{"id":3331,"date":"2009-05-12T12:00:46","date_gmt":"2009-05-12T16:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=3331"},"modified":"2009-05-12T12:11:48","modified_gmt":"2009-05-12T16:11:48","slug":"star-trek-the-next-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=3331","title":{"rendered":"Star Trek: The Next Movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite my raving about the Star Trek franchise yesterday<\/a>, I actually liked the latest movie. Or maybe it’s not surprising at all. Perhaps the movie was aimed squarely at fanbase malcontents like me. As others have said, it didn’t actually feel much like a Trek movie. It’s set in the universe of the original series with the original characters and all of the classic plot devices. But despite all of the desperate look-who-it-is-now fanservice mugging, I never felt like I was watching a Trek movie. This bit from The Onion has a lot of truth i it:<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object>
Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As ‘Fun, Watchable’<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

Spoilers from here on:<\/p>\n

A bit about the characters:<\/p>\n

Did young, hale, pre-academy Kirk just lose a brawl? Given the number of seven-foot aliens he beats Marquess of Queensberry-style [much] later in life, it was kind of hilarious to see him get pummeled in this one. Is this the only fistfight Kirk ever loses? (Er. Not counting his last one. That one never counts.) <\/p>\n

All of the characters look admirably like their TOS counterparts, except for Chekov. Aretha Franklin looks as much like Walter Koenig as the guy they picked. He was fun, but didn’t look the part.<\/p>\n

Sulu was fine. The sword fight was flagrant fan service pandering, though. I loved it.<\/p>\n

I get that they turned Scotty into comic relief. (And well-played.) But was it then necessary to give the goofy comic relief character an even goofier comic-relief sidekick? <\/p>\n

Of all the characters, Karl Urban was the one that made the least sense to me when I heard about it, and yet worked the best when I saw him on screen. He looked like him, he acted like him, he was the right age, and he had the right accent. <\/p>\n

Contrast with Zachary Quinto, who seemed perfect in the previews but who managed to hit several wrong notes during the movie. Most notably, when he gives his angered sarcastic “live long and prosper” to the Vulcan Council Of Important Dudes, he was more Sylar than Spock, and that was exactly the sort of thing he needed to avoid. <\/p>\n

I like that they finally filled in Uhura. It’s a shame they never alluded to her depth or intelligence in the original rendering of the character. Her move on Spock was… unexpected.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Being a Trek film, they were more or less contractually obligated to insert new and even more confounding continuity errors. I will not enumerate them here. I’m just putting this here so nobody thinks they got away with anything. Even allowing for the continuity reset provided by the reset, they still managed to commit some obvious plot blunders. <\/p>\n

Who am I kidding? Pointing out errors is 90% of the fun of reviewing a Trek movie. If they ever made an airtight story I’d probably feel let down. Here are my gripes: <\/p>\n

Did they warp from Earth to Vulcan in 3 minutes? That’s… crazy. It would have been effortless to insert a time cut of unspecified length. Look, I’m not one of those geeks that can quote you how long it actually takes to get from A to B in the Trek Universe, but three minutes is far too short.<\/p>\n

The uniforms were perfect. They looked enough like the original outfits to sell it as “original Trek”, but were modernized enough to avoid the stench of 60’s go-go dance sci-fi. The new bridge was cool, but was really, really<\/em> far from the original. Just making it black instead of white would have been a good idea. Making the bridge pure white was the equivalent of replacing the communicators with iPhones. <\/p>\n

In this whole great big galaxy, Kirk just happened to get booted off the ship and end up on the same planet as Spock? A five minute walk from his location? And then ran the rest of the way by chance? And that both of them were 14km from where Scotty was? This defies the impossible odds even by Trek standards. Perhaps these older ships ran on the Infinite Improbability Drive<\/a> before they switched to Dilithium Crystals. I can’t really say that one technology is more ridiculous than the other. <\/p>\n

Spock lived on the ice world, fighting off T-Rex size ice bugs and eating icicles even though he knew there was an outpost 14km away? Maybe I’m remembering that wrong. I sprained my frontal lobe trying to make sense of that stretch of the movie. <\/p>\n

And what was Spock doing on that world anyway? Yeah, the bad guy left him there so he could “watch” Vulcan die. (And Vulcan was really<\/em> big in the sky. Like, this would have needed to be a moon of Vulcan for that view to make sense.) But Spock acts like he’s been stuck there for a while. But that means the bad guy was right here, and… left? Does he have ADD or something? <\/p>\n

The bad guy was a time traveler. He was upset about his homeworld being destroyed. He worked for years getting his revenge, and in all that time it never dawned on him that he could use the tools at his disposal to try and save his planet?<\/p>\n

Why did the bad guy need to drill to the core? If “Red Matter” (the Midi-chlorians of the movie) was capable of making a mass into a singularity, then I can’t imagine why it would matter where you put it. <\/p>\n

What in the heck was with all the plumbing in engineering? Someone needs to let the writers know that, unlike sailing ships, space faring vessels don’t need bilge pumps<\/em>. (Or whatever those were supposed to be.) The spinning water blades reminded me of the “what are these things for” stomper-smasher rods in Galaxy Quest. But the stompers were stupid on purpose. And they were making fun of machines like this one. <\/p>\n

In contrast to every other incarnation of Trek, this one was filled with anti<\/em>-transporter malfunctions. Given what a capricious pain in the ass the device is over the next 40 years, it was pretty funny to see it perform so amazingly far beyond specifications here on the maiden voyage of the Enterprise.<\/p>\n

Poor Captain Pike. The entire timeline is re-rolled and he still<\/em> ends up in a wheelchair. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Still, it’s all good. It was a fun movie. The continuity reset effectively means they can go wherever they want with the story without trampling over the previous 40 years of events. I actually wouldn’t mind if they made another one. <\/p>\n

The next movie needs to have Harcourt Fenton Mudd, and he needs to be played by Jack Black. <\/p>\n

Just kidding. <\/p>\n

(Sort of.)<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite my raving about the Star Trek franchise yesterday, I actually liked the latest movie. Or maybe it’s not surprising at all. Perhaps the movie was aimed squarely at fanbase malcontents like me. As others have said, it didn’t actually feel much like a Trek movie. It’s set in the universe of the original series […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nerd-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}