Friday, May 08, 2009

I give Star Trek a B+

There are SPOILERS ahead, so proceed at your own risk.

I have always enjoyed Star Trek. TOS and Next Gen were great, Voyager may have been my favorite, and I only marginally watched DS9 and Enterprise. Unlike many, I loved the Motion Picture. I never believed the every other movie theory for Star Trek. I thought V, Insurrection, and Nemesis were weak, but the rest were great.

That brief summary gives you a baseline for my take on this week's Star Trek release.

What worked:
  • Kirk, Spock, and McCoy have great chemistry
  • They captured the characters without looking like they were imitating the original actors
  • Pike was an engaging character
  • There was a good balance of action, drama, and comedy
  • The Enterprise was beautiful... inside and out
  • Rebooting the timeline to reboot the series works
  • Kirk WAS Kirk
  • I left wanting to see it again!
What did not work:
  • Nero the vengful mine worker. This did not work on SO many levels. I wish they would have dug through about 20 years worth of 24th century villans to find a "Khan".
  • Chekov.... if he had about a fifth of the accent, he might have been passable.
  • Kirk gets dumped on the nearest inhabitable moon... and Spock Prime just happens to be within walking distance... I laughed it was so absurd.
  • Cadets were running the Enterprise awfully quick. Where was its crew? Why make them all newbies? Couldn't a few of the primary characters already have been crew (Scotty for instance).
My few quibbles do not take away from the fact that it was a great flick. The only bummer is - now a have to wait a few YEARS for part 2.

2 comments:

OneSmallStep said...

But at least there will be a part 2? Someone told me that the release date for the second movie is already set -- sometime in 2011.

Hopefully, they won't push that release date back.

OneSmallStep said...

I was thinking about the whole Kirk meeting Spock Prime on the frozen planet thing ... I didn't have as much of a problem with it, because I could rationalize it in the sense that Spock was put there to watch Vulcan be destroyed, and maybe it's the only habitable area within the Vulcan system that Spock could quickly deposit Kirk on.

And, fortunately for Kirk, the Venus Fly-trap monster just happened to chase him in the right direction. :)

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