StarDestroyer.Net BBS

LordOskuro wrote: 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.

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

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.

Zac Naloen wrote:

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

It was Deadpan, there was no mistake.

andrewgpaul wrote:

Zac Naloen wrote:

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].

that's not fencing, that's Kendo

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

La Maupin wrote: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.

Junghalli wrote:

SylasGaunt wrote: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.

Spoiler

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

Vanas wrote: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.

Jon wrote: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 wrote:Spoiler

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

JLTucker wrote: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).