To the bridge

Let’s start this with a very fine LotD for this is very very cool – 24 hours, filmed from a geosynchronous satellite. Watch for the moon and the sun to make their appearances, the crescent shining limb of the atmosphere, and just the light splaying across the world’s surface.  Sweet.

Space… the final frontier.  These are the voyages of the movie reboot.  Their mission:  get everyone into the theatre.  Well, they got me there.  I wasn’t terribly anticipatory about the film until seeing the last couple of trailers, and then I got very excited.  Jose, Tri, William and myself headed for a late night showing on Thursday… how did the film fare vs the trailer?

Oh, and one very big spoiler warning, I won’t be hiding anything.

Back when the final Voyager episode was aired, I made a point to see it even though I hadn’t really watched the series.  At the first commercial break my roommate, who was less into the series than I, says with humour in his voice “I’ll bet it’s time travel!”   After a pause I could only go “Guorrrrghh… you’re probably right.”  And, of course, he was.  Trek is so full of time travel that the fact the space-time continuum hasn’t collapsed is almost a mystery.

Yet here, this stale plot device it was actually stroke of genius.  For the purposes of a reboot it gave the producers a licence to alter as much, or as little, as they wanted to craft the series anew without invalidating anything from the original timeline.  In the end they can now make a tonne of new content and tell a raft of stories without duplicating anything or breaking continuity.  It’s all new, but not entirely.  In a way they keep the best of both worlds and with less chance of alienating the old guard.  Brilliant.
It also could have given them the opportunity to send Nero back through another black hole and restore the timeline, and for about three quarters of the film I thought they might well do that.  Then the potential for future movies in this clean slate became readily apparent to me and I figured they wouldn’t.  And indeed, no reversing course.  The new timeline is the one to stay.

Inside of this framework, I thought the movie was pretty good.  Good humour and it kept it light.  Overall I really could have done with less blockbuster and more Trek, which kept this film solidly in my good fun category.  (and Trek is by no means the first or the few of films that has succumbed to (or been subjected to) blockbusteritis)

The thoughts:

• A mostly good job of introducing the various characters , though poor Chekov is played for a dialogue gag.  I especially liked the scenes on Vulcan with the young Spock.
• Actually, I liked the exploration of Spock’s character a lot, I think he got the focus of the movie.
• And I loved his almost throwaway line “We are now an endangered species.”  Profound, in many ways.
• I inwardly went “oh cool” when the upcoming Kobayashi Maru retest was presented… that’s a classic one, and we’d get to see it!  I was a bit let down by it though.  The sense I got of it in Wrath of Khan had me envision Kirk as tweaking the system and pulling out a victory, and not being so overly insensitive and flippant about it.  Then again, the apple was a great shout out.
• Ok there are a tonne of great shout outs.  And classic quotes/lines.  Every character got theirs.
• I found the score a bit overly bombastic once, yet properly adapted at others.  I need to hear this by its lonesome.  I think it may shine.
• The use of silence in the drop scene to the drill was perfect.  Just the sound of breathing as they scream into the atmosphere.  Nice touch.
• The older Spock bits worked surprisingly well.  That could’ve come off hokey or awkward, and it didn’t.
• I’m not sure of the physics of the planet Kirk was marooned on – close enough to the Enterprise to be dropped off before it goes into warp, supposedly close enough to Vulcan that you can see Vulcan huge in the sky to see its destruction sans telescope?  So it’s a moon?  Of Vulcan?  That is now orbiting a black hole?  That might be now moving towards the hole due to increased gravity?  Then the Enterprise warps away, and Scotty can, with old clunky equipment, now suddenly beam across solar systems (light years distant??), and now they can beam onto a ship some 100 light hours distant?  From a Spock calculation that was his to begin with?  It all didn’t sit well with me.
• I loved how they got the oft-used Vulcan “You lied?”  routine in there, this time even Spock to Spock.
• I liked the art direction for the most part.  A pretty good mix of new shiny with old-school.  The big E looked good!
• But wait… building starships on Earth?  Starships in the atmosphere of a planet? Nuh uh, no way.  YATI!
• For a supposed ‘only a mining ship’ Nero’s vessel was pretty damn well armed.
• Ok, here’s the bigge.  I’m coining a new term:  “Autonomous Action Sequence.”  This seems to be the key technique of moviemakers these days.  A random action-y sequence added in to make the film more ‘exciting’.  Please stop doing this.  If you can remove the sequence from the film and it changes the film not a whit then you’re not helping the story, you’re hurting the story.  It’s too obvious.  It serves nothing.  Just because it’s kinetic doesn’t make it tense, exciting or engaging.  Strange beast chasing and water tube weirdness, I’m eying you both, primarily.
• Is it me, or did Kirk spend half the movie hanging from things?  Cliffs, platforms, drills…
• The red goo was just too neat and unexplained and perfect that it pretty much became a Mac Guffin.
• One cliché I really wish they’d dropped – for the love of the directives please come up with another strategy than ejecting the warp core!  Starfleeet’s insurance bill must be killer.

This is a film I want to see again.  I’m a bit mixed about it still.  There’s lots of good in there, and if it extracts itself from the not as well handled, then so much the better.