Star Trek 09 review thread

[Oskuro]

Also, since we're in the mood for reviews, here's this one:

"I shall boldly go where no one has gone before.... But will gladly go again!"

[Loner]

Oh, and also: Spoiler

-Was that Cameron from House M.D. as Kirk's mother? Anyway, loved that scene, including how they choose the kid's name. Touching and epic at the same time.
-Damm, please tell me she's wearing makeup cause, otherwise, Winona Ryder is really looking old nowadays.
-Also, during Kirk's fight with Nero, I was expecting his shirt to get torn at some point.

Spoiler

Yep. I'm now expecting a nice trek reference on House.

[Knife]

Took the family to it today; and liked it. I could have done without the whole Ice planet Delta thing, nothing there really meant anything except as a device to meet Spock Prime and the chase scene with the animals was annoying. Other than that, I rather liked the show, the guy who played McCoy nailed it, as did Spock. Scotty was fucking killing me, I loved it. I don't particularly like the new Enterprise on the outside, but the interior sets were really nice, though I do like the other designs. The Kelvin and the other ships show for starship porn were really nice, I really liked the duel engineering hulled ship.

But most of all, I like the small things that the TNG didn't do. I like that the shuttle had scuffed paint, dings and dents and vents and pannels. I loved it. The Kelvins phaser turrets were nice too. Could have done without the chomping jaws of death in the water reclamation plant but....ok.

[Guardsman Bass]

I enjoyed it, and my first thought upon it ending was "If they make good money on this, they're probably going to do a re-boot of TOS".
Spoiler

Just to be sure, is it more or less explicit that the original TOS and this timeline are like parallel universes, in which Old Spock from the original TOS timeline is trapped in the latter timeline?

That's the impression I got, from the whole "Kirk's father lived to see him commissioned" from Spock with regards to the old timeline.

[Ford Prefect]

Dude, Uhara actually says 'an alternate reality' in the film, just in case that people in the audience didn't quite get it.

[Styphon]

Overall, I liked the film, which is a fairly glowing review in and of itself if you have any idea how jaded I've been towards remakes/reimaginings/whatever since Tristar's Godzilla in 98. There are, however, a number of problems that I haven't really seen mentioned. Spoiler

Probably the least significant, but it just bugs me... Sulu says he's trained in fencing, then busts out a folding katana. This leads to three sub-problems: A, I'm pretty sure conservation of mass doesn't work that way; B, that's not fencing, that's Kendo; and C, I'm just sick and tired of fucking katanas.

Delta Vega - that red monster did the same thing as the V. Rex in Peter Jackson's Kong, spitting out a perfectly good lunch in favor of chasing a bite-sized human instead. Why?

Transporting people to the wrong place, ridiculous joystick controls... when did this movie turn into Galaxyquest?

Branching off of that last one, I just thought the whole scene with Scotty stuck in the water pipe was overly silly, especially the release valve that seemed to be purposely designed for letting out people. That can't come up that often, can it? If it can, then why have the whirling blades of terror/pipes wide enough to hold people in the first place?

Now that I think about it, file Sulu leaving the ship in Park under "overly silly" too.

Kirk gets back to the Enterprise, mindfucks Spock rather than passing him any information from Spock Prime... and the next scene they're talking about retreiving the "stolen weapon" (Red Matter). If Kirk's not telling anybody anything, how do they all know the weapon is stolen?

And then, of course, there's the obvious stuff that's already been mentioned, like Delta Vega being too close to Vulcan and Red Matter not making a lick of sense (on the other hand, they didn't seem to waste any screentime on technobabble explaining exactly why Red Matter makes sense to them, so maybe that ends up in the movie's favor) and not constructing the Enterprise in orbit.

[andrewgpaul]

The "fencing =/= katana" thing was slightly irritating, but at least the guy wielding the thing was Japanese.

I remember reading something once where Kirk reprogrammed the Kobayashi Maru simulation so that the Klingons, on hearing it was Kirk, were overcome by his awesomeness and apologised and helped rescue the crew of the ship. I was sort of waiting for that to happen.

Scotty's comment about "if there's any common sense about this ship, you'll beam into the cargo bay" was, I think, a nod to the usual ridiculous design of SF starship interiors (and on that note, I did like the big chrome Warp Speed lever on the Enterprise ).

