Background: Imagine yourself as William Shatner on the set of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. You're getting way too old to play the dashing ladies man Captain James Tiberius Kirk, but you need a paycheck so you're doing it anyway. By this time, Star Trek: The Next Generation has been on TV for years. You've been replaced Captain of the USS Enterprise for an entire generation of young nerds. You've been going to conventions for decades, being hounded for autographs by millions of people who want nothing more than to correct you about some piece of Star Trek lore that you misspoke about at last year's convention. You probably want to break free from that whole world right? Maybe create your own sci-fi future nonsense? Well, in 1989, Shat did that.
In 1989, Shatner decided it was time to break out the… whatever existed before computers. Abacus? Anyway, he wrote a book called Tekwar. Then he wrote another book, TekLords. He's pumped out nine of these bad boys in total, all with "Tek" in the title somewhere. These books have been made into movies, a TV show, a series of comic books, and a pretty crummy looking video game. If you ask around the right circles, Tekwar is famous, but around the Netflix circle, it's lost. Why no love for the Shat?
Plot: There is a whole ton of plot here, as is often the problem when a book is made into a movie. There are right ways and wrong ways to do adapt a novel. You can choose to tell a stripped down story in detail, or you can briefly cover everything that happened in the book. This bets big on the latter. First thing's first. Tek is a new drug out on the streets. It's the microchip thing that when plugged into this little headset, lets you see in virtual reality. I'm not sure what makes one have to buy more of it though. Seems like a microchip is more than a one use thing.
Jake Cardigan is a cop who got thrown in cryo-prison. Sorta like John Spartan in the much better movie Demolition Man. He, of course, was framed. It's never really explained too well what happened, but there was a Tek deal, people think he paid off the bad guys, other cops got killed. Bad stuff, you know. He's looking for his wife and son, she left him while he was frozen. He goes to some hackers who are super annoying to try and find them. The computers are really secure though and they have to fly through hologram cyberspace to get through. I guess this is supposed to be tense, but it makes so little sense that it's hard to feel anything except confusion.
Speaking of confusion, the rest of the movie is some of the most confusing stuff I've ever watched. I'm sure that if one really tried, it wouldn't be too hard to follow, but there's just way too much plot for 90 minutes. There are TekLords like Sonny Hokori who control all the Tek. There's Shatner who runs a corporation that has a way to destroy the world's supply of Tek. Hokori's brand of Tek would be immune though. This seems like it should be the crux of the movie, but very little thought is given to it. There's also the eco-terrorist/Jakes ex-girlfriend Warbride. I can't make head or tails out of her involvement. There's a robot hitting snapshots at Jake in a hockey arena. I dunno, maybe the book makes more sense.
Why Was It Forgotten? The key to great sci-fi is telling a good story that works when you take all the spaceships and cyberpunk out. Take Star Trek for example. What made it stand out certainly wasn't the great acting and superior special effects. People loved that show because of the way the characters interacted and worked out the myriad of problems they were faced with every week. The recent reboot of Battlestar Galactica was so well respected because it would work if it were on Earth and there were no robots. This wouldn't work like that at all. Take away all the future mumbo jumbo and you have a really really boring, uncreative story. The only parts that are even a little interesting are just incredibly confusing.
The other fun part of Sci-Fi are the predictions it makes about the future. It's always neat to go back even just 15-20 years when this came out to see what they thought the near future was gonna be like. This movie gets shockingly few of them right. Sure, this movie takes place another 30 odd years from where we are today, but still. For just one example, money is transferred between people by linking up these personal devices about the size of a deck of cards. The way things are going with Near Field Communication and Bluetooth, there's no way anything will ever come in contact with anything ever again.
What Went Right? No part of this movie is particularly bad. Sure parts of it are dated and none of the future drug nonsense makes a whole lot of sense, but if you want to lose yourself in a world, there is a ton of information to lose yourself in. I think that's why there's still a small, but very loyal following around Tekwar. Outside the novels of Neil Stephenson, there's really not a whole lot of quality cyberpunk. Actually, you know what? There might be, I really have no idea. None of it has the name "William Shatner" on it though.
Verdict: There's a whole bunch of Tekwar movies on Netflix. I don't think I'll watch more of them
Score: 25%
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