....with my sweet wife at her request and we each each thought it was entertaining and pretty good overall.
The Link
Spoilers ahead!!!!!
This movie succeeds with good casting, an adequate if shopworn storyline, sheer exuberance, a forgettable for me musical soundtrack and decent special effects, but most chiefly it succeeds by boldly going exactly where no Star Trek episode or movie has gone before.
Specifically, it shows all the iconic characters being born, the actual birth in one case, and then having thern rise to meet the early formative challenges of their Star Fleet careers, in every case.
It just jumps right in and does this from the start, without warning, apology or any self-consciousness.
And that was a good way to renew a moldy, overly familiar franchise that had already gone everywhere else.
This is a straight action movie, efficiently conceived and wisely made without troubles with Tribbles or extinct whales, sans searching for Spock, and with no undiscovered country or voyage home.
It features beginnings instead of final frontiers and I thought it was better at the prequel/sequel/what the h*ll? cinema game than some other made out of sequence flicks in a series such as, say, Star Wars.
So far, anyway.
To me this screenplay had more of the steadiness and logic of Spock, who starts out as the senior ranking officer, rather than the emotion and brashness of Kirk.
We'll see how the next ones go, because Kirk ends up in command and is the hero who saves the day with his initiative.
In fact, I liked the first half of the movie better, before Kirk started doing his thing full time.
Just my preference and opinion.
Maybe I'm part Vulcan.
Many good things:
It, IMHO, has the best Star Trek villain since Ricardo Montalban as Khan put that nasty bug in Chekov's ear.
I thought only the chillingly focused Borg, as a single minded collective, made a better bad guy, but that was in the next generation not this one.
There's a green-skinned alien girl at the Star Fleet Academy that Kirk makes out with.
As far as i know, Wesley Crusher never went green, like where James Tiberius Kirk so boldly goes in his personal explorations, sexually skirting around that pesky Prime Directive
There's aging Leonard Nimoy coming back from the future, here with better looking pointed ears and either dentures or veneers on his teeth.
It has some familiar actors, like Winona Ryder as Spock's human mother and "Shaun of the Dead" star Simon Pegg as the often flustered but always effective Scotty and, I found, they and the newer, younger faces playing the Enterprise's crew were all used to good effect.
Mannerisms, language, idiosyncrasies, character strengths and weaknesses that William Shatner, Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig created for Kirk, Spock, Bones, Sulu, Uhura and Chekov were "introduced" and portrayed.
It re-energizes this previously faltering movie series and beams it up to a special place in space where it can live well and prosper without ever resorting to characters like Jar Jar Binks or Kirstie Alley and some other really bad acting.
Some WTF moments:
The Enterprise drops out of warp speed into orbit around Vulcan, right in the middle of a Star Fleet massacre with starship wreckage all around and in the way and their enemies are just as surprised at their sudden appearance as they are.
Actually, I bet this is how it's supposed to be because sensors and scanners probably don't work during warp speed, coming or going.
Like built in cloaking.
So, I'll give these movie makers that one, since even transporter science isn't as predictable as you'd like when your body's atoms are floating around dematerialized
That orbital congestion around Spock's home planet wasn't as silly looking as the dense, crossing, multi-leveled, personal vehicle traffic jams that George Lucas showed us in the skies over whatever planet the Federation was meeting on.
I guess traffic, even in the vastness of space, is forever possible, ultimately unsolvable and no real surprise.
However, when this Spock and this Uhura revealed their hidden hots for one another in a turbolift, it came as a genuine shock to us, given his Vulcan panache and problematic penchant for unemotional involvement and her devout devotion to dutiful duty and (how shall I put it?) what I always saw as Nichelle Nichols' complete lack of babe-aliciousness as she appeared later in life to my white bread self.
But, what the heck, Spock was younger here and still learning to control his dual makeup.
And I guess Miss Nichols always had some potential, but here the new actress just looked so much better.
I distinctly remember one TV episode where Captain Kirk kissed Uhura himself, although he was brainwashed to do so by an mischevious and playful, though ultimately evil, alien entity.
Future movies with this younger cast may liken Spock and Uhura to The Next Generation's William Riker and Deanna Troi as kindred spirits and/or lovers, until something (?) happens.
All in all, we found this movie satisfying, mostly hitting the right notes for us as merely casual, although long term, Star Trekkies.