[Zac Naloen]

The "fencing =/= katana" thing was slightly irritating, but at least the guy wielding the thing was Japanese.

It was Deadpan, there was no mistake.

[Androsphinx]

Anthony Lane, the funniest arsehole reviewing movies, didn't like it very much. I should point out that while he doesn't seem to understand that we -need- all the backstory to adequately re-boot the franchise, the idea that you need half a 2009 movie to over-ride a handful of references from the 1960s would make him more scathing, not less.

What happened to “Star Trek”? There it was, a nice little TV series, quick and wry, injecting the frontier spirit into the galactic void, and managing to touch on weighty themes without getting sucked into them and squashed. It ran for three seasons, and then, in 1969, it did the decent, graceful thing and expired. End of story. Except that the story was slapped back to life and forced to undergo one warping after another: five more television series (including an animated version) and no fewer than ten feature films, all of them based on the debatable assumption that you can take a format designed to last fifty minutes and stretch it out to twice that length, then pray that the thinness doesn’t show. Believe me, it showed. One of the movies was about humpback whales.

But fear not. Here comes J. J. Abrams, riding in like Shane to save the threatened franchise. Abrams made his reputation in television, conjuring up “Alias” and “Lost”—another show that began in vigorous style and has shown increasingly little sign of knowing how to stop. He directed the third “Mission: Impossible,” which had its own distant echo of the small screen, before producing “Cloverfield,” a monster-eats-Manhattan flick weakened only by our reluctance to care about, or even notice, which of its appetizing youngsters had become an entrée. No such problems for the eleventh “Star Trek,” which arrives ready-branded, peopled with a set of action figures, led by Kirk and Spock, who require neither introduction nor advertisement but, rather, a simple chance to freshen up. That, I presume, is why Paramount went with Abrams, who is less of a creator than a re-creator, toiling to reboot old myths and tropes that feel overloaded or fried. He is the perfect purveyor of fictions to a generation so easily and instinctively jaded that what it craves, above all, is a storyteller who—with or without artistic personality, and regardless of any urge to provoke our thoughts or trouble our easy dreams—will never jade.

Hence the demeanor of the new film. It begins peacefully enough, with a Federation starship, the U.S.S. Kelvin, being dragged into an apocalyptic ambush by a tattooed Romulan maniac in a pitch-black battle cruiser, who slaughters the human captain and blows the Kelvin to kingdom come, even as the howling wife of the second-in-command gives birth inside an escape pod. As I say, a quiet start. In the midst of this, the doting parents find time, over the airwaves, to have one of those “No, darling, what would you like to call the baby?” conversations that bring so much joy to interstellar couples everywhere. Their first thought is Tiberius, which, given that the Romulan captain is named Nero (Eric Bana), suggests a delightful rerun of first-century imperial Rome, complete with a new Caligula cavorting in zero gravity. In the end, though, they play it safe and go for James. Cut to his childhood, in which he trashes a red Corvette (nice work, Jim, getting hold of fossil fuel in the twenty-third century), and thence to his early adulthood, which finds him picking fights, eying girls, and gazing at a ship under construction on the plains of Iowa: the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Here, in other words, is a long-range backstory—a device that, in the Hollywood of recent times, has grown from an option to a fetish. I lost patience with “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” once we learned of Willy Wonka’s primal trauma (his father was a dentist, and forbade him candies, so guess how he reversed that deprivation?), and, likewise, with “Batman Begins,” from the moment that mini-Bruce tumbled into a well full of bats. What’s wrong with “Batman Is” ? In all narratives, there is a beauty to the merely given, as the narrator does us the honor of trusting that we will take it for granted. Conversely, there is something offensive in the implication that we might resent that pact, and, like plaintive children, demand to have everything explained. Shakespeare could have kicked off with a flashback in which the infant Hamlet is seen wailing with indecision as to which of Gertrude’s breasts he should latch onto, but would it really have helped us to grasp the dithering prince? Or, to update the question: I know it’s not great when your dad dies a total hero and leaves you orphaned at the same time, but did James T. Kirk have to grow up such a cocky son of a gun?

