There were tangible ripples of excitement and many a face was lit with trekkie-based glee. Finally, four years after sci-fi made its comeback with the first J. J. Abrams directed film, Star Trek is back. Fast-paced, funny and action-packed, the latest adventure with the Enterprise crew kicks off in a bizarre, slightly under-developed land called Nibiru, featuring a rather strange population who have what looks like papier mâché faces. Unfortunately for James Kirk, they’re hot on his heels.

Why are we there? Because a volcano of epic proportions is just about to erupt with the potential of wiping out an entire population. There’s no slow set-up here. Spock gets into hot water (well hot lava actually) within the first five minutes. Jim Kirk saves the day, but his violation of the prime directive (not letting people see the spaceship) gets him in trouble with Chris Pike. Will Kirk have to go back to the academy for further training? Is this the end of his career?

Cue Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays the villainous John Harrison: an ex-Starfleet crewmember who randomly orchestrates an explosion at a Starfleet data archive. Although Harrison is declared public enemy number one, it’s not just one big manhunt – there are plenty of other events along the way. We are introduced to stowaway crewmember Dr. Carol Marcus, witness a scene depicting what the Titanic disaster would have looked like in space, and are treated to a scattering of brilliantly delivered Spock one-liners.

The thing about Star Trek Into Darkness is that it somehow manages to cover all bases without trying too hard. It’s by no means faultless: for instance, Karl Urban doesn’t seem to be able to do anything besides frown and stare into the distance, Dr. Marcus has a curiously short-lived and painless broken leg, and the Spock/Kirk bromance is verging on serious over-cheese. Despite these niggles, it doesn’t take away from the fact that this is a worthy follow up to the Oscar-winning first movie with action, humour and a solid cast. Chris Pine boosts his credentials yet again, Simon Pegg provides the laughs with his slightly ridiculous Scottish accent and J.J. Abrams delivers a master class on how to direct an action epic. The Marvel brigade would do well to take note. The beauty of this movie is that you don’t have to be a trekkie or have seen the first movie to enjoy it. My advice: see it in 3D and see it soon.

4 Stars

The coming of summer means but one thing to most Oxford undergraduates: exam season is under way. If the thought of writing several hours of nonsense about something you haven’t cared about since third week of Michaelmas isn’t the most thrilling prospect in your life, you might like some cinematic distraction. Alternatively, you might like to see your fate enacted on screen before you have to go through it yourself. To this cheery end, some of the best and worst exams on TV and film have been gathered in the paragraphs below.

First off comes, predictably, Exam. This 2009 British thriller was so dreadful that with any luck it has disappeared from public memory. In an alternate version of reality, eight candidates sit an employment assessment exam while an armed guard stands at the door. This all sounds like real Oxford exams, even if the dress is less quaint, until you find out that the paper is a mere eighty minutes long, and it doesn’t have any questions written on it. Instead of just rejoicing in this, the candidates make a lot of fuss, call each other dubious nicknames, and eventually work out that there really are no questions on the paper. In a witty twist, “Blonde” is the one to make this realisation and she ends up getting employed. If only real life were as simple as this.

Marginally more dreadful than Exam is Final Exam. Set in Lanier College, one of those American places that teaches useful technical courses rather than how to render Dickens into exquisite Ciceronian Latin, Final Exam sees a bunch of friends being killed off one by one at the end of Final Exam week, generally in the dark of night, always by a psychopath. “Some may pass the test… God help the rest,” went the catchphrase on the 1981 poster. It may have been a turd of a film, but at least its promotional jingle retains some relevance today.

But something jollier to watch might be more what’s needed at this grim time of the academic year. It might even help if the films were worth watching. Brideshead Revisited is always an efficient way of procrastinating for eleven hours. Although a most Oxonian of films, the amount of the 1981 TV series spent in Oxford is refreshingly little. For most of it, Charles Ryder just wanders around the eponymous Brideshead estate, goes on cruises and paints some pictures. It’s a lovely visualisation of what life might have been like if we had decided to leave before becoming finalists.

Lesser known, but equally nostalgia-ridden, is Summoned by Bells, the BBC’s film version of John Betjeman’s verse autobiography of the same name. Betjeman got sent down after failing the Pass School, a set of exams taken only by those who had no hope of getting an honours degree. Depressingly, pass degrees are long gone in most subjects, but you can relive the glory days in this obscure 1976 film.

