A new, big budget reboot of Crazy Taxihas already been in development for more than a year, and is expected to launch within the next three years. That’s the revelation issued forth by Bloomberg today, suggesting that a rebooted Jet Set Radio is also currently gestating with a similar development timeline. Both titles are part of Sega’s Super Game project, which the company first teased back in early 2021 as a way of accelerating the developer's recovery.
Details about Super Game have been thin on the ground but Shuji Utsumi, the former PlayStation executive leading the project, has let some things slip. Back in April, he said that the project would involve a series of AAA titles leveraging cloud gaming and, deep sigh, NFTS. Late last year, Sega announced that it was teaming up with Microsoft’s Azure cloud division to help produce large-scale “global games.”
When Super Game was announced, Sega bandied around references to its Silver Age blockbusters including Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Panzer Dragoon and Virtua Fighter. According to Bloomberg, these titles are going to be reborn in the Fortnite mould as a free-to-play, massively online title. Sega is reportedly staking its business on the riches on offer from such titles, which already have devoted cult followings. Of course, as with any title this early in its lifespan, Sega could pull the plug before it reaches players, but it's about time we had something nice in this life, and no amount of NFTs can make us hate Crazy Taxi... right?
Polar is today launching a new pair of watches designed to encourage you to get your sneakers on and start running. The Pacer and Pacer Pro are back-to-basics devices with an emphasis on high-quality data to help you train, run and recover. Both devices use lightweight bodies and round cases, with color Memory In Pixel displays sat below a Gorilla Glass 3.0 crystal. And both use the same custom system-on-chip which the company says will run much faster than many of its older devices.
If the Pacer name rings a bell, it’s because it was the name Polar used for a wrist-worn heart-rate monitor at the turn of the millennium. Back then, the data was being pushed from the chest monitor, but the point of reusing the name is to let customers know this is a very light weight running watch first and foremost. They’re both pretty lightweight, too, with the Pacer / Pro clocking in at just 40 / 41 grams, or 1.4/1.44 ounces.
Both promise advanced optical heart-rate sensing technologies, as well as analysis to measure your training load and rest. But the Pacer Pro gets several features its cheaper sibling does not, including a barometer for more accurate power tracking and gradient counting, as well as turn-by-turn guidance. It’s worth mentioning, however, that while you’ll be able to get push notifications and share data with third-party running apps, neither device can be classed as a proper smartwatch.
The Polar Pacer Pro is available today in gray, white, blue and maroon, priced at $299.90 / €299.90, while a green version will begin shipping later in the year. The Pacer, meanwhile, will set you back $199.90 / €199.90 in black, white, teal and purple, and will begin shipping in May.
This morning FIFA, the global governing body for world soccer, announced the launch of its own streaming service. FIFA+ offers subscribers live streams of men and women’s matches, as well as a raft of original series and documentaries. The platform will also play host to a vast archive of older games from previous World Cups, as well as news, statistics and its own fantasy league.
But what’s likely to be the major draw for users is the live games, with FIFA saying that it’ll show the “equivalent of 40,000 live games per year.” At launch, we’ll see around 1,400 matches a month, with that figure “rising rapidly” until we get closer to 4,000 a month. Original series, including documentaries about Ronaldinho, Dani Alves and Lucy Bronze will help bulk out the reasons for users to hang out on the platform.
FIFA+ is, at launch, ad-supported and free, and so users shouldn’t expect to see live streams from any of the major football leagues. After all, European football is big business, and FIFA doesn’t have the ability (or cash) to start streaming games from England, Spain, Germany, France and Italy. Instead, it will focus on less well-represented competitions where the streaming rights aren’t tied up. The Hollywood Reporter suggests that domestic games from Mexico, Denmark, Poland and Angola will all feature.
It’s worth saying, too, that while FIFA is hoping to generate attention ahead of the 2022 World Cup, you won’t be able to stream those games. That, much like the big domestic leagues, is far too valuable to just give away for free, and it’s likely that those rights will be closely-guarded. But while FIFA+ for now may seem like an inexpensive afterthought, it marks something of a shift in the way live football can, or will, be accessed by the majority of its fans. This, to me, feels like FIFA testing the water for the long-mooted, albeit often-dismissed, “Netflix for Soccer.”
