Brikar

STAR TREK
Written By Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman
Directed by JJ Abrams
Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto

Well, FUCK. After years of waiting, anticipation, building positive buzz over months and months until finally the release tonight...

...I just had a Trekgasm. That movie was just fun as hell. It moves at an absolutely breathless pace, with very little downtime. The whole movie just seems to fly by in a wink, it's so fast.

But let's slow down, back up. There's so much to say about this new "Star Trek", I don't even really know where to begin.

"Star Trek" is the story of two young men who seem very different... but ultimately are a lot alike. James Tiberius Kirk, and Spock, the son of Sarek. After the destruction of the Starship Kelvin and the death of his father, Kirk ends up living a listless life, ending up a townie who trolls bars looking for chicks... and a fight. He revels in his rawness, his instinct and his capabilities - a cocksure, arrogant son of a bitch who just also happens to be charming.

Spock, on the other hand, is torn - His love for his mother is intense, and is the one thing that seems to bring about an emotional response from him. As a boy, he is tormented by the other Vulcans, who look down on him and his family with disdain. One even calls Sarek a "traitor". When this same prejudice comes up at his acceptance to the Vulcan Science Academy, Spock's emotion gets the best of him, and he opts for Starfleet instead.

Years later, a crisis on Vulcan brings the two of them smashing together aboard the newly christened Starship Enterprise, flagship of the fleet, under Captain Christopher Pike. At Vulcan, the Enterprise encounters Nero, a Romulan with powerful weaponry unlike anything anyone has seen... and here's where things get huge.

This movie tears apart the "Star Trek" universe in ways that are just fascinatingly exciting. Nero, angered at the destruction of Romulus, DESTROYS VULCAN. This movie literally wipes out the Vulcan race, save a few thousand that managed to evacuate in time. That literally changes the landscape of Star Trek as we know it.

Spock's log where he acknowledges that he is now a member of an endangered species is shocking, and delivered with a cold sorrow that is almost unbelievable.

For you see, Kirk and Spock are THERE. They're different, of course, but at the same time, Pine and Quinto absolutely NAIL it. They don't imitate Shatner and Nimoy, and yet the characters are totally recognizable and they already feel totally familiar. Chekov, Sulu, Uhura, Bones... each and every one of them is right there on the screen! Probably the only one that's totally, completely different is Scotty. Sadly, Simon Pegg gets the least screentime of any of the other cast members. He's used almost exclusively for comic relief, and while he's hilarious, I just hope they can figure out what more to do with him next time.

I'm not really sure what else to say... This is not the deepest "Star Trek" adventure you'll ever see. It moves from one action set-piece to the next, "at warp speed" if you will. The characters of Kirk and Spock are definitely the focus, with all the others just providing support along the way. Ultimately, the throughline of it all becomes their destined friendship. I loved the way Spock Prime, now stranded in the new timeline, engineers their coming together. That he realizes that almost as much as saving Earth, he needs to save their friendship is the masterstroke of this picture. Kirk and Spock, and everything surrounding who they are both separately and together, become the heart of "Star Trek". It's not about intergalactic politics, it's not about exploration, it's not about transporters or warp drives or phasers and photon torpedoes, it's not about bumpy foreheaded aliens... it's about two men - colleagues, friends, brothers... and the new, unexplored lives that lay ahead of them.

If anything, it reminds me of Q's words to Picard - "It's not about mapping stars or charting nebulae; it's about charting the unknown possibilities of existence."

"Star Trek" has a helluva lot of heart. It's fast, it's big, and above all... IT'S FUN.

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Sam Cogley

I don't know if Scotty is necessarily "completely different." I think we're seeing him at a point where he's been made a bit loopy by being stuck alone in the middle of nowhere. Once he settles into life on the Big E, I figure he'll settle down into our favorite hard-drinking, estimate-inflating wizard of the warp drive.

Brikar

But until we see that, this interpretation of Scotty is much more comedic than ever before. I'm not saying I disliked it - I thought it was great, and Pegg is hilarious. I'm just saying that it seems very different, more so than the other characters.

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

Brikar

Also, NEVER in a million years did I think we'd hear the Beastie Boys in "Star Trek".

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

Closet Racist

That really bothered me. They don't have their own shitty pop music in the 23rd century? That, and Young Kirk and old Spock just happen to end up in the same cave on the same ice planet?

Other than those two points, I think I can live with it.


I've never been to a movie where ABSOLUTELY NO PERSON TALKED during the feature...until now.









Oh...and why did engineering look like a brewery?

Sam Cogley

We saw plenty of comedy from Scotty - drinking with the Kelvins, "where they'll be no Tribble at all!", the bar fight and aftermath in "Tribbles" and most of his scenes in STIV are some quick examples that come to mind. He was never as constantly over-the-top as McCoy's grumbling or Chekov's wisecracks, but I always thought the character had quite a bit of humor.

Cymro

Yeah, I liked it. It was really really fast, so much so I hadn't even realised we were in the third act until it was nearly over, and it just had loads of shit in it I wish they'd have done before. On the flipside, I think it could have done with being a bit longer, and I'm not really that keen on the art direction for the bridge sets, it was just too busy. I also thought the dialogue was a bit stiff at times, but to be fair none of the other incarnations have been any better.

__________________
"Let me tell you something about humans, nephew: They're a wonderful, friendly people - as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working.

"But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those friendly, intelligent, wonderful people...will become as nasty and as violent as the most blood-thirsty klingon."

iamspenagain

That was kind of a badass movie.

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If I could, I would marry a Magnum bar.

Bean

I just watched it and I'm not sure yet what I think overall.

It wasn't bad by any stretch of the imagination, but a few things bothered me.

Uhura/Spock/Kirk. That plot point wasn't needed at all. It was just clumsy and awkward.
Like CR mentioned above, the coincidence of Kirk winding up in Spock Primes cave, after happening to wind up on the same planet etc...
And the a lot of the sets, like the Enterprise bridge, were way to busy. It was almost distracting at times.
Also, how in the hell did Kirk and Scotty beam from that planet to the Enterprise which was at warp speed. I understand that the explanation was that he could be the distance from one planet to the adjacent one, but at warp, the Enterprise would have been a lot further away than that. And if they have that technology now with the transporters, doesn't that essentially dispense with the need for Starships at all?

All of these things I can live with, as overall it was a good movie. I can't compare it to other Trek films as better or worse since it's just too different to compare. It's definitely a good way to reinvent the franchise, I'm just not as happy with it as I thought I was going to be.

__________________
"I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing."

--James T. Kirk

Brikar

You could nitpick the niggling scientific details to death - this movie played as fast and loose with that shit as the original show did. Beaming onto the ship, Spock watching Vulcan get destroyed, the "red matter"... But there were episodes where the ship gets thrown clear across the entire galaxy, or where the entire universe winks out of existence for a fraction of a second. It wasn't until the latter parts of TNG where they started toning it down into just that one "quadrant".

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com