star trek: weeks behind
27 May 2013 08:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pauraqueFinally got a chance to see the new Star Trek.
The good: I'm still pretty enthusiastic about this cast. They all do a good job even when the writing is clunky, which unfortunately it was at times here. More than the last one, I feel like they carried this movie. Uhura/Spock/Kirk is my OT3, and could Scotty get any more charming without exploding or something?
The not so good: The last one I liked because it felt like a love letter to TOS and the fandom in general. A reboot is a fanwork of sorts, and there seems to be awareness of that. This time around... I dunno, it was like the elements were there, but it all rang a little false and pandering to me. Maybe because retreading the character beats of Wrath of Khan felt unearned, because Kirk and Spock haven't actually developed their relationship to that point — yet. So the writers are just leveraging our feelings about the TOS characters, instead of developing these characters.
I think they badly need an original plot for the next movie, so I really hope it won't be a retread of The Undiscovered Country as some have theorized. Let these people have some adventures that Spock Prime can't swoop in and get them out of (not that he exactly did that, but it was troublingly close). I didn't like the bad "zomg look at the stupid primitive peoplez" vibe in the first scene, but I did like the energy of the crew working together, which I felt wasn't quite matched for the rest of the movie.
I know there are also issues with the casting of Benedict Cumberbatch. To me the bottom line is I just don't think he was that good in the movie. Unlike the regular cast members, he didn't seem to get that vital spark of who his character was supposed to be. Very detached, zero charisma, nothing like TOS!Khan at all.
I was pleasantly surprised that they brought in Section 31 and all that, which is a pretty damn obscure bit of the canon, but I wish they'd done more with it. I mean, obviously Admiral Marcus didn't act alone, so who else was held responsible and what does that mean for Starfleet going forward? I know they're trying to make it more of an action movie, and that's fine, I like action, you can make a Star Trek action movie. But if you don't also talk about ethical dilemmas and xenophobia and war and peace and all that, then it's just an action movie. You need to really respect and engage with those things to make it properly Star Trek; just having Leonard Nimoy show up isn't enough. They made motions in those directions but it seemed a bit perfunctory to me.
I have some other more minor quibbles. Like, ship-to-ship combat at warp?! Not nearly enough setup to justify something that has never been depicted as remotely possible before, least of all in this early time period, so instead of being cool it just felt off. And, as with the last movie, the plot holes bug me. Why did they need Khan's blood to save Kirk when they had his 72 frozen buddies right there already whose blood presumably has the same properties? One sentence of technobabble could have closed that hole (and would have been in the proudest traditions of Star Trek plotting), but it wasn't there.
Or was it? The theater had the sound cranked up so high I was often having trouble making out the dialogue, which was frustrating, though not something that can really be blamed on JJ Abrams.
I don't know! It wasn't bad per se, but could have been a lot better. Maybe I expected more because of how damn long they took to make the thing. With that much time and money you could make a way better Star Trek movie than this.
The good: I'm still pretty enthusiastic about this cast. They all do a good job even when the writing is clunky, which unfortunately it was at times here. More than the last one, I feel like they carried this movie. Uhura/Spock/Kirk is my OT3, and could Scotty get any more charming without exploding or something?
The not so good: The last one I liked because it felt like a love letter to TOS and the fandom in general. A reboot is a fanwork of sorts, and there seems to be awareness of that. This time around... I dunno, it was like the elements were there, but it all rang a little false and pandering to me. Maybe because retreading the character beats of Wrath of Khan felt unearned, because Kirk and Spock haven't actually developed their relationship to that point — yet. So the writers are just leveraging our feelings about the TOS characters, instead of developing these characters.
I think they badly need an original plot for the next movie, so I really hope it won't be a retread of The Undiscovered Country as some have theorized. Let these people have some adventures that Spock Prime can't swoop in and get them out of (not that he exactly did that, but it was troublingly close). I didn't like the bad "zomg look at the stupid primitive peoplez" vibe in the first scene, but I did like the energy of the crew working together, which I felt wasn't quite matched for the rest of the movie.
I know there are also issues with the casting of Benedict Cumberbatch. To me the bottom line is I just don't think he was that good in the movie. Unlike the regular cast members, he didn't seem to get that vital spark of who his character was supposed to be. Very detached, zero charisma, nothing like TOS!Khan at all.
I was pleasantly surprised that they brought in Section 31 and all that, which is a pretty damn obscure bit of the canon, but I wish they'd done more with it. I mean, obviously Admiral Marcus didn't act alone, so who else was held responsible and what does that mean for Starfleet going forward? I know they're trying to make it more of an action movie, and that's fine, I like action, you can make a Star Trek action movie. But if you don't also talk about ethical dilemmas and xenophobia and war and peace and all that, then it's just an action movie. You need to really respect and engage with those things to make it properly Star Trek; just having Leonard Nimoy show up isn't enough. They made motions in those directions but it seemed a bit perfunctory to me.
I have some other more minor quibbles. Like, ship-to-ship combat at warp?! Not nearly enough setup to justify something that has never been depicted as remotely possible before, least of all in this early time period, so instead of being cool it just felt off. And, as with the last movie, the plot holes bug me. Why did they need Khan's blood to save Kirk when they had his 72 frozen buddies right there already whose blood presumably has the same properties? One sentence of technobabble could have closed that hole (and would have been in the proudest traditions of Star Trek plotting), but it wasn't there.
Or was it? The theater had the sound cranked up so high I was often having trouble making out the dialogue, which was frustrating, though not something that can really be blamed on JJ Abrams.
I don't know! It wasn't bad per se, but could have been a lot better. Maybe I expected more because of how damn long they took to make the thing. With that much time and money you could make a way better Star Trek movie than this.
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Date: 28 May 2013 03:55 am (UTC)Even in my squee post I'm pretty miffed about the ship-to-ship combat in warp. It breaks something fundamental about the canon, I think, but for the life of me I can't think of any scenes where they explain WHY it's not possible in the tv/shows. It's just always taken as a given that starship combat in Trek cannot happen in warp. I get that fandom has some legit whitewashing issues with this one, but I'm way more concerned with stuff like this, because I think it does something damaging to the franchise itself.
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Date: 29 May 2013 01:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 May 2013 10:59 pm (UTC)Breaking that rule makes me really uncomfortable because the movie didn't exactly set up new rules for how the combat in Trek is supposed to work. (Except that now we can Honor Harrrington gravity-well bomb the fuck out of major cities, I guess.)