On DLP at the Ziegfeld Theater with Lucía, Dave, and some of Dave’s friends, on 9 May 2009 at 22:15.
Star Trek is a fun, funny, action-filled romp of a re-imagining of the characters from the original Star Trek series in their youth. There’s some kind of story about a Romulan terrorist blowing up Vulcan and trying to blow up Earth, but the less you think about that story, the better. Really. Most of the characterizations are pretty flat—only Jim Kirk and Mr. Spock are really fleshed out in any sense. Mr. Spock, attempting to be a purely logical creature learns to pay more mind to his emotional side, and Kirk as a raw, emotional character learns that he needs to heed his better judgement.
For some reason Kirk looks a lot like James Dean (and in the very opening, acts a lot like him, too). Also, Captain Christopher Pike looks like a spitting image of James Mason. Not really sure what that was about.
Every so often through the film we are re-introduced to the new versions of old characters: McCoy, Uhura, Sulu, Chekhov, Scotty—each time I felt like the director was sort of winking at me.
On the one hand, this film was a celebration of the original Star Trek characters. On the other hand, this film was very little about Star Trek. It has a little of the ridiculousness of the original show, but mostly the action sequences and the settings could have been taken from anywhere (young Kirk’s earth seems a lot like Tattooine, the main fight scene on the Romulan ship (“I’ve got your gun”) seems a lot like the Death Star, and much of the space between the tendrils of the Narada seem more than a little like the ship fromIndependence Day). The plot itself is just a simple framework to hang the film on and seems more like an excuse for the film’s peculiarities than anything worth thinking about.
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