Star Trek - An Unprofessional Review

So The Lawyer did it again. She took me to a movie. This time we went to see the new Star Trek movie. In short, it was a good Sci-Fi, action flick. It's worth seeing.

Without giving away the whole enchilada, the movie reinvents the characters from the original TV show and movies (Kirk, Spock, McCoy, etc) in a way to allow a new movie franchise to go forward with new stories. They do this in a classic Sci-Fi method and I found it perfectly acceptable. If they had tried to do this 20 or 25 years ago with the original cast members it would be like a TV show where a character wakes up from a dream and the entire previous season was not reality. Of course, no one would do that.

I'm not one to normally take note of a movie's directing but the action sequences were jumpy and disjointed ala Transformers. You never really have a feel for what's going on. I guess one could argue this convey's the experience of someone actually in the middle of a battle but as a movie goer, in almost every instance, you are supposed to be an observer from afar. I also noted some similar scene cuts in the last Bond flick and wasn't too happy. This could be a bad trend (in my mind) going forward. Then again, with the few movies I see this could be something that's been happening for the past decade.

My last little quibble was that on a couple occassions, in an attempt to connect the characters to their past, some of the dialog was forced. Bones, "Dammit, I'm a physician not a physicist," was painfully leveraged into a scene using 5 foot pry bars. However, some of the more sublte things were done very well: the Orion woman, Uhura's go-go boots, the conical hair bun of the unnamed woman on the bridge, and general speech paterns of everyone but Kirk. And it's still not a good idea to wear a red shirt.

Good movie. If you're at all into the genre, go see it.