The Link
Spoilers ahead!!!!!
This movie succeeds with good casting, an adequate if shopworn storyline, sheer exuberance, a forgettable for me musical soundtrack and decent special effects, but most chiefly it succeeds by boldly going exactly where no Star Trek episode or movie has gone before.
Specifically, it shows all the iconic characters being born, the actual birth in one case, and then having thern rise to meet the early formative challenges of their Star Fleet careers, in every case.
It just jumps right in and does this from the start, without warning, apology or any self-consciousness.
And that was a good way to renew a moldy, overly familiar franchise that had already gone everywhere else.
This is a straight action movie, efficiently conceived and wisely made without troubles with Tribbles or extinct whales, sans searching for Spock, and with no undiscovered country or voyage home.
It features beginnings instead of final frontiers and I thought it was better at the prequel/sequel/what the h*ll? cinema game than some other made out of sequence flicks in a series such as, say, Star Wars.
So far, anyway.
To me this screenplay had more of the steadiness and logic of Spock, who starts out as the senior ranking officer, rather than the emotion and brashness of Kirk.
We'll see how the next ones go, because Kirk ends up in command and is the hero who saves the day with his initiative.
In fact, I liked the first half of the movie better, before Kirk started doing his thing full time.
Just my preference and opinion.
Maybe I'm part Vulcan.
Many good things:
It, IMHO, has the best Star Trek villain since Ricardo Montalban as Khan put that nasty bug in Chekov's ear.
I thought only the chillingly focused Borg, as a single minded collective, made a better bad guy, but that was in the next generation not this one.
There's a green-skinned alien girl at the Star Fleet Academy that Kirk makes out with.
As far as i know, Wesley Crusher never went green, like where James Tiberius Kirk so boldly goes in his personal explorations, sexually skirting around that pesky Prime Directive
There's aging Leonard Nimoy coming back from the future, here with better looking pointed ears and either dentures or veneers on his teeth.
It has some familiar actors, like Winona Ryder as Spock's human mother and "Shaun of the Dead" star Simon Pegg as the often flustered but always effective Scotty and, I found, they and the newer, younger faces playing the Enterprise's crew were all used to good effect.
Mannerisms, language, idiosyncrasies, character strengths and weaknesses that William Shatner, Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig created for Kirk, Spock, Bones, Sulu, Uhura and Chekov were "introduced" and portrayed.
It re-energizes this previously faltering movie series and beams it up to a special place in space where it can live well and prosper without ever resorting to characters like Jar Jar Binks or Kirstie Alley and some other really bad acting.
Some WTF moments:
The Enterprise drops out of warp speed into orbit around Vulcan, right in the middle of a Star Fleet massacre with starship wreckage all around and in the way and their enemies are just as surprised at their sudden appearance as they are.
Actually, I bet this is how it's supposed to be because sensors and scanners probably don't work during warp speed, coming or going.
Like built in cloaking.
So, I'll give these movie makers that one, since even transporter science isn't as predictable as you'd like when your body's atoms are floating around dematerialized
That orbital congestion around Spock's home planet wasn't as silly looking as the dense, crossing, multi-leveled, personal vehicle traffic jams that George Lucas showed us in the skies over whatever planet the Federation was meeting on.
I guess traffic, even in the vastness of space, is forever possible, ultimately unsolvable and no real surprise.
However, when this Spock and this Uhura revealed their hidden hots for one another in a turbolift, it came as a genuine shock to us, given his Vulcan panache and problematic penchant for unemotional involvement and her devout devotion to dutiful duty and (how shall I put it?) what I always saw as Nichelle Nichols' complete lack of babe-aliciousness as she appeared later in life to my white bread self.
But, what the heck, Spock was younger here and still learning to control his dual makeup.
And I guess Miss Nichols always had some potential, but here the new actress just looked so much better.
I distinctly remember one TV episode where Captain Kirk kissed Uhura himself, although he was brainwashed to do so by an mischevious and playful, though ultimately evil, alien entity.
Future movies with this younger cast may liken Spock and Uhura to The Next Generation's William Riker and Deanna Troi as kindred spirits and/or lovers, until something (?) happens.
All in all, we found this movie satisfying, mostly hitting the right notes for us as merely casual, although long term, Star Trekkies.
