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And Then They Skydove Out a Moving Spacecraft in A Totally Unironical Way
I saw the new ST reboot! I went with both roommates and one of M's girl-friends and WSFA!S. (She needs a cooler nickname for the purposes of internet chatter.) Because we were poorly organized, we got to the theater ten minutes before the movie started. We found three seats together in the front, and WSFA!S and I made about half of a row shuffle their legs so that we could sit dead center, and it was awesome, because we could giggle together like giddy fools. Roommate M. thinks Kirk (as played by Chris Pine) is totally and unironically hot, her friend says and H. said she liked Spock, and I looked at them like they were from another planet, because I have a type: smart, and self-aware, or at least funnily un-aware of how they present themselves. ST buried its self-aware in sets, costumes, and loving recreation of '60s schmaltz with '00s movie aesthetics, and didn't put any of it into the characters, except maybe for Leonard Nimoy's Spock.
It's worth noting that I think I last went to the movies sometime last summer, which should tell you how I value Hollywood movies. If it doesn't have epic huge explosions (which can be seen at matinee prices), I'm waiting for Redbox to get the DVD. But watching ST while hyped up on Raisinettes? Priceless.
Taking it from the top, until I lose my place: James T. Kirk is born. In a shuttlecraft as his Starfleet dad sacrifices himself for duty and his family.
Okay, not in order: Captain Pike was kind of awesome.
But back to Kirk. His entire childhood is an unironic rebel without a cause schtick! His mother gives birth and is offscreen for the rest of the movie! The canyon in Iowa looks like an ex-quarry, if you sort of squint, and are already distracted by the anachronistic muscle car's horrible death. I kept waiting for a director's wink or nod, but no: this is played straight as Kirk's dating life.
Meanwhile, Spock is on Vulcan, being half-everything and totally proving that you can say anything about him, but mom? Off limits. Harkening back to an era where no episode was complete without a fist-fight, Spock turns someone's face into hamburger, and Kirk has a nice snarky bar fight that ends with more human hamburger-face. Do not try to tell me Abrams or Pine intended me to read Kirk as sobered up the morning after.
Bones the paranoid and possibly not sober doctor? Awesome. Kirk and Bones as Academy BFFs? Major awesome.
Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru. I spent a lot of the movie asking what Kirk's leadership skills really were, and it came to me that perhaps it's his unkillable desire to win. This is different from an unkillable desire to do the right thing, which I think is possibly a more interesting source of conflict. Anyway.
I don't care about the Romulans, except to be distracted by their tattoos. So body mod - evil? I did find the Red Matter very '60s; by the time it showed up, I had accepted that the entire movie was about as subtle as a brick to the head, and when WSFA!S wondered what it was, I voted for "bomb" and went with it.
A break for the obligatory Modernizing Or Reinforcing Your Old School Ways moment: if you're not a white man, you're still out of luck. Amanda dies, the bastards, and Uhura is way more awesome now than she was in the '60s, but she also gets entangled in the only romance between two lead characters, and momma Kirk is absent after childbirth. Also, the days of playing accents for comedy are over. (Though Chekov was a cute little geek when he discovered his true love for transporter technology. Awwwww.) Benjamin Sisko would pwn you kids, and I'm not saying that just because I'm rewatching Deep Space Nine. (Much.) And if you can't bring yourself to put actual not-white or not-guy people on the screen as heroes, maybe have some little stepping-stones like white guys in heavy face makeup? Please? There were like no aliens on the Enterprise other than Spock! I am a child of the Next Gen era, so this was way distracting in the slower moments.
I think a thousand fangirls had spontaneous glee when McCoy said he liked Spock. Speaking of "awwww".
They blew up Vulcan. I spent the rest of the movie waiting for the reset, since all the pieces were there: space-and-time-warping black holes, time travel, horrible planetary and personal tragedy - did anyone notice, Nemo got what he wanted? He trashed Vulcan, like Romulus was trashed, and Spock is now suffering the way Nemo suffered. Point, set, and match, except for Earth surviving.
