Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 1060

The Amateur's Guide to Dabs

Dabs, wax, earwax, honey, honey oil, shatter—whatever you want to call Butane Hash Oil, it's how people are getting stronger, faster, more expensive, and arguably more dangerous THC highs. All the talk also reminds us how far out of the wake-and-bake loop we are.

Dabs have gotten to the point that local evening news reports, like they did with Lil Wayne and the great sizzurp scare of 2013, are beginning to frighten parents into thinking their kids are getting high off of "weed oil". A local report from Fox Philadelphia earlier this month reads: 

Parents, listen up: A drug popular back in the 70s is making a very big comeback, and your teens are taking notice ... However, as you're about to see in the special video report from FOX 29's Thomas Drayton, cooking up this high can be a recipe for disaster. Weed oil, known on the streets as "honey," comes from the dangerous process of turning marijuana plants into oil.

Fair warning: if you run into your kid's room or your friend's kid's room screaming about hidden "weed oil"  you may get laughed at (more than usual). Either way, it's high time (get it? get it?) we get familiar with dabs or weed oil or honey, or whatever you want to call it.

So what are dabs? Dabbing? Is it like dabbling? Beause I dabble, but I don't think I'm dabbing. 

Well, hmmm. Dab(s) is just one of the slang names for a solid, waxy substance of concentrated butane hash oil (we'll get to this in a minute). Philly420 columnist Chris Goldstein had an article this morning, explaining how "dabs" came to be: 

The term derives from the most common method used today: a piece of metal resembling a large nail is held at the end of a curved glass pipe then heated until glowing with a lighter or kitchen torch; a small 'dab' of the thick hash oil (greasy and thicker than cold honey) is placed on the end of a thin glass rod and then touched to the hot nail. The smoker inhales the instantly vaporized concentrate through the glass pipe -- and gets seriously stoned.

Dab is much more palatable than the other names concentrated hash oil goes by, like earwax or shatter. Sometimes it's also called honey oil, which may sound like something you might put on a baguette or feature in a spa treatment, but refrain for eating and/or smearing the stuff on your face.

[image error]Got it. So what's butane hash oil? 

Well, it looks a little like cookie dough, and melted down it looks a little like caramel or honey. According to Animal New York's Matt Harvey, it's "most commonly created by a technique in which high quality pot is blasted with butane that is then extracted, these cannabis concentrates approach 70 to 90 percent THC."

The last part made no sense to me. 

For your premium strains of high-grade pot (Harvey mentions OG Ghost Train Haze, Headband, Lemon Diesel) the THC levels approach 25 percent. So, you're talking around three times as strong. The takeaway: if getting high is like driving, dabbing is cruising around in a Tesla and making every other car ever made look like a stagecoach. 

Oh, got it. So this is a new thing? 

Not really. Harvey points the origin of hash oils to the early 1970s. And, as you might guess when learning about a drug culture development from the local news, dabs were already stale news to West Coast pot enthusiasts last year. "Johnny Green" at the self-explanatory The Weed Blog wrote in February 2012 that these things were just catching on in Oregon, but had been around for a while in California. Green writes: 

California was the first state in the country to legalize medical marijuana, and the first to have dispensaries. Combine that with a 'cutting edge' minded population and LOTS of people, and you have a recipe for excellence. If you live in an area that does not have a burgeoning dabs industry, just wait, because it’s coming. As with almost anything these days, it has started in California, and the popularity will spread sooner than later.

Goldstein at Philly420 points out that dabs were gaining in popularity at the NORML conference in Denver more than two years ago and this past February FEMA issued an alert about a rash of "hash oil explosions."

"BHO has been gaining in popularity in the past three years," High Times senior editor Bobby Black told Wired's Alison Hallett in February. "It’s been done for decades, but it was only done by a few people and it was very underground. Even at High Times we didn’t really talk about it or cover it because it was so rare," Black added, giving credence to Green's theory that pot innovation starts in California and trickles down after. 

So, dabs have been around longer than "Call Me Maybe." Besides their high THC levels, is there any other reason people use them? 

