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progI saw Star Trek and enjoyed it very much. If you like cool shit, you'll probably like this movie. Lilek's thoughts on it jibe with mine, more or less.
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cortezopossum's summary of "they managed to screw up everything, and yet it worked" in mind as I watched, but I don't think any apologies for canon-drift are really necessary. The producers made room for it in-story by not only explicitly putting the movie in an alternate timeline from the old canon, but an alternate-to-an-alternate. (Pretty sure that Romulus wasn't destroyed in the TNG timeline, right?)
I was delighted to see that Old Spock was both a fairly active character, and was also allowed to live past the ending. Knowing nothing of the plot going in, I was expecting his role to be Mr. Basil Framingstory ("Ah yes, our very first mission, why it seems like only yesterday...") so this was a nice surprise.
Three scenes of Kirk clinging to a lip of a bottomless pit by his fingers was one too many. Two (little-boy Kirk being a jackass, and first-away-team Kirk putting past jackassery to better use) would have been perfect.
I also went in withsurrealestate's perception that the movie was cringingly sexist. There is sexism-by-omission, but I want to beg off that charge by the fact that, short of BSG-style gender-flips, the producers didn't have much to work with given the source material. (Now, as dougo sez, they totally could have made at least one of the crew a lady, and made it work. Aw, I am now envisioning a girlie-girl Chekov. So cute. Oh well.) I can grok the negative reading of Uhura, but it's not the one that seemed natural to me as I watched the film. So, the movie didn't really trip my personal feminist barf-o-meter, for whatever that's worth... though I wouldn't have objected to more effort.
(I preëmptively dismiss the claim that any adaptation of Trek has to be sexist in order to stay true to its roots. As commenters to Ms. Estate's post note, the 1960s TV series did a lot to test social boundaries of the day, even though much of it seems pretty backwards to us now.)
BONUS REVIEW! Terminator: Salvation trailer: Boy, when the androids come for real, robophobic shit like this is gonna be unbearably igry. Just saying.
I had
cortezopossum's summary of "they managed to screw up everything, and yet it worked" in mind as I watched, but I don't think any apologies for canon-drift are really necessary. The producers made room for it in-story by not only explicitly putting the movie in an alternate timeline from the old canon, but an alternate-to-an-alternate. (Pretty sure that Romulus wasn't destroyed in the TNG timeline, right?)I was delighted to see that Old Spock was both a fairly active character, and was also allowed to live past the ending. Knowing nothing of the plot going in, I was expecting his role to be Mr. Basil Framingstory ("Ah yes, our very first mission, why it seems like only yesterday...") so this was a nice surprise.
Three scenes of Kirk clinging to a lip of a bottomless pit by his fingers was one too many. Two (little-boy Kirk being a jackass, and first-away-team Kirk putting past jackassery to better use) would have been perfect.
I also went in with
surrealestate's perception that the movie was cringingly sexist. There is sexism-by-omission, but I want to beg off that charge by the fact that, short of BSG-style gender-flips, the producers didn't have much to work with given the source material. (Now, as dougo sez, they totally could have made at least one of the crew a lady, and made it work. Aw, I am now envisioning a girlie-girl Chekov. So cute. Oh well.) I can grok the negative reading of Uhura, but it's not the one that seemed natural to me as I watched the film. So, the movie didn't really trip my personal feminist barf-o-meter, for whatever that's worth... though I wouldn't have objected to more effort.(I preëmptively dismiss the claim that any adaptation of Trek has to be sexist in order to stay true to its roots. As commenters to Ms. Estate's post note, the 1960s TV series did a lot to test social boundaries of the day, even though much of it seems pretty backwards to us now.)
BONUS REVIEW! Terminator: Salvation trailer: Boy, when the androids come for real, robophobic shit like this is gonna be unbearably igry. Just saying.
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Date: 2009-05-15 06:12 am (UTC)People may call Uhura being a 'switchboard operator' sexist but having a woman officer on the show (eps a BLACK woman officer) was extremely progressive for the time. The show even had the first 'interracial kiss'* on a major television network which kinda made some heads a splode.
She's also 4th in command according to some sources (she took command in an animated episode when all the men were 'incapacitated').
Despite their stereotypical roles the multi-cultural crew was also a bit of a first for any kind of TV series.
People forget what an incredible 'wasteland' of WASP actors television was in its early days. Even casting the characters of the radio-play-turned-tv-show 'Amos and Andy' with actual black people was considered a 'bold step' back in the early 1950s.
* okay.. technically they didn't actually kiss -- it was kind of done with heads turned so you didn't see any lips -- the actors were in fact about a foot apart.