Okay, you got me.

I’m a pretty big Star Trek nut. No, I don’t know where the Romulan Neutral Zone is or what star Ceti Alpha VI orbits, but I like me a good Star Trek here and there.

Unfortunately, there were very few good new Star Treks lately.
That show with the pansy song intro sucked beans until the season it got canceled and the movies were crapola in a box too.

And here we are with a new trek across the stars with a new crew and an old Spock to boot.

What did I think? Lessee…

Lens Flares… WTF?

Did some of the keys on the editing software get stuck or something?

The lens flares are annoying.

WTF.

Bigness in Real Life doesn’t necessarily transfer to Film and Screen.

Okay, so I’ve heard that JJ Abrams wanted to make Enterprise feel all big and stuff.
So they used everything from a beer factory to a new, larger bridge to do it.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

The Bridge, Sickbay, Engineering.
All of it was purposefully BIG looking.
But it entirely failed to communicated the size or bigness of the ship.
Abrams’ camera work and the tightness of the shots ended up making the ship feel tiny.
And the random junk around the sets made it feel cluttered like my desk.

And at the same time, the old sets felt more advanced because it allowed more of the ship left to interpretation and imagination.
JJ’s intent to show the ship to be bigger made it feel smaller because it created real borders, as opposed to those imagined.
Much like the Star Wars prequels with fake giant sets, the world became restrained.

And big doesn’t mean advanced.
I mean, for frak’s sake, we try to make things smaller when things get good.

Even Battlestar Galactica was able to pull off a much larger feel, despite tinier sets.
I don’t know how Ron D. Moore was able to pull it off, but Galactica felt like a behemoth.
I mean, they didn’t even show the engine room until the last half of the last season!

Enterprise felt the smallest in years.

Slow. Down. It’s. Okay. To. Lay. Off. The. Speed.

Am I getting old or something?
It’s not like I can’t keep up.
I can.
It was damn fun.

But please, please, someone try to educate me as to why everything is so damn fast.

Didn’t they teach you that a good steak needs to rest before you eat it?
Or cook it, for that matter.

This movie was definitely fun, but the problem is that once it starts running, it just keeps on galloping to the gate at full flank.
It doesn’t slow down for the sadness, speed up for the action, or give you time to consider Nero’s position.
It just runs straight ahead on warp factor 9 straight through the script as if mommy was calling JJ in for dinner.

In Japan, especially Western Japan, and in many areas around the world, the concept of ma is appreciated.
Ma is purposeful rest.
It’s a fundamental in music, cooking, comedy, everything.
With silence and lull comes the emotion.

All I got was an adolescent “AWESOME!!!”.
I would like a little more than that.

And the Moral of the Story is…

This movie is good, but it’s not great.
It’s a popcorn action movie.

Except, the greats of Star Trek, and much Sci-Fi for that matter, are able to carry a nice plot point to the end.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan wrestles with aging and cheating death.
Battlestar Galactica wrestles with morality where your conscience is your only policeman.
1984 wrestles with information freedom.

But this Star Trek could have had a perfect plot point.
Yet, it failed.

Star Trek could have been entirely opposite of it’s Khan predecessor by saying “YES, YES YOU CAN cheat death/be awesome/take risks and succeed. (Circle One)”.
It could have been about confronting adversity and succeeding despite your pitfalls.
It could have been partly the pursuit of happiness.
It could have been, “fall seven times, rise eight”

But it just ended up being traditional hero worship.

The good thing is that there’s enough to hope for the next movie though.

Captain James T. Kirk is not a douche. Just kinda. But he’s okay.

Recently, there was an article on io9 that straight out called Chris Pine’s Kirk a “douchebag”.

At face value, that’s what I thought too.
Yet, really, he’s just cocky and confident, not super douchy.
Pine’s Kirk is definitely not William Shatner’s Captain. James. T. Kirk.
Yet, Pine does justice and creates a believable, yet herotastic Kirk.

Recently, I was asked where I get my confidence.

(Okay, I’m not that confident, but apparently I look so. Anyways.)

My answer was that I don’t really know.
I just am carefully confident.
In my opinion, Kirk was always this way too.
He just is confident.
And this Kirk is just as so.

All Good Things…

…must come to an end.

And right when you thought things could pickup, the movie ends.

Nero?
Oh, yeah.
He’s dead already.
Can’t we go explore the next solar system or something?

That’s what the movie ends on.

And I like that.

It ends with a great platform for the next feature.

I just hope it’s a little deeper.

Space, The Final Frontier…

It’s damn good.

Go watch now.