Well, think about it. Because they're so potent, you don't need a large amount to get high. That makes it easier to transport without being caught. The other advantage of dabs is that they don't give off a noticeable odor in both their solid and vaporized forms as Haslett and others report. And Harvey, referencing a dabs smoker, wrote:

... he’ll fortify himself throughout the day with nail-sized hits from a small vaporizer that resembles an e-cigarette. This delivery-system has a built in advantage to weed: near invisibility to law-enforcement.

So the major drawback is that you will look like one of those dorks who takes drags off of an e-cigarette—

—but didn't FEMA ...

Oh yeah, that. Well, there are videos like this one which make it seem like you need to be an octopus to avoid setting yourself on fire while trying to enjoy dabs:

The problem and the reason FEMA issued an alert, as Haslett points out, is people have blown up their houses while making dabs. It's not an inherently dangerous process (like the way making crystal meth can be), but according to Wired proper ventilation appears to be vital:

Butane is highly flammable and it tends to sink, meaning that if you use it indoors or don’t ventilate well, you’ll run into serious trouble. Let some butane puddle in your living room, throw in a thoughtless spark from a cigarette, stove, or — dare I suggest — bong hit, and suddenly your apartment is missing a wall.

Right. So, you don't condone making BHO/dabs/honey oil, but if people are going to do it, please do it outside? Are there any other side effects?

Aside from being quite possibly too stoned? The current science shows that inhaling butane doesn't seem to be harmful. And as The High Times pointed out in October, there was one freak occurrence when someone was "blowing nails" of BHO suffered from epiglottitis, a condition where the smoker's throat was so irritated that the BHO user had trouble breathing. "The only real negative would be overdosing, which might make you uncomfortable for a while, maybe a little anxious or paranoid ... but as far as a long-lasting physiological danger? I don’t think so," a doctor told The High Times.

Anything else? 

"If you don’t like smoking pot, 'concentrates' definitely aren’t for you," Kyle Tracey, CEO of GrowLife Inc. and pot zealot told Harvey.

       

White House Releases Benghazi Email Chain to Try and Clear Its Name

In an apparent effort to settle the on-going dispute over the development of the government's talking points in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, the White House released, early Wednesday evening, nearly 100 pages of emails outlining how those points were developed.

The emails (all of which can be seen — and searched — at the bottom of this post) progress as originally reported by ABC News. Initial drafts from the CIA — which, as has been noted, included references to a protest over a YouTube video — were subjected to feedback from administration officials, the State Department, and other CIA representatives.

What's more clear from the emails is the extent of the exchange between the parties. The initial ABC report, relying heavily on an unidentified person who had access to the exchange, gave the impression that the State Department was mandating changes unilaterally. On Tuesday, CNN raised questions about that formulation, showing one email which called ABC's presentation into question.

Republican critics of the administration's response to the attack embraced the ABC report as an indication that the White House (and Obama) and State Department (and Hillary Clinton) were working to hide information that they considered unhelpful. Wednesday's document dump will certainly not entirely eliminate those concerns, but may further bolster the alternative view of the back-and-forth: that the State Department and CIA each wanted to distance themselves from the attack as much as possible.

Some interesting discoveries have already been made, particularly around a key point: when was a reference to Al Qaeda participation removed? CNN points out that it appears to have been the CIA that did so.

It specified that intelligence officials did not know whether Islamic extremists, including those aligned with al Qaeda, has participated in the attack.

This bullet was later changed after a CIA analyst questioned whether the current intelligence supported the assertion that extremists had participated in the attack.

Another CIA officer agreed, stating the intel placed extremists at a protest, but could not support the notion that extremists were responsible for the Americans' deaths.

One CIA official indicates that the White House didn't have concerns with the talking points as they existed at the end of the day Friday.

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Politico's Dylan Byers points to an assertion from the FBI.

Do I have this right? Email at 9/14/12 9:43 p.m.: "FBI says AQ…was involved" ?

— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) May 15, 2013

The email in question:

[image error]

Other findings:

The emails suggest that if there was a coverup, the uppers didn’t do much covering & that the WH was most concerned with interagency accord

— Marc Ambinder (@marcambinder) May 15, 2013

This is the key page - CIA Deputy Morrell's hand-written edit of Benghazi talking points twitter.com/StevenTDennis/…

— Steven Dennis (@StevenTDennis) May 15, 2013

Email exchange b/w CIA Dir. Petraeus and aide show he didn't like final version of talking points. twitter.com/RyanLizza/stat…

— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) May 15, 2013

Congressman Dutch Ruppersberg, NYT source: i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/interactiv… twitter.com/jktrotter/stat…

— J.K. Trotter (@jktrotter) May 15, 2013

The Wall Street Journal explains why the administration likely released the documents at this point.

