Star Trek

[slgarrett]

I just got home from the new Star Trek movie. I loved it. It's a much tougher, adult Star Trek. The young Kirk in this movie makes the Kirk of the 1960s look wimpy. Death can be sudden and meaningless. It's a universe where people make tough decisions, take their licks, and everything doesn't always turn out okay. It's also a much more high energy, thrill-seeking Star Trek. It's a Star Trek where you can play rock and roll and have it not come off as crass camp. Technology is different too. It's less slick and more industrial. The engine room is huge and looks like an experiment hall in Fermilab or an assembly building at NASA with lots of pipes, tanks, cables and wires. It looks like big science, not a neat little control room. Warp drive is a messy, inexplicable contraption. Space is filled with the noisy radio chatter of thousands of voices conversing simultaneously about a every conceivable topic. Sensors ping, and things don't always work perfectly. Actually, it was the sound of the bridge that really struck me. Having been aboard a real warship, they got the noise of a warship's bridge or CIC right. It's a three dimensional Star Trek, too, where the camera is constantly in motion, and the ship's actually roll. Frankly, I thought it made all the Star Trek movies I've seen in the past look like Star Trek with training wheels.

Oh... and gogo boots and retro hairdos are back in Star Trek. Gotta LOVE it.

I haven't been this fired up about Star Trek in years.