The new-ish Star Trek movie

John popped in the newest Star Trek movie, the one where Kirk and Spock and all the rest are fresh out of the Academy, to "test the Blu-Ray player setup".

Once again, I find myself tremendously annoyed by this movie.

On the whole, I am not a huge Star Trek fan. I'll watch it, mostly because it's on in the house a lot, but I don't find Star Trek interesting just because it's Star Trek-- if the episode (or series, in the case of Enterprise and later seasons of Voyager) doesn't have a strong plot, it bores the hell out of me. Thus, episodes/series/movie/whatever that have a lot of fan service are lost on me.

This movie is pretty much all fan service.

I can deal with the universe reboot. I don't LIKE it, because one of the big pluses of the Star Trek universe is that it's absolutely huge, so there's no real reason to have to reboot it-- just do what you want to do in another planetary system or quadrant or whatever.

What irritates me is that Abrams felt a need to shoehorn in all The Original Series characters, even when their previously-established backstories had them somewhere else. I've complained about this before, but always in general terms, ala "what's wrong with designing it as a trilogy*, and giving them each their own time to shine?". But during this viewing, I finally figured out why that bothers me so much: it assumes that none of these characters are interesting on their own.

That's a self-fulfilling assumption, because by stuffing them all in with no real rhyme or reason, the characters have no chance to acquire any depth, and thus are not at all interesting. Wouldn't you like to know what it was that Scotty was accused of to get him assigned to that lonely rock? Me too, but we're never going to get to here his story, because he's just there to be the Deus Ex Machina, Genius Engineer Fan-Service version. How did Sulu and Chekov get there at all? They don't even have an excuse for their fan-service. How did Spock and Uhura's hinted-at romance start? If Spock is teaching at the Academy, wouldn't that be a forbidden romance? Wouldn't that be INTERESTING to see? So why didn't we get to see it?

* or more. God knows the Trekkies will pay for any movie that comes out, regardless of how awful-- Nemesis proved that.

The new-ish Star Trek movie

John popped in the newest Star Trek movie, the one where Kirk and Spock and all the rest are fresh out of the Academy, to "test the Blu-Ray player setup".

Once again, I find myself tremendously annoyed by this movie.

On the whole, I am not a huge Star Trek fan. I'll watch it, mostly because it's on in the house a lot, but I don't find Star Trek interesting just because it's Star Trek-- if the episode (or series, in the case of Enterprise and later seasons of Voyager) doesn't have a strong plot, it bores the hell out of me. Thus, episodes/series/movie/whatever that have a lot of fan service are lost on me.

This movie is pretty much all fan service.

I can deal with the universe reboot. I don't LIKE it, because one of the big pluses of the Star Trek universe is that it's absolutely huge, so there's no real reason to have to reboot it-- just do what you want to do in another planetary system or quadrant or whatever.

What irritates me is that Abrams felt a need to shoehorn in all The Original Series characters, even when their previously-established backstories had them somewhere else. I've complained about this before, but always in general terms, ala "what's wrong with designing it as a trilogy*, and giving them each their own time to shine?". But during this viewing, I finally figured out why that bothers me so much: it assumes that none of these characters are interesting on their own.

That's a self-fulfilling assumption, because by stuffing them all in with no real rhyme or reason, the characters have no chance to acquire any depth, and thus are not at all interesting. Wouldn't you like to know what it was that Scotty was accused of to get him assigned to that lonely rock? Me too, but we're never going to get to here his story, because he's just there to be the Deus Ex Machina, Genius Engineer Fan-Service version. How did Sulu and Chekov get there at all? They don't even have an excuse for their fan-service. How did Spock and Uhura's hinted-at romance start? If Spock is teaching at the Academy, wouldn't that be a forbidden romance? Wouldn't that be INTERESTING to see? So why didn't we get to see it?

* or more. God knows the Trekkies will pay for any movie that comes out, regardless of how awful-- Nemesis proved that.