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Two major components to this review: structure and impact. I will use inline spoiler tags, but note that I do not consider facts about the true events to be spoilers. It's a biopic—we know what happened. But if you don't, be warned that I will "spoil the ending", as it were, and stop reading now.

Now, then.

This is an important story. We all know what happened to the plane, and we all know what usually happens to aircraft whose pilots attempt to do what Sully pulled off. The story of the cra— I mean, forced water landing, itself is amazing. The whole process is so incredible, and this movie captures everything from the initial bird strike through the last boats carrying passengers to shore. I thought the story of the landing itself was done very, very well. This movie is worth watching on the strength of that portrayal alone.

I did have some major objections to the structure, though. They're probably not unlike @LuckyNumber78's complaints…though I'm not coming at this from the perspective of a screenwriter, just as a viewer.

Specifically, the most insulting sequence in the entire film to me was the beginning, which seems like it's throwing us right into the narrative, but turns out to be a just a dream (if it wasn't given away already by the aircraft trying to fly through Manhattan, grazing skyscrapers on its way to a fiery crash). That put me in a pretty skeptical mood for the rest of the film, and for good reason—lots of sequences turn out to be Sully's daydreams/hallucinations/imagination. They were not managed well, in my opinion. That's not to say I object to their use; just that they weren't done well in this film.

The whole temporal flow of the film is pretty unhinged, actually. Though it technically follows a single event from start to finish (the NTSB investigation), even that continuity is disrupted in places. The film retreads certain events, and includes a few others, for no discernible dramatic purpose. And even when it does buckle down and get on with settling the NTSB investigation once and for all, the climax reeks of half-assed attempts to make it "Hollywood suspenseful" that just fall flat. (I mean most of the final NTSB hearing, if you're wondering, where evidence like the report on the left engine shows up at the last minute.)

To be quite honest, I waffled between a 5 and a 6 on this one, not because I didn't find the film compelling, but because it doesn't work structurally. I get that there's an element of metaphor in how the film is laid out, and I appreciate it, but for a film like this it's really not in the story's best interest to keep the audience guessing at what's real. I finally decided on a 6, but only because the true story deserves more than a 5.

Skimming other reviews of this film elsewhere, I've seen accusations of slow pacing, bad writing, unrealistic characters… For every reviewer who found the movie amazing, it's almost like that had to be balanced out by someone else who couldn't stand it.

Someone will have to balance out my review, then, because I need more films like Leave No Trace in my life.

Sometimes, if a movie leaves me wondering what actually happened, it's a sign of incoherent writing, or editing. Other times—as with Leave No Trace—it means I wasn't paying close enough attention to the details. And no, I'm definitely not in the segment of moviegoers who would argue that it's the filmmaker's job to make sure I know what's happening. Nothing smacks of "inexperienced director" like hitting me, the viewer, over the head with a plot point several times to make sure I got it.

Fortunately there's none of that in Leave No Trace. I've been meaning to watch Winter's Bone for some time, but I'll have to bump it up a few slots on the ol' watchlist after seeing this. If the two films share any of the same DNA (and they do, in the form of writer and director Debra Granik), I'll love that one too.¹ I can't get enough of this storytelling technique, where the characters just…exist, and don't stand there explaining what's happening (or what happened before now) for the audience's benefit.

Not everyone appreciates this style of "expositionless" storytelling, to be sure. One IMDB reviewer said "it seemed this [movie] had a beginning, beginning and beginning."² But those of us who relish poking fun at the "exposition dumps" traditional screenplays often throw out really love being left to our own interpretations of characters' words and actions. Or at least… I do.

This isn't an easy movie to watch, really. I wouldn't throw it up to relax after a hard day. The subject matter gets too deep for that, I think. But it is very much worth the journey. Along with those critical accusations I mentioned earlier, numerous reviewers also called this film insightful, thought-provoking, and uncomfortable. I agree with all of those, at least on some level. Scenes that might seem kind of throwaway at first (the church service, say) always turned out to be plot-relevant in the end.

Leave No Trace is slow and quiet at times, but it's never boring.

1. I used to think that the same person writing and directing a film was a sure sign of a mediocre movie, but I've been proven wrong about that many times at this point. Now I just wonder what made me start thinking it…
2. From review by ohajee on IMDB. Permalink: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4250151/

Google were right to feature this film on Chrome's "New Tab" page when it came out. It's breathtaking. Lion deserves a 10/10 for cinematography.

I wish I could agree with the choice to cast Dev Patel in the lead role, though. Apart from the difference in skin tone, Patel's Saroo spent a lot of the film playing something of a sex icon. As amazing as the story is, I found the execution disappointing in the area of character development. Saroo himself didn't really get fleshed out, and as a result he remains kind of a cardboard cutout, a place for the viewer to self-insert and imagine how it would feel to be in his place.

One other big issue: Saroo's adopted brother. We find out almost nothing about him over the course of the film. His obvious mental illness/disability is sidelined to just a couple of scenes—sidelined to the point of being irrelevant. As the viewer, we know it exists, but that's all. We don't know what it is, or if he's undergoing treatment, or if he tried treatment and it failed to help, or how it's really affecting his life. Its effect on Sue is alluded to in a few places, but nothing about Mantosh himself.

