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By Peter T. Chattaway
PREQUELS, prequels, prequels. As if it wasn’t bad enough that Hollywood makes sequels to anything and everything that is remotely successful at the box office,
lately the studios have been cranking out movies that take place before the original stories, hoping these new stories will keep us enthralled – even though we all know how they will have to end.
Case in point: When we first saw the reluctant mutant superhero Wolverine in the
original X-Men movie nine years ago, he was an amnesiac who did not know where he had come
from or how his skeleton had come to be coated in an invulnerable metal called
adamantium. He then went on to recover some of those memories in the first
sequel, X2: X-Men United.
But now that the original X-Men series has run its course, X-Men Origins: Wolverine jumps back in time – over 160 years! – to tell us everything we already knew about its main character all over again,
along with some things that we didn’t know.
The result is a movie that doesn’t really add anything to what the earlier movies gave us; if anything, instead
of furthering the character’s development, it gives us the character’s un-development.
Two other recent films have tried to sidestep the predictability that we often
associate with prequels, by shaking things up via time travel and alternate
versions of reality.
The new Star Trek movie, for example, takes the legendary science-fiction franchise back to square
one and shows how young Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), young Mister Spock (Zachary
Quinto) and all the other Enterprise crew members got to know each other.
But the film is no mere prequel. Thanks to the magic of time travel, it is also
something of a sequel, as the original Spock (Leonard Nimoy) – now 155 years old – and a villain named Nero (Eric Bana) are thrown back in time from the late 24th
century.
They set in motion a chain of events that creates an entirely new timeline,
which is very different from the one we saw before. So for the young Kirk and
Spock, the movie functions also as a ‘reboot,’ a way of keeping the future wide open as they start their five-year mission all
over again.
Directed by J.J. Abrams (best known for producing TV shows like Lost and Felicity), the new Star Trek is a fast, fun summer thrill ride; but it’s also somewhat shallow. The original TV shows and movies all revolved around
some sort of theme, whether socio-political (Save the whales!) or
religio-philosophical (Who is God, and where can he be found?).
But the new movie isn’t about anything, really – beyond keeping its own franchise alive.
Then there is Terminator Salvation, which is mainly a sequel to the previous Terminators, but functions like a prequel in some ways, thanks to the time travel of the
previous films.
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In the first film, a cyborg came back in time to kill a woman named Sarah Connor
and thus prevent the birth of her son John, who is destined to save humanity in
a war against the machines some 45 years later. But the woman was protected by
a man named Kyle Reese, who was also sent back in time – and who ended up becoming John’s father.
In the second film, John Connor was 10 years old, and he and his mother tried to
prevent the war from happening in the first place. But in the third film, John,
now in his 20s, watched the war begin with his own eyes. And so, in the new
film, John Connor (Christian Bale) is now in his 30s, and working his way up the
ranks of the human resistance. He is not yet the messiah that he will become in
another decade or so – but he’s getting there.
Along the way, John discovers that a teenager named Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) has been
captured by the machines, so John sets out to rescue Kyle, to guarantee that
one day he will be able to send Kyle back in time to become his own father.
John also discovers that he may need to rely for help on a former
death-row inmate named Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), who has mysteriously
been turned into a cyborg himself.
At their best, the Terminator movies have explored such themes as the mechanization of society, the
relationship between soul and body, and the way free will finds its ultimate
expression in acts of self-sacrifice. Those themes are present in the new film
too; but alas, none of them are developed all that well, and director McG (Charlie’s Angels) fails to get us emotionally involved in the characters in a way that would
make these themes matter.
Those who enjoyed the religious themes on the TV spin-off The Sarah Connor Chronicles, however, might get a kick out of Salvation’s nods to Psalm 23, and the film’s recurring suggestion that there can be a “second chance” for all of us.
– filmchatblog.blogspot.com
June 2009
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