Predictably, I went to see the new Star Trek film at the weekend.
At the last minute I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it after all – I’ve followed its progress with interest, and once upon a time I was an avid Trekker so was prepared to nitpick and go into full-on nerd mode. I’ve also not been very complimentary regarding many of the Trek films so…
My first concern was that the ‘new’ cast would simply be actors-playing-actors-playing-characters. Certainly there were elements of that here (most notably in the character of Chekov and the V/W speech) but I look forward to seeing more of John Cho’s ‘Sulu’ or Karl Urban’s ‘McCoy’.
Another issue was that of canon: I wibbled about this a bit back saying ‘it’s just a film’ but I was wondering how it would be dealt with if at all. Yeah, OK, it’s a Trek film that contains time-travel (an oft-used device) but the difference here was that it wasn’t a deus-ex-machina – things were changed in the first two minutes, that’s it chaps, everything you know and love past stardate 22*mumble* has changed and ain’t going back. A throwaway ‘everything you could have been, isn’t’ has explained the lot without labouring the point. Excellent.
(Urgh, time travel mechanics do my nut in, best not to think about it much!)
Right, nerd starship design bit follows, I’ll get it out of my system: Moving the bridge down a level seems a good idea, excellent redesign there (I wasn’t sure I liked it when I saw the stills); nice to see them go back to the original engine room design, but there seemed to be precious few engineers hanging around; whoever did the nacelle design needs shooting; liked the new shuttlebay design. Nerding over, I’m not picking canon, right? 😉
Not many bad points: the two annoyances were when I saw a bit of Nokia product placement (really!), and the JJ Abrams trademark ‘let’s wiggle the camera around’ (which put me off the Battlestar Galactica reboot). The Spock/Uhura interaction grated a little at times.
That said, it’s a very enjoyable film, a hell of a reboot, tons of action/comedy/tragedy, thoroughly recommended and deserving of the label “the best Summer blockbuster since Raiders Of The Lost Ark“. I do hope the now-confirmed sequel is as good.
(…and please can I have the Orion girl for Christmas?)
Update: If you want the full ship nitpick, take a look at Ex Astris Scientia… sigh 😉
May 11, 2009 at 3:20 pm
I was a little sickened by the Jack Daniels namecheck too. That sort of thing really dilutes the credibility of filmmakers.
Interestingly, I just accidentally typed ‘nakedcheck’ instead of ‘namecheck’ there. Weird.