| Review: STAR TREK |
[May. 11th, 2009|10:44 pm] |
I went to see Star Trek yesterday (Sunday, Mother's Day) with my family; Mom, Peter (who came over Saturday), Sissy, Angel, and Gabriel. I later heard that it made $76 million at the box office on its opening weekend (warp-speeding past X-Men Origins: Wolverine in its second week, and being the highest-grossing Star Trek movie ever!), and its box-office success is quite deserved.
I think this is the BEST STAR TREK MOVIE EVER!!!!!
My whole family (and some audience members, who were Trek fans themselves) were totally geeking out about it when we exited into the lobby! And we all agreed on how great it was. We couldn't stop talking about it. As I understand it, many Trek fans (Trekkies, Trekkers, whatever) absolutely loved the film, while other fans hated it for the reasons you'd expect (it was a reboot, they avoided canon, they should've had the old cast, etc.).
But here's my 2-cents on the whole thing:
Before now, my favorite Star Trek of all time was, and still is, the original 1966 TV series. I grew up with that as a kid. Sure, some episodes were made on the cheap (with rubber monsters, throwaway Hollywood sets, etc.), but the most important thing was that the show was fun to watch! It was made mostly for adults, but it had more kid appeal than anything that ever followed, because it was all about action, adventure, tongue-in-cheek humor, Captain Kirk being a badass (beating up the weekly alien monster, and making love with an alien woman, the latter was the only thing Mom HATED about Star Trek!), Spock & McCoy's hilarious idiosyncrasies, etc. Everything after was made strictly for the diehard fans. This wasn't a bad thing, mind you, but it also loses what made Star Trek so successful with the mainstream crowd. It became an elite thing and stopped being fun. Let me go into it:
The series: Star Trek: The Next Generation was good for the first few seasons, as it brought back everything I loved about the series, with a dramatic twist to make it acceptable to mainstream audiences. But I stayed away from EVERYTHING starting with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which was absolutely boring. Peter and I agreed that executive producer Rick Berman killed the franchise.
The movies: Star Trek: The Motion Picture put me to sleep the first time. SPFX were good, but that was it. It tried to one-up Star Wars, to no avail. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was the best of all the films, and I agreed that this should've been where it stopped. I liked Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, even though that was where the series sort of jumped the shark, or, if you count Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (which I enjoyed, also), jumped the whale. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was kinda' there (but it proved that William Shatner can actually sing!!!), and I thought Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was the last good Trek movie. The others just didn't do it for me (except for Star Trek: First Contact). Again, Berman killed the franchise by repeating the mistakes of the post-Next Generation series. Some fans are actually glad he's out of the franchise. I know I am!
Enter Star Trek 2009.
The movie reintroduces the original Enterprise crew to a new generation, and I think this is a very, very, very healthy thing for the franchise, to make it relevant, and open for new possibilities. Instead of repeating past mistakes, or the current mistakes of the fading Star Wars franchise, the Trek franchise took a step back to consider the overall picture. The mainstream doesn't know about the crew's origins, so their backgrounds, as told in the new movie, were very faithful to the mythos. Gone is the franchise's complicated Byzantine baggage (the "canon bible"), which producer/director J.J. Abrams (Cloverfield) thankfully ejected into space, and has the audience just sit back and not think about things too much! The epic story fits together very well, the humor was wild, the SPFX are incredible, the iPod-like Enterprise and streamlined crew uniforms are great updates of the originals, and the whole cast (Chris Pine as Captain Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Mr. Spock, Karl Urban as Dr. "Bones" McCoy, Simon Pegg as Scotty, Anton Yelchin as Chekov, Zoe Saldana as Uhura, John Cho as Sulu, and Bruce Greenwood as Captain Pike) all nailed the original characters perfectly!
By the end of the film, they all had me saying, "That's my Star Trek!"
Eric Bana as the villain Nero (I like him better in this role than as the Hulk, which just didn't fit him for me), Ben Cross as Sarek (Spock's father), and Winona Ryder as Amanda Grayson (Spock's mother) all turned in great performances. And, of course, there's Leonard Nimoy as the old Spock from the future (how that comes to be, you will have to see!). Nimoy was a poignant addition in his representing the original cast, and passing the torch to a new generation. It couldn't have been more moving. (Nimoy was so moved by the performances that he struggled to hold back tears, because it was like meeting absent friends again.)
In closing, I could not recommend this film enough. This new film captured the spirit of the original that I grew up with, so I cannot wait to see what the sequel will offer! I urge everyone, Trek fans and all, to go see Star Trek in theaters now! It's creating a new generation of Trek fans, and love it or hate it, Trek fans should not be more proud of that. And as a Trek fan, I know I am very proud.
Live Long and Prosper. |
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