Star Trek--what was I saying about "origin" movies?

Formulaic. It's what you've got to work with, after all, when you are working with well-known characters, right?

Because everyone knows how things are supposed to go.

One of the difficult things with working with something that already had a strong fan base has to be a desire to, well, not piss off the fan base. With a movie like Watchmen, that was done by being very faithful to the original material. But with something like Star Trek, a lot of possibilities present themselves--after all, there's more to work with. The original series. The movies. It's been a cartoon. There have been spin-off shows. Culturally, even people who aren't Star Trek fans "know" Star Trek. So I think the choice to do a "Star Trek" reboot by taking the origin story through an alternate universe is, oddly, the best way to have done it. It lets us see the characters we're already familiar with, but with a new story and the possibility for more.

From a "goosing the franchise" pov--brilliant. But of course, it's useless if it isn't well-done, and Damnit! This movie is so well-done. I will forgive the silly bits. all action movies have them. I will mention them. But I'm going to start with what was done right.

Right off, visually it's great. Sometimes sf backgrounds look fake-y and too futuristic and implausible, but I like the bright, shiny, really well-lit Enterprise. I liked the space-battle parts--very hectic. Some people don't like that kind of "camera moving everywhere getting seasick now" kind of filming--it works for that kind of action, if you ask me, because it heightens the confusion. I thought the "villain" Nero's (Eric Bana--you'd hardly recognize him) ship looked a bit like a menacing flying collection of cutlery, but conceptually it leant to the sense of "alien" and "harmful" and "not at all nice". The Romulans in this movie are not the heavily shoulder-padded Beatle-hair-cut-wearing Imperialists of yore, though. They have a kind of biker/tribal thing going on, which aethetically is easier to take seriously.

Kirk's Iowa looks like Iowa, except for the kind of Colorado/Nevada-looking canyon. So help me, my brain filled in something like "Wow, did a bomb or something do that?" (This movie has a penchant for Kirk dangling off of precipices. It seems to be a metaphor, perhaps? On the cusp of becoming a Federation captain? Or to remind us of his physical bravery?) The Enterprise is modern, but looks like it is supposed to--

And so does the cast. A truly terrific job was done in the casting and the chemistry. Star Trek is is some ways, character-driven, with the interplay of Kirk's courage, Dr. McCoy's down-to-earth wisdom, Spock's logic, etc. making the crew of the Enterprise run. The actors step into these Star Fleet uniforms pretty well.

Christopher Pine's James Tiberius Kirk as a younger version of the Captain as something as a rebel without a cause whose father was killed by the Romulan bad guys the same day he was born. When Capt. Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) reminds him of his father's short, but very brave captaincy, he is motivated to join Star Fleet. He quickly befriends Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban.) Urban completely sold me on his being McCoy. He just did.

I was looking forward to seeing Zachary Quinto as Spock, um, since I heard he was cast, because he really seemed right for the part. I think he's great on Heroes, and he really doesn't disappoint in what basically is a Spock-oriented story. Spock has always been my favorite character in Trek because he is of two worlds. The movie depicts Spock's youth as having been bullied because he's half-human (even on Vulcan, the bully's worst taunt is "your momma".) He also experiences a kind of distasteful prejudice when he is accepted to a prestigious Vulcan program, "despite his disadvantage". The human mother, again. He advises them he is turning them down and going into Star Fleet, turning their insult back on them in, I think, a very Vulcan way--brilliant.

We meet young Uhura (Zoe Saldana), as a serious, bright xenolinguist who already knows what she wants to do with her life when Kirk tries to pick her up in a bar, and we meet Sulu (John Cho--no, wait, Harold? A very different kind of movie!) on the bridge as a substitute pilot. (He pilots--and has an intense sword-fight. I enjoyed seeing a pretty substantial Sulu part.) Anton Yelchin's Pavel Chekov's accent is everything it ought to be, but I think the neat thing is how the movie shows us he's really young (17!) and smart.

We don't meet Simon Pegg as Montgomery Scott until over halfway in--but he's brilliant. That seems to be why Kirk and the (okay, how's this go, regular time-line ST:TNG-era older, and played by Leonard Nimoy) "old" Spock meet him and Keenser (Deep Roy--in a suit somewhat reminiscent of a cross between an Ewok and lettuce) in a Federation outpost version of Siberia. Since his idea about teleportation is so completely brilliant and likely given that teleportation is already being used, I'm hard-pressed to see why they situated him out there without proper food as if he were a crank.

I'm not going to give anything away about the story. If it helps, some MacGuffin called red matter was developed by Spock and might've been used to try and stop a cataclysm that destroyed Romulus, but the mission failed, and made Nero, a Romulan captain of a mining vessel, into a person insistent upon revenge, even if he had to wait 25 years for the "old" Spock to show up, and kills Kirk's dad in the beginning, and then destroys "young" Spock's Vulcan right in front of him, with only time enough to try and rescue the Vulcan elders; he saves his father, but not his mother.

It's complicated. Nero apparently subscribes to the idea that revenge is a dish best eaten cold. His motivation, and that of his crew, seems limited for 25 years worth of waiting. That he happens to fling "old" Spock to the same planet that Scottie is stationed on, and that "young" Spock, in a fit of very controlled anger, jettisons Kirk to, seems a bit contrived, given the size of space. And I'm not sure about the ice planet dinosaur. It looks like a dinosaur, but the climate is just too wrong for a thing that looks like a dinosaur, you know?

Anyway, the first thing I said when the credits ran was: "Again!" I thought the movie was awfully good fun. with some really humorous minutes, and some of the really fun things an "alternate universe" version of a story allows (like Spock/Uhura relationship--that's what I'm talking about!).

I just unqualified loved it to pieces, funky story-line, formula-bits, and all. A first-rate effort by Abrams, and a clever script by Orci and Kurtzman. Worth seeing right now, actually.

Go.

Edit: I forgot to add one feminist beef--the miniskirts. In the late '60's, the miniskirt was about "liberation". Of--what? I dunno. But pants are really practical. They make sense, for example, if you have to get into a pressure suit for a space-walk. Also, they don't show your tushie. I don't care if Uhura has a crush on Spock and decides to trip him whilst he's devastated--so what? Yeah, Trek needs more better female characters. But all in all, future femme characters shouldn't have to wear miniskirts. They suck. And most women can't do them without tights--and that means "pinkbelly." It's vicious, the oppression, even in space. Miniskirts, indeed.