It irks me a bit that the film devoted so much screen time to Saroo flicking the Google Earth map around. Some of that time could have been spent further developing characters, perhaps showing some of Saroo's life growing up. Skipping ahead 20 years deprived the audience of opportunities to watch Saroo adapt to life in Australia.

All that said, I realize that this film is essentially a pseudo-biography of living people, and as such there must have been limitations on what the film was able to show. So I can't lop off a mess of rating points for the perceived holes in the screenplay. And besides, it was still a damn enjoyable film.

I like this episode not because the writing is particularly strong, or because the characters feel particularly well developed, but because of the (perhaps not-so-)subtle political points it makes along the way. One of Quinn's arguments sticks out as remarkably salient:

"I was the greatest threat the Continuum had ever known. They feared me so much they had to lock me away for eternity. And when they did that, they were saying that the individual's rights will be protected only so long as they don't conflict with the state. Nothing is so dangerous to a society." (emphasis mine)

The slippery slope that decision represents could be taken as the first step toward a totalitarian government, and Quinn's status as a renowned philosopher among the Q rings true in that moment. For all intents and purposes, the Q Continuum already is a form of totalitarian democracy, wherein the citizens govern each other by means of consensus and any dissenters are suppressed.

On top of that, it was a master stroke to have had Jonathan Frakes direct this episode—if only because he was already well-versed in telling this kind of ethical dilemma from his years on TNG. And Q stories always seem to work better when there are multiple Q involved, likely because they give the writers an excuse to give John de Lancie more than just comic prankster material.

It's a first effort at adapting Star Trek to the feature film format, and it shows. Pacing is very slow for most of the film, only picking up near the climax. The slowness is not helped by long, drawn-out shots of the ship—leaving spacedock, exploring new environments, etc. At the time, I suppose, the audiences probably loved getting to see such views of the ship they'd known up until then only on small television screens, but that's the only purpose these…let's call them "ship porn" shots…serve. Dramatically, they belong on the cutting room floor (or, more accurately, should never have been shot, given how much of the $43 million budget effects shots consumed).

There just isn't enough plot to fill the runtime of this film. It feels like a standard one-hour TV episode script stretched to fill 2+ hours with eye candy. Presented as an episode of the original TV series that ran from 1966-1969, the film's plot would likely have been quite at home. As a full-length feature film, though, it felt like a slog. For the first 90 minutes or so I found myself often checking the playback position, the movie-watcher's version of constantly asking Mom, "Are we there yet?"

That's not what you want your viewers to do when they watch your film.

Update from the future: In summer 2019, TrekMovie interviewed Douglas Trumbull about his work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, as a lead-up to the film's 40th anniversary and Trumbull's first appearance at a Trek convention. Read it here: https://trekmovie.com/2019/07/26/interview-vfx-pioneer-douglas-trumbull-on-how-it-took-a-miracle-to-complete-star-trek-the-motion-picture/

Riker calls for emergency attention from security, so who shows up? Worf, with Geordi. Neither has a phaser. La Forge isn't even part of the security division—at this point in the series, he's the helmsman. But Dr. Crusher happens to bring along a phaser when called to a medical emergency onboard the ship… because that makes sense. (We'll try to ignore how Worf and Geordi play along with Admiral Quinn's lies about what happened to Riker. That's also bad.)

That chair Remmick is sitting in looks an awful lot like the one used for Admiral Jameson in "Too Short a Season". That's because it was the same prop, redressed.

Not a nitpick, but doesn't fit into the review proper, either: I had no idea Captain Rixx was a Bolian. This is the first appearance of the species in Star Trek, and I guess I'm used to the later makeup design—which uses a much more saturated blue. Bonus trivia: The Bolians were named after Cliff Bole, who went on to direct a total of 42 Star Trek episodes across TNG, DS9, & VOY. He also directed on numerous other well-known shows like MacGyver, The X-Files, Baywatch, and Charlie's Angels.

Some background information on what was happening in the television world at the time explains why this episode wasn't as good as you might think it should be. After all, it's clearly meant to be a taut thriller about the possibility of Starfleet being seized by aliens. It's obviously meant to be part of a larger story arc—that started several episodes back, when Quinn gave Picard that warning.

The writers' strike of 1988 was ultimately responsible for this letdown. This "Conspiracy" plotline was meant to be intertwined with the Borg, who were to be introduced at the start of season two. But the writers' strike delayed the rest of the Borg storyline several months, and this piece of it was dropped. That's why nothing ever comes of the "homing beacon" Data reports.

It's too bad. Aside from it being entirely too easy for Picard and Riker to win against the "mother creature" (in Remmick's body), I enjoyed this one. It's not perfect, but "Conspiracy" as part of something bigger would have been better than what ultimately happened: treating this like any other incident-of-the-week—essentially, pressing the "big reset button" and pretending like these events never occurred.

