Early movie review: Star Trek

Since I don't have enough time before the movie to finish my gigantic Star Trek primer, I figured I should at least express my thoughts about the movie. So here are my thoughts:

I don't know.

It could suck. It could also be Star Trek's Batman Begins or Casino Royale. A good movie from an outside director has reinvigorated the franchise before, so why not again?

My fear is that the approach will be to favor action, explosions, and sex scenes over intellectual content. The Hollywood perspective on Star Trek is that it should be more like Star Wars, but as multiple bad movies have shown, without its intellectual introspection, it just doesn't work. For some reason, the mainstream of entertainment is so fucked up that intellectual content is considered a bad thing.

As for the casting, someone argued that Kirk, Spock, et al can be recast for the same reason that James Bond or Superman can be recast, but unlike those examples, Star Trek's characters were established by the actors who originally played them. James Bond is a guy in a tux and Superman is an icon, but Kirk is Shatner and Spock is Nimoy.

That said... eh. You have to be flexible. Hollywood does what it wants and you can cry and scream about it, or you can take it for what it is. For my money, Zachary Quinto was a great choice for Spock, John Cho playing Sulu is fantastic, but my favorite casting choice is Simon Pegg as Scotty. It would never have occurred to me, but I am a big fan of Pegg so I think he'll bring a lot to the role. As far as the other casting choices, I'll have to wait and see.

One thing that the producers rightly emphasized in interviews was Star Trek's uniqueness in the field of science fiction as an optimistic vision of the future. It may sound cheesy, but at a time like this, after the disaster that was the Bush administration and our current economic catastrophy, I'm really looking forward to returning to a world where things turned out okay.

I think we need to have fiction that represents the best in people, whether its the idealism of Star Trek or the altruism of superheroes. We have become so indulgent in petty our disputes; it's hard to turn on the TV without seeing someone (real or fictional) acting like a self-absorbed child. We need to start imagining people being good to each other for a change because life really does immitate art.

My favorite thing about this movie so far is that I really don't know what it is about. Despite all of the trailers I've seen, all I know is that this is the story of Kirk's first mission as captain of the Enterprise and his enemy is a Romulan. To me, this is kind of like Batman versus Ra's Al Ghul in Batman Begins. Rather than focusing on their most iconic opponent (Klingons/Joker), they are choosing a recognizable, powerful villain that has not been seen much in the past, particularly by a mainstream audience. This leaves them with the option of doing a Klingon story in the sequel without the added burden of "fixing the franchise" or establishing the characters.


Another surprising perk is the return of the original costumes. Ever since I heard about this project, I was wondering how they'd do the costumes. Never in a million years did I think they would go back to the original look, but with a few adjustments, it really works.