Ok, Star Trek pretty much rocked. I have to say this first, because the way my brain works, I always focus on the negatives first and forget about the positives. So here’s the negatives:
- The camera work was a little problematic at times. It’s like they used some special lens to emphasize lens flares in some attempt at “realism.” There are scenes with huge lens flare rectangles right above the actor’s faces. Also, there were a couple fight scenes where the cuts were so quick you couldn’t tell what was happening in the fight. Editors: we know quick cuts indicate action, but if you make to too quick nobody can tell what the hell is going on!
- While they did a pretty good job of following the Star Trek canon, I’m pretty sure that the Federation didn’t build the Enterprise in the middle of a corn field in Iowa. That was just weird. (Also, what were those super-tall Iowan buildings? Was that a future-city, or was it just the biggest grain elevator ever?) Oh and the Enterprise is at least twice the size of the old one… the original had room for maybe 2-3 shuttles in its landing bay, this new one has like 16. I guess this movie si a “reset’ so it’s not that big a deal. They also changed Star Trek’s warp drive to work more like Battlestar Galactica’s jump drive.
- That scene you saw in the preview where the classic car is racing along the Iowan freeway, then falls off a cliff while Kirk holds on for dear life? That actually has nothing to do with the plot. At all. Not even slightly. It is, believe it or not, part of a product placement for Nokia.
- Apparently all Federation ships now include vast engineering areas that resemble, more than anything, cheese processing plants. I’m actually ok with this, given the larger size of the Enterprise it almost makes sense– except for one small point: since there are no computers or really controls of any type (just pipes and tanks), Scotty’s engineering shots just consist of him running alongside pipes.
- Just say no to cute little comic relief sidekick alien characters. They suck. There’s one in this movie, accompanying Scotty. Just try to pretend it doesn’t exist.
That all said, the movie is vastly more entertaining than I expected it to be. Chris Pine did a great job of playing Kirk, without copying William Shatner’s un-copy-able Kirk. Zachary Quinto, as well, made an excellent Spock, and was much better than I expected. (I guess the crappiness of Heroes was firmly rooted in the script, not in the acting.)
All of the classic bridge characters are there, and all of them have their particular quirks/talents re-inforced: Chekov’s accent, Sulu’s fencing, that weird antenna thing in Uhuru’s ear, Scotty and McCoy’s classic lines. Captain Pike is there, playing the same role as Kirk’s mentor. Even the Kobayashi Maru test is present, and Kirk’s “cheating” is shown in a particularly comical way.
In fact, I was surprised at the amount of humor in the film. Even the villain is given a humorous line at one point, that made the whole theater laugh. It’s really at the level of, say, Star Trek IV, almost sliding into the comedy genre.
My recommendation: Watch it.
I won’t gush on and on about what a genius, mind-bending, ahead-of-its-time series Patrick McGoohan’s “The Prisoner” was. It’s available on the web, please watch it if you haven’t before, it’s truly amazing and deserves your attention.
Patrick McGoohan’s death is a tremendous loss. Be seeing you, Number Six.
Recently in World of Warcraft, I managed to complete the quest and get my level 70 druid Sacora to the Ogri’la faction area. (I know; I’m slow. Leave me alone.) One of the daily quests in this area is named “The Relic’s Emanation.” To complete it, you must kill a guard or two, then feed a crystal into a machine and play a mini-game. Once you’ve reached level 7 of the mini-game, you gain the Apexis Emanation and the quest is complete.
The mini-game is Simon.
That’s right; you have four colored tiles that are triggered in sequence and you must repeat back the sequence. They are Red, Blue, Yellow and Green and each one plays a unique musical tone. Simon. The loveable game everyone had in the 80s:
So I put down WOW and pick up a new game I just bought: Bioshock. Working through the tutorial level, I get to the part about hacking turrets, security robots, and cameras. To successfully hack a machine, you must complete a mini-game. Guess which one?
Pipe dream.
That’s right. The quintessential pipe-clearing game I played in 1990 on my green-screened Gameboy, that’s the mini-game you have to complete. Pipe Dream:
What’s the deal? Has the world run out of games? Or is Blizzard and 2K not very creative? And did they really think that people wouldn’t remember Simon or Pipe Dream?
One of the few shows I watch every week is Lost. It kind of sucks this season, but I already have the season pass in iTunes so I watch every episode if only so I’m not wasting money. The most current episode “Tricia Tanaka Is Dead” had about the worst case of manufactured suspense I’ve ever seen in a show.
Manufactured Suspense is the term I use to describe an event in a TV show or movie that attempts to be suspenseful but, well, isn’t. You can tell it’s supposed to be suspenseful from the music, acting and editing, but if you spend more than a few seconds thinking about it, you soon realize that there’s nothing really happening.
Last week’s Lost is about Hurley finding a tipped-over VW van (complete with Dharma Initiative badge) in the jungle, and trying to convince the other castaways to help him fix it and get it running again. Finding that the battery is stone-dead, Hurley decides to get the VW started by pushing it down a hill and popping the clutch. Fair enough. The “danger” is that at the end of the hill is a pile of big rocks, which will smash the car up unless Hurley steers away in time.
But think about this scenario a second. The danger can be easily dodged by steering the van in the other direction, that’s all. Steering the van doesn’t require that the engine be running. So… what difference does it make whether the engine starts or not? None at all.
So Jin and Sawyer push the van down the hill, and complete with dramatic music and editing, it rolls towards the rocks. Needless to say, Hurley doesn’t pop the clutch until he’s almost exactly at the rocks, and of course after the engine starts he steers the van away from danger and saves the day.
To the creators of Lost: I like to think the castaways aren’t so retarded that they believe you can’t steer a car without the engine running. Please stop insulting my intelligence and theirs.
