Star Trek (2009)
Star Trek. Shatner-free since 2009.
I kind of hate this movie, but only kind of. Actually, some of it is fine, but there's aspects of it that plain piss me off, so I'm ambivalent. It's not the retconning; I'm familiar enough with the Trek universe but by no means a committed Trekker, so I wasn't concerned about 'authenticity' or the like. It was the opening credits that got me started.
No, it's not that J.J. Abrams directed. I like pretty much everything he's done, except for the hilariously godawful Cloverfield. And yes, all the action sequences are in confuse-O-vision™, but that may or may not have been his fault. It was, rather, the names Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. If you follow the links you'll see that they are responsible for scripting that cinematic Auschwitz, that mortal offense against everything decent and worth defending in the world, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. So let's just say we weren't off to a good start.
Lest there be any confusion, I'll state right up front that Star Trek is nowhere near as bad a movie as T:RotF. Damning with faint praise, maybe, but there are worthwhile aspects on hand here. Overall, the primary cast does a decent job. The young Spock (Zachary Quinto) is in particular a slightly more believable creature than Leonard Nimoy's iconic Vulcan, but this probably has more to do with the character reflecting modern sensibilities than anything else. I also like seeing Simon Pegg (as Scotty) and Karl Urban (as Bones) in movies; they're good actors and deserve the work, but they're given fuck-all to do here (for Urban, it's standing around looking pained, and Pegg is tasked with comic gurgling). Really, the only truly ridiculous character here is Anton Yelchin's Chekov; Bullwinkle cartoons had more subtle Russian accents. Chris Pine does fine as Kirk, but his character is insufferable by design. There's something of a running gag the film makes in a Freudian acknowledgement of this—young Kirk gets beaten and/or strangled by another character, on average, once every ten minutes. It happens with enough regularity to be the trigger for a drinking game.
Which leads me to the first of this film's fatal flaws. There's no chance, not even a mathematical one, of any main character dying, so there's no point in going to great lengths to show them in mortal peril, as the film's many action sequences do. Zero tension is generated thusly, because you know they will live long and prosper and all that shit. Abrams and crew try to inject the movie with the adrenaline of gee-whiz visuals and crash-bang-kapow in order to keep its heart beating, but it just doesn't work.
Because really all they have to work with are the memories of anyone who's seen any part of the Star Trek universe so far, which is statistically everyone. They can trot out a character, and no matter how clever they are with the winking and nudging, they simply have to reference that character's tropes. (Scotty's "I'm giving her all I can, cap'n!" actually sorta-kinda works, but McCoy's "Damnit, I'm a doctor not a physicist!" is 100% affectation. There was just no good place in the script for McCoy's "I'm a doctor" line, but that doesn't stop Orci and Kurtzman, our fearless duo. No, they just crammed it in there anyway.) This can make for good fun (like when Ensign Nobody picks the red jumpsuit for the aweigh team mission, you know he's gonna bite it) but it's not a way to build tension and it's not a way to generate interest in these people as human sentient beings. What you need, at the least, is a story worth telling, and Orci and Kurtzman don't have one.
Instead, what we get is some gobbledygook about time-traveling Romulans, led by a cat named Nero (Eric Bana), in a huge-ass spaceship, looking to destroy Vulcan and Earth because Spock failed, as very, very old man, to prevent Romulus from being burned to a crisp by a supernova. Key to Nero's plan is a giant laser drill that bores a hole to the victim planet's core, wherin "red matter" is injected, causing the planet to turn into a black hole. Said drill hangs from Nero's ship by a huge chain. Oh, and it takes like twenty minutes to drill to the planet's core.
And this is what leads us to the second, and really really unforgivable, of the film's fatal flaws. Because when Nero attacks Vulcan, of all places, the entire planet's 6-billion plus inhabitants just stand around with blank looks on their faces as if to say, huh, ain't that some shit. Apparently it occurs to no one to just shoot the stupid thing out of the sky (a tactic that proves unsurprisingly effective when Nero attacks Earth in the same manner). Because of this mass collective failure of (ahem) logic, Vulcan gets destroyed.
Now, let me be clear. It's not the time-travel retconning part of "Vulcan gets destroyed" that pisses me off; it's the mental crotch kick of the way the movie goes about destroying Vulcan that pisses me off. It's a middle finger jammed into your cerebral cortex. It's pure Orci and Kurtzman, and it hurts.
There's some minor-in-comparison WTFs here as well, like the third-year starfleet officer candidates getting motion sick on the shuttle leaving Earth, or Kirk's wide-eyed, unsophisticated, and totally out-of-character farmboy ooh-ahh routine as they approach the Enterprise for the first time. Harder to swallow, though, is the fate of old Spock. Nimoy returns as the aged Spock (God bless him and all that, but he's really really old now and his voice is distractingly 'denturey') who was marooned by Nero on a desolate, frozen Hoth-like world for thirty some-odd years. Now there's two things about this that make absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever:
- In a flashback, the movie shows Spock witnessing the destruction of Vulcan by merely looking up into the sky. Indeed, this was the reason Nero marooned him there, so he could witness the destruction of his planet the way Nero had to witness the destruction of Romulus. But Vulcan, in the sky of the other planet, is quite large, larger than our moon appears. Let's say that the moon was turned into a black hole suddenly. Would life on Earth be, shall we say, affected in any way by this eventuality? Because this frozen planet seems somehow strangely immune to the cosmic turmoil right next door. Note that this is not explained away; rather is is simply never mentioned.
- Come to that, how is it even possible in the Trek-iverse that this planet is all but uninhabited? There's a Starfleet friggin' outpost on the planet, some "fifteen miles" from the cave that Spock has lived in for thirty years. Why didn't Spock go to the damned outpost and get his geriatric ass saved? Why, for that matter, on a class-M planet less than a hour's travel from Vulcan, is there only one lonely Starfleet outpost? Why isn't the planet terraformed, climate-controlled and populated all to hell?
Never mind. It hardly matters, as no one involved in the production of this thing seems to give a damn about such matters. Then again, this is coming from the writers who brought you T:RotF. Here, the destruction of Vulcan (i.e., the deliberate genocide of billions) is only a plot device intended to get Spock to show emotion. Here, Kirk's backstory (including his notorious fiddling with the Kobiashi Maru simulation) is ham-handed, silly, and cliche-laden. Those of you looking for a little logical continuity along with your retroactive continuity are going to be sorely disappointed. Fanbois and the easily amused will find enough in-jokes and pretty shiny things to to keep them distracted for two hours, but everyone else can give this a pass.