Star Trek: The Mockable Picture

This is the text of an email I sent to an old friend of mine. In highschool we were trekkies, going so far as to send a letter to the editor extolling the virtues of the original series when a review of the first movie mocked the whole concept. Roddenberry did have some important points to make about the Vietnam war, race relations, religion, etc. And ST gave him a venue that the moron censors couldn't see past. Anyway, not a trekkie any more. Those days are long gone. But I am a science fiction and fantasy aficionado, and a lover of movies. On with my review......

So...I saw it yesterday.

Well.

Well.


My reaction to ST was not positive. It was "This is stupid."

There's just a level where you have to at least pretend to make some sense. And they lost me early on.

I did like the McCoy character. He did a great job and it was well written. Too bad he disappeared half way through the movie. I guess they couldn't figure out how to make him a counselor throughout the action.

I think they lost me with the boat throttle controls and Sulu's complete fuck-up at the helm when they first tried to "punch it" to Vulcan. At least they didn't have the engine clunk sounds they had in ST 4 TSFS. But they did have smoke in space later on. Ug.

They had the drill thing. Ug. You couldn't just create a black hole next to the planet?

They had the space jumpers who magically didn't have to deal with the atmospheric heating (which they did use later on for another type of scene).

I love time travel stories. But when they are used for convenience.....ug. Again.

I liked the Scotty character too. But why did they put him in that tube of water? What did that do? And it was a little weird that at one moment he was being punished on some remote outpost, and then suddenly he's in charge of engineering......I guess, like the chief med officer, the chief engineer got killed? Nobody else on board?

The whole Uhura-Spock thing didn't bother me. It was just pointless. I don't think it revealed anything about his character that the destruction of his planet/death of his mother couldn't have. If you're going to have this, then let's see some skin (guess I'll have to wait for the DVD version).

Let's see....oh yeah, all of Vulcan takes few moments to be sucked into the black hole. But the evil ship takes, oh, 5 minutes. And keeps fighting. I know. Drama. Well, they'd lost me completely by that point. I was checking my watch out of boredom. That's right. Boredom.


So, it wasn't that they violated any ST thing that I cared about. Well, other than Roddenberry was trying to do something serious-ish. It was that the story was silly. Actually, no, the story was no more silly than things that have come before. The story was contrived. Not natural. Not a story. It was a setup. I want more out of a movie. In the end, I equate that effort to a Saturday morning super-hero cartoon. Or Spock's Brain. Or the Undiscovered Country. I'll even put the original movie up against it. And as for science fiction....it wasn't even fantasy. It was ... I don't know what it was....just making money I guess. Congratulations to them: they are rich and I'm not.....shows you what I know.

But then, I'm an old fart-trekkie who went in with low expectations. But it's a damn good thing I didn't go in with high expectations.....I would have wanted my money back.

So there. ;-)

Whatever. There's lots of really good SF out there. I'll go watch that. But I had to see this movie, given all the hype and my trekkie past. I won't be seeing the next one.....you know, the remake of Spock's Brain.