But then they started shooting stuff and I got bored. To be fair, long-time Abrams colleagues Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman have cooked up a much better script than they did for Abrams' lamentable Mission: Impossible III or Michael Bay's horrific Transformers. But the action is staged with little ingenuity, and visually, the film is garish, if in a pretty sort of way. Abrams updates the original series' shiny, basic colors for the 21st century, with a sort of whiz-bang exuberance, which means that everything is a lot brighter, flashier, and oh my God, chill out with the lens flares. Where Firefly and Battlestar Galactica used lens flares during space battles to add to the you-are-there immediacy, Abrams' approach is mere surface gloss, and is more distracting than it is stylish.
Which can also be said for much of Star Trek's unnecessarily complicated time-travel plot. I have infinite patience for the insane leaps of logic on Lost, which Abrams co-created, but there they are an integral part of the characters and their situations. Star Trek, not so much. It's one of the worst-kept secrets in Hollywood that Leonard Nimoy pops up as an older version of Spock, and though I won't ruin the specifics, what is positioned as the film's major turning point amounts to little more than a convenient way for Trekkers to fit the movie into formal continuity.
Although I may have a caveat or two about the original Trek, it still holds up, largely because Gene Roddenberry always made sure it was about something. Star Trek was always one of the most progressive shows of the 1960s, dealing with such thorny social issues as racism and religion. And while I appreciate that Abrams has brought Trek's bright, shiny mixed-race melting pot back just in time for the Obama Age, I'm not quite sure what this one is supposed to be about. There's nothing wrong with boldly going forth to sell tickets, but there's not exactly a lot of nobility to it either.
Still, this movie made my dad happy, and for that I am grateful.
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Article comments
1 - Kt D
Most critics have been quite positive about the just-released Star Trek film, but there are a few individuals who see the movie as a mere summer-blockbuster attempt or as lacking the necessary references to earlier shows.
There is an interesting video on the new Star Trek film. It summarizes the movie and reveals a few different peoples' (fans, critics, moviegoers...) opinions. Take a look.