Eleven
Saw Star Trek last night. Very enjoyable.
I don't know if I should judge it as another Star Trek movie or the first. It essentially takes place in a parallel universe, with the same names but different characters who regularly wink at the originals.
It's an origin story, showing how the gang on The Enterprise got together. Looks fine, and there wasn't a weak link among the regulars. Had some good gags, and action that moved so swiftly you hardly noticed two hours going by. Considering how much money was spent, however, the story was fairly simple and the villain not much.
It's clearly set up for sequels, and, considering it's a hit, I assume they'll happen.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:22 AM
4 Comments:
Saw it Friday is a more or less sold out 400 seat theater. I liked it very much, but I agree that this was the least fearsome villain of any Start Trek movie (a rogue Romulan from the future in a giant mining ship?).
Star Trek fans knew they would be throwing out most everything they knew about the old crew with the first few minutes - as soon a swe saw a 14 year old Jim Kirk driving a car (everyone knows Kirk can't drive combustion engine automobiles). But the new visioning holds a lot of promise. In fact, I'm hoping future sequels will revision some of the classic episodes (I would love to see a good Gorn costume).
[Spoilers below]
The only other weakness I observed was a particular lack of concern for the pseudo-science of Star Trek. Why does the Enterprise have Willy Wonka's chocolate mixing system installed near engineering? How close to Vulcan must Delta Vega be if you can see Vulacn in it's sky? And how would turning a supernova into a black hole possibly save the planet Romulus? (Spock - what were you thinking!)
Apparently the Enterprise runs on steam power.
Anyway, and I guess this is a spoiler, they clearly created a clean slate with a plot that has a Romulan ship go back in time and affect the Federation so much as to make an alternate timeline (a la Back To The Future). Khan may still be out there, and most of the galaxy wasn't effected, but the whole future of Kirk, Spock et al will not follow along the path of timeline 1 (which still exists in the mind of Old Spock, who lives now in timeline 2).
I just saw it. It was a lot of fun, but I wasn't happy that they retconned the whole timeline.
I can understand Abrams being willing to erase large portions of ST:TNG (which he did, since the entire Vulcan-Romulan conflict is now gone). But he also erased "Amok Time" and "Journey to Babel". Or maybe there will still be a journey to the Babel planet, but this time Kirk and McCoy will have already met Spock's father, who will be a widower. So there won't be any jokes in the new version of JTB.
I don't like retcons in general. If you want a tragic character whose home planet has been destroyed, invent one. Don't rewrite an entire universe to convert a well-established character to the character you prefer.
LAGuy wrote: Looks fine, and there wasn't a weak link among the regulars.
Not a weak link cast-wise, but character-wise I disagree. Uhura was turned into a much more fleshed-out character than she ever was, which was great, but McCoy and Chekov were turned into much more one-dimensional caricatures than they ever were.
LAGuy wrote: It's clearly set up for sequels, and, considering it's a hit, I assume they'll happen.
Which is even worse. What you would then get is not just a retcon but a full reboot, as happened with the Batman movies (twice) and several comic series (e.g., Legion of Super-Heroes in 1994, and then again in 2004, and then again in 2009). These never stop, because once Abrams shows you don't have to be loyal to Roddenberry's timeline, why will the next director even consider being loyal to Abrams' timeline?
OTOH, if there is a new ST spinoff, they can always have a crossover story (perhaps using the Mirror Universe?) that re-retcons everything back to what it used to be!
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