Now that's my kind of Vulcan mind meld. [Thanks, Great Architect!]
Reboot. And we got a good movie again. Just a mere five days after dedicating to the turd bomb that was the Wolverine movie, I took in the unheardof Thursday premiere of J.J. Abrams' Star Trek. What I thought I was going to expect was high octane action with jittery camera movement, young actors panicking, and a monster tearing up New York. (I swear, if those pretentious Cloverfield f*ckers just stood in one place, they wouldn't have had such an insurmountable body count.) And, in a way, yes, we got all of that in a special, neatly wrapped package. But Abrams' Trek, being a prequel and all to the campy "O.G."/Shatner Star Trek, was a success in telling an independent story of drama, mild comedy, and intrigue while paying tribute to the nerds/Trekkies that enjoy the series. Oh, yeah, the visual effects were cleaner than any space oddysey up to this movie. In all, it wasn't half bad.
I never claimed to be a Trekkie or a Jedi in the eternal struggle between two highly evolved but greatly contrived space adventure franchises. For goodness' sakes, these stories were MADE UP! But if you go to great lengths to create a universe in which the Hulk could play a conflicted Romulun on a revenge mission and one of the hillbilly hitmen in Smokin' Aces could turn around and, dare I say, improve the suave debonair character of Capt. James T. Kirk, then you're bound to turn in a rather decent series prequel. Did I mention Sylar from Heroes did a good job playing Spock? His Spock was the one we came to know and appreciate over the span of the original movies. He too was conflicted in his own logical order to choose humanity with emotion or rationale with reasoning. It's a performance like Zachary Quinto's that makes me wonder what I'm missing on Heroes, despite all my Chuck worshipping. The part that did it for me was when Spock and **SPOILER** Uhura kept sharing kisses, and, as a Vulcan, he could only stand there to take those kisses of consolation and relief from Zoe Saldana, who did Uhura justice after those years of the series just having her idly standby on the bridge in the old series.
Winona Ryder as Spock's human momma was a pleasant surprise. (What? No ping-pong trick?) The fact that Spock's father found loving his wife as "logical" was heartwarming. It also confirmed the fact that despite appearances and the voidness of emotion, Vulcans love to make out and make babies. This leads me to Jolene Blalock. Remember her as the Vulcan Commander T'Pol in Star Trek: Enterprise. No? Here's a refresher. Remember her now? Vulcans. Horny people, right?
The Trekkies, or at least the ones in the theatre I was watching the movie in, appreciated the throwback to the old corny phrases. If Karl Urban's "Bones"McCoy shat out the quotables he had, I swore he had diarrhea. "Dammit! I'm a doctor, not a physicist!" "Are you out of your Vulcan mind?!" Hm. These are phrases only the segmented superfan of the Trek would get a hard on and/or get wet to.
Oh, yeah, there was a hot green woman in the movie, which is an obvious throwback to Shatner's Kirk romancing verde flesh. Hot. This brings me to the next diversion in this rhetoric: watch Space Nuts. Legitimate movie? Yes, if you treat pornos like any other big screen feature, and I know you do. There's a blue naked chick getting "deep space nined" in that movie. Hot.
A.D.D. ramblings: Charlie Bartlett made a solid outing as Chekov, that poor Russian bastard. Put Simon Pegg in anything and he'll make it 50 times less crappier than it should be. Pegg's Scottie takes the cake. Leonard Nimoy's role was fitting, yet I couldn't get the thought of his Futrama cameo out of my head as he talked. My God, they fed him like a fish in that series! Green boobies. Hot. Can I admit this? I almost cried during Kirk's father's death at the beginning. Damn you, J.J. Abrams, for your dramatic pull-the-sound from perilous death approach to movie making! Apparently, Iowa has a space station in the future. WTF?
In summary, Star Trek is by far the movie of the summer. We are only a week into the whole summer movie season, right? Yeah, that's right THE MOVIE OF THE SUMMER. That's, of course, when Terminator Salvation, Up, The Hangover, Land of the The Lost, Year One, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Bruno, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Funny People, and Inglourious Basterds come out. We have a long summer.
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