Reviews: Movies – Star Trekking Across the Universe!

The requisite squeeing fangirl post. Stark and I saw Star Trek (dammit, I keep typing “Stark Trek”) yesterday and had differing opinions on the film. Stark said “Meh,” I said “Wheeeeeeee! Saving the universe and getting in bar fights! Tribbles and booze and wild space adventure! Pyoo pyoo set phasers to stun!!”

Right before my trip to New York, Space Channel was showing a Star Trek movie marathon. We diligently powered through each of the movies up until I left. Sadly, I only got to watch up until the eighth movie before I had to leave the country, so I missed out on Insurrection and Nemesis. Oh well, I have heard I wasn’t missing much. Generally, I thought the entire series wasn’t all that great. Most of the movies amounted to just decent, extra-long episodes of the show. Which is not a bad thing, really. I mean, for the hilarious interactions of Bones/Kirk/Spock alone, they’re worth watching. The most movie-like of the movies was The Voyage Home, which had an engaging script, time travel with an amazing purpose, and great interactions between the cast. Chekhov getting captured as a Russian spy! Bones bitching about medieval medicine! Uhura being baffled by San Francisco! Kirk doing a terrible job of hitting on a woman and making her pay for his dinner! SPOCK MIND MELDING WITH WHALES!!! Awesome. Here are my ratings for the series:

I, Star Trek: Boring but inoffensive
II, The Wrath of Khan: Campy awesomeness. KHAAANNNNN!
III, The Search For Spock: Kinda rambling and slow, but generally decent.
IV, The Voyage Home: WHALES! BEST. MOVIE. EVER.
V, The Final Frontier: AWFUL. AWFUL. Never leave Shatner in charge of a story. Ugh.
VI, The Undiscovered Country: Definitely an improvement on V, but more like a long episode than anything else. Lots of boring galactic council meetings. Lucas should have learned from this. Space politics, like real politics, are BORING.
VII, Generations: I liked this movie. It was actually the first Star Trek movie that I ever saw in theaters, so I’ll always be fond of it.
VIII, First Contact: Borg queen! Borg queen! Data being smarter than everyone! Awww, Picard, you make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside when you say things like “Engage.” Purrr. And the day is saved by Picard’s hot biceps of power and righteousness!

In sum, STAR TREK RULES!

As for the new movie, I thought it was great! We went to see it at the new AMC theater with the floor to ceiling screen and the surround sound that could make a girl go deaf. There were lots of awesome previews, like for Where the Wild Things Are and Terminator: Salvation.

I thought the new cast was great with one exception. If everyone had seemed like they were just doing impressions of the original cast, it would have seemed too hokey. But the actors playing Kirk, Scotty, Spock, Uhura, Sulu and Chekhov weren’t doing impressions, they were doing interpretations of the characters. The one bit of miscasting was McCoy. Bones was an effete Southern gentlemen with a drinking problem. He was a bit too small and weak for a Federation officer, and was really more adept at embittered snarking and sneaking pulls on his flask than at doing anything useful. This new Bones was young and tall and buff and looked like he could throw Kirk around the room. He mostly sounded generic except for a few times when he sounded like he was mimicking DeForest Kelley after having watched a few clips on YouTube. So yeah, not impressed with the new Bones. I miss the old Bones!

The opening sequence with Kirk’s father was probably the most emotional part of the movie. I found the rest a bit cold. But it was exciting and full of action and adventure and cool ships and funny aliens and evil aliens and sword fights and an overall great return to the madcap adventuring of the original series and there was NOT ONE GALACTIC COUNCIL SNOOZEFEST or BORING LECTURE ABOUT THE PRIME DIRECTIVE. Finally! Thank you, J.J.

The scene at the beginning with the Beastie Boys was, oh gosh, with the sound in that theater, I was just vibrating with sci-fi rocking goodness. The one flaw was the stupid Nokia plug that proceeded it. What was that? I mean, no product has ever been mentioned on Star Trek before and now we are going to start with Nokia? In the future when everything is perfect and there is no such thing as money or capitalism, why would there be a cellphone brand? Would brands even exist if they can’t sell anything? I mean, c’mon. C’mon! Was it worth pulling viewers right out of the experience of the idealistic future to make a few bucks on a product plug?

My biggest request for the sequel would be the addition of another female cast member. I understand being loyal to the source material, and Uhura is great and all, but really, the show cannot go on with one woman alone. I don’t even mind Kirk’s womanizing or any of the sleeping around the universe hijinks as long as there are some awesome female characters around, preferably MORE THAN ONE who is not something lame like communications officer or ship empath and who does not wear a miniskirt on a starship. Sheesh, Star Trek, for forty years you have sucked at this. Oh, and maybe Bones will work on his characterization more and next go ’round we can have more Kirk/Spock/Bones bickering/flirting. Finally, I would really like it if the movie could start with the Trek Theme and not some generic movie music. Also, Leonard Nimoy is still, and will always be, a very sexy man.

In other news, oh my god, William Shatner, what the hell is this? This type of thing is why no one asked you to be in the new movie. (If you get bored, skip to 3:51, that’s when it starts going entirely off the wall)