is actually quite normal and stable, although that doesn’t mean that he gets to be likeable, well developed or even particularly happy.

Surely the bleakest aspect of law enforcement side of Spiral, however, is the sheer volume of incompetence and brutality that takes place throughout the series. When it comes to the more interesting and legitimate parts of police procedure, our heroes seem completely incompetent; an undercover cop strolls casually in and out of the police station, a surveillance group fails to encrypt their signal, so that it gets picked up by a neighbour’s TV – the list of embarrassing blunders is near endless. And since they can’t seem to manage to do these things properly, the end result is that Laure and her team seem to always end up trying to beat the truth out of their suspects. This is hardly unheard of in the genre as a whole, but when a police force is portrayed as a bunch of thugs whose propensity for violence makes Jack Bauer look like a pacifist, it’s hard to warm to them or commend them for showing any kind of skill whenever they do manage to solve a case.

But if the police aren’t up to much, then surely, you might think, it’s the lawyers who save the story? Well, to be honest, things aren’t much better there. Rounding out the six-strong main cast we have Judge Pierre Roban, ambitious and self-serving barrister Josephine Karlsson and solicitor Pierre Clement. Roban is probably the least interesting of the three, probably due to the fact that he at least seems to have some interest in bringing people to justice. Even storylines involving his dying mother and estranged brother don’t really add much to his character, other than forcing him to play dirty (quelle surprise) by not revealing that his brother is involved in a case he wants to work on.

Clement, meanwhile, seems to function as little more than eye candy – much like the police he liaises with (in Laure’s case, perhaps a bit more intimately than strictly necessary), his competence is nothing to write home about. In the first series, he too suffers from a conflict of interest when his best friend (who also happens to be letting him stay in Paris rent-free) is a suspect in a murder case. By series three, his attempts to help a young drug addict see him falsely accused of rape, evidence that even trying to be a nice person in this series probably isn’t worth the hassle.

And indeed, this is a lesson that the beautiful Josephine Karlsson has clearly learnt, for the vampish seductress is probably the most corrupt and self-serving of them all. When she isn’t working for old lawyers of dubious morality, she’s doing anything she can to further her own greed and personal ambition. Most of the time, she flouts the rules for money, but it does seem like she’d do it for just the hell of it. In the right hands, she would be written as a highly intelligent, multi-layered character, but unfortunately, here you just dislike her for her capricious approach to justice.

So, given this less than overwhelming selection of characters, does Spiral have much to offer when it comes to the cases themselves? Well, the series must at least be applauded for attempting something a bit different  by fusing  of a single case spanning the entirety of a series with more minor stories that come and go in an episode or two. Unfortunately, if not unexpectedly, the format doesn’t quite work. The short cases cover some quite hard hitting material, and yet they come and go in such a superficial way as to leave you feeling quite desensitised to the horrors they are trying to portray. Meanwhile, the police’s idea of solving the major cases seems to be to either blunder around making schoolboy errors, or just spending entire episodes trying to beat a confession out of someone detained on minimal evidence, these overarching plots are equally uninspiring, usually turning into overcomplicated fiascos that don’t even bother to resolve everything in the final episode.

Final Thoughts

With its bleak setting, relentless brutality and dislikeable characters, Spiral manages to ignore everything that makes procedural crime drama entertaining and replace it with something that manages to keep on getting worse from one series to the next. A series so miserable that it left me wondering if I would ever enjoy live action TV again, Spiral is not something I would recommend, no matter how much you enjoy other crime shows.

As in my previous review, here again the focus will be on a decent sci-fi concept that doesn’t quite make sense when translated into a big screen adventure. This time around, In Time is under the spotlight, showcasing a world where one’s own life is a trade-able commodity, to the extent that it has replaced all other forms of currency. Coffee, bus tickets, rent, all of these are now paid for in hours and days, and thanks to ridiculous rates of inflation, the poorer classes are continually scraping around for their next day of life.

