Film: Star Trek
Aug. 19th, 2009 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livReasons for watching it: I was never exactly a Trekkie (or a Trek fan, in modern parlance), but I did watch TOS and especially TNG fairly regularly when they were on TV. On top of that, it seems like absolutely everybody is talking about this film, so I was quite keen to see it and be able to join in the discussions.
Circumstances of watching it: Delta showed it on the flight back from New York. Since it was an overnight flight I probably should have used the time for sleeping, but hey. It seemed to sit in the absolute sweet spot for watching on a plane. It's a film I had some interest in seeing, but not one I was passionate about and would be disappointed to watch on a tiny screen with cheapo headphones and a lot of background noise and interruption. Also, exciting but not too scary, entertaining but not intellectually demanding.
Verdict: Star Trek is everything I was hoping for from this film.
Star Trek really could have been made for me. I probably wouldn't have bothered with yet another generic new addition to the franchise (indeed I haven't seen any of the recent Trek films), but a prequel (or "reboot", as I've seen it referred to by media fans) really drew my attention. It allowed a film which was faithful to the original material, but not just slavishly regurgitating more of the same. It really did work, providing just the right balance of familiarity with originality and evolution of the idea. The things I liked about it were just the things I like about the (old) TV series, and the glaring but lovable flaws in that were still present.
I found the film extremely exciting, I was more emotionally gripped by it than I have been by a film in a long time. As soon as you step back the plot doesn't make any sense, but it was easy to become immersed in it and not care. I really cared about the destructions of the planets, and the secondary character deaths were taken seriously enough that I could easily believe that the film would take the unprecedented step of killing a major character. I was able to suspend not only disbelief but the certainty that the Good Guys would win in the end; indeed, I was impressed that the eventual happy ending did not gloss over the serious costs of victory or reset things back to the happy base state.
The tone was set for me by the opening where the POV characters actually lose a battle, and badly! And I thought the characterization was really interesting, keeping the memorable elements that identify the famous characters, but expanding on that to present plausible, multi-dimensional people. Quinto's young Spock in particular was fantastic (but he can't do the Vulcan salute!) Also enjoyed the way that Sulu and Uhura were given actual bits of plot rather than being more or less stage scenery. I loved the way the special effects were updated, but not to cutting edge standards, increasing the sense that I was watching a 2009 version of Star Trek, not a demonstration of the latest flashy CGI. The time travelling stuff hung together even less well than the average TV episode plot, but that just made it even more authentic for me, and shoehorning Nimoy's Spock in there was probably worth a bit of stretched plausibility.
And I've been going back over all the intelligent analysis of the film around various blogs.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rawles' IBARW post has some really excellent thinky stuff on racism and sexism and how they interact, for example.
Circumstances of watching it: Delta showed it on the flight back from New York. Since it was an overnight flight I probably should have used the time for sleeping, but hey. It seemed to sit in the absolute sweet spot for watching on a plane. It's a film I had some interest in seeing, but not one I was passionate about and would be disappointed to watch on a tiny screen with cheapo headphones and a lot of background noise and interruption. Also, exciting but not too scary, entertaining but not intellectually demanding.
Verdict: Star Trek is everything I was hoping for from this film.
Star Trek really could have been made for me. I probably wouldn't have bothered with yet another generic new addition to the franchise (indeed I haven't seen any of the recent Trek films), but a prequel (or "reboot", as I've seen it referred to by media fans) really drew my attention. It allowed a film which was faithful to the original material, but not just slavishly regurgitating more of the same. It really did work, providing just the right balance of familiarity with originality and evolution of the idea. The things I liked about it were just the things I like about the (old) TV series, and the glaring but lovable flaws in that were still present.
I found the film extremely exciting, I was more emotionally gripped by it than I have been by a film in a long time. As soon as you step back the plot doesn't make any sense, but it was easy to become immersed in it and not care. I really cared about the destructions of the planets, and the secondary character deaths were taken seriously enough that I could easily believe that the film would take the unprecedented step of killing a major character. I was able to suspend not only disbelief but the certainty that the Good Guys would win in the end; indeed, I was impressed that the eventual happy ending did not gloss over the serious costs of victory or reset things back to the happy base state.
The tone was set for me by the opening where the POV characters actually lose a battle, and badly! And I thought the characterization was really interesting, keeping the memorable elements that identify the famous characters, but expanding on that to present plausible, multi-dimensional people. Quinto's young Spock in particular was fantastic (but he can't do the Vulcan salute!) Also enjoyed the way that Sulu and Uhura were given actual bits of plot rather than being more or less stage scenery. I loved the way the special effects were updated, but not to cutting edge standards, increasing the sense that I was watching a 2009 version of Star Trek, not a demonstration of the latest flashy CGI. The time travelling stuff hung together even less well than the average TV episode plot, but that just made it even more authentic for me, and shoehorning Nimoy's Spock in there was probably worth a bit of stretched plausibility.
And I've been going back over all the intelligent analysis of the film around various blogs.
rawles' IBARW post has some really excellent thinky stuff on racism and sexism and how they interact, for example.