Review: Star Trek (2009)
May. 13th, 2009 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofelevenShort review: Yeah, it’s alright, I enjoyed it more than I expected, go see it.
Long review, many spoilers:
Alright, good things first before I get into tearing this thing apart: liked most of the actors, newSpock is great – and looks a hell of a lot like oldSpock, to the point that a friend of mine initially thought Leonard Nimoy was just newSpock in old-age makeup. I really liked the guy they got for Christopher Pike, and was rather surprised and pleased that he actually survived the movie. The Uhura/Spock relationship seemd to advance a little too quickly for my tastes, but I think it worked very well – and does (imo) have some support in OS canon. I was sceptical about some of the main cast, but once things started getting going, it all started to click, and by the end of the film, I was totally willing to buy the whole cast as the OS crew. It felt right, and I’m surprised by how well it worked together…
Except…
Well, I admit, I walked out of the cinema feeling a little sad about the whole thing. There were a bunch of reviews I saw that were really positive about how the new Trek returns to the optimistic feel of the original series. And yeah, the end of the film’s really trying to create a positive feel, that they’ve overcome these threats, but now they’ve won, everything’s back to normal, and the original crew is back in the roles they’re meant to be in and they’ll go off and explore the galaxy.
Except they lost. Nero won. Vulcan is dead, its people on the edge of extinction. The Federation fleet is in ruins. The timeline irrevocably altered. And oldSpock, the last of the real original crew, is now trapped in an alternate universe, a century out of his own time, knowing his entire species is dead because of his failure. What fun!
And I felt it cast something of a pall over the rest of the film. It’s really hard to concentrate on the fun of the Enterprise blasting baddies when they’re shutting the barn door after the horse has completed his vengeance. This isn’t optimistic, this is the OS version of “Year of Hell” – except, for the first time in Trek history, there’s no effort made to undo the timeline changes. I can’t think of any previous Trek in which the heroes are this impotent in foiling the bad guys.
And, well – that’s not necessarily a bad story, but the movie seems unwilling to devote itself either to being an optimistic space adventure or a darker story where the heroes initially suffer a massive failure. On the one hand, there’s a fair bit of attention paid to the magnitude of what’s going on – scenes with both Spocks emphasising just how overwhelmed they are by the destruction of Vulcan. On the other hand, of the human crew, Uhura seems to be the only character who’s similarly affected by the deaths of six billion. Nero destroys a half-dozen Federation ships, and they never get mentioned again; I was expecting something like the scene in “Best of Both Worlds” with the crew staring in shock at the starship remains at Wolf 359. And, like I said, the end of the movie seems to have forgotten just how badly things have gone.
Other complaints:
Visually, the film felt a little too busy. The Enterprise bridge seems like it’d give anyone working there a case of information overload within minutes, and the Romulan ship… looked like nothing I could describe. Too many spikes and pointy bits, no sense of what the thing’s actual shape was. Shame, I’ve tended to like Romulan ship designs.
Would it really have ruined the movie to have everyone as ensigns fresh out of the academy, not actual cadets? It would have been contrived anyway, but having Kirky-Boy go from stowaway cadet to commissioned captain in under a week was… beyond silly. Not to mention how the hell is Uhura picking up transmissions from Klingon space while still at the academy?
Kirky-boy strikes me as the one character I never warmed to. I get the idea; the timeline’s altered, so he’s more reckless, more of dick than ShatnerKirk. The thing is – well, Shatner’s Kirk was a little reckless, willing to bend the rules – but he was a Captain, he’d made it to the top. This Kirk hasn’t demonstrated – and never demonstrates – that he can actually work within the system before breaking it. He’s an undisciplined jerk from start to finish, and ends up in command largely though authorial fiat. It’s not even that Pike served with his father and wants to help his son – Pike’s read about Kirk’s father and seemingly based entirely on that makes him first officer in his absence!
And I can’t say I’m fond of the implication that being raised by a single parent is what makes Kirky-boy into an undisciplined arrogant dick.
Sarek and Amanda are totally wasted. Winona Ryder makes the most of her – what, three lines? Sarek… Sarek’s practically a non-entity. I realise the film’s already got a big cast, but more time devoted to the surviving Vulcans would have been nice. There’s a great passage in one of Diane Duane’s Romulan novels, where a bunch of Vulcans are rescuing their captain from a Romulan base, with Kirk watching and realising just how FUCKING TERRIFYING a bunch of angry Vulcans are. I’d imagine their reaction to the destruction of Vulcan would be on the same level as the Minbari in Babylon 5 after the death of their leader – “NO MERCY!”