The decision to release them represented a major shift that officials hope will tamp down the controversy. Administration lawyers for months had rebuffed calls to hand over the emails on the grounds the exchanges were part of internal administration deliberations.

But administration officials have complained that congressional Republicans in recent days have been leaking selective excerpts from the emails to buttress their argument that the talking points were manipulated for political purposes.

Reporters, including ourselves, are poring over the contents; we will update as information is uncovered.

To search the document below, simply do a "Find" on this article.

    

Now, a Word from Isabella Rossellini on How to Eat the Young

We realize there's only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cellphone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:

Not content with teaching you everything there is to know about sex between snails, Isabella Rossellini now wants to show you how hamsters give birth and how hamster moms will eat their young. Yay!

Robot Chicken x The Simpsons. It's the first time in a long time that something from The Simpsons felt this funny — and we mean that in the best way possible: 

Fine, we get it. There's a distinct possibility that you hate the new Daft Punk album — the robotic DJs kind of wanted it that way. But even if that's the case, we'll always have this goat version of "Get Lucky":

And finally, here are more than four minutes of animals sneezing. We promise that Ms. Rossellini does not make an appearance.

       

Obama Is Pushing for a Media Shield Law That Could Also Shield Him

Though the White House wouldn't comment on the Department of Justice seizing phone records from the Associated Press, it did take one step Wednesday to try and limit the increasing political fall-out of the department's action. By making overtures to renew a media shield law, the administration gets to have its beloved subpoena power and condemn it, too.

According to a report in The New York Times, the president's liaison to the Senate called Senator Chuck Schumer of New York to try and restart the 2009 Free Flow of Information Act. That bill, crafted by the Senate in concert with the newspaper industry and the White House, passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee but never received a final vote following the furor that arose once Wikileaks released leaked cables. (The bill's re-introduction was confirmed by other outlets speaking to White House officials.)

That bill would have set three levels of protection for journalists, as the Times's Charlie Savage outlines. If sued in a civil case, the media's right to protect sources would have been strong, requiring a clear demonstration that the concerns of the person filing the lawsuit trumped the right to a free press. Criminal cases would have required reporters to prove that free press was more important than law enforcement's concerns. On the federal level:

Cases involving the disclosure of classified information — as in the investigation into The A.P.'s disclosure of a failed bomb plot in Yemen last spring — would be even more heavily tilted toward the government. Judges could not quash a subpoena through a balancing test if prosecutors could show that the information sought might help prevent a future terrorist attack or other acts likely to harm national security.

In other words, this law likely wouldn't have prevented the Justice Department from seeking a subpoena to access the Associated Press' phone records, nor would it necessarily have forced the department to inform the AP earlier that the subpoena existed. Which is probably why Attorney General Eric Holder repeatedly said at a hearing on Capitol Hill today that he supported implementation of the bill.

It's why the White House does, too. As has been noted before, the Obama administration has pursued leaks with a vigor that's been unprecedented. On Tuesday, Slate's Emily Bazelon walked through what that looks like.

“We have tried more leak cases—brought more leak cases during the course of this administration than any other administration,” Holder said before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year. …

Between 1917 and 1985, there was one successful federal leak prosecution. The Obama White House, by contrast, has pursued leaks “with a surprising relentlessness,” as Jane Mayer wrote in her masterful New Yorker piece about the prosecution of Thomas Drake.

The 2009 bill wouldn't do much to temper that relentless push.

On Wednesday, The New Republic's Molly Redden wrote that the administration's prosecutions has a real effect on journalists' ability to do their jobs.

[Prosecutions have] unnerved reporters, [Times reporter Scott Shane] and others said, but even more so their sources: national security officials. In fact, it’s hard to call a reporter on this beat who hasn’t felt sources withdraw as the subpoenas and seizures have piled up. “Officials are reluctant to get anywhere close to the line,” Shane said. “Take drones. The official position is that the government cannot confirm or deny the existence of a drone program in Pakistan. But the president has spoken several times, publicly, about the program. Is someone going to get into trouble for talking about it?” Few want to test the limits. “Sometimes they’ll offer some black humor about it. ‘So you want me to be the next person to go to prison?’ But it actually has been much harder to get people to talk about anything, even in a sensitive-but-unclassified area.”