If only finals essays were as easy as the one in The Breakfast Club, where a gaggle of unruly students are forced to sit down for eight hours and write about ‘who they think they are’. Still, if all else fails, why not make à la Lindsay Lohan in Freaky Friday and hook up with a hot invigilator? They’re bound to let you access the papers after the exam so you can copy everyone’s answers and scribble all over your enemy’s work. If you’re more into preventive measures, you could do worse than follow the example of the great Bart Simpson. In ‘Bart Gets an F’, our spiky-haired hero turns to prayer the night before the exam. Miraculously, a huge snowstorm hits Springfield the next day, allowing Bart an extra day of revision. His study technique of slapping himself around the head every time he gets distracted is definitely worth a try. Or if you’re a Harry Potter fan, you could always pin your hopes on Fred and George flying into the North Schools flinging fireworks everywhere, like in Order of the Phoenix. Oh, and don’t make the mistake of Will in The Inbetweeners. Stay off those energy drinks, unless you’re planning on bringing a spare pair of pants.

Under the direction of Thomas Bailey and Emma D’Arcy, The cosmonaut’s last message to the woman he once loved in the former Soviet Union becomes a much simpler expression of human emotion than the title might suggest. David Greig’s script doesn’t follow a strict linear narrative but is instead tied together by a story of two Soviet astronauts that are stranded for many years in outer space, ignorant of the collapse of the superpower that put them there. Their scenes are intertwined with those of the people remaining on earth whose lives, seemingly unconnected at first, are all linked to the forgotten spaceship orbiting above them.

The structure of the play, fragmented into over 30 scenes, forces the audience to focus on the intensity of the interaction between the characters “in the moment”, and the play relies on the actors’ capacity to earnestly portray this. The cast rises to the challenge, most notably with the performances of the astronauts – Will Lewis and Mark Mindel – who are immediately convincing as a pair who have spent many years in only each other’s company. Bailey says, “Thankfully, they’ve got to know each other quite well now” and this is evident, particularly in the comedic episodes which struck me as very relaxed and natural.

Emma D’Arcy and Edward Wingfield’s strength lies in their body language: the awkwardness of their first encounter could be physically felt as they appeared on stage. Depicting the relationship between two people unable to understand each other’s language was particularly demanding for Wingfield who had to rapidly swap between French accent (when his character was attempting to speak English) and English accent (when “speaking French”). This technique was not immediately obvious, but worked well, particularly with D’Arcy’s responses. Despite moments where I wished a pause to be slightly longer, or the intonation hit the wrong note, the actors’ performances seemed faultless.

While at first the episodes might appear disjointed, each is well rounded, and could be a miniature setpiece in itself. The performance is held together partially through Frankie Meadows’ soundscaping, who will be mixing naturalistic sounds with his own music live on each night of the performance, tailoring it in response to the actors and the audience. The set promises to convey the expansiveness of space through projecting the starry sky onto the backdrop, which will alternate with other set projections to make one scene distinct from another. Scenes occurring in space will all be set downstage, so that even when we are witnessing the scenes on Earth, they would be seen through the lens of the astro- nauts’ experiences.

The cosmonaut’s… will be on in 5th week at the O’Reilly, and from what I have seen, it promises to be a striking and human performance.

 Prelims and finals loom ever closer. It’s time for a revision break that doesn’t involve Facebook or gin, so go and in­hale some culture at the Ashmolean instead. It’s healthy, free and, as these editors found out, fascinating. It’s a big muse­um which can be daunting, but here’s our col­lection of top hits.

Our advice for handling the Ashmolean is to forcefully ignore all their orientation galleries. Turn immediately left and walk through the room of marble sculptures, pausing only to ad­mire a few beautifully sculpted buttocks. Head straight to the Egyptian section, stuffed with hieroglyphic paraphernalia. The shrine of King Taharqa dominates Room 23, and just beyond lies the section on burial. The Ashmolean’s col­lection of mummies is impressive, especially the case containing Djeddjehutyiuefankh’s three coffins. Just outside the Egyptian galler­ies you can find a mummy of a little boy. Beside it is a 3D artwork based on the CT scans and painted on 122 sheets of glass by Angela Palmer.

The rest of the ground floor is dedicated to the art of other ancient worlds. Expect coins, statues, ivory combs, and the odd piece of jew­ellery. Room 15 has beautiful Etruscan bronzes, but if pottery is your thing, then this is the floor for you. The offerings from Crete are by far the most impressive — check out the six ten­tacled Octopus pot (Knossus, 15th century BC), and the collection of narrow Greek pots called lekythoi at the bottom of the back stairs.

Whip swiftly round the first floor – ‘Asian Crossroads’. Look out for small statues of multi-limbed deities in the Indian section, and intri­cate Islamic inlayed boxes. Ignore the ‘Medi­terranean Crossroads’ room if you’re bored of coins and jewellery. Go straight to Room 29 – ‘Eastern Art Paintings’. It displays beautiful Japanese manj netsuke – small engraved ivory ‘toggles’ alongside Japanese woodblocks.

