J and I finally saw the Star Trek movie today. I wasn't sure if we'd make it. Our budget being what it is works against extravagances like movie tickets and the obligatory popcorn. Also, we just don't go to movies much anyway. It takes a lot to get one of us--say nothing of both of us at the same time--ready to slog out to the megaplex and risk placing ourselves in the midst of an annoying throng of humans. But we went to a noon show today, a couple weeks after the movie's premiere, and it worked well: cheaper daytime tickets, not much crowd.
We both liked the movie quite well. It didn't change my whole life in the way I hear it did for some people, but it was quite entertaining and sufficiently "trekkie" to make me accept it as a legit depiction of that universe. It is a total reboot, however. After what happened in this film, the universe of all previous Treks has little connection to it. This is, of course, handled in traditional Star Trek fashion in a scene in which Spock explains how the villain's time-traveling machinations have changed the course of their timeline, creating an (you guessed it before you ever saw it) alternate universe.
I don't know if time's up yet on holding back on "spoilers," but...Spock and Uhura? WTF! We liked the portrayals of all of the characters and thought the movie was a really lovely thing to look at. Of course it's a big summer action blockbuster type film, like I guess it would need to be to have any hope of success. I do think, however, that Trek as a concept was always better suited to TV than feature films. I'm into the "explore strange new worlds" stories that were the mainstay of the original TV series and also TNG to a large extent and don't really need my Trek to be about epic battles with evil Romulans. But I get it that a big movie like this needs something like that, and this one delivered it well.
After we got home, we watched on DVD Danny Boyle's Sunshine, which is about a team traveling to the dying sun with a plan to re-ignite it. I'd heard good things about it, borrowed the disc from Pat and Heather months and months ago, but somehow never got around to it. I thought it was a nice little treat, a little bit of serious sf dessert, a wine and cheese course after the lush banquet of Trek. It is an exceedingly infrequent occurrence to find a thoughtful, serious-minded, rigorously told science fiction story on film in the post-Star Wars era (not that I don't like Star Wars, too; but after that, you can count on too few hands the number of really good sf films). It's not grand, it's not epic, it's not bombastic...and that's something to like about a movie nowadays.
[Images are, of course, of the lovely leads of Star Trek (Chris Pine as Kirk) and Sunshine (Cillian Murphy as Capa)]
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2 comments:
Love Sunshine. The soundtrack is awesome and I can't find it anywhere. Now... Darjeeling Unlimited? I heart Huckabees? Eternal Sundshine? The Fountain? These are a few of my favorite things... :)
I kind of liked the 'hot Urhura'... and I want to BE Capa! Such a cool character and a great actor behind him.
:)
Yeah, Kene, do doubt! I was wanting that chill-thrill of seeing the Enterprise for the "first" time but it never quite happened because the ship looked some kind of awkward merger of the TV and movie versions. They should have just had the thing look exactly like the old TV series one, or maybe the way it does in that recent CGI-enhanced version of the TV show. But...yeah, DAMN Kirk was way HAWT, I wanted more of that shot of him in his underwear.
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