It's close enough to Tuesday. --------------------------------------------- Let’s face it: J.J. Abrams faced an almost impossible challenge with Star Trek. He had to breath life into a beloved, well-known and – frankly – worn-out franchise. He had to make a movie that appeals to arguably the most devoted, extreme and nitpicky fan base this side of, well, most of your major religions. You know, those dweeby Trek geeks. (Not cool people like you and me.) At the same time Abrams had to appeal to moviegoers who don’t have a collection of three phasers, a gold velour uniform shirt, and 47 variations of Captain Kirk action figures on my bookshelves and hidden in the back of my office closet. Those – um, we – normal people just want to see a good flick with lots of action, solid character development and a great story. Add to that one more barb. Abrams was working with a concept that in the last 20 years had all the life wrung from it by some of the most notably mediocre writers and producers in the business, who have been sucking like parasites at the legacy the Original Series with their anemic, gelded spin-offs -- Next Generation, Voyager, et al. The groundbreaking had become grating, and the inspired had become insipid. So all that stood against Abrams before he even got under way. It was pretty much a no-win scenario. Abrams took a cue from Kirk; he beat the Kobayashi Maru. The movie, like the original Star Trek series, hits the ground running and knows where it’s going. The opening battle sequence at once shows a new dynamism while it preserves the notion that the spaceships of Star Trek aren’t the little attention deficit disorder fighters from Star Wars, but big, heavy battleships maneuvering in space. There’s a great moment where the camera follows a crewman who gets sucked out hole torn in the hull – it goes from a roar of battle to the silence of space and the body bouncing lifelessly amid the debris. That’s when you know this isn’t your safe, family hour Trek. It’s Trek all grown up. What follows is an introduction to adolescent Kirk and young Spock, neither of whom are what you expect. There’s a reason for these changes that makes sense in the context of the Trek universe if you care, but it doesn’t matter if you’re not the kind of nerd who can cite Kirk’s serial number. (SC-937-0176-CEC. So I’m told.) Shortly after we meet teen delinquent Kirk (Chris Pine) and young college age Spock (Zachary Quinto), and find out why they choose the paths they will which are, of course, destined to cross at Starfleet Academy. (Great moment: Spock declines to attend the Vulcan version of MIT after his mother’s human heritage is insulted, giving the Vulcan church ladies a parting “Live long and prosper” that’s very clearly him saying “Eff you.”) Along the way we also meet Leonard McCoy MD, (Karl Urban) who is likewise joining Starfleet, but for him it’s like the Foreign Legion. Let me tell you, Urban is Dr. McCoy more than Dr. McCoy ever was. Without it descending into caricature or two-dimensional imitation, Urban’s performance captures all of the old McCoy’s mannerisms like he was DeForest Kelley reborn, and still he gives the crotchety, quite frankly bigoted, old country doctor a new take. Pine’s turn as Kirk was probably the most challenging role. And I’m a Kirk purist. I gotta say, I bought it. Oh, he wasn’t Captain Kirk for the first half of the movie, but that’s the point. He was growing into the gold velour and tight pants. He caught elements of Shatner’s charm and swagger from the start, but by the end he owned the role and burned the mortgage. So the Academy comes and goes (the apple munching nod to the scene in the Genesis cave is among my favorite moments) and then along comes the Big Bad Universal Threat, only the USS Enterprise can save the day, Kirk sits in the big chair and smiles like a dildo when his plan comes together, the good guys win, lather, rinse, repeat. Abrams makes a good go of shaking things up – yeah, you won’t believe what happens to poor Spock’s folks – and they explain at least enough to my satisfaction how a guy just out of college could take command of the equivalent of the USS Nimitz. (To paraphrase the Shat, it’s a movie.) And yes, it’s a movie and a fan movie. Throughout this fun adventure there are more nods and salutes to fans than I could keep up with – and I mean visuals, name-dropping, the just perfect use of old catchphrases without it ever seeming forced or even expected. It’s a just an endless stream of bonuses for the faithful, but it doesn’t get in the way of anything for the non-Trekkies. Fanboy heaven. It also wipes away the last 40 years of story build-up (canon, in nerd speak) that’s strangled story telling. It gives the writers a blank slate – something it needed more than anything else – while keeping the core. (Except the warp core. Which they eject. I can show you how on the blueprints.) Special effects? Oh yes. All the old stuff is given new life, and the space stuff is like nothing I’ve seen before, and I am not exaggerating when I saw I have seen it ALL before. The other familiar Trek characters are there – Scotty, Sulu, Chekov and Uhura – and each is handled with the same respect as the big three. Simon Pegg’s Scotty, of course, arrives late in the show but steals every scene he’s in. They get decent screen time (Pegg not nearly enough) but this is Star Trek. And Star Trek means a movie about Kirk, Spock and McCoy. That is why the standard stop-the-bad-guys-with-the-doomsday-device storyline isn’t a problem. The story isn’t that important because this is not plot-driven Trek; it’s character-driven Trek. This is what’s going to make it accessible to non-Trek moviegoers. A lot of Trekkies don’t want to accept the basic truth – the original Star Trek was special and it captured the imagination not because of the Enterprise, the hippie-dippy utopian visions of the future, the special effects (such as they were), the intergalactic politics, the Klingons, the preachy messages about tolerance, or any of the other bits window dressing. All that stuff was important, but it wasn’t the heart. Doubt it? The later spin-offs had all of that stuff in spades along with better special effects, a combined 23 years on the air compared to just three for the Original, and superior toupee technology. But ask anyone on the street to name something from Star Trek – they’ll say Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. Maybe the Klingons. No mention of that bald French guy or the woman who – oh, big surprise – got her ship lost in space. No, what made the Original, Accept No Substitutes, Kirk in Command Star Trek iconic is the three lead characters and how they interacted. The Enterprise, the aliens, the velour, and the transparent aluminum social commentary – it was all just the icing on the cake. Abrams gets it, and it comes across in film, despite the screen flares. So it’s the new Star Trek for the win. (I want sequels and I want them now.)