McCoy seemed underused. Urban did a fantastic job – and I say that as someone who’s not much of a McCoy fan – but he gets only one short conversation with Spock, and there’s no scenes with Kirk, McCoy and Spock.
The whole sequence on Delta Vega seemed unnecessary and contrived. newSpock marooning Kirk on a barely inhabitable planet seemed unnecessarily harsh, and seemed to occur purely so Kirky-Boy and oldSpock could meet. Here’s an idea – Kirk gets captured by Nero, escapes, finds oldSpock being held prisoner there, oldSpock beams them back to the Enteprise, plot continues as normal. Feels less contrived, and removes the silliness of Vulcan’s destruction being visible from another planet.
Nero, as a villain, doesn’t get to do a great deal other than growl at people. His entire motivation and goal ends up being explained not by him, but by oldSpock. He gets a big showdown fight with Kirk – but he doesn’t actually have anything personally against Kirk. He vaguely remembers the name from history; that’s it. He’s not going to unseat Khan any time soon. What the hell was he up to for twenty years, anyway? Did it not occur to him to get in contact with contemporary Romulans?
Really trivial criticism:
I’d have liked it if oldSpock’s future ship had been designed to fit in more with the TNG aesthetic.
Alright, so Pike’s being tortured. They’ve got a creature that looks like a Ceti Eel. It behaves like a Ceti Eel. The scene seems to be set up to directly reference the scene where Khan uses Ceti Eels. Why on earth then are they called “Centauri slugs” here? It’s not like the movie was shy about referencing places and things from earlier Trek.
Oh no you don’t! You don’t bloody well blow up Romulus too! And not crappy alternate reality Romulus – regular, TNG era Romulus!
I prefer the meaningless gibberish of technobabble to the misuse of real terms. Saying something like “A subspace fracture that can only be sealed by a targeted trilithum pulse” doesn’t actually mean anything, but it’s less silly than attempting to stop a supernova by creating a black hole inside it!
Miniskirts? Come on. You’re redesigning everything else, and keeping that?
Somehow, the green Orion makeup actually looked faker here than it did in the original series. Didn’t help that the woman’s hair clashes with her skin.
And, for balance, a few trivial praises:
I had to suppress laughter at seeing Pike come out at the end of the movie… in a wheelchair. No blinking light, though.
Was oldSpock telling newScotty about advanced transporter tricks a reference to Scotty giving away the secret of transparent aluminium in Star Trek IV? Cute.
I was really pleased with how big a role Leonard Nimoy got. I was expecting a tiny cameo – but he’s got a very big role. The film’s really about Spock, much more than Kirk, and having oldSpock as a reflection of what newSpock will or might become worked very well.
The opening sequence with Kirk’s dad on the Kelvin was a really good opening – though I’m a little concerned that the Kelvin didn’t appear to have warp nacelles.
Anyway, look, I did actually enjoy the movie a lot more than I thought I would… but I felt the attempts to put a cheerful ending on a rather dark movie didn’t work as well as intended.
Long review, many spoilers:
Alright, good things first before I get into tearing this thing apart: liked most of the actors, newSpock is great – and looks a hell of a lot like oldSpock, to the point that a friend of mine initially thought Leonard Nimoy was just newSpock in old-age makeup. I really liked the guy they got for Christopher Pike, and was rather surprised and pleased that he actually survived the movie. The Uhura/Spock relationship seemd to advance a little too quickly for my tastes, but I think it worked very well – and does (imo) have some support in OS canon. I was sceptical about some of the main cast, but once things started getting going, it all started to click, and by the end of the film, I was totally willing to buy the whole cast as the OS crew. It felt right, and I’m surprised by how well it worked together…
Except…
Well, I admit, I walked out of the cinema feeling a little sad about the whole thing. There were a bunch of reviews I saw that were really positive about how the new Trek returns to the optimistic feel of the original series. And yeah, the end of the film’s really trying to create a positive feel, that they’ve overcome these threats, but now they’ve won, everything’s back to normal, and the original crew is back in the roles they’re meant to be in and they’ll go off and explore the galaxy.
