I am not a Star Trek kind of guy. I grew up with Star Wars, and Trek fell in my ‘not watching much TV’ period. TOS was before my time, and TNG was after my time. DS9 looked interesting, but I was doing other things then. Voyager sucked ass, and Enterprise was a blip on my radar for all of two episodes.
With that in mind, my wife and kids went to Kennywood today, and I knew they wouldn’t be back before bedtime (in fact, 11PM), so I went to see Star Trek tonight. There were 4 people in the theater. Me, another guy by himself, and a couple. That’s not really relevant, except that it means that maybe the movie won’t be in theaters much longer.
Anyway, as to the story:
There were plot holes large enough that I could pilot the Enterprise through. I mean, really. If I can tell there are plot holes, they are gaping chasms stippled across the fabric of reality. If the Red Matter (I could tell it was capitalized) could cause black holes when a single droplet of it impacted normal matter, how did they contain a sphere of the stuff larger than a basketball? How were they able to extract a single droplet using a giant heroin needle without it destroying the entire vessel? How come when they shot the ENTIRE SPHERE of it at the bad guys, it didn’t create a GALAXY CONSUMING black hole larger than the nearest Supercluster? Why couldn’t they just drop the single drop on Vulcan’s surface and have it eat it up from the top down instead of from the core out?
And yet, I liked the movie. The opening scene was just ridiculously good. James T. Kirk was enough of a jerk. Spock was Spock, although his emotional outburst was perhaps a little over the top. Scotty got a little TOO Scottish, but I’ll survive. McCoy was excellent. Sulu was ehn, as was Chekov. The love story between Uhura and Spock was not developed enough, and I don’t think it really fit that well. A red shirt died, there were the classic fan-service lines, “I’m givin’ her all she’s got!” etc. I’m sure there were more nods to the fans than I recognized, I’m no Trekkie/Trekker. And, I enjoyed the fact that Leonard Nimoy reprised older Spock. He’s getting old, which is not surprising, but either they played that up with makeup or failed to cover it at all with makeup, despite trying. The ‘re-imagining’ of Star Trek was done well. I think they have stayed true to the major concepts behind the show, while being a little more modern (whether that’s a good thing or not is up to the individual).
If you don’t want your kids to see violence, this movie is not for your kids. If you don’t want your kids to see sexual content, cover their eyes for the 30 seconds in the first 1/3 of the movie that has women in their underclothes, and you’ll be fine.