“What’s real and what’s not is not always easy to figure.”

Justin’s rating: This is what you find when you hack the Gibson

Justin’s review: When you’re a famous scifi actor with a huge amount of name recognition, it’s not the dumbest thing in the world to turn that into some sort of revenue stream. And like him or hate him, William Shatner’s been one of the shrewdest entrepreneurs of the original Star Trek series. So we shouldn’t have been too surprise that, come 1989, Shatner leveraged all of his cache into making a brand-new scifi franchise called TekWar.*

TekWar ended up becoming a blitz to make a thing happen whether or not the public wanted it. The crazy thing is, it kind of worked. Pulpy books. Four TV movies. A TV series. A video game. Comic books. Trading cards. That all happened from 1989 to 1997, after which the TekWar craze (if you can call it that) died down. Interestingly, there have been efforts in the 2020s to make a TV reboot, but I wouldn’t bet on it happening.

I was a huge TOS Star Trek fan at the time that the first TekWar novel came on the scene, so it was a no-brainer to snap up the book. As I recall, it was OK but nothing amazing, so I never read any of the other books or watched any of the movies or the series. Yet this was cyberpunk from a very specific point in time when we sensed a big technological change was coming but weren’t quite sure what form that would take. That seems worthy of a revisit.

Jake Cardigan (that’s his name, not his fashion) was a cop who was both a drug addict and a guy framed for murder. Frozen for four years in a cryo-prison, Jake’s thawed out in 2045 to work for a security firm called Cosmos, headed by Mr. James T. Kirk himself. His family moved on without him, Jake pours himself into his new job — a job tracking down some bad people involved in the making of the highly addictive Tek.

I should pause here and note that Tek is, in essence, a virtual reality drug that lets you experience things as if they were truly real. This is illegal for reasons beyond merely frying people’s brains if used to often, a pushback against the inauthenticity of VR. It’s as if someone took one look at Star Trek’s holodeck and declared it too addicting and fun to be allowed to continue.

Jake teams up with his former partner, an eco-warrior named Warbride, and an android for what turns out to be a convoluted chase through FutureToronto. As both a stand-alone movie and a de facto pilot for the upcoming series, TekWar needed a tight, simple, and enjoyable story while the audience got used to the setting and characters. This story? It kind of lost me. Something about a professor who was killed and the TekLords who might be involved in it and also a side mystery of what’s going on with Jake’s estranged wife.

Also, at one point Jake finds himself trapped in a hockey rink while evil hockey robots shoot pucks at him. The music thinks that this is the height of suspense.

One thing I’ll give TekWar is that it embraces any and all futuristic technology in a very cheery cyberpunk way. There are holograms, augmented humans, voice-activated computers, AI, video chats, culture fusion, voice masks, sleek cars, androids, cyber-jocks (hackers), tablets, virtual reality, synthetic bodies, and a whole lot more. It’s the most cyberpunky thing until Strange Days and Johnny Mnemonic came along, and I adore the ambition.

While critics snickered at TekWar‘s futuristic vision in 1994 — and the cheese factor is pretty high here — from 2025 the swings that this franchise take connect more than whiff. We definitely live in a society where technology is integrated into every part of our lives. We may not have kamikaze androids, true, but cyber warfare and internet addiction is a real thing.

If you’re familiar with Canadian scifi, especially from the ’90s, you’ll know that it tends to be both dorky and enjoyable at the same time. That’s certainly true here. TekWar does a lot with its television budget to draw us into 2045, but nobody’s going to mistake this for a high-end production. I didn’t hate it, but I also didn’t love it enough to want to see anything else in this series. This was mid before ‘mid’ was a thing, and a few decades haven’t changed that any.

*Shatner had the books ghost-written by Ron Goulart, so it’s up to you to decide how many of these ideas or storylines were his original creations. I imagine maybe a few scribbles on a napkin and a doodle of a guy with the biggest handgun in the universe.

Intermission!

• Dang they are going to 3-D CGI this title sequence within an inch of its life
• If it’s a futuristic prison in a ’90s movie, it involves cryogenically freezing prisoners. That’s the rule.
• Also, frosted glass cube walls everywhere. It’s the FUTURE!
• The police have minivans
• “Try internet.”
• Digital photo frame — that was ahead of its time
• Shrink-wrapped jeep
• Wild Side, king of the cyber-jocks
• She’s got a power glove! It’s so bad.
• It’s the Matrix Police!
• He’s trapped in a random noise generator
• “Come on, we got to evaporate!”
• That’s the biggest, chunkiest pistol
• It’s Carmen Sandiago!
• Exploding androids, that’s what the Terminator should’ve done
• His car just got hacked
• “Feet first, take your time, have fun with him.”
• She’s a level 10 android… at least!
• Android shower scene, that’s pandering
• Evil hockey players!
• BOTH of them lose their pistols without firing?
• Warbride is a cool name. That headpiece is not.
• Photoshop!
• Those fake masks look like giant socks before they’re activated
• “There’s one problem with perfection: Boring as hell.”