Which is almost certainly the intent of the prosecutions: suggest to any whistleblowers that there are consequences for that action. By advocating for a renewed shield law, Obama gives himself something he can point to in response to critique. In other words, it's a bill that would give the press a shield in certain circumstances — and give the president one for himself.

       

Why Would Anyone Ever Switch from Spotify to Google's New Music Service?

As expected, Google unveiled its new streaming music service at their annual I/O developers conference on Wednesday. It has a very long name and some pretty cool new features. Whether it will actually do anything to upend your listening habits and the market for streaming music services, well, that's up for some immediate debate. 

[image error]Google's Chris Yerga introduced Google Play Music All Access to a room full of clap-happy developers Wednesday. The Verge reported that Google has landed deals with Sony and Universal to distribute songs over the new streaming service, which is available in Chrome and on Android devices, right now. Google already had a deal with Warner in place, but going to market without the other two major label libraries would have been insane.

So how does this thing compare to Spotify, the reigning best streaming music app on the market? Let's take a look at the tale of the tape:

Number of songs:  Google: "millions," according to Yerga. Google has licensing contracts with the major labels, so, yeah, a lot of songs.  Spotify: over 20 million. If Google could beat this number, they would have said so.

Advantage: Spotify. 

Price:  Google: There's a promotion! Until June 30, any user who signs up for a 30-day free trial gets a $7.99 per month per month rate. Anyone who signs up past that deadline will be charged the usual $9.99 per month.  Spotify: $9.99 per month.

Advantage: slight edge to Google. 

Is there a free limited version for the cheapskates? 

Google: Aside from the 30 day promo, no.

Spotify: Yes, you can listen to the whole library free in the U.S. With commercials, but still. They don't need your money.

Advantage: Spotify.

Is it available outside of the U.S.?  Google: Yerga said it would be available "elsewhere" in the future. But for now it's 100 percent domestic.  Spotify: In a small collection of countries, yes, it is. 

Advantage: Spotify. 

Is there an easy playlist option? Google: Google Play Music All Access has a Listen Now feature that recommends a playlist of songs similar to the one you're listening to. You know, kind of like what iTunes and Pandora already did, except it combines songs from Google's streaming library and your collection of music, too. Once the playlist begins, you can swipe to restructure the playlist to your preference or eliminate songs you're certain you won't like. It's more genius than Genius. Spotify: Spotify has a Spotify Radio feature that recommends a playlist of songs similar to the one you're listening to, choosing a playlist of songs from its own expansive library based on the artist. You can skip any song you don't like. It's still pretty genius.

Advantage: Google, but only by a hair because you can preemptively get rid of the stuff you don't want to listen to. 

Total: Spotify by a three-to-two margin. And Google's victories were only by a hair. 

So will people switch over to this long-named thing from the streaming services they've come to know and love? Probably not. It may depend, in the short term, on how well the Listen Now feature is received by the existing Android crowd. If word spreads enough maybe Google can convince some Spotify users, or even Rdio and Pandora holdouts, to jump ship. Spotify already has 24 million active users and 6 million paying users across the globe, but if streaming is the future of the music business, at least Google is playing along.

       

James Franco's 'As I Lay Dying' Trailer Is Impossible to Understand, Obviously

James Franco wants you to know he reads William Faulkner. The ubiquitous famous person and failed fiction writer is apparently a director again, this time for As I Lay Dying, based on the 1930 Faulkner novel and debuting next week in Cannes. The just released trailer is, to be sure, a jumble of disconnected scenes: a woman lying in a bed, people fording and then falling into a river, James Franco riding a horse, James Franco trying on a Southern accent, James Franco looking intently at someone. There is a lot of James Franco in this trailer. Have a look at it yourself:

There's a reason Faulkner's novels are widely considered to be unfilmable!

