Lyn ([info]raaga123) wrote,
@ 2009-05-14 22:44:00
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The Star Trek Movie
If you ever loved Star Trek, see it.  If you never loved Trek but love a good sci-fi action movie, see it.  If you just want a good ride with some touching scenes and some funny dialogue, see it.

If you can't stand William Shatner, see it.  He's not in it.

Of course, I may be the wrong person to ask.  I saw it in IMAX, and the combination of sensory overload , delight in the lovely dialogue and characterizations (and possibly also an empty stomach) hit me like a drug.  I think I was hyperventilating for most of the last hour, and I literally had to ask [info]chikuru  to help me up the stairs on the way out of the theatre.  Bizarre -- I've never had quite such a spectacularly visceral reaction to a movie before.  So I may not be the most objective of reviewers.

Mind you, the movie doesn't fit 100% as an origin story to the original canon, but it doesn't really have to -- within the first few minutes it becomes clear that the central (interesting, tragic, crazy) villain is a time traveler, so the whole thing works nicely as an alternate timeline.  Further, it reads like an alternate timeline that will converge fairly closely (though not exactly) with the original Trek universe.  The conflicts and camaraderie between Kirk, Spock and McCoy are very believable as an early beginning to the central triad that defined the original TV series. 

Sure, OK, McCoy's eyes are brown instead of blue, Spock gets along a little too well with his father, and  Uhura has a force of personality more in keeping with the command officer of the movie franchise than the kittenish communications officer of the TV series.   You won't care.  Trust me.



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[info]chemoelectric
2009-05-15 07:22 am UTC (link)
Anything based on nostalgia rather than ‘last frontierism’ is by definition not Star Trek.

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[info]raaga123
2009-05-15 12:18 pm UTC (link)
Um. Have you seen it? It's got both.

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[info]chemoelectric
2009-05-15 06:35 pm UTC (link)
I don’t do the movie thing anymore, which is the reason I’m spared disappointment. :)

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[info]raaga123
2009-05-15 06:39 pm UTC (link)
Ah. Well, for what it's worth, Star Trek afficionados do seem to like it. In fact, the buzz is that it rivals WRATH OF KHAN as best Trek movie ever.

So, don't rule out seeing the DVD once it comes out. ;-)

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[info]chemoelectric
2009-05-15 06:48 pm UTC (link)
I don’t do that, either. :)

[info]mister_kat, with whom I regularly watched Star Trek back in the day, seemed quite disappointed with the movie.

Edited at 2009-05-15 06:48 pm UTC

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[info]raaga123
2009-05-15 06:52 pm UTC (link)
Really! Well, he is a man of respectable tastes, but he seems to be in the minority on this one.

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[info]chemoelectric
2009-05-15 07:15 pm UTC (link)
He tends to be curmudgeon-like, but I may be a tougher audience, in my own way. I just tend not to be entertained, and get more that way with age. For example, at the time I was entertained by Wrath of Khan, but now it would have to have been directed by Alfred Hitchcock and star Charles Laughton to entertain me. :)

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[info]chemoelectric
2009-05-20 06:14 pm UTC (link)
I was just scanning Anthony Lane’s review in the New Yorker. While he’s lamenting a current cinematic fetish with ‘backstory’, it dawns on me that this ‘backstory’ has Jim Kirk being born in an escape pod. My face probably turned red; the entire world (though maybe not Anthony Lane) knows that Jim Kirk was born in Iowa.

You can’t just play around with stuff like that and get away with it. How are we supposed to imagine a future-world that keeps changing, and suspend disbelief rather than be given continual little shocks?

When they had Kahn recognizing Pavel Chekhov, which was well nigh impossible, at least we could figure this just an annoying mistake and let it go; I didn’t even notice that mistake until told about it. But it surprises me that serious Trekkies (which I am not) aren’t burning down the movie theaters with these latest liberties! :)

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[info]raaga123
2009-05-20 06:51 pm UTC (link)
But again, remember that this is an alternate timeline triggered by Nero's appearance from the future. In the movie, Spock-prime (our Spock, an old half-vulcan by now) tells Kirk that in the original timeline his father lived to watch him grow up and graduate from the Academy. So, it's not too "out there" to figure that he was born in the escape pod because of his mother going into premature labor due to the crisis in *this* timeline.

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[info]chemoelectric
2009-05-20 07:13 pm UTC (link)
Time line anomalies are part of why I lost interest in SF generally. Science fiction has been infected by and fed into the destruction of fundamental physics, so I don’t think it is harmless fun – theoretical ‘physicists’ talk like religious mystics these days because that’s what they are – but Star Trek can’t fairly be blamed for that. (Analog magazine OTOH, to which I subscribed for decades, is another matter.)

:) <-- This means I’m being friendly about being very upset about physics, not that I’m joking. :)

Edited at 2009-05-20 07:14 pm UTC

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