First-pass thoughts on the new Star Trek movie (2,500 words)
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
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I'm excited to read it!
(1) Because basically I gave Prometheus more leeway on the sloppy messaging and ridiculous pseudoscience, which I suspect is related to my level of canon devotion (infinitely lower Alien series than for Star Trek) as well as my tendency to look for something good (or bad) in a media source if popular opinion is skewed far in the other direction.
it's funny; I didn't dislike Prometheus--I actually paid to see it twice. I enjoyed the sci-fi-thriller-horror aspect of it, and I had fun cheering for the xenomorph monsters at certain points (maybe this says something about me?). I didn't really get frustrated with the film until I started discussing it with other people, and we tried to hash out the various thematic explorations that it carried out (or failed to carry out). and, interested though I am in the examination of faith, divinity, and wonder, those themes felt pretty inelegantly stitched into a franchise that already had a lot of dense material to explore vis-a-vis the nature of horror, the grotesque, gender, sexuality, rage, violence, and the phenomenology of the body.
...actually, now that I say this, I don't want to imply that investigations of faith, divinity, wonder, or awe is somehow mutually exclusive from the issues of grotesquerie and the soma (in fact, given a certain lens, they could be seen as inextricable)--but Prometheus seemed to have a hard time weaving those topics together and struck me as being more interested in the divinity/awe question, leaving the psychosexual horror stuff to just get sort of...tacked on because it's expected of the Alien franchise.
There is also a difference there in that the original canon creator made the Alien prequel, whereas for Trek there's more of a feeling of the canon being hijacked by someone who doesn't seem to love or want to stay true to its origins
this is actually a fascinating point! Ridley Scott was the director on Prometheus, but Damon Lindelof was one of the two main writers credited on the project. given that Scott never exhibited much interest in the divinity/awe/wonder stuff in the original Alien (though I can't speak for the Alien sequels, since I never saw them), I'm going to assume (and have been told by others who know his work better than I do) that Lindelof is responsible for the questions of faith and belief popping up throughout the story. Lindelof is also credited as one of the main writers for STID, and he and Abrams have a relationship going back at least as far as Lost (both of them worked as executive producers, as well as writers, for that series)...and I'm nnnnot really sure what point I'm trying to draw out here, except that maybe jarring scriptwriting is typical of Lindelof and/or Abrams?
who knows, really. either way, I'm excited for your post!
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