I can only really speak about the situation here in the UK, but I think the situation is similar across Europe. Here, major pay-TV providers offer up eye-watering amounts to secure the rights to broadcast live football matches. In the UK, for instance, the most recent deal was valued by Sky News at around £5.1 billion ($6.6 billion) for the right to show football. Of that figure, Comcast-owned Sky paid £4.5 billion ($5.8 billion), with BT Sport, Amazon and the BBC paying the rest. But despite the figures on offer, many clubs feel that they’re not getting a big enough slice of the pie.
This is, broadly speaking, because the cost of running a major football club has skyrocketed, and COVID-19 hasn’t helped. Inflation in transfer fees (how much it costs to buy a player) and salaries after 18 months of almost-nonexistent revenue has made even historically-wealthy clubs hit the financial skids. Barcelona, as close as a blue-chip brand in the soccer world as you can get, is currently trying to dig itself out of a $1.56 billion hole by selling NFTs (among other things). The ones that are surviving, and thriving, right now, are often owned by petro-states, who are bankrolling the clubs to launder their public image in the West on a money-no-object basis.
The present situation, with pay-TV providers keeping matches behind paywalls isn’t helped with some arcane blackout rules. The situation in the UK is as frustrating as it is for US baseball fans, where there’s no legal way for you to watch every game your team plays in a season. It means that there’s a number of people on every side of the debate who feel resentful about the current situation.
It’s why, back in 2020, the Premier League conceded that it was likely that, at some point in the future, it would launch its own direct-to-consumer streaming service. The thinking was, at that point, it could sell games straight to fans and offer them more comprehensive coverage. And, of course, any profit that Sky and other pay-TV providers made on subscription revenue would now go straight to the clubs. At the time, it seemed as much a negotiation tactic as a genuine strategy, but it deserved some serious analysis.
In February 2020, The Athletic suggested that “PremFlix,” as it was dubbed, would likely be a huge money-maker from the day it launched. There are currently 200 million or so people who pay for access to Premier League matches, writer Matt Slater mused. If the majority of those could be convinced to sign up, even at a discounted rate, the annual revenue could be worth £24 billion ($31 billion) – far more than the £5.1 billion paid for a three-year rights package.
It’s likely something that the major European leagues have been considering, behind closed doors, for the last few years. And it’s also likely that a combination of the high risk and massive early investment will put off owners looking for stability in the current uncertainty. But if FIFA+ can demonstrate that there’s an audience for live soccer streams, and that it can turn a profit on its archive content, it’s likely to push the conversation toward streaming far faster than it might have done so organically.
Of course, this is all for now just speculation, but it’s common in football for everyone to jump on a good (or bad) idea when it seems like it might make some money.
Confession time: I’d never read any John LeCarré until after I’d seen the 2011 film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It’s a brilliant movie, and one that sent me scuttling to read the Karla trilogy and then watch the two excellent Alec Guinness adaptations. After devouring the first two episodes of Apple TV+’s Slow Horses, I can think of no higher compliment than to say that I’m bulk-buying the book series it was adapted from in short order.
Slow Horses is an adaptation of Mick Herron’s series of Slough House novels, featuring a group of British spies trapped in administrative purgatory. MI5 agents who have committed high-profile mistakes but know far too much to be fired are dumped in the dingy Slough House. There, they are given harmless busywork too demeaning for real spies to undertake, all the while being tormented and demeaned by division chief Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman.
It’s this world that former superstar spy River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) is thrust into after his own notorious error while out in the field. There, he’s given jobs like searching a dodgy journalist’s trash can and acting as a courier between offices. It’s hardly a spoiler to suggest that Cartwright’s arrival triggers something of a major case for the rejects to handle, which has mostly kicked off by the time the second episode finishes.
What Slow Horses has to offer, beyond the enjoyment of a modern-day thriller done right, is a sense of pulpy fun. A sequence in the second episode I can’t spoil plays out with the beats of a Chuck Jones cartoon rather than an entirely gritty espionage potboiler. It helps, too, that the show isn’t trying to make everyone a two-dimensional cut-out, which can so often be the case when prestige TV attempts to make spy-fi.
