[Other]: Star Trek (2009), reviewed by Dal Thrax (5/4)

[RPGnet Reviews]

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14286.phtml

Stephen Delear's Summary:

A rocking good movie with logic hole large enough to drive a starship through.

Go to the full review for more information.

[falstaffe]

The new Trek is a fun film, and does preserve and re-package the mythology in a new and interesting way, featuring a WONDERFUL cast.

However, it did bother me that they were catering so much to the non-trek crowd by making it a frenetic, over-the-top roller-coaster ride a la Raiders of the Lost Ark. The camera doesn’t sit still for a second and the screen is always full of action, explosions, blinky lights or cheesecake (cue the green Orion chick.)

Neither do the actors stand still: the first time we meet Spock (as a child) he’s getting into a fistfight, immediately followed by Kirk trashing his stepfather’s car, driving it off the edge of a cliff!!!

Even in little details they’ve sought to amp up the action: phasers do a whirly-whizzy thing as they switch from “stun” to “kill” and they don’t shoot in long streams, they go Pew! Pew! Pew! (Like the guns in Star Wars. Speaking of which, there’s a chase-scene gag lifted directly from The Phantom Menace. Y’know, if you’re making that movie look leisurely, you might be over-doing the action.) This movie has serious attention-deficit disorder issues.

I’d always thought of Trek as “drama” with dashes of action, comedy and adventure thrown in. I’d rag on the score (forgettable) or the set design (weirdly uneven—the bridge looks like the Apple Store while Engineering looks like a sewage-treatment facility), but they’re minor nitpicks. Is the new Star Trek enjoyable? Yes. Am I eagerly waiting to see where they go with it? Yes. Just be ready for the roller-coaster ride. (Oh, and don’t expect to see Nimoy until late in the game.)

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Originally Posted by RPGnet Reviews

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14286.phtml

Stephen Delear's Summary:

A rocking good movie with logic hole large enough to drive a starship through.

Young officers on the bridge is the big stumbling block that threatens to collapse the new film series?

Franchises have survived far worse. Heck, the entire kit and kaboodle is based around a show starring a commanding officer who should have been court martialled after pretty much every episode.

[Calculon]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the film without layering on some of the more thundering spoilers.

My concern is more where the series can go from here: particularly, will they be able to begin exploring Big Ideas the way the series used to, while still maintaining the exciting pace of this movie?

Cut down the scenes of Kirk running from place to place - or if you keep them, help to establish the geography of the ships/planets/installations - and add in some "thinking scenes" - much of Star Trek had to do with the crew voicing the various sides of the debate in question. "Are we right to build technology that can create or destroy a planet? Do the ghosts of the past deserve a place in the new world, setting aside our differences?"

Still - hell of a spaceship movie, and I generally had a lot of fun without feeling *too* offended, intellectually.

[arete66]

Before you, too, engage in the geek beatdown of the new Trek film, check yourself:

http://www.theonion.com/content/vide...star_trek_film

Love it,
Tom

[GarrettPLC]

Young officers taking command during the conflict is actually not that hard to swallow in the Starfleet of this new Trek universe; remember, even though they're newbies, all the other people on the ship aren't officers at all. They're enlisted crewmen, which means that any cadet out of the academy holds rank over them.

Now, of course they wouldn't normally KEEP that command after the battle is over, but Kirk gets promoted to Captain by Stupid Bravery Alone (and, presumably, Admiral Pike's backing). Which is entirely within the bounds of the original series and movies, where Kirk gets promoted to Admiral, 'demoted' back to Captain, promoted, demoted, killed, resurrected, and commended by Starfleet command so often that this new movie seems more realistic by comparison :-)

I'm not saying the logic can't be criticized, but I wouldn't call it a gaping plot hole.

Blessed be,
~Nathan

[falstaffe]

I always read Kirk, Spock, Scotty and Bones as being senior to the rest of the bridge crew (in age and rank), but the movie crew was *determined* to shoehorn them all together.

It's been suggested elsewhere that when Spock was being de-briefed by Starfleet, he revealled the importance of Kirk captaining the Enterprise to the safety and security of the Federation. A plausible fix, and would have taken five minutes of screen time. But, I think that's this movie. They did "the cool thing" not the plausible thing (Scotty transporting into the plumbing, bridge crew running all over the place, gattling phasers, monsters eating monsters chasing Kirk, on and on...)