The Eastern rooms spill onto the second floor, entitled ‘West meets East’. This is where the real fun begins. Highlights include Samu­rai armour; an authentic ‘one and a half mat’ tea-house; an enormous, intricate tapestry ‘The Battle of Animals’; and a spectacular 17th century lacquered Chinese screen. Chinese painting seems to be spread all over the Ash­molean at the moment. The ancient paintings are found on the ground floor, and on the 2nd floor the exhibition takes China from 800AD to the present. There are some beautiful modern examples hidden away in room 38, but don’t miss the special exhibition of Xu Bing which ends on the 19th May.

The impressive Eastern section makes look­ing round Room 41 – ‘England 400-1600’ – rather embarrassing. If you’re studying the Anglo-Saxons it might be useful, if not, admire a brooch or two then leave. Do not even think about stopping in the European ceramics room. Walk straight through to the musical in­strument display, and spend some time wish­ing you could make violins like Stradivarius.

The other half of the second floor is a sub-standard National Gallery. The rooms repre­sent most of European art, badly. The Italian Re­naissance room features Bronzino’s ‘Portrait of Giovani de Medici’. It depicts one of the wealthy Medici family’s sons but is worth seeing for the frame alone. There is also a lovely rare Titian, ‘The Triumph of Love’, showing Cupid standing triumphantly on the back of a subdued lion. Avoid the overcrowded still-life room like the plague; but do try and find the tiny hidden cor­ner of Russian Art. Unless you are from Corpus and want to see your college silver, or have a keen interest in pocket watches, you can ignore Room 55.

The same goes for most of floor three, espe­cially the revolting collection of wine glasses. The pre-Raphaelite gallery is, predictably, not worth the walk. The Pissarro pickings are thin on the ground, and if at all pressed for time, go straight to see the Sickert. Down a short flight of stairs is an odd room of unimpressive paint­ings by big names (Picasso, Kandinsky, Hep­worth). Take it or leave it.

If you’ve managed to squeeze this all into an hour, congratulations. You are now an art afi­cionado. Go to the restaurant on the top floor, and reward yourself with an expensive goat’s cheese salad.

Observant people may have already no­ticed some work from Conscious-Un­conscious without having even passed a gallery.

Nestled discretely in seven storefronts in the town centre, small screens flicker with People and Diagrams, a series of films made around Oxford in the past year. These site-based works reflect Willats’ practice of systematizing our relationships with our surroundings, and in this latest solo show he has chosen to use the city and its inhabitants as his means to do this.

The most prominent piece in the exhibition is ‘The Oxford Community Data Stream’, which the artist developed over the last two years in conjunction with one group of residents from Kennington and one from Blackbird Leys. Participants were given super-8 cameras and asked to record their daily environment. The two sets of footage were then spliced together to create imaginary realities. For those who only think of Oxford as dreaming spires, the candid and gritty accounts of these neigh­bourhood’s is refreshing. Though the final cut is dull and prosaic, the participant’s films and photographs form touching portraits of the community.

Willats’ fixation on our interactions with the “hypernormal” emerges in Macro to Micro, composed of text, stills and video. In 1998, the artist instructed five actors to perform a series of “normal” events in an Uxbridge shopping parade and commissioned a team of people from media backgrounds to document what took place with complete subjectivity, again using the very evocative Super-8. Their focus on the details of the parade and the minutiae of the group’s actions successfully evokes our individualistic perspectives of the everyday, and pleasantly disorientates the viewer as we struggle to apply our objectivity.

The exhibition also looks at interpersonal re­lationships. In ‘How Others See Us and How We See Ourselves’, brightly tinted photographic prints show two young creatives in incred­ibly tasteful domestic setting, over which Wil­lats has placed letraset buzzwords to describe the couple, such as, “Pacesetters, Consumers, Searching for the Attraction.” Though Willat’s work dignifies his pedestrian subject matter, the prints also parody their lifestyles and stim­ulate knowing middle-class chuckles.

The bold colours and designs of Willats’ prints have a 1970’s feel, which can makes his works appear conceived from an antiquated perspective. This is most obvious in the 2011 se­ries ‘How the Future Looks From Here’, which shows a twenty-something Brooklynite couple at home. The prints are stamped with ideas about how new communication technology is shaping our relationships. The dated form made me inherently skeptical of their perspec­tives and suspect them of fogeyism.

Much of the work in the show does look like it was created much earlier than the captions claim, and it is a shame that Willats’ style has not developed to match the contemporary poignancy of his social analysis

 In one album sleeve, Ancient Mesopotamia collides with A Clockwork Orange. Beethoven meets HG Wells meets disaffected Samurai youth. The International Space Station fuses into Elvis. The source of the synthe­sis, according to Simon Goddard, is Ziggy Stardust.