He is played here by Chris Pine, who struggles with a screenplay, written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, that could have been downloaded from a software program entitled “Make Your Own Annoying Rebel.” Sample line: Kirk is hailed as “the only genius-level repeat offender in the Midwest” by Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood), who exhorts him to put aside his brawling and enlist in Starfleet. Jim rolls up next morning on a motorbike, hung over, with bruises from the night before, as surly as Steve McQueen; but roll up he does, taking his place beside the other recruits—among them Bones McCoy (Karl Urban)—and from here on the path to Kirkhood is plain. True, he boards the Enterprise by subterfuge on her maiden voyage, but since when did a little insubordination prevent a guy from winding up as captain? I thoroughly approved of his bedding an extraterrestrial female with green skin, eco-sex being all the rage two centuries from now, but that is the only downtime afforded by the recklessly rolling plot, although Jim still manages to defy the continuity team and switch hair color from dirty blond to redhead and back again. Don’t worry, he’s still a natural dickhead underneath.

While our man has been trying and failing to grow up, Captain Nero has been waiting among the stars. Now he pulls the same stunt he did with the Kelvin, luring friendly craft into the maw of his ship, which looks like a dozen Philippe Starck lemon squeezers clumped together and dipped in squid ink. The Enterprise finds herself amid the drifting debris of her sister ships, torn apart by Nero, and, with revenge beckoning, Abrams gets his chance to unpack the tools of the “Star Trek” trade, starting with some brightly polished phasers. Not being a Trekkie, I didn’t particularly mind how he refashioned the gizmos, but it was still surprising to learn that, when beaming down to planets and up to the ship, the crew members no longer vanish with the old granular shiver but, instead, whip around and around, aided by cartoonish whirling strokes, as if planning to reconstitute themselves as fruit smoothies at the other end. They even get to communicate, as they did in the nineteen-sixties, via these marvellous little phones that you actually hold up to your ear! Isn’t the future great?

This new “Star Trek” is nonsense, no question (“Prepare the red matter!”), but at least it’s not boggy nonsense, the way most of the other movies were, and it powers along, unheeding of its own absurdity, with a drive and a confidence that the producers of the original TV series might have smiled upon. The crew is well sketched, with Simon Pegg making a late but amiable entrance as Scotty, and with Chekov (Anton Yelchin) apparently nudging puberty; mired in his Russian accent, he mixes up his “v”s and “w”s, (“wektor,” “inwisible”), a tongue-slip that Dickens pretty much exhausted for comic value in “The Pickwick Papers,” but I guess the old jokes are the best. Similarly, our heroes keep clinging to brinks by their fingertips, as if to prove that a proper cliffhanger needs a genuine cliff—a curiously nostalgic approach, although the director’s fondness for the retro is crucial to his non-stop knowingness, with its hints of both hipster and nerd. He gorges on cinema as if it were one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, piling his plate with succulent effects, whether they go together or not. Hence the red ravening beast that pops up on a random planet, clearly left over from the props cupboard of “Cloverfield”; the man-to-Romulan fistfight borrowed from “M:i:3”; and, I regret to say, a dose of parallel universe. Come on, guys, you’re already part of a make-believe world in which mankind can outfly the speed of light. Isn’t that parallel enough for you?

This theme of alternative reality is clumsily worked, and not a patch on its tighter, more alluring, and thus much scarier treatment in “Coraline.” Its effect here is to saddle us with two Mr. Spocks, one from the vulnerable present and one from the comforting future, and its main purpose, I suspect, is to drag in Leonard Nimoy, who these days makes Bela Lugosi look like Zac Efron, and thus insure that all the “Star Trek” scholars in the audience will have to hurry home and change their underwear. On the other hand, it does mean that we get more of Zachary Quinto, whose very name sounds like the sacred text of a superior race, and who, in his role as the youthful Spock, is the most commanding reason to see this film. He alone prepares the gray matter. Bowie-thin, solemn but not humorless, tacitly quoting Sherlock Holmes, and nipping around like a sixties groover in his skintight costume, he wipes the floor with Kirk, while making time for a Vulcanizing smooch with Lieutenant Uhura (Zoë Saldana), the resident linguist, who is said to have “exceptional oral sensitivity.” Beyond that, however, Quinto is the one person here who may leave teen-aged viewers more perplexed than puffed up; he somehow rebukes the movie’s whole obsession with backstory and immaturity by seeming riper and wiser than the charmless folly that is spun around him. Only once does Spock unnerve, when he says of the ship’s crew, “I want everyone to continue performing admirably.” Is that a warning of incoming sequels? I fear so, Captain. Shields up.