In this world we follow our young hero Will Salas, who lives with his mother, as played by Olivia Wilde of House and Tron Legacy fame. Despite her youthful appearance, Mother Salas has just turned 50, but thanks to the family’s hand to mouth existence, she only ever has a few hours on the clock. This leads to a wonderfully hilarious sequence in which she discovers that the bus fare has gone up to two hours, meaning that with her remaining 90 minutes of life, she can’t afford to take it (I have to admit that I’ve been on some pretty traumatic bus rides before, but never have I actually hand over the remainder of my hours on this earth in order to ride one). Instead, she must walk to her destination – except that, too, will take two hours! Not only does this incidentally mean that taking the bus is, essentially pointless (unless you’re rushing to make an appointment at which you will be remunerated), but it means she must run to make the rendezvous with her son, only to die seconds before falling into his arms. I’m sure I was supposed to be upset at this point, but the whole scene was so ridiculously over the top that I couldn’t help but laugh.

With his mother gone, things are looking bleak for Will, at least until a random rich benefactor shows up and gives him a hundred years to play with, along with a key secret – there is more than enough time for everyone to live a full life, it’s just that the rich are hoarding it all for the sake of their own immortality. Well, maybe they are, but this statement can’t help but raise any number of questions. Even if we ignore the fact that it’s completely unclear how society transitioned from everyone having a natural lifespan of around 70-80 years, to one in which everyone grows up normally until 25, and then has an inbuilt timer with a default value of one year on it, which can be topped up and traded away as necessary – either to another person, or to special storage machine – there is still much to ponder.

First off, presumably this time is not something that can be manufactured artificially, else it would be greatly devalued and the rich wouldn’t need to steal it from the poor; thus the only way to make more is to give birth to a child, adding a single year to the total time in circulation (although they can only start using it once they hit 25, so it’s a bit of a delayed investment). So the total amount of time in this economy is, therefore, around 7 billion years, which would be plenty, if not for all the people who need to have a share in that. Now obviously, anyone who lives beyond their 26^th birthday has automatically consumed more than a year of life, and thus becomes a drain on their economy. This means that a fair proportion of the world’s population must have died (specifically by running out of time) at the age of 25, so that some kind of surplus could have built up – and given the millions of years that we later see stored in the time banks of this world, that means an awful lot of people have indeed met their end at such a young age.

Maybe we can solve this problem, however, in one of two ways. Perhaps when everyone was converted to this new lifespan, their life expectancy from 25-natural death age was converted into time to put into the bank, giving say 50 years per person in the bank, or around 350 billion years (a nice nest egg). Or perhaps the US has conquered some weaker countries where it forces people to breed and then steals their year of life when they hit 25. Nonetheless, there are other problems with the system. The ridiculously high inflation rates inflicted on the poor are themselves unsustainable, and while they may help to gather more time for the upper classes in the short term, eventually they will surely end up killing off all the working classes. At that point the idle rich may indeed be able to live forever, but there will be no one to supply their food, water and electricity, because they’ve managed to kill off all the workers!

But enough of that, what about the plot of the movie itself? When we left Will, he’d just been given a hundred years to play with, so what does he make of that? Well, after unsuccessfully trying to help his friends out with gifts of time, he manages to buy himself into the upper echelons of society, where Vincent Kartheiser struts around wearing lipstick, partying, and hanging around in casinos. Will manages to get himself a few hundred more years with his own gambling tricks, and even woos Kartheiser’s daughter, who is as clueless and naïve as only the extremely rich can be.

Now at this point, you might be wondering, where exactly is this all going? Obviously, somebody asked the writers this same question, because after all this meandering, they attempt to inject some kind of plot into the proceedings. Hence Will becomes a suspect in the murder of the rich man who gave him his hundred years, has all his time confiscated once again, and has to go on the run with his new girlfriend. At this point, the movie becomes some sort of Bonnie and Clyde flick, as the duo start robbing banks to give time back to the people, all the while being chased by a policeman whose obsession with catching Salas seems way out of proportion. And, to be honest, that’s pretty much all she wrote.

As with Surrogates, the subject of my previous review, what we have here is an interesting concept that falls flat on two fronts; first off, under examination, the time-based economy actually makes very little sense, and even if it did (or if we could look the other way), the actual plot of the movie is so paper thin as to leave you impatient for the whole sorry experience to be over. Certainly after watching it, you’ll wish there was technology available to enable you to get two hours of your own life back.