[Tori Bergquist]

I had no problems with the idea of a young senior crew.....this is, after all, the "peackeeping humanitarian fleet" that Pike describes. I get the impression this incarnation of Starfleet is a lot less military than prior renditions...kind of an official Peace Corp. in space....but with guns and ships?

The plot holes I had issues with involved the liberal abuse of basic physics, although in some cases one could postulate a reasonable explanation, although invoking some treknobabble Okudaisms might be required. For example:

NOTICE: SPOILERS BELOW

1. What the hell is Red Matter? Is this related to trilithium???

2. Exactly which sun went nova, and how did it threaten Romulus in a manner which was faster than light? Subspace warp speed supernova? Gah!

3. Nero and his buddies decide it is more fun to sit around for 25 years waiting for Old Spock to show up than taking initiative and wiping out a virginal Federation? Or did it take them 25 years to repair their ship after Kirk Sr. punched a hole in it?

4. Spock Sr. is marooned on Hoth...er, an Ice World. Which is close enough to Vulcan that Vulcan can be seen to implode....is this some hitherto unmentioned moon, or what? Gah!

5. Okay, given that transporters are Trek supertech, its hard to argue any physics on this. But the movie's use of transporters to hit a target moving faster-than-light a a distance that has to be several light years away with near amazing precision has alarming consequences for the possible abuse of such technology. It is entirely unclear to me why A: anyone even needs starships when transporters can cross light years instantly, B: they don't simply engage in interplanetary warfare by transport-warping in antimatter bombs from several light years away, and C: it's all completely doable with existing technology....you just need the formula.

Now, aside from those issues I had, this movie ROCKED! And I can hardly wait for sequels, let alone to see more. It was Star Trek at its finest, harkening back to the very oldest days of the space opera genre, beyond Roddenberry and right on back to the awesomeness of E.E. Smith's Lensmen. Fantastic movie.....just keep in mind that the Trek universe is filled with rubber science (and plot loops galore) and all is well.

[Tori Bergquist]

Thought I'd offer my own answers to the above questions:

Problem: what the heck is Red Matter?
1. Red matter is a plot device. But it's some sort of unstable super matter, related to another popular imaginary substance in Star Trek (protomatter). Problem Solved!

Problem: How exactly did a nova affect Romulus so quickly no escape was possible?
2. The sun went nova because of a trilithium detonation, maybe, caused by terrorists or romulan civil war or WHO KNOWS WHAT. Whatever did it obviously caused some sort of warp acceleration to the expanding nova, and thus the reason it all happened fast enough that the romulans had no time to evacuate their planet. The backstory doesn't tell us, but it also leaves lots of room open to imagine just what started events that led to the termination of all existing Trek canon in one fell swoop. The important thing was that it happened, and the reboot is a success. Whew!

Problem: why did Nero sit on his ass for 25 years?
3. Nero is a douche bag and has a serious obsessive-compulsive disorder, which prevented him from taking any real action until Old Spock arrived on the scene. Yeah, he could have caused incalculable amounts of damage to the Federation early on, long before Spock showed up, but that would just be a normal bastard, when he wanted to be an extraordinarily mean bastard instead. Unfortunately, he failed miserably at avoiding all the classic evil villain mistakes 101 class.

Problem: Where is Hoth relative to Vulcan?
4. It's a sister planet in the same system as Vulcan that Spock (and Kirk) is marooned on. He can see the implosion from where he is because of a really, really, really eccentric orbit.....OR he can see because the gravitational drag of the new black hole nearby dragged Hoth in closer. Or...he didn't REALLY see it, as such, but it looked like that in the thoughts he was hastily conveying to Kirk in the mind-meld. It was really just a metaphor, and we did not get to see the telescope that Nero also left with him....

Problem: Super Transporters are universe/storyline wrecking tech
5. Scotty and Old Spock both realized how devastating the Super Transporter effect would be to civilization throughout the galaxy and buried the formula. Scotty is such an amazing genius in his time, that no one else discovers this use of the technology, hopefully.

[GarrettPLC]

SPOILER ALERT

Actually, I have to admit, I LOVE the 'red matter' thing. It completely, unashamedly is nothing but a plot device, with no attempt to explain it.

However, in answer to the question about Nero: Apparently, in the 'extended cut' version of the movie, Nero et al spent those 25 years trapped in a Klingon prison, and their breaking out is what caused the distress call that Uhura intercepted.