Except they lost. Nero won. Vulcan is dead, its people on the edge of extinction. The Federation fleet is in ruins. The timeline irrevocably altered. And oldSpock, the last of the real original crew, is now trapped in an alternate universe, a century out of his own time, knowing his entire species is dead because of his failure. What fun!
And I felt it cast something of a pall over the rest of the film. It’s really hard to concentrate on the fun of the Enterprise blasting baddies when they’re shutting the barn door after the horse has completed his vengeance. This isn’t optimistic, this is the OS version of “Year of Hell” – except, for the first time in Trek history, there’s no effort made to undo the timeline changes. I can’t think of any previous Trek in which the heroes are this impotent in foiling the bad guys.
And, well – that’s not necessarily a bad story, but the movie seems unwilling to devote itself either to being an optimistic space adventure or a darker story where the heroes initially suffer a massive failure. On the one hand, there’s a fair bit of attention paid to the magnitude of what’s going on – scenes with both Spocks emphasising just how overwhelmed they are by the destruction of Vulcan. On the other hand, of the human crew, Uhura seems to be the only character who’s similarly affected by the deaths of six billion. Nero destroys a half-dozen Federation ships, and they never get mentioned again; I was expecting something like the scene in “Best of Both Worlds” with the crew staring in shock at the starship remains at Wolf 359. And, like I said, the end of the movie seems to have forgotten just how badly things have gone.
Other complaints:
Visually, the film felt a little too busy. The Enterprise bridge seems like it’d give anyone working there a case of information overload within minutes, and the Romulan ship… looked like nothing I could describe. Too many spikes and pointy bits, no sense of what the thing’s actual shape was. Shame, I’ve tended to like Romulan ship designs.
Would it really have ruined the movie to have everyone as ensigns fresh out of the academy, not actual cadets? It would have been contrived anyway, but having Kirky-Boy go from stowaway cadet to commissioned captain in under a week was… beyond silly. Not to mention how the hell is Uhura picking up transmissions from Klingon space while still at the academy?
Kirky-boy strikes me as the one character I never warmed to. I get the idea; the timeline’s altered, so he’s more reckless, more of dick than ShatnerKirk. The thing is – well, Shatner’s Kirk was a little reckless, willing to bend the rules – but he was a Captain, he’d made it to the top. This Kirk hasn’t demonstrated – and never demonstrates – that he can actually work within the system before breaking it. He’s an undisciplined jerk from start to finish, and ends up in command largely though authorial fiat. It’s not even that Pike served with his father and wants to help his son – Pike’s read about Kirk’s father and seemingly based entirely on that makes him first officer in his absence!
And I can’t say I’m fond of the implication that being raised by a single parent is what makes Kirky-boy into an undisciplined arrogant dick.
Sarek and Amanda are totally wasted. Winona Ryder makes the most of her – what, three lines? Sarek… Sarek’s practically a non-entity. I realise the film’s already got a big cast, but more time devoted to the surviving Vulcans would have been nice. There’s a great passage in one of Diane Duane’s Romulan novels, where a bunch of Vulcans are rescuing their captain from a Romulan base, with Kirk watching and realising just how FUCKING TERRIFYING a bunch of angry Vulcans are. I’d imagine their reaction to the destruction of Vulcan would be on the same level as the Minbari in Babylon 5 after the death of their leader – “NO MERCY!”
McCoy seemed underused. Urban did a fantastic job – and I say that as someone who’s not much of a McCoy fan – but he gets only one short conversation with Spock, and there’s no scenes with Kirk, McCoy and Spock.
The whole sequence on Delta Vega seemed unnecessary and contrived. newSpock marooning Kirk on a barely inhabitable planet seemed unnecessarily harsh, and seemed to occur purely so Kirky-Boy and oldSpock could meet. Here’s an idea – Kirk gets captured by Nero, escapes, finds oldSpock being held prisoner there, oldSpock beams them back to the Enteprise, plot continues as normal. Feels less contrived, and removes the silliness of Vulcan’s destruction being visible from another planet.