From what I've seen of the battle scenes, they look "dirty"- lots of debris, torpedo trails (?), phaser tracers (?)...much more realistic than any of the Trek battle scenes before. Much grittier and more realistic. Me likey what I've seen so far in that regard. The warp scenes look different too, as when the Enterprise drops out of warp and the battle field or star field just "pops" in before them. I would expect that effect to be more realstic, again, something we really never saw before.
Wow, okay now I'm excited! This was the sort of review I've been waiting to read. Someone who gets it, but isn't slavish to the details. Like the font. Bring it on.
WTF? Let's try to keep this movie in perspective. I'm sorry but your review comes across way too self important. I know you're excited that you saw a movie noone else has seen yet but seriously... pull it back. The self important smugness bleeds boring. Anyhoo.... I hate when people say 'we wiped away the last 40 years of story cause it was holding Trek back!' What utter crap. It was the last 40 years of story which made JJ's little film possible. If you're too lousy of a writer to come up with a story or don't have enough respect for the source material to actually read it, well don't blame the works of others. Personally I never thought the stories of DC Fontana were holding your vision of Trek back JJ but thanks for enlightening me.
*Was happy for a whole 25 seconds until....* ....*sighs* right back to the old WF I hated....*leaves again with gloom cloud over head*
Yes. Grip your ass. Put your hand right in and reach around until you get to your tonsils. That's when you've gripped enough. Then grip those tonsils and pull as hard as your fat paws can.
I really think this must've been a director's decision. No self-respecting graphic designer would use more than one lens flare in an entire movie. However, the unwashed masses generally think it is "cool". I can't tell you how many times I've shown a client a lens flare, and they want it incorporated into every page of the brochure/website/flyer. I don't show them that stuff anymore. Storm, is this review the WF review or the one you're going to publish? I'm thinking the former, especially with the un-PC shot at the woman getting lost in space.
I've seen ONE 40-second trailer with Karl Urban, and I had to do a double-take to make sure it WASN'T the reanimated corpse of DeForrest Kelly. The voice, the tone, EVERYTHING. It's like Christian Slater doing a Jack Nicholson impression, he was born for it.
For the longest time I've supported chucking everything about the last 40 years over the side and starting fresh. Keep the names of the characters and the same traits and everything would be fine. Oh and the ship of course should look cool too. The show as correctly pointed out was always about the characters. But I just can't buy Kirk taking command over the Enterprise the way he does. Now yes I haven't seen the movie yet but unless I'm reading all the spoilers wrong he catapults over hundreds if not thousands of men and women in Star Fleet who would be on the promotion track to be Captain of the USS Enterprise long before him. And he does it basically right out of the academy. Sorry not ever going to buy that. Never.
To be fair, we never really saw a ship drop out of warp into the middle of a battle at all. But from the few frames I saw in the trailer, it LOOKS like they just used the effect they used in TNG (in all of one episode), but backwards.
Well, I read somewhere that he might actually only be operating on a field promotion at the end. Would you buy it then (no haven't seen it yet)?
Nope. There is no one on the ship, no one on the planet, no one in the quadrant to take command? A fresh wet behind the ears academy grad would never get a field promotion to captain a ship. Hell if they need a Captain that bad get one of the Admirals on that ship and let him run it until they get a proper Captain.
But you'd buy the premise of the captain always beaming down and putting himself in danger, material transporters, phaser beams you can see, sound in space, Arabs in the 23rd Century, alien species that can mate with humans, and putting the brain center of a space battleship on the top like a big target?
OK, Storm, you've made me want to see it. I wasn't at all excited about it until now, but this sounds different. For someone who grew up with the original run of the original series, that is Star Trek. I wouldn't have thought it was possible to do it in a way that would be interesting, but I know your taste in Trek is pretty similar to my own. So now I have to see it. You've also managed to get me to make my first post ever in Media Central. P.S. Proofread your review before you publish it. I noticed two errors.