For my next couple of reviews, I’ll be focussing on sci-fi movies that have an intriguing concept, but completely fail to execute them well. First up, obviously, is Surrogates, a tale set in a world where humans prefer to remain in the safety of their own homes whilst interacting with others through the medium of androids that never age, die or get hurt. It’s the ultimate in avatar technology, but it’s also one that raises many questions that the writers clearly hope we’ll never think about.

First off, if the majority of people’s days are spent motionless in chairs remote controlling these avatars, why isn’t everyone suffering from obesity and muscle wastage? Do they all have gym equipment in their homes so they can exercise and work out at night? How does procreation work, given that you’re most likely out having sex via your surrogate than as yourself? Assuming at some level of intimacy you decide to get together and do it in the flesh for the sake of conceiving a child, how does a pregnancy proceed? Is there a midwife that calls round? Does the baby stay in the room with you when it’s born, or is it looked after by the surrogate? At one point in the film, new “surrogates for children” are advertised – how does this even work? At what age can a child start learning to control a surrogate? Do you need to keep upgrading models as they grow?

Anyway, let’s switch off our inquiring minds for a moment and focus solely on the plot of the movie itself, which includes, disturbingly enough, a Bruce Willis surrogate with hair (thank god that gets destroyed partway through). As one might expect, humanity’s idyllic future is being threatened – by a weapon that destroys not only a surrogate, but in an unprecedented turn, also kills the user attached to it. Given that everyone has lived in a world of safety and low crime rate for years (which doesn’t stop the police and FBI from having as large a department as ever), this is an unwelcome turn of events, and it’s up to Bruce Willis to sort things out.

Of course, Bruce, or rather his character Tom Greer, being a main character and all, has problems of his own, namely that since the death of their son in a car accident some years back, his wife has become terrified of the outside world and refuses to interact at all without her surrogate. The real world, after all, is a scary and dangerous place, as Bruce himself realises when his surrogate is destroyed and he decides to go it alone with his comfortingly balding real body.

At this point, I’m going to be spoiling various plot twists, so look away now if you’re still dead set on watching this movie. Anyway, as Bruce delves deeper into the story, complete with various obligatory action scenes, he learns that the weapon is the last of its kind, and is left over from an experiment gone wrong. Now, the very creator of surrogate technology himself (portrayed by James Cromwell, who will always be Zephram Cochrane from Star Trek: First Contact to me) is using it as part of an elaborate plot to make people realise that, actually, surrogates aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and we should probably go back to how things were before. In order to achieve his aims, he has gone to the trouble of hatching some elaborate plot involving a splinter group of ghetto dwellers who refuse to use surrogates, and even the murder of his own son. The culmination of the plot seems to involve not only destroying all the surrogates, but killing everyone they’re attached to, because the only way humanity will learn their lesson is if EVERYBODY DIES.

Naturally, Bruce is on hand to save the day, with the help of a techie who does all the actual hard work, but when the moment comes, he chooses to save humanity but shut down all the surrogates. Now somehow, this works out magically and everyone emerges from their homes ready to start a brand new day, unrealistic as this seems. Given that humanity’s entire infrastructure has evolved to accommodate surrogates, surely Bruce Willis has actually just doomed everyone? Presumably, surrogates were being used to do all the hard jobs of society, including operating heavy machinery, generating power and such, so when they were all shut down, everything should have just gone haywire. Not to mention the psychological effects on the people who had spent the last few years indoors in chairs. Are we really supposed to believe they just picked up where they left off pre-surrogates?

All in all then, Surrogates is, as I said at the start, a good concept that completely falls down in the execution. Next up, I review In Time, which suffers from much the same flaws, but nonetheless deserves its very own review to pick it apart.

In the normal course of things, I like to begin a review with a brief summary of the plot of the film, book or game in question. GI Joe, however, defies conventional reviewing; firstly, because there is no way to summarise the plot, and secondly because it’s simply far more enjoyable to go through the film from start to finish, ripping it to shreds as I go. Don’t worry about the fact that this review will give the entire plot away – just think of as many Hollywood clichés as you can, add a few more for good measure, and you’ve got it.

