Movie Thoughts: Star Trek
May. 14th, 2009 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerMy interest in Star Trek always seems to have been a dilettante's. I've seen the fourth through the eighth films at the movies and bits of all five series, but my greatest familiarity with the stories is only with "The Original Series" and The Next Generation, and that more or less through reading plot summaries. It may be, then, that the looking down on a "wheezing franchise" that seemed to start floating around here and there online in the latter part of the 1990s had a certain effect on me for once... but when the very first trailer for a "new beginning!" Star Trek movie came out, I was interested enough in it to go see Cloverfield, and the trailer seemed one of the best parts of the experience in retrospect.
The funny thing, then, was that the second trailer that eventually showed up made me less interested in seeing the movie; it seemed somehow too "extreme" compared to the effect the first trailer had had on me... although I did get a kick out of a video that synched up bits of the new Star Wars movies to the audio of the trailer. However, certain other people I ran across seemed to react in general to the news coming out by complaining about Star Wars... and when the reviews of Star Trek started turning up quite positive, I could feel a somehow familiar cold feeling creeping across me, something that might be darkly summarised as "if something I like isn't always respected, why should anything else even remotely similar luck out?" However, I managed to find the time to head off to the movie, to try and judge it for myself before it was perhaps too late...
I suppose that the comment of one person about "Xtreme Trek" did resonate with me still, but I've got to say that I did enjoy the experience, more than I did with "The Lord of the Rings" movies or The Dark Knight. I would certainly say that a film with its "tone" would seem just plain ridiculous to me as a "Star Wars prequel" compared against the old ones, but in thinking that I was able to interpret certain to my own satisfaction as "it's just one more excuse to make complaints they've been making for years." Now, "the actual crew gets blown up and the 'new guys' take over" is a plot line I have a certain familiarity with, but in being aware of it I was able to handle it... I also found myself toying, in a casual, amused way I've tried with different things before, with mental "tweaks" to the storyline to address "connections between realities" and "whatever happened to 'boldly going?'"... although in the middle of that, I did start wondering about just how Kirk took command. We know he's "supposed" to be there, he was told in the movie itself to go and do that, but the thought did occur to me that to the other characters, he could have seemed like he was pushing his way in, just because he could...
The funny thing, then, was that the second trailer that eventually showed up made me less interested in seeing the movie; it seemed somehow too "extreme" compared to the effect the first trailer had had on me... although I did get a kick out of a video that synched up bits of the new Star Wars movies to the audio of the trailer. However, certain other people I ran across seemed to react in general to the news coming out by complaining about Star Wars... and when the reviews of Star Trek started turning up quite positive, I could feel a somehow familiar cold feeling creeping across me, something that might be darkly summarised as "if something I like isn't always respected, why should anything else even remotely similar luck out?" However, I managed to find the time to head off to the movie, to try and judge it for myself before it was perhaps too late...
I suppose that the comment of one person about "Xtreme Trek" did resonate with me still, but I've got to say that I did enjoy the experience, more than I did with "The Lord of the Rings" movies or The Dark Knight. I would certainly say that a film with its "tone" would seem just plain ridiculous to me as a "Star Wars prequel" compared against the old ones, but in thinking that I was able to interpret certain to my own satisfaction as "it's just one more excuse to make complaints they've been making for years." Now, "the actual crew gets blown up and the 'new guys' take over" is a plot line I have a certain familiarity with, but in being aware of it I was able to handle it... I also found myself toying, in a casual, amused way I've tried with different things before, with mental "tweaks" to the storyline to address "connections between realities" and "whatever happened to 'boldly going?'"... although in the middle of that, I did start wondering about just how Kirk took command. We know he's "supposed" to be there, he was told in the movie itself to go and do that, but the thought did occur to me that to the other characters, he could have seemed like he was pushing his way in, just because he could...