Of course, it's possible that the Franco is attempting to duplicate the experience of actually reading As I Lay Dying, in which Faulkner employs a loose, stream-of-consciousness style among fifteen unique characters. But his directorial naiveté seems like the more obvious culprit. (His only other directing credit: the oddly-punctuated short film Interior. Leather Bar, in which Franco watches men have sex.) So maybe this version of James Franco was looking for an artistic challenge? After all, the notoriously industrious dilettante juggled classes at Columbia and New York Universities for a few semesters, and is now a doctoral candidate at Yale, and all the rest. How hard could filming a novel be?

Pretty tough, actually. Early reaction to the film's first look seems to be dividing along predictable lines. The novelist Alexander Chee wrote resignedly on Twitter, "I forgot we left James Franco alone with As I Lay Dying. And by we I mean 'America'." Celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton, meanwhile, announced the trailer with the following headline: "James Franco Is FABULOUS In Faulkner! See His Delightfully Dusty As I Lay Dying Trailer HERE!"

We suppose it does require a certain audacity to direct a film based on canonical literature, in part because the film pretty much always fails to meet the expectations set by the quality and force of the original material. (See: War & Peace, Anna Karenina, Gatsby.) It requires even more nerve to do so as a young, first-ish-time director in hopes of creating his first serious film. Seriously, guys.

       

Look at These Flippant Startuppers Trying to Rap

Rap videos from weird startup guys are nothing new, but the genre may have reached its ultimate nadir. Dave McClure's 500 Startups released this homage to Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" on Tuesday — and it's so tone deaf that you'll be begging for the bubble to burst. 

Where do you even begin with this video? Let's start with the early shot of whatever car that is, the one that looks like it costs over $100,000. Making a rap video about raising millions of dollars for a bunch of future bubble victims over a song about shopping at thrift stores is a new level of obliviousness, even for the tech world. Then there are the gratuitous shots of the girls drinking from straws, because there are no sexist problems in tech. Oh, and the racism! Let's not forget the racism. Like the Arab guy saying "blow stuff up" — and then stopping the beat so he can make a joke about how the Arab guy shouldn't be saying "blow stuff up." Hilarious. The very next shot is three Asian people in front of a painting of Sulu from Star Trek. 

Beyond those very serious issues, the remix is terrible. The kids at 500 Startups, an accelerator and seed fund, have rewritten Macklemore's lyrics to apply to the wonderful world of startup finance. None of these kids can rhyme at all, the beat can barely be heard in the track, and the voices fluctuate in the mix from person-to-person. None of these kids look like they want to be there. This is like that time your teacher asked the indoor kids to play outside and they reluctantly agreed. There's literally not a single good thing about this video.

       

Millennials Are Driving Less, but What Happens as They Get Older?

It is unquestionably true that Americans are driving less today than we did just a few years ago. Sometime around 2004, our addiction to driving – expressed on a graph in the decades-long steep expansion of “vehicle miles traveled” – took a turn in the opposite direction. Per capita, we began to drive fewer miles each year than we had the year before. As the U.S. population has continued to grow, our collective miles traveled by car has begun to stagnate.

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"A New Direction: Our Changing Relationship with Driving and the Implications for America’s Future" by Dutzik, Baxandall

It’s not entirely clear, though, exactly why this has happened or whether the downturn will continue, two questions intimately tied to the behavior of Millennials as they age. Twenty-something Americans drive about 20 percent less today than their parents did in their 20s. But is that because of the recession? High gas prices? A lasting shift in consumer demand? What will happen to today’s 20-year-olds as they enter their 30s, raise families, and consider moving to the suburbs?

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This question lurks behind every celebrated trend story about the Millennial generation: Will this group really push systemic change (as the baby boomers did) in how Americans live, work and relate to each other (sharing cars, for instance, as opposed to owning them)? Or is this moment – with its associated driving patterns – a hiccup in history?

"We've basically assumed in transportation planning for decades upon decades that the amount of vehicle travel and per capita VMT can go in only one direction, and that's up," says Tony Dutzik, a senior policy analyst for the Frontier Group, a public interest think tank. "And we have been planning our transportation system based on that assumption."

Data from the last few years clearly show that this axiom is no longer true. So what happens next? In an effort to at least sketch out some of the possible scenarios, the Frontier Group and the US PIRG Education Fund today released a report outlining three alternative futures for America's relationship to the car.