The series was created by the unfortunately named Will Smith, the British standup, actor and writer who, far as we know, has never slapped Chris Rock on stage. The dialog sparkles, not surprising given that Smith has written for Avenue 5, Veep and The Thick of It. It’s also clear-eyed about its politics, offering something approaching nuance concerning the benefits and burdens of living in a surveillance state.
Much has already been made about the fact that this is Gary Oldman’s first starring role in a TV series. But Apple also spent big to recruit serial award-winner Kristin Scott-Thomas and Jonathan Pryce, who appears as a former spymaster who has lost none of his imperial pomp. Mentions too, to Olivia Cooke’s Sid Baker, a vastly more talented spy who, despite slumming it in Slough House, is actually allowed to undertake real espionage work, and Saskia Reeves’ as Lamb’s long-suffering assistant, Standish.
I’ll admit, I get a kick out of watching the once-and-hopefully-future George Smiley playing a cracked-mirror version of that same character. Lamb is trapped in the grimy whiskey and tobacco-stained late ‘70s, and Oldman has never looked grander than as a man in ruins. Even at this early stage, there are hints that Lamb was once a spectacular agent whose fall from grace was similarly staggering, but the series isn’t teasing it out in mystery-box fashion.
There are two reasons I’m recommending this to you. Firstly because I thought it was good, and I feel like sharing cool stuff is part of my job. But also because the only reason I even started Slow Horses was because I’d forgotten to cancel my TV+ subscription. I saw the email hit my inbox, and felt resentful at yet another £4.99 that I’d wasted on something I’ve not used at all. (I keep meaning to use that money to subscribe to Disney+ now that my kids are old enough to sit through a whole movie in one sitting.) Ted Lasso aside, TV+ in my mind remains the home of mostly middle-of-the-road fare that aspires to do well enough on either coast, and much of the middle.
It didn’t help that The Morning Show left me cold, and I can’t imagine myself watching Jason Momoa wandering around a forest in in See. You can’t fault Apple for not wanting to just throw a fortune at its TV department and flood its service with forgettable originals. But that deliberate process of slowly building up its catalog has always made me feel a bit like a chump for paying for the privilege of not wanting to watch what was on offer. And yet, after Slow Horses, I decided to take a gamble and watch Severance. I’m only a few episodes deep, and it’s not one of those shows you can, or should, binge over a couple of bloodshot nights, but it is good. It’s a left-field exploration of the nature of memory, personality and corporate life that defies easy explanation. (Also, check out our interview with creator Dan Erickson!)
If I needed to have a grand theory about All Of This (and I’m not sure at this point that I do), it’s that TV+ needs to get weirder. Yes, it has the cash to buy as many prestige-TV series as it wants, but we’re swimming in worthy, often dull series (looking at you, WeCrashed!). I’ve still not bothered with either of the two (two!) Tom Hanks films Apple rescued from the ignominy of a COVID-era cinema release. But shows like Severance and Slow Horses, one a highbrow exploration of something, the latter the televisual equivalent of a luxury dirty burger. Neither of which you could imagine HBO, even in its post-Netflix anxiety pomp, buying. Hopefully we’ll see more of this sort of thing in the future, and I can feel a bit less resentful about paying for TV+.
Finally, I’m benefitting from the world’s seemingly-endless appetite for nostalgia for the good ol’ days. 25 years after Theme Hospital was released, and four years after Two Point Hospital, its remake spiritual successor made its debut, we’re getting a true sequel.
Two Point Campus takes players back to the world of Two Point County, this time tasked with building a chain of new universities in plots adjacent to the previously-dysfunctional hospitals you’ve finished renovating.
I recently played through an early build of the first two levels of the game. Freshleigh Meadows is a cut-down tutorial stage, while the Rome-inspired Piazza Lanatra is the second area players can expect to access. With the release date pushed back to August 9th, I get the sense that the title isn’t yet as polished as the developers might have hoped. This is, at least in part, attributed to the fact that much of it was created remotely while staffers were locked down at home.
I’d only recently (re)completed Two Point Hospital and found that I could breeze through these early levels on instinct alone. At first blush, you might feel that Campus is a little too similar to its predecessor for it to be deemed a standalone sequel. Much has been pulled over wholesale from the previous title, albeit with some graphical polishing. The team clearly felt that if it wasn’t broken, there was little point in trying to fix it, at least as far as I’ve played so far.
