For those of you who get this in RSS - this is full of spoilers. Turn back now!
Saw the new Star Trek movie last night, and I wanted to write about it.
Dude, that was sooo cool!
Also - letter grade bobbing between a B+ and an A-. Definitely in the 'Pay full price for it' category - as a matter of fact, pay an extra buck for the Ultrascreen.
So I absolutely loved it, even when it bothered me, and I came away feeling great! Seriously, this movie invoked such a sense for me of the positive, of the crazy utopian post-capitalist integrated society of the United Federation of Planets - it put a spring in my step! Serious.
In the intervening time since walking out - floating out awash in positive endorphins - I've had to come face to face with some stuff. Like the fact that there were really quite some starship-sized holes in the reality, which is always a problem with action-adventure genre movies. The big stupid things like basic physics being ignored, inconsistencies from one minute to the next, stuff like that. And I'll be listing them, see if I don't.
But this is mythic territory. In my grading, I had to admit that I had a full possible letter grade of 'fanboy' that I could give this movie, depending on how well they serviced my fanboy-ness. And in this case, they'd already signaled that they would be changing the reality some, so not to expect full continuity. (The geek term for this is ret-conning, or retroactively altering the continuity of the world.) So if they did well by the source material, a full letter grade boost; if they did poorly, possible minuses.
And, frankly, the original was a three season TV show, with some good writing, some so-so writing, some simple hammy acting doing some simple morality play SF stuff. They do get props for first interracial kiss, that's fine. And they had the liberal utopian stuff I refered to earlier.
The movie also suffers from the Dark Knight phenomenon, which also befell Lord of the Rings. By this I mean the good guys are less good and the bad guys are twice as bad and three times as violent. I attribute this to the long brutal years of Bush, the torture and the warlike nature. Hopefully this will be less the case in coming years, but both of these adaptations feel a need to take the good guys and 'show the bad side' and then to EXXTREME the baddies. However...
Next chapter: Characters
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