Star Trek

[innerSpaceman]

Really?

To the extent this will become one of those LoVE iT OR hAtE iT movies, with most people on the (correct) side of Loving it ... Star Trek might be destined to become one of my fAVoriTE MoVIEs eVeR.



Just got back from seeing it again, btw. Holds up completely. Might see it again tomorrow. So.Good.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

LOVED IT!!!!

I can't believe they did it. A reboot, an alternate universe, new and old at the same time.

I could easily nitpick things, as JW did (and I have more too) but I found myself laughing them off and enjoying the movie fully anyway, which surprised me greatly. They nailed so much that I love about Trek that the rest seemed unimportant.

My heart was in my throat for much of it...Vulcan! Spock's mom! *sob* Yet instead of getting angry at the writers I found myself involved in this alternate universe deprived of these things.

There were some amazing performances that drew on my deepest Trekkie emotions. There was a lot of nuance hidden in there. Bones was killing me - damn, he was amazing.

At the point where Kirk talks to old Spock in the ice cave, I felt a sharp pain in my chest as I fully grokked the death of the old show. These actors are beyond old, some gone. That era is beyond over. I truly felt a sense of grief while Nimoy told young Kirk of his friendship with him.

But, what this movie signifies is that these characters are defying death. It's a reverse engineered comic book. The show and actors came first - the characters developed later. And now, the characters have jumped out and beyond their origins and have become a mythos onto themselves, open to new interpretations, new adventures.

I laughed and cried and loved it.

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

Or, as Onion News perfectly encapsulates it.

EXACTLY! Bwahahaha!

[Alex]

Much I liked a lot. A bit too much I didn't like. And a smidgen of stuff that was just god awful stupid (the two slapstick scenes particularly).

Solid B.

But that is a huge improvement since the last 7 Star Trek movies have probably averaged a D.

[Alex]

(isn't that one of the basic rules of alternate realities...that you're never allowed to meet yourself without suffering some dire conequence?)

I don't think there are "basic rules of alternate realities" though you're right that such a rule is not infrequent in the genre. Don't think it has ever been suggested for Star Trek though (and in reality, to the extent that alternate realities are hypothesized to exist, transfer of information from one to the other is also hypothesized as impossible so the issue can't arise).

Besides, old Spock is no longer the future of the current Spock, he's just another person.

[Ghoulish Delight]

I'm in the liked, verging on loved camp. I could surely pick apart things I didn't like, things that didn't make sense, etc, etc. But I just found myself happily overlooking it all as the whole package came together to make a very good, fun to watch movie.

I am conflicted on the whole alternate universe thing. I understand why, and on one level really do like the idea of flat dropping the decades of baggage. On the otherhand, I can't shake the nagging feeling of loss that they've just wiped out everything I've known and loved that's happened to these characters. That feeling is outweighed by the appreciation of the necessary freedom gained by it, but it is what's keeping me from saying I loved it.

Like I said, I have my quibbles with it, but I have my quibbles with every single Trek episode/series/film so whatever.

[Alex]

I will admit that the presentation of the physics of black holes was just so horrendously stupid that I had a hard time overlooking it.

I know that science isn't something that Star Trek has ever shown an interest in getting right but it would have helped if they just invented a new particle instead of referring to singularities and black holes (and if you have a black hole that sucks up all of Vulcan in a few seconds it is probably doing to do horrible things its Earth-mass-moon Hoth).

And that is where I'll try to leave the nitpicking since pretty much NOTHING shown in the movie makes any rational sense (apparently planets have no defense systems or satellites so that Vulcan reports "tectonic activity" but not a giant ****ing spaceship drilling a hole into the planet...whoops I'll stop) but most of it was still fun to watch.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

So what if they destroyed Vulcan? It certainly was unexpected! And the alternate timeline allows for anything. Oh, and the actress playing Amanda was lame, so I'm glad they killed her off.

Yeah, total hack.

