I went and saw the new Star Trek this weekend, on IMAX no less, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you should. Man, is it good. The movie effectively deals with the messy problems of coming after an iconic series with a tidy plot, which it manages to explain in such a way that’s blatantly obvious and yet doesn’t come across smelling like an info dump.
The Infamous Kate W. had told me that there’s nothing bad or wrong about this movie, and she’s right. The writers/producers/director/what-have-you could have so easily taken the story off the deep end in so many places, and yet the managed to walk a fine balance that resulted in nothing but solid, well done entertainment. Kirk’s childhood could have been relegated to angst-ridden navel-gazing, the scene of Spock being bullied might have been relegated to the excessive if it hadn’t played a role later in the plot, and Leonard Nimoy’s cameo could have been nothing more than a wink to the hardcore Trekkie fans, except that it wasn’t. None of it. Everything and everyone played a purpose in this movie, which gave it both a sense of completion and of being just the beginning.
Admittedly, I’m much more a Next Generation girl than a fan of the original Star Trek series, so a lot of the inside jokes were lost on me. And while this movie did make me wish to go back and rent the series and the various movies, I still haven’t decided if I’m willing to sit through Shatner’s Kirk. (I just never much went for the grandiose playboy types.)
As a bonus, though, is that I finally had a prolonged look at what so many of the writers at the various workshops are talking about when they use the Star Trek characters as archetypal examples. One less thing to go flying over my head at the conference this year. Woo-hoo!