[andrewgpaul]

The "fencing =/= katana" thing was slightly irritating, but at least the guy wielding the thing was Japanese.

It was Deadpan, there was no mistake.

Sorry, I'm misunderstanding you. Or you me. Anyway, all I was trying to say was, at least it was a Japanese guy wielding the 'techo-katana', unlike, say, Blade or [/i]Highlander[/i].

[Zablorg]

Wow, Anthony Lane sounds like he has cement up his ass. I think he loses any visage of trying to enjoy himself when he starts criticizing the beam effect. I mean, really? I was going to mention that phones you hold up to your ear seem okay to me, but I guess there would be more "headset" alternatives.

[Zac Naloen]

The "fencing =/= katana" thing was slightly irritating, but at least the guy wielding the thing was Japanese.

It was Deadpan, there was no mistake.

Sorry, I'm misunderstanding you. Or you me. Anyway, all I was trying to say was, at least it was a Japanese guy wielding the 'techo-katana', unlike, say, Blade or [/i]Highlander[/i].

Deadpan is a form of humour.

You deliver without inflection.

Basically, he was joking and he is an accomplished swordsman not merely a fencer.

[Bounty]

That's either a really shitty review or a really shitty attempt at being "funny".

[Ford Prefect]

that's not fencing, that's Kendo

Actually, no, it's not kendo. Rarely in kendo does someone start pulling the crazy acrobatics that Sulu was. Besides, fencing is a family of sports, in any case, which in the future may include Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon space kung fu.

[La Maupin]

I just read some of the "reviews" on the ex-astris-scientia site and I gotta say:

The tears of the hardcore Trek nerds are like sweet, sweet nectar to me.
Spoiler

"Why didn't Spock go back in time to save Vulcan?" Ummmm... maybe because he had just been given overwhelming proof that all he would be doing would be running away from the problem he helped create (since he would merely jump into a parallel universe, yet again). The logical solution was to stay in this timeline and help re-establish the Vulcan refugees.

EDIT: Or maybe not logical. But as he himself said... "Ignore what is logical. Do what is right."

[Androsphinx]

That's either a really shitty review or a really shitty attempt at being "funny".

I thought it was both a good review and an amusing one, but Lane is an acquired taste.

[SylasGaunt]

I just read some of the "reviews" on the ex-astris-scientia site and I gotta say:

The tears of the hardcore Trek nerds are like sweet, sweet nectar to me.

The real for me I've seen from the assorted negative reviews from the hardcore crowd is their wailing that the movie wipes out the assorted TV shows.. only from the tone they put on it you'd think it meant some paramount enforcer was going to come around to their house and smash their DVDs, erase their tapes, and take a flamethrower to any other iteration of 'the canon'.

[Skylon]

While I can see that somewhat with Kirk I didn't notice it in McCoy.. I mean yeah he bitches a lot but it's McCoy.

I was talking about the bit where he joined Starfleet because of a messy divorce. I suppose strictly speaking it could very well have been true in the original timeline too, but I'm pretty sure it was an invention of this movie.

It was never shown on screen, but was in the TOS writer's bible. An episode was supposed to cover McCoy's divorce but went through re-write hell to become "The Way to Eden", one of the worst TOS episodes.

[Vanas]

Okay, I saw it a couple of days ago, but now's the first time I've got to a PC to rant. Or not. I was quite impressed by the movie, really. So, here's a kinda review-thing that's mostly going to be stream of conciousness stuff. Guess I'll spoilerise everything as seems to be the norm...
Spoiler

Well, personally, I'm not shedding too many tears over Vulcan. From what we see they're still a bunch of arseholes.

Nero was... alright. He seemed to have a vaild reason for what he's doing and appeared to be semi-competent, which elevates him above Shinzon, at least.

The crew certainly worked. Only person who gave me issues was Simon Pegg, but he did seem to get better after being shipped to the engine room so I'll let him off for now. Pike was a high point. Out of the Enterprise's 3 captains, Pike seemed to be a genuinely decent man and a good captain.

Every scene with the Enterprise in is sheer spaceship porn, even while it's under construction in Bumfuck, Iowa. It looks to be huge, and while the new look seemed a little off in the preview shots that appeared here, in motion it works incredibly well. Given it's construction location and later moments in Titan, I guess it's atmosphere capable.