[innerSpaceman]

Originally Posted by Alex

I don't think there are "basic rules of alternate realities" though you're right that such a rule is not infrequent in the genre. Don't think it has ever been suggested for Star Trek though.

In fact, that was one of the nicely sly bits ... Old Spock explaining to Spock how easy it was to get Kirk to assume the universe would implode if 2 of the same people were to meet in a temporal paradox ... but, no, that's just a wive's tale. Hehehe.

[mousepod]

I'll keep it brief, just to get my thoughts down.

It was a Star Trek movie, with characters from the original series. They made the movie about Kirk, Spock, Bones etc because they are characters that we love and are familiar with.

I disagree that it was an alternate universe from moment one. In many prequels, the backstory is rewritten. Sometimes it's to make sense out of sloppily written existing backstory, and sometimes it's dramatic license. Either way, that didn't bug me at all. I rather enjoyed the first chunk of the movie, the same way that I've enjoyed the various iterations through the years of say, Batman. But in every origin story of Batman, his parents die. That's the thing that "made" him Batman.

So when they introduce McCoy and he's bitching about his divorce, I slapped my knee and chuckled, "That's why he's so crotchety! Good for the writers!" When adolescent Spock is taunted by the young Vulcans, I appreciated the duality that the character was being handed by the script. Again, I was delighted by the writers' choice.

But then, they blew up Alderaan Vulcan. And then I realized that they hadn't just scrapped the backstory, they scrapped the whole shebang. Past, present, future.

Again, to bring it back to comic book terms, it was as if there was a character I really liked and they promised for years that a great writer was going to write his origin story. But that origin story negated not only the hastily written backstory that had stood for years, but had also completely negated any of the adventures that I'd enjoyed so far. And that, to me, is cheap shenanigans. Why bother using the characters from the original series if you're going to change them all? The only answer I can imagine is that the last Star Trek movie only grossed $47 million so they went back to the original well to revive the franchise. If it had been done artfully, I might have been happy. But it was ham-handed and sloppy.

An illustration of my point: in the 70's, there was this great DC comics character called Swamp Thing. He was a scientist developing a plant serum that, through no fault of his own, was involved in an explosion that somehow fused him with plant matter, making him a weird human/plant hybrid. The original issues of that story, created by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson, were very cool and, for the time, pretty forward-thinking. Decades later, when Alan Moore (the guy who would write Watchmen) was brough in to "re-boot" Swamp Thing, he rewrote the origin and in this case, the scientist dies. Somehow, his essence, his soul, or whatever, is what animates the plant. The comic took on a whole other dimension - examining what it truly is to be human. If one looked back at the previous (pre-Moore) Swamp Thing stories, they take on an extra layer of poignancy, because the character isn't what he thinks he is.

With Star Trek, it's more like the crappy "multiple earth" concept that DC comics used to make the heroes perennially young. How could The Flash (or Green Lantern or Hawkman or Superman or Batman...) be the same superhero in the 1940's and the 1960's? Easy! They weren't. Those stories took place on a different world.

So this movie sacrificed the entire Star Trek universe as we know it for a mediocre story about a rogue Romulan... miner? Nice work, guys.

This wasn't how Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Scotty, Chekov, Sulu et al met... this movie is how similar characters with the same names met. And I felt like a victim of bait-and-switch halfway through. And I don't like it. Not one bit.

[innerSpaceman]

Oh, and yeah, realized it was Winona Ryder when I saw it again tonight. Still think she's a lame Amanda, and I'm glad she won't be in this movie series anymore.


And I'll grant that some of the details were completely stupid (Assembling Starships on planet, in Iowa or anywhere ... traveling through black holes and all of Alex's other blackholisitc observations - - -


- - - BUT since they could explain away any of this with a line of expository dialogue, I don't care that they didn't bother with that step.




Edited to add: ooooh, I see mousepod has posted his remarks. gonna read 'em now.