The most notable difference is that Two Point wanted to address the most common complaint made by players of Hospital – that they didn’t enjoy the layout puzzles. In both Theme Hospital and Two Point Hospital, you’re given intentionally problematic floor plans for you to build your facility on. That’s part of the core mechanic, forcing you to optimize your layouts for both a speedy patient journey and to make the best use of the space allowed. That weird dogleg building too small for an X-Ray room? It’s your mission to try and fill it with something, that’s the point.
With Two Point Campus, it’s not anymore, since you can now pay money to amend the boundaries of your building and even move the entrances. You can claim, or return, land back to your garden space depending on your need on each level. The point of having weird building layouts that wasted acres of potentially-useful space was part of the game’s playful sadism. I’d complain more about those darn kids needing things to be easier, but I’m coming around to it.
Two Point / Sega
And you’re no longer solving for efficiency anymore, but also aesthetics. The outdoor spaces can be filled with trees, pathways, flora and concession stands, amongst other things. Your obligation isn’t just to educate people, but also to ensure that your students are learning in a pleasant environment.
Financial management is less of a key factor in Campus, because success is now tied to how well your students do. That means watching underperforming students who you’ll need to send to private tuition, or expelling ones who aren’t up to scratch. You’ll also have to set up events for people to meet each other, both socially and romantically. You can buy romantic trinkets for the campus, like love seats, to encourage meet-cutes on your watch. I don’t know if I’m a fan; it feels like the wrong sort of subject for a light-hearted business simulation game to be tackling.
Universities are also a lot less of a gold mine for zany jokes compared to a cartoonish hospital. Sure, there are still menu gags and amusing radio commentary, but there are just less things to poke fun at in a campus setting. The weirdest thing I’ve seen so far is trainee chefs cooking a burger the size of an SUV in a slightly bigger skillet. It’s a far cry from unscrewing a lightbulb sticking out of someone’s neck when they’re suffering from “lightheadedness.”
Campus’ sense of scale has shifted fairly significantly, too, and Hospital players may find the bigger rooms are more of a challenge. While you could build a serviceable clinic out of just 3x3-sized rooms, the default area in Campus is closer to 5x5. There’s a lot more stuff to cram into each room, too, with a more maximalist sense of design compared to the last game. I suspect it’s because of those Hospital players min-maxing their hospitalsuites with impractical objects.
Two Point / Sega
Mercifully, you can now build bathrooms on a 2x1 plot, so any spare room in lobbies all over your campus can now be put to use.
Even as a loud-and-proud fan, I’m mature enough to admit that the titles wear out their welcome after a while. Hospital, while brilliant, essentially asked you to play the same set of gameplay loops across its 15 levels. Yes, the scale got bigger, as did the obstacles, but by the time I reached the final level, the toughest challenge was maintaining my interest.
It’s something that Two Point does seem to be aware of, carefully ensuring that you can’t blow through its new game with the same speedy ruthlessness. Part of this is down to the three “year” cycle the game employs for your entrants to get their degree. The other is a greater focus on actively managing your campus beyond squeezing every penny from its walls.
Early on in Piazza Lantara, I ran out of cash – which often meant restarting a level in Hospital. But here, you can simply wait, burning off a year of some kids’ education in order to recoup the losses without ever needing to take out a loan. (Two Point could never, ever, run away from the satirical point that nothing is more important than guarding your bottom line in whatever privatized industry you’re running.)
If there’s one thing I wish, deep down, the developers had devoted more time to, it’s the game’s frustrating intangibles. There are many instances when you need to improve your hygiene rating, for instance, and have to plaster every wall with hand sanitizer stations and trash cans. But because one too many staff members are “unhygienic”, you’ll never get there unless you start sacking folks.
Two Point / Sega
It’s one of the game’s problems that are often most reliably solved by visiting a Reddit thread, since the solutions are often buried beyond a casual player’s ability to find them. I also wish the UI was less fussy when it came to duplicating rooms with duplicated items on the walls. Having to manually delete internal windows, for instance, seems to be harder this time around than it was in Hospital. (And another: Why can’t I put a sanitizer dispenser over a trash can, since they don’t occupy the same space?)