Nero, as a villain, doesn’t get to do a great deal other than growl at people. His entire motivation and goal ends up being explained not by him, but by oldSpock. He gets a big showdown fight with Kirk – but he doesn’t actually have anything personally against Kirk. He vaguely remembers the name from history; that’s it. He’s not going to unseat Khan any time soon. What the hell was he up to for twenty years, anyway? Did it not occur to him to get in contact with contemporary Romulans?
Really trivial criticism:
I’d have liked it if oldSpock’s future ship had been designed to fit in more with the TNG aesthetic.
Alright, so Pike’s being tortured. They’ve got a creature that looks like a Ceti Eel. It behaves like a Ceti Eel. The scene seems to be set up to directly reference the scene where Khan uses Ceti Eels. Why on earth then are they called “Centauri slugs” here? It’s not like the movie was shy about referencing places and things from earlier Trek.
Oh no you don’t! You don’t bloody well blow up Romulus too! And not crappy alternate reality Romulus – regular, TNG era Romulus!
I prefer the meaningless gibberish of technobabble to the misuse of real terms. Saying something like “A subspace fracture that can only be sealed by a targeted trilithum pulse” doesn’t actually mean anything, but it’s less silly than attempting to stop a supernova by creating a black hole inside it!
Miniskirts? Come on. You’re redesigning everything else, and keeping that?
Somehow, the green Orion makeup actually looked faker here than it did in the original series. Didn’t help that the woman’s hair clashes with her skin.
And, for balance, a few trivial praises:
I had to suppress laughter at seeing Pike come out at the end of the movie… in a wheelchair. No blinking light, though.
Was oldSpock telling newScotty about advanced transporter tricks a reference to Scotty giving away the secret of transparent aluminium in Star Trek IV? Cute.
I was really pleased with how big a role Leonard Nimoy got. I was expecting a tiny cameo – but he’s got a very big role. The film’s really about Spock, much more than Kirk, and having oldSpock as a reflection of what newSpock will or might become worked very well.
The opening sequence with Kirk’s dad on the Kelvin was a really good opening – though I’m a little concerned that the Kelvin didn’t appear to have warp nacelles.
Anyway, look, I did actually enjoy the movie a lot more than I thought I would… but I felt the attempts to put a cheerful ending on a rather dark movie didn’t work as well as intended.
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no subject
on 2009-05-13 12:34 pm (UTC)YES. This, exactly. It's why I don't understand the endless reviews saying how great and fun it is. The end is far too "yay Kirk's promoted we're together!" rather than looking at what actually happened.
And given what we know of original canon, how will the Federation EVER hope to survive without Vulcan?!
Re: The Ceti Eel - I thought it WAS that (and thought it was cool they were being reused)! Guess I didn't pay enough attention to the dialogue.
no subject
on 2009-05-13 12:53 pm (UTC)I want to see Romulus take in the Vulcan survivors. Vulcan was their ancestral homeworld too, after all - and I want to see the Romulans as Federation allies against the Klingons instead of the reverse.
The Ceti Eel thing I just find inexplicable - especially since "Centauri Slug" is *just* close enough that it's obvious that's what they were going for - I can only assume someone forgot what they're called and nobody corrected it in time.
no subject
on 2009-05-13 04:20 pm (UTC)Also, for some reason, spiky Romulan ship really bugs me. Klingons have spikes. Romulans have graceful, sleek, predatory ships.
no subject
on 2009-05-14 02:21 am (UTC)newKirk I did not like; it does seem like it's an intentional choice, that he's meant to come across as an arrogant snot, but I felt the film having set that up never really redeemed him. He actually ends up oddly irrelevant to the story's outcome - it's primarily a Spock story, and the newSpock is... well, very Spock. (As is Nimoy, but that goes without saying. *grin*)
I really wish they'd just given Nero a standard TNG warbird - or, if they want to go retro, a Bird of Prey like in "Balance of Terror", with the painted wings...
Mustard
on 2009-05-14 05:29 am (UTC)American Mustard – exclusively on hamburgers and hot dogs. It’s a great “junk food” mustard made for junk food.
Dijon Mustard (from Dijon) – Best on sandwiches!
English mustard – probably the best steak mustard alongside wholegrain.
Russian Mustard – exclusively for iron gut competitions etc.
Wholegrain mustard – the most versatile mustard for me! It’s best used as a base for salad dressings, but it’s great on steaks and sandwiches too!
…now I’ll never be president.
P.S. Spock was awesome.