Posted on 05/10/2009 12:14:38 PM PDT by pabianice
Edited on 05/10/2009 3:43:21 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
My wife and I saw the new Star Trek movie today. It is a long, very loud, two-dimensional, inadvertent look at what we as a society have lost in the past 40 years.
SPOILERS ***********************************************
The good news is that the FX and production are state-of-the-art. The bad news is that the plot is embarrassingly stupid and retro, the acting ranges from good to awful, and the production as a whole is one huge rock video. On top of that, the movie is so horribly loud that the audience had to block its ears several times.
J.J. Abrams, the man behind the incoherent "Lost," is the man behind this film, and it shows. Just as "Lost" long ago lost any semblance of sanity, his Star Trek is all about "updating the story." In the process of "updating," he has lost the bubble (as we Navy fliers say).
In touch with the contemporary 18-35 year old ethos, Abram's Kirk is a misunderstood genius who brawls and [expletive deleted by Mod] his way into his 20s, clearly not appreciated for what he is. He goes to Star Fleet Academy as an after-thought, challenged by a Star Fleet officer to do something worthwhile. Abrams rewrites and otherwise disregards the Trek canon at will to help support his thin as tissue rewrite of the Kirk-Spock legend. After all, today’s film-makers can’t be expected to actually be coherent over time. Do not expect anything in this film to gel with what has been told about Trek in the past 40 years; we are told that meddling with the time line has changed what we know to have been the case. What a lazy, dishonest way out.
The simple fact is that the original Trek was clasped to the bosom of the first fans because: (1) the stories were entertaining; (2) the acting was excellent (give William Shatner credit – why he has been vilified since is a discredit to a very fine actor; (3) the writing was largely imaginative, thanks to scripts from some of the greatest scifi writers of the 20th century; (4) given a meager budget, the show still looked good; and (5) teenaged boys who could not get dates adopted Trek like a starving man grasps a pizza.
The Trek saga had shown its age recently after Star Trek 10 cratered and there seemed to be nothing left for Trek to say. Paramount’s old cash cow needed to be put to sleep or somehow redone. Enter Abrams and a boat-load of new actors raised in the era of Grand Theft Auto IV and Madonna videos. The best-known actor in the new Trek (aside from Leonard Nimoy, who reprises Spock as a 200-year-old) is Zachary Quinto – the creepy character Syler from “Heroes,” which has been disintegrating for two years thanks to lack of plot). The rest of the cast are handsome/beautiful actors and actresses who are forced by the script to “re-imagine” the original characters. And this effort is largely disastrously bad. Perhaps the only successful one is Carl Urban, who does an excellent job of recreating Dr. McCoy in a younger version just the way we in the audience might have imagined (although in this version McCoy is also a graduate of Star Fleet Academy, unlike the original story line). The rest of the characters are pure Abrams: louder-than-life empty suits. Uhura is reduced to the love slave of young Spock (!) An Orion slave girl is now a Star Fleet cadet, bedding every other cadet she can find (very liberated). The new Kirk – Chris Pine – has the thankless task of trying to channel Shatner, a task he is clearly not up to. Instead, we see Kirk as a hot-headed, ready-fire-aim loose cannon.
The command architecture of the new “Enterprise” makes no sense, either military or literary, with the captain inexplicably making Officer Candidate Kirk the XO during Kirk’s first space mission, which he attends only through fraud. All the characters of the original Trek are made contemporaries in this re-telling and its hurts both story line and common sense. There is non-stop action (see: “video games”) but the audience is left unsatisfied since none of the characters are presented as more than two-dimensional cut-outs, with the names of familiar characters but no depth. You just don’t give a crap about any of them. The fighting scenes are ridiculous, with multiple killing blows given characters who suffer only a split lip(is it me or are today’s younger people such couch potatoes that they have never sparred in a dojo and are clueless about what being beaten senseless really does to someone?). So, after multiple beatings and phaser hits and jumps from 40 feet that do no damage to the people involved, the audience has been largely desensitized to what has occurred on-screen.
As the movie passes two hours and I was thinking strongly of a bathroom break, the story ends on an Alice And Wonderland plane. The new Kirk, having won the day through impossible fighting skill, genius IQ, daring good looks, and sheer force of will, is promoted from Cadet (E-2) to Captain (O-6) and given command of Enterprise. I couldn’t help myself – I burst-out laughing. Abrams – impatient with how the real world works and a child of I Want It Now! – simply discards any sense of reality and ends this story with Kirk in command of Enterprise without having had to bother with inconveniences like advancing through the ranks by proving competence and maturity and receiving the endorsement of his superiors – a process which actually take 21-22 years in the real military. Presto! We have Jimmy Kirk, boy genius, in command. This may seems fine in Abram’s world of Hollywood dementia, but all it did was make the audience at this showing laugh.
The rest of the plot is a re-telling of The Wrath of Khan. Ricardo Montelban had more dramatic flair in one finger than the current bad-guy actor (Eric Bana) has in his entire body. He’s a menacing as your junior high school guidance counselor.
In a broader sense, this movie shows what we have lost. Look at Flight of the Phoenix. The 1965 film with Jimmy Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Hardy Kreuger, Ernest Borgnine, et all, is gripping story-telling. The 2004 remake is hideously bad, with non-dimensional characters and an awful script yukking it up in a tale of desert survival. Today’s audiences don’t know the difference. Today’s audiences don’t know the difference between a qualified, patriotic presidential candidate and an empty suit who really shows his hatred for his own country.
Apace, the new Star Trek dumbs-down Trek to the 12-year-old level and leaves the viewer bored and with an ear-ache. The first sequel is due out in 2011.