Nice to see more Federation ships. IIRC, as well as the Kelvin, we also had a twin-engineering hull/twin nacelle ship as well as a 3 ventral nacelle and 1 dorsal engineering hull ship. And heck, while the Federation seemed to be a little short-manned, it still managed to field 8 ships to get to Vulcan. A notable improvement over the usual, I think. Didn't see another Connie though. Maybe the Enterprise is the first of this class? It is intended to be the Fleet Flagship, after all. Noted ship names: Kelvin, Truman, Farragut. (I see what they did there.) Earth Station looked a lot like the design from the TOS TM as well, which was a good touch.

Pike's shuttle appears to have shields going by the radio chatter. And transporters seem to have had a massive range boost from previous occurrences. I did like the fact that it really helps if you stand still while it's locking on. Guess if it's counting atoms it helps to keep them in the same place (or moving predictably?).

Only ship designs I was less fond of were the future ships. The Mining Ship and the USS Whirlygig were both frankly hideous. I didn't see the Death Squid firing any disruptors, either? Maybe the Future Romulans only fit mining ships with walls of torpedo launchers for some reason.

Starfleet seems to offer fold-out swords as part of away team gear. Well, whatever works. I'm sure they're useful on occasion.

Oh, yeah. I did like the fact there wasn't a huge amount of technobabble. Red Stuff that makes (2D?) Time Holes? It's not a transphasic quantum anomaly disruption multi-spectrum teabagging flux capacitor. It's... Red Stuff.

Finally, guns guns guns guns.
The Kelvin seemed to be firing both beams and little torpedoes from various turrets, while the Enterprise only fired pulses from the phaser turrets and torpedoes from the standard launcher. Guess it's an upgrade? Hand phasers looked neat, very reminiscent of the STVI ones. (the good looking ones.) Quite liked the mode change option though the glowy barrel lights seem to be... impractical.

There's some thoughts. In conclusion, I liked it, it seemed like TOS updated, which I suppose was the idea. The story's got more holes than a machine gunned piece of netting, the science is clearly bollocks, but it all seems to boil down to being a good movie and I went away happy.

[Jon]

Spoiler

Red Stuff that makes (2D?) Time Holes?

I was thinking this might be somewhat accurate, would a wormhole in space actually look the same no matter which orientation you viewed it from? I know that's not quite what is portrayed but an improvement over a single 'entrance'?

[andrewgpaul]

Spoiler

Starfleet seems to offer fold-out swords as part of away team gear. Well, whatever works. I'm sure they're useful on occasion.

Spoiler

Wasn't that his own personal sword, as opposed to standard issue? That's what I thought, anyway.

[Vanas]

I was thinking this might be somewhat accurate, would a wormhole in space actually look the same no matter which orientation you viewed it from? I know that's not quite what is portrayed but an improvement over a single 'entrance'?

IIRC, and I'm not an astrophysicist, a black hole's event horizon would be spherical. I think if it's spinning very quickly there can be an 'ergosphere' that's elliptical, the distance at which you can't help but be swept around.

Spoiler

Wasn't that his own personal sword, as opposed to standard issue? That's what I thought, anyway.

Spoiler

Could be. I figured they might be an optional extra.

[JLTucker]

I didn't like it. It had cheesy dialogue, too much humor for my tastes, a shitty score, lens flares, and one annoying character (Scotty). Note that I've never seen the television series so I don't know if he;s supposed to be that way. My theater experience was ruined because of assholes talking and making noises at stupid shit that happened in the film (when Kirk hits his head when he boards the small aircraft).

[Knife]

I didn't like it. It had cheesy dialogue, too much humor for my tastes, a shitty score, lens flares, and one annoying character (Scotty). Note that I've never seen the television series so I don't know if he;s supposed to be that way. My theater experience was ruined because of assholes talking and making noises at stupid shit that happened in the film (when Kirk hits his head when he boards the small aircraft).

Funny, that's what made it fun for me. Less technobabble and more character.

[Gil Hamilton]

A detail that just occured to me that I liked about the movie is that when Kirk stunned the one Romulan with his phaser, the emitter on the gun physically changed emitter heads when going between kill and stun. That was a nice touch.