Star Trek: XI

Captains Log. Star date: 05092005.

I started Blogging on Xanga all those years back in order to (as the subtitle says) "turn squaresville into coolsberg." Blogs seemed like the future had arrived in some weird way. Everyone on earth finally got their own Captain's log. Okay on to Trek...

Fangasm.

I try really hard to NOT get excited about films like Watchmen or Daredevil or X-Men 3 or Matrix 3 or Return of the King or Ghost Rider or The Spirit or Batman & Robin or Transformers or Spider-Man 3. It's tough. It's really tough. I love these properties a lot. And I do say properties because that's what they have become. Nothing more than revenue for major studios. And I'm cool with that. I've come to realize that they want to strip mine anything that made a penny over the past hundred years just to see if it will make them two pennies. And HUZZAH! IT HAS!

Given such a long bad track record for sequels/retcons/re-launches it's amazing audiences buy into this stuff over and over and over(granted I lovED SpMn3, XMn3 and I STILL FREAKIN' LOVE WOLVERINE! So my opinion loses weight), aaaanywho. And with this being an odd numbered Star Trek, I was set for it to bomb bigger than Search for Spock, Final Frontier or Insurrection. Before I dilute the power of this powerful review, I want to say very simply, STAR TREK RULED! I couldn't believe it. J.J. Abrams, I will gladly eat my blueprints of the NCC-1701D.

I wasn't thrilled with Cloverfield and Lost lets me down the more I watch it. So I was pretty much checked off in the "sigh, it's all for the fanboys" category. But over the past few weeks I've been realizing something more and more about myself. I was brought up a Trekkie. Every Sunday after church was spent watching ST:NG with my family and when I was older it was ST:DS9 every Friday with my friends watching back to back episodes until late in the morning (INTERGALACTIC TRUCK-STOP FTW!). It was only when I started hanging out with people that were raised Warsies (I've been friends with pretty much only Warsies since those DS9 days) that I gave up on Trek and didn't force myself to be come a Warsie, but certainly dove more headlong into it than I ever had.

But, one night a few months after I had moved here to San Francisco, I went to a friends house and his uncle was watching Wrath of Khan. Suddenly it all came flooding back to me. PHOTON TORPEDOES! VULCANS! EVIL EARWIGS! GENESIS PROJECTS! ::sigh:: I had denied it too long. When I bought my LaserDisc player the second set of discs I bought after "The Trilogy" was 4, 5 & 6 (the rest I'm waiting to appear at Amoeba although they are on Blu Ray...).

"GET TO THE POINT TOLKIEN!"

Fair enough.

I realized, I was and always have been: a Trekkie. And if J.J. Abrams brand of Fanboy zeal seemed to appeal to others of my ilk, mayhaps it would (in the end) work on me. I mean Simon Pegg? Anton Yelchin? John Cho? How the hell do you find a better set of casting than that to play the legendary Montgomery Scott, Pavel Chekov and Hikaru Sulu? I was still nervous about Quinto and Pine as Spock and Kirk, especially if they were going to be as Screamo as they appeared in the trailer, ("I WANNA BE CAPTAIN!" "NO I WANNA BE CAPTAIN!" "WAAAAAAAH!!") but J.J. Abrams pulled the wool over my eyes on this one. He showed me everything I would need to get me mad as heck in that trailer then made me love their context when I finally saw each scene unfold before my eyes. One of the best ones was that the Facebook ads kept showing the USS Kelvin (which has two vertically aligned nacelles instead of two horizontal ones) and I kept screaming, "WHAT THE HELL IS THAT! That's not the Enterprise!" And indeed, it wasn't. ;)

They change the story quite a bit. I'll leave out the spoilers ('cause that's who I am) but no one's past gets away unscathed with this ret-con. But in the end they manage to do the greatest thing 21st Century "remakes" have afforded us and that's ::gasp:: improve on WEAK ideas. Most characters of the past were created without any forethought to the journey they had ahead of them. It wasn't until Kirk's son died long after the series was over that he finally gained some motivation. I had never been fully sold on Kirk or Spock's backstory/character type but they made some changes that made me excited to see where they are taking this branch of the franchise.

I have plenty of other glowing amazement at this film, but I'll move onto the "Args!" fast before I need to go to bed.

Well, we finally get more Romulans. Without making them interesting AGAIN. I love that they're the flip side of the Vulcan coin, but no-one can do anything interesting with them. Eric Bana has some fun with it, but it still just feels like a poor man's Klingon or Vulcan. Or a dime store Borg (especially with all that green). They give 'em an awesome ship that is one of the most menacing things I've seen in a Star Trek film since V'Ger (yes, V'Ger freaks the crap out of me. I am a Trekkie, leave me be) so Kudos on that.

And the alien makeup looks ridiculous even though all the CG in the film made my jaw hit the floor. Some things never change I s'pose.

I'm gonna say one thing and then drop it 'cause it's too close to a spoiler to go any further. Wynona Rider.

Man, I can't say much more than that on the negative side. It's one awesome incredible high flying action sequence after another as the film travels at warp speed (couldn't resist) through a myriad of classic Trek references all the way to the credits. By the end they ARE the crew of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 even if they took a different route to get there.

P.S. IMAX!!

P.P.S. Thank you for breaking the Trek curse, Nemesis. We owe you big time.