After a brief prologue in which it’s established that the main foe is descended from a pathological foe with a mask fetish, the film jumps to the present day, where Generic Hero and his Black Buddy kick enough ass to be allowed to join Team Alpha, some super awesome top secret team of, er, ass kickers who get to defend the world with cutting edge technology such as Iron Man reject suits. Naturally, Generic Hero takes to all this like a duck to water and does ridiculously well on the entrance tests, whilst Black Buddy is, as per usual, forever doomed to be in second place. Naturally, this doesn’t stop him from trying his luck with the ladies, specifically the usual Ice Queen, a talented female colleague who believes only in Science, not foolish things like emotions that can’t be measured. Just for the record, I am a female scientist, and yes, I do believe that emotions exist, because, well, it’s pretty damn self-evident.

Then, for no reason I can really discern, we have The Guy With A Past, who refused to utter the ridiculous lines that pass for dialogue in this film (beauties such as the deadpan “You don’t ask to join GI Joe. You get asked.”) and hence has taken a vow of silence. His Past naturally involves one of the bad guys, who murdered their master back when they were both precocious underage apprentices. There’s no real point to the inclusion of this storyline, but then there’s no real point to the film, so they could have just thrown in anything they liked and it wouldn’t have made any difference.

But wait, that’s not all, for every villain team needs a femme fatale, and in this case it is the Evil Ex Girlfriend of Generic Hero. In the past, she was all sweetness and light, which we know because she was blonde and only ever lived in sunshine, whereas these days she stalks about in skintight leather with black hair. Could it be that the catalyst for her turning evil was that fateful mission where Generic Hero promised to bring her brother back alive (a death sentence if ever there was one)?

So, with the forces of evil launching warheads packed with nanomachines that disintegrate everything they touch, it’s time for the heroes to spring into action. What this means is an extended fight/chase scene that ruins much of Paris and culminates in the destruction of the Eiffel Tower. If there was anything that moved me to genuine emotion in this movie, it was surely the callous devastation of this historical landmark. What kind of morally bankrupt writer would put such a thing into a screenplay?

Anyway, having survived the first hour, I knew that if I stopped the film at that point I would never resume it, and so I ploughed on towards the second hour, where from out of nowhere, a complete disjoint set of clichés arrived. Whilst the rest of the team are expelled from Paris forever (an unbearable punishment!), Generic Hero is captured and put under the care of Evil Mad Scientist. But wait, what is this? Not only is Evil Mad Scientist actually the Not Deceased Brother of Evil Ex Girlfriend, but in his bitterness and anger, he was the one who used nefarious Mind Control Techniques to turn her evil in the first place!

Of course, ultimately the power of Love triumphs over Mind Control, and Evil Ex Girlfriend breaks free of it to save Generic Hero, who in turn must save the day. Actually, to be honest, Black Buddy does more than his fair share towards saving the day, even igniting emotions in the Ice Queen. Quelle surprise, eh? In the meantime, Evil Mad Scientist and Main Villain indulge in their fetishes by donning Masks of Evil in preparation for this year’s sequel. I’ll see you at the cinema…or not.

Source Code is one of those films where it’s almost impossible to describe the plot without giving away some kind of spoiler. Nonetheless, I shall do my best not to ruin more than the first few minutes by explaining that it sees air force pilot Colter Stevens being sent into a simulated reconstruction of a recent train explosion. His job is to relive the last eight minutes prior to the explosion and identify the culprit so that the authorities can arrest him before he strikes again.

So without giving anything further away, what we have here is a spiritual successor to Quantum Leap, but where Sam Beckett was smart, savvy and accompanied by a hologram, Colter Stevens is an idiot and entirely unsuited for his job. His idiotic blunders through the simulation are almost painful to watch, and by the time he starts making progress on his mission, it’s more of a relief than anything else. It doesn’t help that all the characters are as paper thin and one-dimensional as it gets, to the extent that it’s an effort even to recall their names.

But all of this could perhaps be forgiven if the film hadn’t blown the last of my goodwill with an ending that manages to not only be bad, but doubly so. At the point where Source Code should have ended, it cops out not once, but twice, creating a big nonsensical mess of a conclusion that will leaving you feeling enraged towards not only the film, but at everyone who worked on it.

The irony of it all is that Source Code had some good ideas behind it, and if it was turned into a ‘Quantum Leap crime drama’ TV series, I might have some time with it. Unfortunately, the execution of this movie leaves us with little more than a damp squib – you’ll have a lot more fun mocking it than trying to take it at all seriously.