Well, GA Custer was promoted directly from first lieutenant to brigadier general at the age of 23, then immediately won a crucial battle, arguably setting the stage for the Union victory at Gettysburg.
He was great in T.J. Hooker, too.
</sarc>
Well, of course. That's why Star Trek was fantasy - not reality. A young, impetuous Kirk (whether played by Shatner or the new kid) would never be a star ship captain. But Star Trek has always required suspension of disbelief.
I’ll wait for “redbox”...
Is the posting of that link in violation of this site’s rules? Just wondering. Don’t want anyone to get into legal problems.
Actually, I thought the bridge command group standing around wondering who was captain now, then acquiescing in Kirk’s assumption of command without the slightest right to do so even more idiotic.
On any naval ship, there is never the slightest confusion over who is next in the chain of command.
Pab: Just to deal with a detail, I don’t think Uhura in the new film was bedding anybody, with the possible exception of Spock. You seem to be confusing her with her green roommate.
Agree with you the new McCoy was spot on.
Agree hard to believe Kirk could be eleveated so quickly, but initially the ship was manned with cadets due to the emergency (another old Star Trek movie gig, I loved that so many were woven in) so the cadets were all assuming bigger roles. Kirk did have years of training, he was a genius, Pike was a mentor, and Kirk essentially saved the world and then some on his own initiative. Still a stretch to be given command of a star ship in one easy step, but this was movie land and they only had 2 hours 6 minutes.
Shatner was great in at least one film and that was Miss Congeniality.
Am I on the wrong website?
I thought only liberals believed in stealing people's intellectual (or other) property without compensation.
“suspension of disbelief.”
I’ve always hated that term. It’s like George Carlin used to say...using unneccesary wordiness when one simple one will do is an attempt to raise the stature of a speaker and temporarily confuse the listener.
Ie. Q”How are you doing today”? A: “I’m not unwell”.
We just saw the movie today, and loved it!
We have loved every Star Trek episode, series, movie, etc.
Guess you have to have the right frame of mind to love all that stuff!
I saw the first episode of “Lost” and thought it had real potential. Pretty soon, (actually very soon) it turned into unbelievable nonsense.
I sort of always liked the idea of a realistic “Gilligan’s Island” but I guess Ginger and Mary Ann are too much to ask for.
Anyway, every week or two I will tune into a few minutes of Lost, hoping it has changed and can only watch for that length of time before tuning out.
I could not agree more - this movie stunk at so many level...I still can’t get over the tantrum that Kirk had on the bridge and Spock actually had him expelled off the skip to a passing ice planet - where we could enjoy the hero run from a monster right into a cave that - hold it!.....drum role please!....SPOCK is hiding in! And then they walk to the nearest Star Fleet camp and ....hold it...another drum role!....Scotty is waiting!....Man the writers on this are great....and hey!...What about Chekov...a 17 year super cadet....
If you like Beverly Hills, 90210 you will love this lot of metrosexuals....
Opening weekend box office exceeded the total gross of the last Star Trek movie, so by that standard, it’s pure gold for the studio.
As for the points - engineering being put in charge of someone who just stepped on the ship, to the point that he’s given the codes and control to eject the power sources for the ship? Just as unbelievable as the rest.
But that’s because it’s a fantasy movie, filled with loads of things we don’t have, like matter transporters, faster than light ships. You might have easily made the complaint that the ships were being built on the surface of Earth, rather than in orbit where the massive space station is.
As for loudness, certainly didn’t have that problem in the theater we went to; I’d strongly suggest talking to the manager next time about the audio level. Kids in the booth tend to turn it way up, rather than following the instructions they’re given.
I’m sorry you had a bad experience, but it really seems to me that you went into this expecting trash, and found it. Then again, Wolverine came across very much the same to me.
It’s not a DVD copy, and that would be an original quality duplication of the product. It’s a cam-shot of it. I don’t have any problem with that. People have done the same thing with their music, recording off radios (in the past, and with computers and/or software in the present day, recording radio programs and/or Internet shows) and TV shows, recording from DVRs and VHS recorder/players, too.
I keep full article renditions of the copyrighted articles from newspaper websites, too — which, by the way, we can’t even put on here, on Free Republic. But, that, in no way, keeps me from doing it myself, for what I want to “record” (of that article), even though they say it’s copyrighted.
I also make computer copies of my own DVDs and put them on other DVD disks, so I don’t use my own original DVDs (which is supposedly a violation there, too...), but that doesn’t stop me either.
I’ll make copies of my CDs of various music/artists CDs and run them off my computer and/or iPod and/or iPhone, even though I’m supposedly not supposed to do that one either.
Oh, and by the way, I also get TV show series downloaded, too, where I didn’t get a chance to record it myself, but someone else did. I’ll (many times) just watch an entire season at once (well..., almost at once, over the course of days and perhaps a few weeks...).
As I said, I’ll keep right on doing all those things, while you can do what you want to..., also... :-)
My whole family liked the new Star Trek, and my son, husband and I love Lost!!!!!
Lost is a good complicated story, and Star Trek is an action packed movie. Both are good.
You said — Is the posting of that link in violation of this site’s rules? Just wondering. Don’t want anyone to get into legal problems.
—
Well, just go to “The Pirate Bay” (can look the website up on Google, then... :-) ...), a Swedish website for BitTorrent files, and then do a search for “Star.Trek.2009.CAM” (using those search terms, to narrow it down).
That’s a generic way of referring to it, without referring to it then... :-)
Or..., go to “The Pirate Bay” website (can look it up on Google), search for the term “Star Trek 2009” and it should give you a list of links for BitTorrent files to pick from. They are cam shots, though, so they don’t have the DVD quality...
Your review of the review left me wanting more.
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