Meet the new Trek, same as the old Trek.
I’ve been a little worried about losing my geek cred, so I figured I’d rant a little bit about the new Star Trek movie.
Okay, first of all, I can see why some deep thinkers hate it. It has logic holes you could drive the Enterprise through (oh wait, they did).
Spock marooning Kirk on a frozen planet? Really? When you’re in command and in charge of the well-being of your crew, you do not abandon them in a life-threatening situation, even ravine-climbing distance away from a station. Spock should have been brought up on charges for that one. If he needed Kirk out of the way, he could have just thrown him in the brig, and/or told McCoy to keep him sedated until the crisis was over. Sending him down to the planet was an idiotic convenience for the next big plot hole ...
Meeting Spock Prime in some random cave on exactly the right planet at the right time? How stupid is that? And it really annoys me that ever since they cracked the Great Wall of Spock a couple of times in the old series, he’s all, “Jim, my old friend” at the drop of a hat. Remember when it took intoxication and physical and emotional trauma to get him to choke out that name JUST ONCE?
Moving on with the stupidity: Spock just figuring out time travel in an instant, when the shuttle addresses him with, “Welcome back, Ambassador Spock.” Remember, the rest of the Old Series hasn’t happened yet, and discovering accidental time travel back then was a big deal. They should ALL have freaked out bigtime. It’s as if the Federation had time travelers popping in all the time. No time for that, though, because they had to hurry and defeat Nero, who was carrying that “red matter.”
And will someone explain to me why they had to do all that drilling to put the “red matter” in the core of the planet? If it created a black hole, all they had to do was fling it onto the planet for it to gather critical mass and do its work. Yes, yes, I know, then we wouldn’t have had the cool drilling sequences and the headfirst dive onto the platform and Sulu’s swordfight. But it’s still stupid.
Same thing with Scotty and the transwarp beaming. They explain to him that he WILL invent it, and he’s totally complacent about it. This should have rocked everybody’s socks, and it didn’t. They had to rush on to the next CGI effects.
But I’m saving my wrath (because I khan) for the final indignity: Uhura. They made this token effort to have the one female character, who was always just decoration on the original set, have some bitchen skillz in this movie. They tried to depict her as just a little more bad-ass and capable. And then they went and ruined it by having her go gaga for Spock. Originally it was Nurse Chapel, and now it’s just a slut of a different color. Is a deck officer and a professional going to go lock lips with the commander in the turbolift just because something bad has happened? I think not. This was EXACTLY the sort of shit they used to pull with women in the old series, and I would have hoped that FORTY YEARS LATER they would have grown out of it. No such luck.
NOW. If you turn your brain off, it’s a fun movie. They were a little heavy-handed with some of the references. When the kid Kirk announces his full name to the police, he should have pronounced “Tiberius” like “Go ahead and make fun of it, I DARE YA.” Nobody could have missed the origin of “Bones” unless they were in the restroom at the time. But all in all, the actors pulled off what was certainly a difficult task. Scotty was delightful. Chekov’s accent in this one was even thicker than in the original series, and that’s saying a lot.
I might watch it again. I saw it in IMAX in the front row, and I was close enough to see phaser shots go up my nose. Maybe a home theater experience would lessen the shock of seeing Spock’s five-o’clock shadow under his perfectly shaved chin. I would definitely place it on the even-numbered side of the canon, but not necessarily at the top.
Whew, glad I didn’t read this before I saw the movie!
I enjoyed the movie as a movie, highly entertaining, fast-paced, action, and space stuffs! I’m not a terribly big Star Trek fan (Star Wars is my schtick), so I can put a lot of that aside (hell, this movie left me rather confused on some things like Uhura and Spock? I really thought I’d missed something there!).
Excellent movie, but like you, I have some complaints. (Yeah, marooning Kirk was completely illogical…)
First, the use of time travel is one of the classic sci-fi fallback plotlines, and stupidly convenient in order to fudge up history and canon a bit. At least they didn’t skip back AND FORTH around time, which is where things get stupid. Some people went back, they changed history and created a new universe, and they stopped there where it makes sense. (I don’t get how they captured Spock years later or how they knew he’d be there, etc.) Anyway, when you’re out of ideas, play with time travel plots!
Second, I felt like the actors tried very hard to be the old characters…just a little too much. Just a few too many tics and tendencies and habits and lines that are blatantly lifted. I’m GLAD they saved the whole Kirk hand-motion “go” for his father and not for the Kirk character. I was ready to groan at the end and fully expected it.
I was really disappointed in the Uhura character. It was completely stupid when she walks into the turbolift with Spock and kisses him. Where the fuck did that come from? I know they’re still cadets, but they’re acting like 12 year-olds, not budding professional officers. By that token, years later they should be even more lax and casual and unprofessional, right? (Kinda like if Spock is going to be this emotional now and non-stoic, he can only get worse with age, right? At which point his character loses all the enigma and contrast that old Spock and even Data have.)
The movie overall reminds me more of Star Wars I-III where they’re trying to merge in with characters and story that has already been done, and it ends up often feeling forced. At least in this one they break history. Which is weird, since they broke history at Kirk’s birth…that could justify having everything completely different (and killing all hope of satisfying anyone, granted).
But as a movie, it’s definitely worth it and entertaining and I’ll gladly watch it many times over when it hits DVD!