Star Trek Movie: A Quick Review

[bristrek]

So I saw the Star Trek movie last night! Woohoo!!! Ended up babbling my ear off to the head projectionist about the various eras of Trek and how TOS wasn't actually the first one and there was this guy called Pike and OMG don't you know the Borg were more badass when they first came along before the Federation started beating them all the time and about Q shoving the Enterprise into that first cube's path and then time travel and how the Borg let their kin know of earth during the time of Archer and....

One long babble.


In any case, after sufficiently bewildering said head projectionist (with the aide of a co-worker of mine who though not actually a Trekker does know his stuff) we went int to watch it in two groups, me and him in one screen and the others in another screen that started about five/ten minutes later. And it was good. Loved it, I really did (though granted I would not be the best film critic in the industry) and I loved it for what it is. The actors are not the original actors but they still fit into their roles rather well.


More notes behind the cut and need I say it? SPOILERS!!!


LESSER SPOILERS - PERFORMANCE BASED

- Karl Urban was a good Bones. He was, he pulled it off well in terms of body and speech patterns and so on. My beef with him is that he didn't sound southern! DeForest came from Georgia and though he didn't have the thickest accent out there (whilst on screen anyway) Karl's accent here was like a generic American accent and probably more northern than southern. It didn't throw me out of the movie or anything but it was a peeve and honestly? I think he should have spent some time on that.

- Simon Pegg! I was dreading this, I was. Well, not dreading but really not looking forward to it. He's good at what he does but I could not match him up with my internal Scotty image for the life of me. But I was wrong! I mean, he wasn't the original Scotty and some of his.... Pegg-ness came through and into his performance which is natural I suppose but he did good. And for all that he's a fellow West Country citizen he pulled of the Scottish thing well, says the gal who has never lived there. I honestly would have loved to see how Paul McGillion would've done it because he fits the character on a basic level, in my mind, better than Pegg. But for all that I was pleasantly surprised with this because it did work very very well in his own way. It wasn't identical, not even the most similar given all the actors out there, but it worked.

- Zachary Quinto was perfect as Spock! He did the "I am Vulcan, yes I am. I am Vulcan so I feel no emotion yes sir-ee (except when I kind of do) see me win the best Vulcan ever medal" thing to a T. And he never seemed ot of place in my mind, he fit perfectly in pretty much every way. He was Spock, the Half Vulcan/Half Human member of Starfleet who has chosen his path as a Vulcan (despite entering that pesky human group called Starfleet) and is determined to stay to it forever but has that slightly pesky matter of the humans in his life. In fact I just saw one of the TOS episodes and it is rather odd how much the two performances fit. Best match up of all the cast me thinks.

- The guys playing Chekov and Sulu weren't the stars of the movie by far. I'm not saying they're bad, they're not, but if I didn't know any better I wouldn't have matched them up with the TOS characters they're playing at all. This is partially because of the writing, I think, but also because of the acting. There was no Sulu-quirky-eyebrows-look-thing that he does now and then if you know what I mean. They were fine but they didn't seem to be THEM. They each had their own bits and places where the characters were allowed to come out of the background but mostly it felt like they were there just so they would be there. To have Chekov and Sulu rather than two other original characters which they could have been with almost no change to the movie. One of Sulu's props made me go "HUH?' for a minute and it was slightly amusing hearing an accent that seemed more realistically Russian from Chekov. I don't think either were fantastically close to the original actors but given that the plot wasn't on them and they were rarely ever the focus it didn't seem to matter that much.

- Paul McGillion was supposed to make a cameo. I was looking and looking and didn't spot him - though to be fair I was looking in the wrong place as it turns out so that may be why I missed it. But that just goes to show just how small his cameo was. Which is to say very very small, shall have to look in the right place next time. Damn I wish he'd had a bigger part.

- Jennifer Morrison! That was a surprise! I saw here and thought 'she looks familiar' and then figured out she looked just like Cameron off of House but dismissed it because, well, I'd have heard mention of it at some point surely? She had an important role in the movie but short screen time and was very good at it, seriously. Aside from me going "OMG, is that actually her?" every few seconds whislt she was on screen my heart went out to her and what her character was going through. So go Jennifer, you did well.

- Guest vocal performance from Greg Grunberg of Heroes fame! Was so very brief though, just enough to make me go "huh?' but not identify it. Real and true Heroes fans will probably notice that more though. Did Zachary do that I wonder?

- Oh Majel, the First Lady of Trek. Still the voice of the computer, but for the last time ever. We shall miss you ma'am.