One assumes that Millennials will eventually revert to the driving patterns of their parents (the blue "Back to the Future" scenario on the below graph). The second assumes that America is in the midst of an enduring shift toward less driving, brought about in large part by the permanent new preferences of Millennials. And the last scenario assumes that the recent decline we've seen in driving will continue apace.

Notably, all three scenarios project car usage well below the status quo we might expect based on the last 50 years of driving trends (even with a growing population).

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"Thus far in the transportation community, the question of declining vehicle miles traveled and declining gas tax revenues has been thought of as a revenue problem. There’s not enough money coming in to deal with the needs that we think we have," Dutzik says. "There's another important part of that question that we really haven’t addressed: What is it we think we're actually going to need for the future?"

What if we don’t need to find funding to for quite so many highway expansions?

"If the Millennial trend continues to play out," Dutzik says, "the amount of highway capacity we’re going to need in the future looks far different than it looked in government projections from just a few years ago."

In fact, here are some of those government projections:

[image error]

Dutzik and report co-author Phineas Baxandall constructed these scenarios by trying to "layer on the unknowable over the knowable." Namely, we don’t how Millennials will behave in the future. But we do know that their parents, from the baby boom generation, will soon begin aging out of the workforce in massive numbers. And when you no longer have to drive to work, that cuts a sizable chunk out of your car consumption (the 2009 National Household Travel Survey estimated that commuting trips accounted for 27.7 percent of household VMT).

With these underlying demographic trends in mind, the "Back to the Future" scenario makes the assumption that Millennials will drive about as much at age 35 as their parents did at that same age, and so on as they get older.

The other two scenarios are built on something of a mystery. Researchers have not yet been able to disaggregate how much of our current decline in driving has been attributable to gas prices, or the economy, or changing attitudes toward car ownership or urban living. But it’s been driven by something. And in these two futures, Dutzik says, “whatever constellation of things it is that has caused the shift in per capita driving over the last decade – we think that’s a real thing.”

The way we work has also been changing, alongside the demographic shape of the workforce itself. And this trend, which the report did not address, could drive down VMT even further, as more people telecommute or join the freelance economy.

In all of these scenarios, Dutzik assumes that we're unlikely to ever surpass our 2004 peak in per capita driving. Today, we individually drive about 7 percent less than we did in 2004 (or at levels comparable to 1996). It’s plausible we could return to that peak, but many of the factors that drove us there no longer exist: cheap gas, the growing baby boom workforce, women entering the workforce for the first time.

Millennials will inevitably wind up driving more than they do today as they age. This is virtually always true of people in their 20s as they enter their 30s and beyond. Certain stages of life demand more use of a car than others. But the question is: by how much? And by how much compared to their parents?

       

Michele Bachmann Worries Obamacare May Let the IRS Kill Conservatives

If anyone can tie the IRS, Benghazi, and Obamacare into one grand conspiracy, it's Michele Bachmann. And she did. In an interview with the archconservative site World Net Daily last Friday, Bachmann presented her theory, which ends with the IRS allowing conservatives to die.

Here's her theory, with each high-level-conspiracy bolded. The House Oversight Committee's hearings on Benghazi spooked the White House so much that they decided to take advantage of "a Friday dump day" (Bachmann's words) to "confess to such a flagrant misuse of politics and power" (World Net Daily's) as the IRS investigation of Tea Party groups. But what really worries Bachmann is that the IRS, which is largely responsible for administration of Obamacare, will use its new-found partisanship to "deny or delay access to health care" for conservatives.

It's not an entirely new argument for Bachmann, who, in 2009, claimed that Obamacare would restrict health access for the disabled. Politifact rated that claim "false."

During his press conference earlier today, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice (Department of Justice) would investigate the IRS' behavior. As the Washington Post reports, Holder indicated that the "FBI is coordinating with the Justice Department to see if any laws were broken … We are examining the facts to see if there were criminal violations." This presumably doesn't include any homicides.

