- My take on the whole Uhura / Spock thing was that it was clearly
meant to be a Big Surprise Twist on Kirk's legendary womanizing.
Will New Kirk make out with New Uhura? Noes! She already has the
hots for... (drumroll) ZOMG SPACE ELF!
So, it's not merely insipid and destructive to the chain of
command, it's not even really about Spock and Uhura at all. It's
just a cheap "gotcha!" from the writers (And hell, Deep Space Nine
already did that particular joke, more than ten years ago in its
neato TOS flashback episode).
- The whole "Starfleet is really busy elsewhere / we're the only
ship in the sector" shtick (as a reason for going out alone /
undermanned / crewed by rookies / whatever) is beyond tired. It's
been used over and over again, movie after movie, TV show after TV
show. In reinventing Trek you'd think they could have attempted to
reinvigorate the bullshit excuses that drive the plot.
- Nero and his buddies hit the past, destroyed one Starfleet
vessel, and then, they uh... uh... hung around in space for 25
years? Maybe this is one of those things that was explained in the
comic, but I'm not terribly impressed by the idea of leaving gaping
plot holes in the feature film and graciously explaining them in
secondary media.
- I loved, loved, loved the cast, Karl Urban as Dr. McCoy in
particular, with Simon Pegg's Scotty as a close second. I wanted to
see more of them, and found myself getting really pissed off when
the movie kept replacing their dialogue and interaction with
whatever running / jumping / exploding action beat was playing out
at that ten-minute interval. I love action flicks, I'm all for
people running around and things exploding, but for god's sake, it
wouldn't have killed anyone to let the actors take their shiny new
characters for more of a drive. The ice monster sequence was
particularly superfluous. Fuck the stupid ice monster; let Kirk and
Spock talk, let Dr. McCoy talk, let anyone talk.
- Leonard Nimoy's elderly Spock was marvelous; I'm glad they did a
lot more with him than a quick face-check and a couple of lines.
Spock Prime seemed to be swinging heavily to his human side
(understandable, in light of events, and he admits as much on
screen). Nimoy brought real grace to the thankless task of
explaining all the backstory and stir-fried technobabble.
- On the other hand, other than one instance of identifying a
language, Uhura really didn't get to do anything. For all her talk
of outstanding ability, she never got a "hero moment." In fact,
neither did Dr. McCoy... but at least he was briefly seen and heard
taking over from the previous chief medical officer. Assuring the
audience that Uhura is special like the boys is a really cheap
substitute for actually showing it.
- Hell, women in general got totally borked out of any heavy
lifting or serious presence in the story. Even Spock's mother was
really only hanging around to become a high-tech version of the old
"Girlfriend In An Icebox" shtick, to supply rage and angst to a
male character.
- I also have to concur on the subject of extraterrestrials. It's
2009, and the makers of this film had more power to visualize
anything onscreen than any previous Trek creative team could have
ever hoped or begged for. And with that incredible power, they gave
us a Starfleet that looks an awful lot like the population of rural
Wisconsin.
- Uh, a transporter computer can track every molecule and
electrical field in a human body as they're pulled apart and
flawlessly re-assembled, but it can't auto-target an object falling
at a couple hundred miles an hour? Well, that's fucking...
stupid.
- Wow, there's a lot of wasted three-dimensional space inside the
new ships. And warp engine compartments with a "high school boiler
room" design motif? The Enterprise's, engineering spaces
looked like a 3M chemical plant. And... the... giant water tubes...
with the conspicuous spinny turbine things... jesus! Galaxy
Quest was awesome, guys, but it was a parody.
- While I'm harping on the general subject, it's really silly to
keep seeing Starfleet extras getting mulched by their own
horrendously unsafe working conditions. You can't walk more than a
few yards in a 21st century wet navy vessel without finding damage
control gear, breathing apparatus, etc. But the fictional 23rd
keeps forgetting to put seat belts, safety fuses, respiratory
protection, etc. where they would do a great deal of good.
- And Nemo's Planet-Busting Plot Device... I just don't get why
starships and their crews are the only defense the movie allows
against this thing. Given how utterly fragile it is (first disabled
with hand weapons, and later destroyed for good by the popguns on
Spock's little space buggy), you'd think hundreds of people on
Vulcan and Earth would have hopped into their shuttlecraft /
helicopters / whatever, rolled down the windows, and gone after the
Romulans with hand phasers. Or landed assault parties. In this
milieu, little vehicles that can hop around a planet or into deep
space are cheap and ubiquitous. I just can't believe that nobody on
Vulcan bothered to even investigate the Obvious Menace above their
atmosphere, when little space-cars should have been parked on the
equivalent of every street corner.
And Earth! The damn thing was drilling right next to Starfleet
Headquarters. Surely there had to be someone on campus that didn't
take the bus to work that day. And wait a minute, the bus probably
would have been a flying bus too... arrrrgh.
- Purest of purely personal preferences for me here, but the
machine-gun style of the new phasers just didn't do it for me. I
miss the portentous, elegant lethality of big honkin' beams. I
wondered, at first, if the phasers were meant to be some sort of
point defense system for knocking out incoming missiles, but, uh,
they seem to just spray them everywhere and hit whatever they
hit.
Damn, this got long. Closin' it down. Summary:
Excellent cast. Some used well, some severely underused, but every
one of them great fun to watch when given a chance to borrow the
camera from the effects team for a few minutes.
Action sequences filmed, like way too many these days, with every
manner of shaky-cam, pointless blurring, and quick-cut editing.
Drives me nuts.
Writers displayed a heroic ignorance of even the extremely generous
definitions of "physics" in previous Trek. And, like the new
Doctor Who, they took an atomic piss on basic astronomy. But
I forgive Who, so I guess I should let this one slide, too.
It's not like it was a real shock.
But... the half-seen shadowy super-skyscrapers in the far distant
background in the Iowa scenes? Oh god, those were cool. I'd love a
future that looks like that.
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