But none of those issues, annoying as they are, won’t stop me from eagerly snagging Campus on the day it’s launched. I sank eight hours into just those early levels, while suffering from COVID-19, because it’s as addictive as its predecessor. I feel like there’ll be the usual period of my life when it swallows every waking minute that I’m not doing anything else. While Two Point Campus is very much the same game as its predecessor, it’s still very welcome.
Two Point Campus will debut on PC, Mac, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox Game Pass and Nintendo Switch on August 9th, 2022.
The entire* principal cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation will appear on the third and final season of Picard. Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis and Brent Spiner, who have already featured in the series, will be joined by LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden and Michael Dorn. In a statement, executive producer Terry Matalas said that “it’s most fitting that the story of Jean-Luc Picard ends honoring the beginning, with his dearest and most loyal friends from the USS Enterprise.”
Matalas added that the final season will offer a “final, high-stakes, starship-bound adventure,” which, at a guess, nods at the predominantly planet-bound series so far. Of course, long-time fans might be nervous at what the show’s writers will have cooked up for our beloved crew, especially after giving Riker and Troi a minor-key postscript to their Star Trek tenure. Maybe Dr. Crusher is now pushing medical misinformation over subspace while Geordie spends his retirement as a crypto evangelist.
* Sadly, no in-series return for Ready Room host Wil Wheaton, despite the fact he was in almost half the episodes, or Diana Muldaur.
If there was ever a Star Trek film that needed a do-over, both artistically and reputationally, it was The Motion Picture. Dismissed by critics as boring and sterile when it came out, its nickname inside Trek fandom has long been “The Motionless Picture.” In 1997, director Robert Wise started the process of re-examining the film, with a Director’s Edition being birthed at the dawn of the DVD era in 2001. For a couple of reasons, the altogether better version of that movie fell into obscurity, unavailable for most people to see. Now, twenty years after Wise’s amended film made its debut, the film has been given a second do-over in the form of a 4K remaster for Paramount+.
The Abandoned Picture
You can buy a shelf’s worth of books discussing the troubled production of The Motion Picture, and its creative failures. Paramount wanted a new Star Trek TV series, until the money men balked at the cost and potential disinterest from advertisers. The pricey show got crunched into a single movie-of-the-week, right until the moment that Star Wars (and Close Encounters) swallowed 1977 whole. Bosses wanted a slice of that late ‘70s sci-fi movie pie and upgraded the Trek project to a big-budget movie. Except none of the already-made material was movie quality, and the effects house wasn’t up to the task at hand.
The Motion Picture was directed by Robert Wise, a footnote in a career that started in 1934 and ran through 2000. Wise got his big break as Orson Welles’ editor on Citizen Kane and, more controversially, The Magnificent Ambersons. He’d won enough Academy Awards that The Motion Picture wouldn’t be in the top ten of his most notable achievements. The special effects were eventually completed by the recently-departedDouglas Trumbull and John Dykstra; both could point to 2001 and Star Wars as the highlights on their own resumes. Even so, Wise was battered by the process of making it, hand-delivering the prints to the film’s premiere and declaring it to be a rushed, unfinished job.
Length was a problem for the film, a 90-minute TV pilot expanded to more than two hours, bloated with too many special effects shots. Paramount would subsequently produce an even longer cut of the film, letting ABC screen a super-sized, 143-minute TV version which included deleted and unfinished scenes. (There is a rumor, apparently tied to this forum post from 2016 (via Memory Alpha), which suggests that Wise re-cut the film in 1980 to be 12 minutes shorter, but producer David C. Fein doesn’t believe it to be true.)
The Director’s Edition
Paramount
In 1997, Wise, through his company Robert Wise Productions, enlisted the help of producers David C. Fein, Michael Matessino and Daren R. Dochterman to help fix the film. They examined the original storyboards, fixed some of the more egregious effects choices and tightened the editing. While the runtime was longer, a snappier edit (more or less) helped contextualize some of the choices made back when the film was shooting. It also helped to kickstart the reappraisal of the film as something more valuable than the big-budget catastrophe it was treated as.
