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 …
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 a…
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 producer David C. Fein, post-production supervisor Michael Matessino and visual effects supervisor 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.
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Google has todayannounced that it has signed an agreement to buy Mandiant, a notable cybersecurity company, for $5.4 billion. The unit, once acquired, will be folded into Google’s Cloud team to ensure that it can offer an “end-to-end security operations suite” for its business customers. Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia says that the deal will enable “organizations [to] effectively, efficiently and continuously manage and configure their complex mix of security products.” Google’s cloud platform is used by a number of major companies, and an outage towards the end of 2021 briefly knocked out Spotify, Snapchat, Etsy and Discord, amongst others.
Mandiant isn’t likely to be a name on everyone’s lips, but it’s one of those companies who gets called in whenever bad things go down. It discovered the SolarWinds hack, and it was hired by Equifax to look into its security practices after its massive security snafu in 2017, and T-Mobile entered into partnership with the company after its 2021 breach. It also works with major banks and governments to work on high-profile attacks involving state actors. Mandiant was previously a part of FireEye after being acquired in 2013, but the company was spun back out last year.
The news comes just a month after Bloomberg reported that Microsoft might be interested in acquiring the company. It said that any deal would enable its new buyer to offer “unparalleled cybersecurity knowledge,” although Microsoft — obviously — subsequently pulled out of negotiations. But Google clearly feels that the deal is worth it, and is the second most expensive purchase the company has ever made, after its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola.
