Day 143 - 5/23/09 - Movie #142
BEFORE: Yes, THAT Star Trek - the one in theaters now... We took advantage of the 3-day weekend to hit the movie theater. A holiday is a great time in NYC - everyone who can afford to leave town does, so if there's an activity you want to do, or a hot restaurant you've been dying to try, it's sometimes a perfect opportunity.
THE PLOT: A chronicle of the early days of James T. Kirk and his fellow USS Enterprise crew members.
AFTER: What a thrill-ride, from start to finish - the action lasted long after my jumbo tub of popcorn was gone. I'll try not to talk about the movie without spoiling the plot, but that might not be possible - so if you haven't seen this yet, stop reading now - I won't hold it against you.
The casting and characterizations are spot-on. In line with the original series, and in some cases, the characters have even been improved. Now even Sulu and Chekhov have important tasks beyond the usual "driving" of the ship by pushing random buttons. Kirk as a brash hothead, who is 3 steps ahead of the enemy at every point? Well, that's EXACTLY who a young Kirk should be. And Scotty is, as usual, one of the most entertaining characters.
As a fan of time-travel movies, I have to point out that this one is very different from what has gone before in the sci-fi genre. Up until now, time travelers have either been extremely careful to NOT change the past (Star Trek IV), or very cavalier because they believe that anything they do automatically becomes part of history, so screw it (Star Trek: First Contact). There's a point in this film where, if you're familiar with Trek chronology, you realize that the timeline has been dramatically altered - I knew it even before the main characters did.
So, knowing that the timeline has been altered, they proceed knowing that history is once again a blank slate, anything can happen, and nothing is for certain, so now they have to struggle once again to bring about the best future that they can. Very smart, and very shrewd. An alternate timeline now means that the "Star Trek" story can continue forward without a crowd of geeks complaining about contradictions with the storylines that have taken place before.
Fans of comic books are familiar with the "reboot" concept - every few years they'll scrap a couple decades of Batman or Superman stories and start over with "definitive" origin stories, so that new readers aren't burdened by a whole lot of continuity issues, and new writers will have free reign to take the storyline in whatever direction they want.
Strange that I'm seeing this film almost 10 years to the day after the 1st Star Wars prequel came out. "Phantom Menace" really kick-started this whole prequel trend that went through Batman, James Bond and Hannibal Lecter before hitting the Trek universe...
My only quibbles are:
1) The use of Romulans. Romulans are like the Riddler from Batman comics, in that no writer knows quite what to do with him, but after you've told a Joker story, a Catwoman story and a Penguin story, you kind of have to go back to the Riddler. Once you've made the ultimate Klingon movie and the best Borg movie, there aren't too many other places to go - but nobody really gets the Romulans, or has a good handle on what they're all about.
The villain in this movie could have come from any planet - we learned exactly nothing about Romulan culture that we didn't know before. So what was the point in making him Romulan?
2) The use of black holes as a story device. If they're so destructive, how come they also seem to allow people to travel across time and space? So they're destructive part of the time? Just because current science doesn't fully understand them, that doesn't mean that they're going to function the way that a writer needs them to.
I will say, though, that Stephen Hawking recently revised his long-standing beliefs about black holes - which on paper seem to contradict the laws of physics, since they seem to destroy matter and absorb energy. Physics has been telling us for years that energy can't be destroyed - so what happens when an object gets sucked into a black hole? Short answer - no one knows.
Hawking's longer answer now says that an object in a black hole gets destroyed - and also doesn't get destroyed at the same time. Or rather, alternate timelines are created, one in which the object gets destroyed, and one in which it doesn't. This revision to the theory sent shockwaves through the physics community, and scientists started to wonder if Hawking's finally gone off his nut.
My point is, it's very premature to use black holes as a story device when one of the smartest men on the planet, who's devoted most of his life to understanding the universe, doesn't seem to have a handle on exactly how they work. Someone could come along in a few years with a radically different definition of how the universe functions, and then your little sci-fi vision of the future is gonna seem very quaint.
RATING: 9 out of 10 transporter beams
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Kirk and Spock were hooooottttt... there was time travel? this was a Star Trek movie?
ReplyDeleteMy wife makes an excellent point. I'm 100% straight, and still I have to acknowledge the new Kirk's studliness. He's past McConnaughey-hot, and close to Calvin Klein underwear-model hot. Now finally we see why he got so much alien tail on that 5-year mission.
ReplyDeleteThis repeats a problem I had with Ebert's review. He complained that the Romulan tunneling device, which he misindentified as a space elevator, didn't appear to be suspended from a ribbon made from carbon nanotubes.
ReplyDeleteTo which I said "You're complaining that the Romulans aren't using an alien technology that's 400 years old and was merely speculative, even on 21st-century Earth?"
He also complained about the use of black holes. Well, we don't know anything about those things, either. If a sci-fi movie wants to say "Something freaky happened and it involved a black hole," I'm willing to let it go.
My general policy is that it only should be a big deal if the movie makes a big deal of it. Tarentino got away with not revealing the contents of the briefcase in Pulp Fiction because throughout the film, he made it clear that the actual contents weren't important. Same thing here.