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.
Sorry, but I can’t agree at all FRiend. My wife and I saw it at the movie grill the night before last, and not only did we leave the theater wowed, but the audience was simply estatic post movie.
I think you defined yourself early on when you mentioned your distates for the wildly successful “Lost”. Abrahms gets his audience and this new Trek will be a blockbuster. I hope there are many more to come with this new cast. I’m stoked at the mere possibility of sequels.
Major spoiler alert:
It made plenty of sense to me in light of the fact that the older Spock has full knowledge of Kirk’s lifetime in the other timeline.
In the early 90s, John Carpenter remade the film with a huge budget, big stars, loads of special effects, and it turned out to be a complete waste of time. Political correctness galore, feminism, anti-Christian propaganda, anti-U.S. military propaganda, gratuitous violence....I saw it once and I've never had a desire to see it again.
I saw it with my children (my husband refused to watch anyone but Shatner) I really enjoyed it. I cringed everytime **spoiler** Uhura kissed Spock, because I kept thinking “this is Sylar and he will KILL you!”
Love slave? The way she pushed him into letting her on the Enterprise showed she was at the very least his equal.
An Orion slave girl is now a Star Fleet cadet, bedding every other cadet she can find (very liberated).
That is a stretch too.
Well, And Captain Pike did make Kirk acting first officer to Spock. The thing that some detractors seem to be missing was that Pike told Kirk in the Bar that Star Fleet had lost its edge, and newer fresh blood with high energy initiative was needed to invigorate the officer corps(not the exact words but that was what Pike was conveying) I got the sense that the Star Fleet in that time line was in danger of losing it’s edge, its purpose...at least Abrams was trying to convey that notion. The “disaster” caught Star Fleet at the ragged edge with few ships and experienced personnel to deal with it.
I beleive there were a lot of quick promotions and battlefield commissions in WW2, especially at the beginning.
The great strength of the Americans was that they responded way beyond their expected capabilities in these new rolls as a whole, as did our women on the home and factory fronts!
So I could believe an inexperienced command crew, yet imbued with drive and a sense of mission, could pull together quickly in a time of crisis, even in the 23rd century!
Captain Pike had named him number one.
Suspension of disbelief has nothing to do with being naive or gullible as you claim. It simply refers to the viewer’s acknowledgement that they are watching fiction unfold, and that the plot line adheres less to real-world rules and more to its own internal reasoning and ruling, even if in other circumstances that reasoning would be bizarre and unbelievable.
Narrative justification for producing a work that depicts a span of hours, days, weeks, months, or even years in a mere 2 hours is not naive or gullible.
Did you watch the Russian cam version too? lol:)
IMO bizarre reasoning but I guess if it works for you...
I’m a life long Star Trek and still fan and I agree with many of your points. I enjoyed the new Star Trek, but thought it should have been more faithful to the TOS canon. I gave this new version of ST a 7 out of 10 on IMDB.
I woulds like to read a thoughtful, conservative review of this entertainment vehicle product, yes, product, and how it illustrates and betrays the infantile utopian Leftist politics of the Hollyweird crowd, because you know very well that it does!
Thank you all for boycotting Hollywood products!
Didn't you see Back to the Future? Spock would be going forward to the future of the alternate timeline, which is pointless. He would need to go back prior to the Kelvin incident (the point where the timeline splits) and somehow stop Nero at that point.
No, bizarre is attempting to apply promotion requirements and traditions of the US armed forces to a sci-fi movie taking place hundreds of years in the future, as happens in the thread-starting review.
That was a mask?
Talk about spoilers!
Three words: Little Big Horn.
Or watch Ricardo Montalban in "The Wrath of Khan"...:)
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