The wife and I attended a Midnight showing of the new "Star Trek" movie last night. As a lifelong Trekker, I'd been doing some serious geeking out, in these last few weeks, anticipating the rebirth of my love. But for diehard Treknerds like myself, it all comes down to this quote, from director JJ Abrams:
""I was never really a fan of 'Star Trek,' ". And that says everything. In some interviews, it is revealed that the cast and crew are seemingly somewhat contemptuous of their Trek fan base. That's not good.
In attempting to "reboot the franchise", always a dangerous and disheartening term for diehard fans of any film or television series, they, and the writers, of course, took some serious, and outrageous, liberties with the perhaps too-well-established Star Trek timeline, and indeed the history of the show itself. I could get into full geek mode here, and enumerate many of the changes they made that caused emotional dips and ripples in my nerdy equilibrium, but that would give out spoilers, and I don't want to do that. The only thing I will say is this:
Gary Mitchell is absent, and Chekov isn't. For you non-fans, Mitchell, played by Gary Lockwood (who later went on to be killed by the supercomputer HAL, in "2001: A Space Odyssey") was Kirk's best friend, established in the second pilot episode, "Where No Man Has Gone Before". Pavel Chekov, Walter Koenig, was not featured aboard the good ship Enterprise until the middle of the second season, in, I believe, "The Trouble With Tribbles". However, he was aboard sometime before "Space Seed", which allowed Ricardo Montalban's character, Khan, to recognize him in the second film, "The Wrath of Khan". At any rate, the character was nowhere near the Enterprise Navigation console this early in Kirk's career.
Now, as a movie, it is very good. It works on many levels: the casting is superb; Chris Pine makes an acceptably brash, dashing young James Tiberius Kirk. Zachary Quinto ("Heroes" evil Sylar) does an appropriately admirable job as Spock. However, for me it was Karl Urban, the guy who plays Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy, and one of the few admitted Trek geeks in the cast, who did his job the best. He was excellent. He channels DeForest Kelley to a "T"; the speech patterns, the tics and mannerisms.....very well done.
The film's acting is very good, the SFX are outstanding, the action sequences spectacular. All in all, it deserves to do well, and was a very, very good movie.....for people who aren't utterly rabid Trek fans like me. I wouldn't pay to see it again, and will have to consider whether or not to add the DVD to my collection. In many ways, this film has nothing to do with the 43-year old Star Trek Universe we know and love. I will say that they get around these...extreme...changes with a rather convoluted (aren't they all?) time travel plot mechanism that alters the timeline and the future....and subsequently the established history of the TV shows and films. I suppose that makes it acceptable. But it doesn't; not to me, and perhaps not to the other real, dedicated Trek fans like me. And we're the ones who matter here, after all.
To the producers. writers and cast: you don't screw so flagrantly with a fan base like Trek's. Now:
Having said that, it was very cool, and just plain nice, to see Leonard Nimoy don the ears, and do it one, last time.