Star Trek

2009, in theaters

You should know

Now, I'm not a huge Trekkie (Trekker?).  I've watched Star Trek off and on in its various incarnations since I was old enough to realize the guy from Reading Rainbow was also on TNG.

But Brian and I had heard really good things about the movie, so we grabbed a quick dinner and then headed to the theater.

So?

Please keep a few things in mind before we debate over whether this is "real" Star Trek.

First of all, time travel, particularly time travel with really inconsistent rules, is canon, as are parallel universes that may or may not be caused by time travel.

 Second of all, even the canon historically has very little regard for continuity.  So even the things that just seem wrong are, in fact, in keeping with those two points.

So the movie was a total reboot of the original series, spun as an alternate universe story so that nothing that has come before will be contradicted.

I didn't particularly buy that our favorite bridge crew were all in the same class at the academy, but the writers wanked things enough to at least account for the age discrepancies -- Kirk was an aimless ne'er-do-well until his mid-twenties; McCoy joined the academy as a doctor, rather than attending Starfleet Medical; Chekov was a child prodigy (which means Wesley Crusher isn't all that special after all, which is nice); and so on.

Now, there are spoilers ahead, so go ahead and skip the next bit. 





I really had a bit of a problem with the fact that the only female main character was only on the Enterprise because she was sleeping with her professor.  I mean, I guess she might not have been at that point, but when Spock made a comment to Uhura about avoiding favoritism, and she overruled him... if they weren't sleeping together by that point, they were both certianly considering it.

There's already been plenty of controversy about whether  Kirk would/should/could ever have been made captain of the Enterprise after all that, but my attitude is... he's James T. Kirk.  He can do whatever he wants and Starfleet will kiss his feet for doing it.  Even when he got court marshalled and demoted that one time, all they did was make him captain of the Enterprise again, which really was all he wanted all along.

Then there were the two Spocks.  Spock Prime (as he's credited) came accross less as "I am Spock, come back in time to save the universe," and more "I am Leonard Nimoy, and how cool is it that I get to do this one more time?!"  Meanwhile, young Spock was awesome, but there were a few fleeting moments when he stopped being Spock and started being Sylar.  And while it would have been pretty cool to see Spock telepathically open up Kirk's skull... that wasn't the movie I was there to see.