Part of that work was to broaden the visual palette, especially in some of the key sequences which weren’t fully-realized in ‘79. The inconsistencies during Spock’s first scene – which were shot in broad daylight but painted on a matte implying darkness – are fixed. Many sets that were constrained even with matte paintings were broadened out and CGI – by pioneers Foundation Imaging – used to fill the gaps in the action. The film remained, more or less, like it had two decades prior, but was a much more joined-up experience on screen.
But this edition, while considered “definitive,” was never re-released beyond its original 2001 DVD printing. According to Memory Alpha, it’s because Paramount never kept its own archive copies of the CGI files for its projects. And when Foundation Imaging went under after the death of its founder, Ron Thornton, it was believed that those files were gone forever.
The Re-Remaster
Paramount
“Completely untrue,” said David C. Fein who produced both the first Directors Edition and its 2022 successor, to Engadget. “Everything was designed to be able to go to film, but the resolution [in those original files] wasn’t there, [...] so it couldn’t just be re-rendered,” he said. “It had to be recreated by people who knew what we were going for, because we’re now able to put the detail in for it to be full-size.” “We re-did all the visual effects, not from scratch – the setups [from 1999] were there – then we worked in all of the new levels of technology and information,” said Fein.
Fein says that the project, which was announced in July 2021, is “not a restoration,” and that his team wasn’t just “polishing this film,” but working to tweak it to improve the overall storytelling. That meant scanning the raw material and re-compositing everything to make a fresh, 4K scan off the original 35mm live-action footage. (Douglas Trumbull, to avoid detail loss, would shoot on 65mm film, and so his material was scanned in at 8K, while Dykstra’s VistaVision material was scanned in at 6K.)
The project is, if we’re being a little too honest, long overdue, since Paramount opted to offer the theatrical print of The Motion Picture for all of the Blu-ray releases. “Unfortunately, when the hi-def [versions of the Star Trek films] came out, Bob [Wise] got to watch the fact that it was the original theatrical version,” explained Fein. “And he sat me down in his kitchen and said, ‘I need you to promise me something Dave’ – ‘I don’t care how long it takes, I need you to finish the director’s edition and it needs to be finished,’ meaning film quality.” But Fein says that the lag time was down to a need for the technology to improve, and also for the “guardian angels” at Paramount+ to greenlight the work.
There are a number of small tweaks to the film, designed to smooth out even more of its visual rough edges. Keen-eyed fans will enjoy spotting the additions and changes, an early highlight is the addition of Shuttle Pod 5 to the exterior of Starfleet’s orbital office. “Just about every shot [in the film] has been touched in some way, there’s a lot of subtlety added to shots,” he said. “There’s [also] at least one clearly new shot in the film that helps continuity, and I hope no-one else notices it.”
One sequence that Fein spent lots of effort on, both then and now, was when the V’Ger probe attacks the bridge. The original film sequence was projected through a bent mylar filter with intentionally harsh lighting to create the alien effect. “The way that it looked, was almost like [our] film stopped and another one started,” he explained, looking at the washed-out colors, high grain and poor continuity. Fein credits the power of HDR which enabled his team to create a harsh overexposure of the probe without dulling the rest of the film.
And a less obvious change – unless you’re like me and watched multiple versions side-by-side – is a vastly improved color grade. Because the film was so rushed, Fein explained, the process of color grading, which can take months, was crunched down to four days. He said that the crew’s opinion, at the time, was “just ‘let’s get it done as flat [as we can] so everything matched, and [get it done] as quickly as it could.” The film’s colors are, traditionally, washed out, leaden with that ‘70s sci-fi beige that makes even the actors look like pieces of furniture. “Now that we’re working from negative scans, we’re able to do what [Robert Wise’s] real intention was.”
The final task Fein had to oversee was to ensure that The Directors Edition is no longer a rare curio. Fein explained that, having worked with the digital negatives and produced a new print designed for theatrical distribution, the film is now “future proof.” That should ensure that it never again becomes the sort of film you have to actively seek out to watch. Not to mention that Fathom events will offer a handful of screenings (in select theaters) for viewers to see the film on the big screen once again.
