First-pass thoughts on the new Star Trek movie (2,500 words)

[bironic]

Saw Star Trek: All the Characters Cry Into Darkness last night with a group of local fangirls plus a bonus group ditto who'd picked the same showing. That was a nice follow-up experience to the 2009 Reboot, which I first saw in Boston with my grad school class + significant others + our program administrator. In an attempt to buoy my low

Comments

[laurashapiro]

I really appreciate your deep thinkiness here. I am now 100% certain I am not gonna pay actual money to see this movie -- and indeed, I hope to avoid it altogether. But it was really great to have you unpack it all for me like that.

[bironic]

Cool, I'm glad it was helpful, even if it means you will not be giving the movie a try just yet. Reviews have been all over the place and so often polarized that I wanted to work out in my own head some of what worked and what didn't, at first blush.

[laurashapiro]

That's exactly why I appreciate this -- you aren't going in with guns blazing, in either direction. Just working it all out. I like that kind of review. It's the most helpful.

[bironic]

Between this and the Fifty Shades review I guess I am setting a precedent here of late. :)

[daasgrrl]

I just skimmed though this for the moment - I'm going to see it again today and now that I know what to expect, will be thinking about it more rather than just sitting there with my eyes wide open *g

[bironic]

(This is supposed to be my convention icon but whatever, it is appropriate right now.)

He's not Bones.

Sigh. Yeah. And I acknowledge that I may feel that way because McCoy was my first crush and I appear to be in the minority as well for my opinion of Reboot Bones, but also what KU has been given to work with comes across like a caricature, as one of the reviewers said. *grumpy face* It caused me great pain, ha, to absorb all the new interpretations of the crew in '09. Some I think have succeeded better than others in making the roles their own while still respecting and reflecting the original.

/snob

make him noticeably 'ethnicitised' and you have the brown people are terrorists trope [...] If you just want a random white dude causing trouble and causing things to explode, it might as well be John Harrison

YES. Thank you, I was having trouble articulating that while drafting the post.

Come by to rant anytime. :)

[bironic]

p.s. Hey, you might enjoy lettered's just-posted rant-review that starts with a discussion of the KHAAAAN yell: http://lettered.dreamwidth.org/159281.html

[deelaundry]

JJ Abrams was on The Daily Show and said he didn't like Star Trek when he was growing up because it had "too much philosophy."

That crystalized for me why JJ Abrams wasn't the right person to re-boot Star Trek.

[bironic]

When he says stuff like that it makes me want to :'(. As others have said, Star Wars suits him so much more. I can't think too much on what these two Trek reboots might have been like if he'd been given Star Wars instead (rather than in addition) and someone who loved Trek but had room for invention had been at the helm in his place. And had hired a screenwriter who wasn't Damon Lindelof.

p.s. If you haven't read the above-linked Wired article:

While reblogging a GIF of the [Abrams-Stewart] exchange on Tumblr, Wheaton added, ”Sigh. The whole point of Star Trek is that it’s philosophical… Philosophy is part of Star Trek’s DNA, and if you’re given the captain’s chair, you’d better damn well respect that.”

[lettered]

YOU HAVEN'T EARNED IT, ABRAMS.

I feel like he never earns anything. Everything I've ever watched by him just feels like a bunch of really quite interesting stuff someone put in a blender.

Those reviews are great; thank you for linking them.

[bironic]

Sure! I spent part of the morning skimming Google and clicking on splatty reviews at Rotten Tomatoes. I just read and really enjoyed your post as well, and am about to follow the link over to liviapenn's.

[lettered]

I spent part of the morning skimming Google and clicking on splatty reviews at Rotten Tomatoes

What a good idea. I've just been moping about it for days, and partly I just feel bad that I feel this way. It's nice to hear other people say the same things, but I also don't want to harsh anyone's squee.

[bironic]

Yeah, it's tough, and people's reactions have been clustered at the... poles... of the opinion magnet... uh. They are divided, anyway, and since I fell somewhat in the middle, though closer to the *facepalm* end, reading well-thought-out reviews helped confirm some of my reactions and articulate why do I feel this way.

/probably incoherent comment - bedtime

[cold_clarity]

I really love this review!

I have mostly a fond-nostalgia-type connection to Star Trek. I watched most of NextGen as a kid with my dad (and I saw a few episodes of DS9 and Voyager because of him)--but I don't think I started watching TOS until I was in college (I saw The Voyage Home in middle school though; mostly I was amped about THE MOTHERFUCKING WHALES), and I only just started revisiting the Next Generation fairly recently. I'm mostly throwing all this background out there to say: I'm aggressively fond of the entire Star Trek universe, I love that I get to explore all the material over again now that I'm older, and I actually really do identify as a Star Trek fanespecially as it applies to TOS), or just the plain old experience of participating in the fandom that a lot of fans have

[cold_clarity]

ALL THAT SAID--I never gave much thought to the characterization/mischaracterization of the main cast. probably because I don't have a very strong idea of the ways in which the crew of the enterprise were characterized in TOS (in spite of having seen most of it, and several of the films, at this point). I really like getting your perspective on that! and, after reading through your writeup, as well as lettered's, I have to agree that it really would have made so much more sense to build up nu!crew as...new people, with different lives, different histories, and different relationships to one another than the TOS crew (as opposed to just using them to puppet out fanservice-y moments--not that I minded those moments, necessarily).

speaking of fanservice (or failed fancservice): I was really annoyed with the recycling of Khan. I just. why go to all the trouble of creating an alternate timeline if you're going to just sort-of port villains across universes. whyyyyy. I spent most of the movie being like HE'S NOT KHAN and then having a 'fuck you

[bironic]

I am also planning to see it again, and it's funny because I think we have exchanged thinking points. I tend to come up from the details first toward theme second, so I picked out all these little ways in which something worked or didn't work, including characterization, and it's only been after reading people's reactions that the themes are taking form, like what you say here:

2. made some attempt at sparking conversations about ethics. jumbled worldbuilding aside, the conversations about a culture's move towards aggressive militarization following a violent attack (and the preponderance of reactionary attitudes that would condone condemnation-without-trial) [...] the film's brief glance at the question of what constitutes an "appropriate response" to a violent and/or traumatic event (especially when the targets/victims/survivors of said event are participant in a broader hegemonic power structure). This will be really interesting to pay more attention to next time and see how coherently the movie tries to come at this question; the

[cold_clarity]

I filed it under "Kirk uncovers Starfleet conspiracy" and "evil Admiral is trying to subsume scientific exploration under military action" rather than "movie is trying to make a larger point about ethics and current politics" because the Admiral was just so over the top, and, granted, because I had a hard time parsing themes when the pace was so fast. The whole Bush-era metaphor escaped me until the giant crash at the end, but I get it in retrospect with the manhunt across borders and the "weapons of mass destruction," although muddied by the bodies in the weapons themselves, and it'll be interesting on second watch to see if it still feels as disrespectful and ham-handed as the first time, coopting this imagery of recent mass trauma without addressing the fallout (of Khan's final crash, anyway) or making a new or deep point.it's interesting--I never got the sense that it was meant to read as Kirk-versus-Starfleet (mostly because Spock spent the whole trip to Qo'noS/Kronos being all like I REALLY DON'T THINK THIS IS AN ETHICALLY