- Chris Pine! Yes, I wasn't ignoring him. Just leaving him till last. He isn't William Shatner. And I don't mean this as an insult to either Chris or Bill. There was no iambic pentameter and no manly cut across his chest displaying his manly muscles and he didn't have the quirkiness that I tend to think of when I think of Shatner. To me this is a bit harder because I watch Boston Legal and as such I'm still up to date with Shatner's acting as it is now after it's had time to change with age and it fits part of my mental 'Shatner-ness' which reverberats in my mind when I think of Kirk. Not all my fault, it was there in part during younger Kirk and more so as the movies developed but.... that isn't what Pine was supposed to do. Because Kirk wasn't like that then and to play it as such would have been bad. So Kudos to Pine on that and as I said he was good, I loved it and he fit the character very very well. Not as good as Zachary with Spock but almost there. You got that determined to do what I want to do and what has to be done, slighty cockiness but justified all the same lover of women but not actually a prat... guy. James T Kirk.

- Not really casting so much as set - Interactive plexiglass wall/stand WTF? There was another case of technology being really out of place and too advanced but that wasn't on the Enterprise, shall not say more. Seemed at least more in place in the interactive plexiglass though.




 




GREATER SPOILERS - PLOT POINTS AND SO ON
The biggest ones need to be highlighted to be read, so don't worry too much





- The first thing I said upon coming out of the screen, my big main problem with this movie is...... SPOCK/UHURA?!?!?! Where the hell did that come from! My co-workers keep on insisting 'alternate reality' (more on that later). I get that they were friends in TOS but it was always more of a shared musician thing rather than a romance thing. Got the impression Uhura was more romantically interested in Chekov or Scotty if anybody. But whoever shipped them from the original series and movies, and they must be out there, will be very very happy with this. It wasn't all over the place to be fair but it was a thing and it was THE thing in the movie that made me go "WHAT THE FRELL?' and rail.

- Original!Spock! Yes! Leonard Nimoy was as great, though that's pretty much a given. And I am so massively relieved that his presence had purpose and need rather than being there just to get an original cast member in the film. It was pretty much pivotal as matter fact and I won't give away why but trust me on this. I swear before he'd popped up I'd been going on in my head about how something had to happen to bring Kirk and Spock together as friends at least because they're T'hy'la damnit and then.... along comes original!Spock muttering one of my favourate lines in all of Trek:

"I have always been and shall always bee your friend"

Needless to say Kirk was rather confused. And it was interesting as all get out to see original!Spock come across these younger versions of friends long dead (well, when it comes to Scotty who knows, he may actually still be alive because of that transporter stasis thing). And a Spock more comfortable with himself if very much affected by the events going on around him. Acknowledging that he feels and has emotion, at peace with that fact, but still eminently logical and doing what had to be done. And happy to see Kirk in his own Spock-ish way.


- ( highlight to read) Vulcan! Oh my god, oh Valen that was..... and this is uber uber spoiler but they destroyed Vulcan. As young!Spock said, he's now a member of an endangered species. They managed to save those charged with keeping their culture and their history including Sarek but still.... my heart just about crushed there.


- Okay, so what's with the making recent graduates of the Academy high ranking officers in the real world?

- Christopher Pike was in it! Woohoo! And came out the end of it an Admiral and not at all disabled. In wheelchair but in the same way all patients in hospitals are in wheelchairs when not in their bed.

- Scotty wasn't originally on the Enterprise with the others but this station on an ice moon, remote, with this other guy who was like a mini..... tree type humanoid about the size of Flitwick from Harry Potter. And he so had a crush on Scotty, I swear.

- Time Travel is a key, KEY thing in the story line. The bad guys came back from the future in anger to try and change things to their advantage and wreck revenge at the same time. In doing so they changed the time line massively starting with Kirk's personal time line. That's where Jennifer Morrison comes in, she plays Kirk's mom.  It was a massive, massive change that meant his father died the day he was born and all that could bring meaning that, yes, I don't think the thing with Kodos on Tarsus IV happened in this time line. He's very much adrift at the start if still him. It's thankst to Pike that he joins Starfleet here, and it's on that shuttle to the academy that he meets Bones for the first time.


- Bones and Kirk, it seems, instantly strike up a fantastic friendship. Kirk and Spock? Not so much - but by the end I think it's foundations have formed and who knows, maybe they'll end up T'hy'la in this reality if it were to continue also. Spock and Bones start of their own relationship pretty much as expected and yes the word hobgoblin does pop up.

- ( highlight to read) The time-lines don't re-set. At the end of it the changes brought on by all the time travel stick which means Vulcan remains destroyed and so on.








 



In short a GREAT film that I love and adore it. It isn't exactly the same as the original but how could it be? To expect that would be foolish. It is what it is, a new Trek movie with new actors playing characters and relationships we're already familiar with in an era before we knew them. And though there will always be things in it that I'm not happy with and every person will have their own sticking points....

Loved it.