       

'Star Trek: Into Darkness' Is Almost Too Good

In some ways it's tough to talk about J.J. Abrams's Star Trek movies, smooth and sleek as they are. The second film in the reboot franchise, Into Darkness, has plenty of big emotional moments and seat-rattling action scenes, but they're all sort of fused together in a way that's hard to pick apart. Which isn't really a bad thing, obviously! More movies, especially big splashy summertime entertainments like this, should be as crisp and assured as Into Darkness. But there is a slight sense, as I had with Abrams's first Trek picture, of all that tightness and proficiency rendering the movie a little cold. At times these new Star Treks can feel like showy demonstrations of how to make a fresh, snappy update of a classic, without giving us much of an experience in and of itself. It's a strange thing to say about an IMAX 3D space adventure, but there's something almost academic about Into Darkness. Not in a bookish way, really. It's more that Abrams seems so breezily in control of the mechanically structured film that it sometimes feels like we're watching something instructional; it's the ideal model, somehow not the actual thing.

Where there are loose ends in this movie, they can mostly be found in the script, written as it was by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and that master of setup but epic bungler of follow-through, Damon Lindelof. (For more evidence of this particular fault of his, watch all of Lost. Actually don't. Seriously, don't do that to yourself. Just watch the first season and wonder forever.) Into Darkness finds Kirk (Chris Pine) on a mission to track down a rogue agent (Benedict Cumberbatch) who has been terrorizing Starfleet for mysterious reasons. Cumberbatch plays all this guy's focused rage with ferocious intensity, and it's moody fun to watch, Michael Giacchino's rousing score swirling around as we peer into, well, the darkness. And yet this guy is ultimately not that scary, his plan a little muddled, the resolution a little pat. By about three-quarters of the way through, the scope of the movie has proven a lot smaller than it initially seemed, which is a letdown. But that's maybe a problem of my outsized expectations — my viewing partner thought everything fit just right. Still, something tells me that these frequent collaborators need to go on a retreat and figure out how to really deliver on a script's big narrative promises.

[image error]Beyond that, though, Into Darkness is a smart and almost elegant blast, Abrams staging fast, limber set pieces with the ease of an old pro. His foundational impulses may be Spielbergian, but he's developing a style recognizably his own, something that marries peak Spielberg-era stateliness with our contemporary tastes for shaky-cam, verite intimacy, all done with a splash of wit and just a breathy hint of bravado. Abrams films dialogue tight on his actors' faces, perhaps trying to avoid the staginess of earlier Star Trek, and his action scenes are drawn in close too, until they pull way, way back and we realize the wowee scale of the thing. The film's opening scene is, for me, the real stunner, involving a primitive alien race, a mad dash through a curious red jungle, a cliff jump into the ocean, and, most spectacularly, a huge raging volcano that threatens to annihilate life on the planet. I loved the faraway mystery of this place, of these alien folks, and the idea that Kirk and his crew were trying to stop their extinction. It's a tease, a glimpse into a whole precarious planetary ecosystem that hints at the unknowableness of the larger universe, how there could be a planet dying right now, at any point really, entire civilizations and cultures destroyed, and we wouldn't know it. It's a lonely thought, but beguiling too, and Abrams poses its questions subtly, breathtakingly. It was my first sense that he really might be the right man for the Star Wars job.

Abrams has also hired a good company of actors. Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, as Spock, have nice chemistry, a good thing considering that much of Into Darkness plays like a love story between the two explorers. Pine in particular has settled snugly into the role, letting some of the first film's overplayed cockiness fall away while adding some notes of weariness that hint at a flintier Kirk to come. As Scotty, Simon Pegg is a lot of fun, as Simon Pegg always is, and Abrams generously gives him a lot to do. The women don't fare quite as well here, as is so often the case with these big movies, but Zoe Saldana is as welcome a presence as ever, while franchise newcomer Alice Eve exudes an enticing air of mystery before the script just sorta forgets about her. And, again, Cumberbatch growls effectively and manages to hold the weight of this big movie, though I wish the story did a little more with him. Ah well. Small complaints.

Which brings us back to that feeling of sleekness, of odd remove. I enjoyed watching Into Darkness but nothing much stuck with me a few hours later. The same could be said of the first film, the details of which I can hardly remember. Ultimately Abrams's Star Trek films are cool technical wonders that don't connect in any real visceral way. My guess is that that's owed to the fact that Abrams, as he's said in interviews, wasn't much of a Star Trek guy before he took on this task. I think he's done well by the franchise, very well in fact, but his heart seems elsewhere. Which is why I suddenly can't wait to see him get out of the classroom and go do his own space travel. You know, out there. In that galaxy. The one that's far, far away.