The action set pieces weren't my thing, but they never are. I think the saber fight was hysterical and awesome for all the wrong reasons (Sulu saves Kirk! Yay!). The face-punching quotient is filled even by original series "it's not an episode until Kirk gets in a fistfight" standards.
All of Spock's meditations on destiny can be taken either philosophically, which makes them look kind of silly and shallow, or as sly commentary on the reboot, which is much smarter. So I'm going with reboot commentary - our destinies have changed, and this franchise is being run by a new generation - because I prefer smart.
I am completely distracted by the Golden Gate Bridge's survival into the 24th (or whatever) century. I don't care how far off the mainline / old timeline the movie is, Earth isn't going to be destroyed.
The other thing that's either trainwreck or awesome is the reboot: James Kirk knows that in old!Spock's timeline, he was a hero and his dad lived and all this other stuff happened, which didn't happen and won't happen in this timeline. Alternate reality, or crazier: unrealized cracked-mirror realities. A lot of the characters are kind of screwups in this timeline: exiled to ice-planets, divorced and lost the planet in the settlement, rebel without a cause skirting expulsion, torn between mom's emotions and dad's logic. As much as I was waiting for someone to punch a reset button (older and wiser for living a double life, or something like that), it's almost more fun to bounce Rodenberry's old vision off the new kids' ideas. Which says that J. J. Abrams et al were clever and awesome, yay.
On a very petty note, it made movie only sense that all these pretty 20somethings get to be senior bridge crew. I was not impressed by Kirk's rise from shady cadet to Enterprise captain.
I could get irritated by the minority under-representation or the bad science, but what's the point? Franchise SF is not the place to go for groundbreaking, pathfinding movies.
WSFA!S and I stayed to watch the credits, lost our other three, and eventually summoned them back through the powers of the cell phone. We eventually lost S to the hour, got dessert and sat around for another hour, and I got home after midnight, hyped on sugar, and wrote two-thirds of this until two in the morning.
Oh - trailers! Sometimes the best part of the moviegoing experience. I leaned over to S and we giggled our way through Transformers 2, G. I. Joe, and 9 spots. (I could not figure out what franchise the G. I. Joe movie was from until the reveal rolled.) These are mostly not movies I will be rushing to see. But the new ST movie totally gets my vote for Popcorn Summer Flick 2009.
It's worth noting that I think I last went to the movies sometime last summer, which should tell you how I value Hollywood movies. If it doesn't have epic huge explosions (which can be seen at matinee prices), I'm waiting for Redbox to get the DVD. But watching ST while hyped up on Raisinettes? Priceless.
Taking it from the top, until I lose my place: James T. Kirk is born. In a shuttlecraft as his Starfleet dad sacrifices himself for duty and his family.
Okay, not in order: Captain Pike was kind of awesome.
But back to Kirk. His entire childhood is an unironic rebel without a cause schtick! His mother gives birth and is offscreen for the rest of the movie! The canyon in Iowa looks like an ex-quarry, if you sort of squint, and are already distracted by the anachronistic muscle car's horrible death. I kept waiting for a director's wink or nod, but no: this is played straight as Kirk's dating life.
Meanwhile, Spock is on Vulcan, being half-everything and totally proving that you can say anything about him, but mom? Off limits. Harkening back to an era where no episode was complete without a fist-fight, Spock turns someone's face into hamburger, and Kirk has a nice snarky bar fight that ends with more human hamburger-face. Do not try to tell me Abrams or Pine intended me to read Kirk as sobered up the morning after.
Bones the paranoid and possibly not sober doctor? Awesome. Kirk and Bones as Academy BFFs? Major awesome.
Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru. I spent a lot of the movie asking what Kirk's leadership skills really were, and it came to me that perhaps it's his unkillable desire to win. This is different from an unkillable desire to do the right thing, which I think is possibly a more interesting source of conflict. Anyway.