Give me a Good Time
I don’t want to be facetious when I say that The Motion Picture is less of a film and more of an experience. For all of the complaints that the film was slow, antiseptic and cold, it also offers something a little more heavyweight than you may expect from a franchise movie. The team behind the film may not have been making Solaris, or 2001, but those influences are keenly felt through much of the movie. It’s not dumb noisy fun, and it’s not as clever as it thinks it might be, but it’s trying to deal with some weighty issues around what it means to be human. A computer looking to understand if there’s any meaning beyond its existence is something fiction has come back to again and again – it’s always been a fascination for Star Trek, too.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to watch the 4K transfer in all of its glory, since previews were capped at 1080p (I know). What is obvious, however, is that the new version is a whole lot brighter, with much more detailed CG models and much better sound, in most places. The new color grade makes a huge difference, with actors no longer blending into the background of their own film. There are only a few moments where the transfer seems less kind than you may expect, and that’s mostly when you go looking for matte lines. You can clearly see some of that hand-cut wonkiness in the more detail-heavy sequences, like the drydock scene.
(While we’re on the subject; the Drydock sequence is considered, by non fans, as the ne plus ultra of pointless fan service. Yes, it’s a six-minute scene in which Kirk stares, milky-eyed at the refitted Enterprise, well-known enough that even nü-Trek repeatedly tipsits hat to it. But let’s be honest, if you wanted to spend six minutes staring at a model, you might as well make it the most beautiful model ever to be created.)
And as much as it’s Wise’s name on the film, in these modern eras, I think we should also offer kudos to Trumbull and Dykstra for their contribution. The effects sequences are, for their age, some of the best ever put to film and the trippy late ‘70s sci-fi visuals during the spacewalk sequence are on a par with anything 2001 offered. I can’t not also say that, without Jerry Goldsmith’s score, one of the best ever written, much of this film wouldn’t hold together nearly as well as it does. While the finished product is not to everyone’s taste, you can tell it is the product of a number of virtuosos all working to produce their very best work.
It’s funny, because I’d say that I’ve seen this film more times than I should probably admit, especially the first 40 minutes. Something that only occurred to me during this rewatch is how Wise’s direction, and the acting, loosens up as things go on. Kirk, Spock and McCoy all start this film stiff and stagey, acting like they’re all trying to act under the effects of a sedative. But once they’ve returned to the Enterprise and you see Kirk visibly relax into his chair, Spock and McCoy start bantering, and you could almost frame this as a deliberate choice to make the film a form of origin story.
While researching this piece, I went hunting for critical reviews of the film back when it first debuted in 1979. (The best modern essay on the film, and the best modern essays on any of the Star Trek films, is Darren Franich’s 2016 retrospective, which I urge you to read.) Weirdly, Roger Ebert wrote the smartest take on the film back then, and I reckon the conclusion of his review is probably the most elegant way anyone could discuss it. He wrote, “Some of the early reviews seemed pretty blase, as if the critics didn’t allow themselves to relish the film before racing out to pigeonhole it. My inclination, as I slid down in my seat and the stereo sound surrounded me, was to relax and let the movie give me a good time. I did and it did.”
Porsche is today updating the world on its financial results and, by extension, its plans to remain relevant in a world that’s clearly not going to survive climate change. The German luxury brand said that it had seen sales leap by €4.4 billion (around $4.8 billion) and plenty of interest in its models. For the third year running, Porsche's pure-EV Taycan line managed to outsell the iconic 911, with 41,296 units of the electric ride out the door, while the flagship managed 38,464 units. To Mother Nature’s chagrin, however, both were outsold by the Macan and Cayenne SUVs, which sold around 171,433 units between them.
The company has said that it wants 80 percent of its sales to be “all-electric” by 2030, with an additional plan to be carbon-neutral at the same time. Part of that push will be led by a new version of the mid-engine 718, which will be released “exclusively in an all-electric form” at some point around 2025. Of course, it won’t be until we get an entirely electric 911 and Cayenne that we’ll see the real extent of Porsche’s commitment. But hopefully the baby steps so far will translate into much faster action the closer we get to the end of this decade.
Porsche has also announced that it will invest in “premium charging stations” and “its own charging infrastructure.” The company has experience in this area, after launching a high-profile charging station in Leipzig, but this is likely to be a neat euphemism for taking a leaf out of Tesla’s book, launching or franchising a wide network of own-brand EV stops explicitly designed to cater for its own customers. It’s something that (stablemate) Audi has also spoken about doing, and showed off a concept for an Audi-only, premium charging hub last year. The company added that it is looking to get new, high-performance battery cells from Cellforce which are due to begin shipping in 2024.