Goddard’s latest book, Ziggyology, charts David Bowie’s musical creation through the vast genealogy of his possible influences. The roots of the Starman are traced back as far as Pythago­ras and the reader catapulted on from there into a tangled mass of interlinked ideas and inspirations. The connexions can verge on far-fetched – Alad­din Sane’s lightening bolt isn’t a reference to the SS just because his mother once dated a Blackshirt – but even at their most extreme his assumptions are enticingly readable. Most of his biography delivers like an extended Bowie-themed epi­sode of QI, filled with snippets of information that provoke momentary murmurs of “Oh-I-never-knew-that”.

But what Goddard is attempting is more intriguing than a potted Bowie history. His biography is a generic miscegenation, poised between non-fiction and fiction, Sci Fi and mu­sic journalism. The line between imagination and reality is hazily drawn – Ziggy Stardust is presented not just as one of Bowie’s many Pop characters but his incarnate alien Other. His­tory is conceptualised around the moment of Ziggy’s miraculous nativity, the distant past and cosmic future drawn together about the single point of the Starman’s ‘arrival’.

Disappointingly, the format becomes more orthodox as the novel progresses. The details of Ziggy/Bowie’s actual time touring never stray far from the sex, drugs and smashed hotel rooms of a conventional rock star biog­raphy. The arrival of Ziggy feels so anticipated that everything after his first ap­pearance savours of anti-climax. We forget that Ziggy is merely Bowie’s creation, a clever piece of Glam Rock market­ing. Goddard fails to bal­ance the tale of Ziggy the psycadelic alien with that of Bowie the ordinary (well, ordinary-ish) earthling — we have learnt too much about Ziggy’s roots to maintain his Martian mys­tique, but too little about Bowie himself to gain real understanding of his charac­ter and career.

But do we really want in­sight into Bowie the human? To make him more ‘knowable’ would be to make him unin­teresting. We want our pop geni­uses to be aliens. As it is, there is a fascinating, almost magical-realist element to Goddard’s smooth movement between space spiders and stardust and the Chris Tarrant and chips banal­ities of 70s life. His surreal explosion of people and facts has an enjoyably hectic extravagance and if nothing else, the eclectic inundation of Bowie-trivia is a good incentive to return to his albums.

‘Starman’ is playing as I type.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

I’ll not deny that I was worried before I set out to the Master’s Garden of St Peter’s to see a preview of that epitome of nostalgic childhood memo­ries, The Wind in the Willows. What if the charac­ters weren’t up to scratch? What if the costumes fell below the standard of my beautifully ornate book-version? What if the Weasel just wasn’t frightening enough? I needn’t have worried. This new adaptation of a classic, performed in the pic­turesque and sunny college gardens is enough to delight any theatrical cynic and establish firm faith in the good old plot-driven adventure.

From the very beginning, as Toad, (Chris Con­nell) bounces onto the stage in red-checked trousers, delightfully camp and with a voice to match even the most flamboyant moments of a Michael McIntyre stand-up, I settled back in my seat, prepared for an enjoyable few scenes. All of the cast were highly competent; but the next animal to really shine was Badger, (Dom Wood), who, complete with waistcoat, watch chain, pipe and a fascinatingly animated beard, encapsulat­ed all that is great and quirky in the stereotypical Oxford don.

Even better, whilst playing the Judge much later in the play, Dom Wood enacts a totally dif­ferent physicality, so that although his costume remains identical throughout we have no trou­ble confusing him with his earlier role. In fact, all of the cast retain their utterly individual characteristics which mark out their personal­ity and remind us of their animal form. Mole twitches and quivers in permanent indecision, Toad gambols about playfully, and the seductive and untrustworthy Fox shimmies on stage with what looks horribly like a dead animal around his neck, twirling an umbrella in a successfully Dickensian way.

A play performed outside is clearly a challenge, but director Stephen Hyde assures me that the natural fading light of the evening coincides helpfully with the seasons of the play; the dark wintery scenes will no doubt be atmospheric. In order to reproduce the many vehicles required in the plot, ranging from motor cars to caravans to trains, someone has come up with a whole host of ideas involving wheel barrows, painted cardboard and deckchairs. They aren’t yet in ac­tion two weeks before the show but are sure to be impressive if they come to fruition.

Even if the finer prop details are not yet totally sorted, I was surprised by how remarkably pol­ished this show is, given the length of time still left to them. There are a few niggles to be worked out: the cast don’t have microphones, so I would advise sitting near the front to catch the odd witty aside, and the audience chairs aren’t raised so any of the more vertically challenged specta­tors should perhaps get there early and/or bring a cushion. But overall, keep your eyes peeled for when tickets go on sale for what promises to be a roaring success.