I knew I'd have to get through it in order to proceed with my rewatch, but oh boy did I keep putting it off as long as possible.

This is awful. It's a shining example of how to take a great premise and run it into the ground, repeatedly.

All things considered, the makeup effects used on Paris aren't that bad, I guess. But if we take a step back and think about the science of how he gets there, none of it makes sense. Keeping in mind that humans originally evolved from, essentially, lizards, how could our future evolution taking us right back where we started possibly make sense?

Add on the nonsense of Paris and Janeway starting the "evolutionary" process 24 hours apart yet somehow ending up at the same stage of "evolution" within a few days, and managing to have offspring in that time… Just no. There's no way that happened, not in three days, not ever. The shortest known mammalian gestation period is 12-13 days (some species of opossum). Generally speaking, lizards take longer just to lay eggs—then the eggs have to incubate before hatching. So this part of the story is patently absurd, even without considering Chakotay's absurd decision to leave the offspring behind on an unsuspecting planet to possibly alter the course of events in the Delta Quadrant as they grow into a flourishing civilization.

What a pile of dreck.

There's an argument to be made against the predictability of this episode, and I acknowledge that. But there are so many layers to Caylem's character that I never really caught in previous viewings!

Before tonight, I just remembered Caylem as "the hat guy" because of his little routine with the Mokra guards early in the episode. I didn't pick up on it the last time I watched this episode (several years ago), but it seems clear to me now that Caylem is suffering from a form of dementia. Perhaps I'm projecting that onto him because my grandfather recently passed after spending several years fighting his own battle with Alzheimer's, but it's really striking. His struggles to recall recent events like the letter he (presumably) forgot to write coupled with his strong, robust recall of the distant past are uncannily similar to the way my grandfather would spin his wheels sometimes trying to remember something. The way Caylem gets stuck on a topic is identical to how conversations were with my grandfather a few years ago, when he was still able to hold them but was suffering the effects of memory loss.

I tried to watch an episode of Enterprise but the hotel wireless is throttled too low to stream it, so rather than try to limit the quality or anything I just picked the next episode of Voyager in my queue instead. It happened for a reason.

Compared to the first Star Trek feature film—a first effort that almost felt like watching grass grow—The Wrath of Khan delivers a real Star Trek experience in movie format. Traces of some of the original's flaws remain, but they are appropriately contained in sequences that make heavy (re)use of footage from the first, very sedately paced film.

It was probably inevitable that this second film would make a bigger splash. After all, its very title invokes one of the Trek fandom's favorite villains, and promises to bring him back. And back he comes, Ricardo Montalban performing splendidly—perhaps even better than he did in the TV series episode that introduced Khan.

There's also just more meat to this plot than the first film. It has character development, it establishes additional backstory, and even introduces a new technology (the "defense field") never seen again in a Trek production. Joking aside, Kirk and Spock get to explore real emotion, and we see just how far Spock will go for logic. (Stopping just short of a spoiler here so I don't have to flag this.)

Keep an eye out for an egregiously bad cut near the end—it's notable because it's the only truly bad edit in the film (that I've noticed). I'll say only to keep an eye on Kirk when he's in Engineering—anything more would be a spoiler.

What's this bullshit about setting the warp core ratio at 25:1? There's only one intermix ratio: 1:1. We learned that in "Coming of Age".

The number of soundstage lights that the various Armus props and costumes reflect is amazing. Using such a reflective material was a big gamble—one I'm not sure paid off in the end.

I don't look forward to this episode when rewatching the series. It's kind of a disaster, from a writing perspective. Picard talking to an oil slick isn't nearly as ridiculous as several members of the production team have been quoted saying over the years, but it's not exactly the high-powered diplomacy we come to expect from Jean-Luc.

Mostly, though, it's the meaningless character death. It doesn't work. Unfortunately, the same thing happened at the end of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season six, again because the actor wished to move on from the show.

In this case, I think Denise Crosby gave up too soon. I agree with something Wil Wheaton wrote years ago in a review of "Hide and Q":

I have to give up some respect for Michael Dorn. I can't imagine what it must have been like to play Worf in the first season, when he was one-dimensional and so incredibly stupid. He didn't do much more than Denise did in these early episodes, and where she decided to quit the series out of frustration, Michael stuck it out, eventually developed a complex and beloved character, became a regular on DS9, and was in all the TNG movies.

— https://web.archive.org/web/20071011201935/http://www.tvsquad.com/2007/02/19/star-trek-the-next-generation-hide-and-q/ (the original site no longer exists)

When I originally went from watching later-season reruns of TNG on television to running through the series from start to finish, the most striking thing was how flat the writing was at the beginning for Worf. All of the characters needed time to grow depth, but it was especially surprising just how far Worf in particular had come. And yes, Michael Dorn really played the long game, where Denise Crosby seemed to rather impatiently throw in the towel. (Whether Worf would have developed as much as he did if Tasha Yar had remained on the show is another question altogether.)

The good points of this episode, though, are actually the scenes where Deanna gets into Armus' head. Didn't see that coming. Early Troi is really not a very good character, but her empathic abilities really work for me in this one.