In early 2021, a group of retail investors realized that GameStop shares had been recklessly over-shorted by major investors. Big funds, certain that the retailer was about to collapse, had shorted 140 percent of the company’s entire public shareholding. Individuals, who co-ordinated their efforts via a subreddit called r/WallStreetBets, knew that they could exploit this vulnerability. They bought up all of the outstanding GameStop stock and drove up the price, forcing the big funds to pay over the odds to avoid losing a fortune when their bet spectacularly backfired.
It’s this story that is outlined, more or less, in MSNBC’s new documentary, Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets, which debuted at SXSW 2022. It tells the story from the perspective of some of the individuals who signed up early and held on to their stake. Some used the squeeze to make a fortune, while others came away with a more modest, but still fantastic, profit. The decision to focus on these personal stories makes for an engaging tale at the human level, albeit one that’s very one-sided.
The film’s general thesis is that the short squeeze took place mostly thanks to the internet and what it has enabled. Without Reddit to coordinate the trades and Robinhood acting, at least at first, as a way around the stuffed-shirt brokerages, none of this would have happened. There is a suggestion that people were motivated to get into investing as a consequence of the stimulus checks. Which I don’t agree with, mostly because people weren’t sinking thousands of dollars into GameStop if all they had was a spare $600 to their name.
It also affords, as far as I’m concerned, a surprising amount of time to talk about the broken social contract most millennials feel hurt by. As useless as the term is, since “millennial” means anyone aged 26 to 41, it’s weird to see MSNBC allowing those under 50 to talk about their plight. Perhaps this marks a new and refreshing change as people who have lived through the last twenty years of utter turmoil are now deemed respectable enough to appear on the news.
The other noticeable thing is the lack of expert commentary from the usual types of Very Serious Men in Finance. The big money fund-types that lost their shirts on GameStop chose not to appear in the film, and so their story isn’t told here. Similarly, you get about five sentences from Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, who became the internet’s most hated figure when his app chose to restrict trading on the platform, potentially prematurely ending the GameStop squeeze. The inequitable screen time makes the documentary’s coverage of some of the major players fairly merciless. Given Robinhood’s launch coincided with SXSW in 2015, it’s interesting to watch nearly 90 minutes of people saying that the app screwed them over at the same festival seven years later. We also don't get to speak to Keith Gill who, as Roaring Kitty, was at the heart of the effort to craft the initial short squeeze.
There is one annoyance that it’s worth being aware of is the film’s decision to create a visual style that apes the language of Reddit memes. Lots of gaudy iconography, remixes of old viral videos and the sort of amateur kitsch awfulness you see a lot online. It reminded me of an experiment Charlie Brooker did on the excesses of youth TV. He piled a bunch of teenagers into a screening room and told them to signal when they got bored while they watched a bunch of clips from screechy, in-your-face teen TV shows. What held them in rapt attention, however, was a sequence from an Adam Curtis documentary, with its slow narration and lack of any visual pizzazz. The point being that just because a subject deals with kitschy, out-there imagery from the internet, you don't need to jazz up the visuals to make your story entertaining.
Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets premieres on MSNBC on April 10th at 10pm ET.
A pair of key consumer electronics manufacturers, most famous for being the places that assemble Apple’s devices, have been forced to close. Reuters is reporting that both Foxconn and Unimicron have announced closures in the wake of newly-imposed restrictions after a COVID outbreak in the city of Shenzhen. Officials are asking locals to remain indoors wherever possible and has implemented a mass-testing regime in order to curtail the spread of the virus. As a consequence of the shutdown, Foxconn and Unimicron will suspend operations until further notice, adding that it has backup plans in place to address any delay.
And while the delay is expected to be fairly brief, it is yet another bump on the already rocky road for consumer electronics. After all, COVID has helped accelerate a crunch time for the tech industry, with chip supplies — already in short supply — becoming something of a rarity. And, as Reuters reported a few days previously, the invasion of Ukraine will have serious implications for the world’s supply of high-quality neon, used to make semiconductors. All of this means that new devices are going to be in even greater demand, and a lot more expensive while all of this stuff rages on in the background.