I don't care about the Romulans, except to be distracted by their tattoos. So body mod - evil? I did find the Red Matter very '60s; by the time it showed up, I had accepted that the entire movie was about as subtle as a brick to the head, and when WSFA!S wondered what it was, I voted for "bomb" and went with it.
A break for the obligatory Modernizing Or Reinforcing Your Old School Ways moment: if you're not a white man, you're still out of luck. Amanda dies, the bastards, and Uhura is way more awesome now than she was in the '60s, but she also gets entangled in the only romance between two lead characters, and momma Kirk is absent after childbirth. Also, the days of playing accents for comedy are over. (Though Chekov was a cute little geek when he discovered his true love for transporter technology. Awwwww.) Benjamin Sisko would pwn you kids, and I'm not saying that just because I'm rewatching Deep Space Nine. (Much.) And if you can't bring yourself to put actual not-white or not-guy people on the screen as heroes, maybe have some little stepping-stones like white guys in heavy face makeup? Please? There were like no aliens on the Enterprise other than Spock! I am a child of the Next Gen era, so this was way distracting in the slower moments.
I think a thousand fangirls had spontaneous glee when McCoy said he liked Spock. Speaking of "awwww".
They blew up Vulcan. I spent the rest of the movie waiting for the reset, since all the pieces were there: space-and-time-warping black holes, time travel, horrible planetary and personal tragedy - did anyone notice, Nemo got what he wanted? He trashed Vulcan, like Romulus was trashed, and Spock is now suffering the way Nemo suffered. Point, set, and match, except for Earth surviving.
The action set pieces weren't my thing, but they never are. I think the saber fight was hysterical and awesome for all the wrong reasons (Sulu saves Kirk! Yay!). The face-punching quotient is filled even by original series "it's not an episode until Kirk gets in a fistfight" standards.
All of Spock's meditations on destiny can be taken either philosophically, which makes them look kind of silly and shallow, or as sly commentary on the reboot, which is much smarter. So I'm going with reboot commentary - our destinies have changed, and this franchise is being run by a new generation - because I prefer smart.
I am completely distracted by the Golden Gate Bridge's survival into the 24th (or whatever) century. I don't care how far off the mainline / old timeline the movie is, Earth isn't going to be destroyed.
The other thing that's either trainwreck or awesome is the reboot: James Kirk knows that in old!Spock's timeline, he was a hero and his dad lived and all this other stuff happened, which didn't happen and won't happen in this timeline. Alternate reality, or crazier: unrealized cracked-mirror realities. A lot of the characters are kind of screwups in this timeline: exiled to ice-planets, divorced and lost the planet in the settlement, rebel without a cause skirting expulsion, torn between mom's emotions and dad's logic. As much as I was waiting for someone to punch a reset button (older and wiser for living a double life, or something like that), it's almost more fun to bounce Rodenberry's old vision off the new kids' ideas. Which says that J. J. Abrams et al were clever and awesome, yay.
On a very petty note, it made movie only sense that all these pretty 20somethings get to be senior bridge crew. I was not impressed by Kirk's rise from shady cadet to Enterprise captain.
I could get irritated by the minority under-representation or the bad science, but what's the point? Franchise SF is not the place to go for groundbreaking, pathfinding movies.
WSFA!S and I stayed to watch the credits, lost our other three, and eventually summoned them back through the powers of the cell phone. We eventually lost S to the hour, got dessert and sat around for another hour, and I got home after midnight, hyped on sugar, and wrote two-thirds of this until two in the morning.
Oh - trailers! Sometimes the best part of the moviegoing experience. I leaned over to S and we giggled our way through Transformers 2, G. I. Joe, and 9 spots. (I could not figure out what franchise the G. I. Joe movie was from until the reveal rolled.) These are mostly not movies I will be rushing to see. But the new ST movie totally gets my vote for Popcorn Summer Flick 2009.