Unifying Cultural Events: Summer Star Trek

It is exciting both to have a unifying cultural event on our hands, and to have a new STAR TREK movie!!! Double bonuses don't come any sweeter for this guy. Like Brendan, I gleefully saw the new Star Trek (no subtitle? no number? no nothing??), but unlike Brendan, I am a big fan of Star Trek and gladly whooped (and wept) at all the appropriate nostalgia-button moments. Back to being UNlike Brendan, though, I don't much care for "prequels" and/or "baby" versions of things I like. Muppet Babies may be the only exception to this rule, and the new Star Wars movies (Episodes I-III) may be the ultimate case-in-point. When I go to see a franchise movie, I go to find out What Happens Next, not How Did Past Events Bring Us To This Previously Exciting Moment? I'm sure my simple, plodding preference violates of all sorts of modernistic narrative-theories, where cool films open with their endings and then flash backward to understand how we got to that point. Meh. That's fine, I guess, but I would just as soon start at the beginning and see how we get to the end. I like Memento as much as the next guy, but as the exception, not the rule. Imagine watching Frodo hurl the ring into the fires of Mordor and then flashing backward to see him at his Hobbit party. You've got the next 11 hours to understand how he gets back to that climactic moment. No thanks!

But I digress. Star Trek was a blast. Do I wish that JJ Abrams and his crack team of action-movie writers went to work and crafted new characters that we would all come to love just as much a Kirk & Spock & McCoy? Yeah, probably. We all (and by we all, I mean me) love Kirk and Spock, but we already know them. Why do we need to reboot them and fundamentally change their story and relationship and world(s)? But since Paramount didn't call me for my input, I have to admit I'm pretty satisfied with this slick, sleek new Sar Trek. The cast was great, and if too much time was spent (singing)"getting to know you," then it just made me that much more excited for the inevitable sequel with this same cast.

And now, it's time once again for another* edition of my Quibbles and Commendations Rundown!

Quibbles:
-Kirk was a little too whiney and know-it-all-ish for me. Confidence vs dickishness is a tough line to walk. Most of the time it was fine, some of the time it got on my nerves.
-That plot was...something else. Seriously, what a totally bizarre "storyline", devoid of (wait for it, wait for it) logic. Fully half of that movie made utterly no sense whatsoever. Of course that didn't matter at all, but it surely deserves to go in a list of Quibbles.
-Tyler Perry. If Brendan thought Winona Ryder was distracting (and she sort of was), there are no words for how I felt about that guy popping up. Yeesh.
-I agree with Brendan on our villan, Eric Bana. Why hire a musclebound (wait for it, wait for it) HULK, if he's not going to have any actual fisticuff action? If you want a guy just to be an awesomely menacing bad guy, Brendan's right: get some Shakespearean-trained Brit (think Christopher Plummer) to chew the scenery with CLASS. Brendan mentioned McKellan, who would be great...or someone like Ralph Fiennes (though I know those two are both taken as franchise bad guys) or (dare I say it?) Patrick Stewart would have been awesome. Think about it, Patrick!

Commendations:
-The cast was uniformly great at paying slight homage to the previous iteration of these characters without doing impressions or feeling hemmed in.
-The special effects were great, without being at the total expense of some good old-fashioned fight scenes.
-The pace, action, and freewheeling sprit of the whole production was great. If you are going to reboot this huge, beloved franchise and have to concoct a (semi-coherent) plot that allows you to do that in a unique way, you might as well throw caution to the space wind and go full-out. This movie made no apologies for being mindless fun, and I appreciated that.
-Coolness factor: say it with me, Star Trek is cool again!! And as an actual Star Trek nerd-fan, I couldn't be happier. Live long & prosper, culturephiles!


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