Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Star Trek

I watched a fair amount of Star Trek when I was younger, but as I got older, and as the spinoffs came, I completely lost interest.  I never got into Deep Space 9 or Enterprise or any of the other shows, but I remember enjoying watching some of the original series and I liked the Next Generation series even more.

I would never say I'm a trekkie.  Just enough to know most of the characters and to know that a red-shirt ensign dies on every episode.

So I went in to seeing the movie this evening with a little skepticism.  Yeah, the movie has an 8.4 rating at IMDB, placing it in the top 100 movies of all times, is directed by the man who brought us Mission Impossible 3 and the always entertaining TV show Alias, and yeah, every review I have read says it is amazing, but then so went the hype about Batman Begins, and that, while good, didn't live up (despite an amazing score by my homeboy Hans Zimmer).

This one does.

From the universally outstanding acting performances, to the gripping action from minute 1 until the end, to the special effects to the music, there is very little to critique in this outstanding film.  For the Trekkies, there are lots of hidden jokes (I saw it with my brother who is a big Star Trek fan and he pointed out a lot of them), for the casual fans even there are inside jokes that you will get, and even for those who couldn't care less about Star Trek (like my mother, who shocked me with the revelation that she liked it) the film doesn't leave you behind - at least not completely.  The young actors who have the nigh unto impossible task of portraying cultural icons do a great job of playing the characters in such a way that it seems that you actually are watching these characters in their younger days.

You still have to suspend your disbelief a little bit in some scenes and a lot in others, but if you can join this fantasy world, you will be held spellbound from beginning to end and walk out of the theatre hoping for more sequels.

And that is perhaps the best part about the whole thing: the plot was constructed in such a way that there is a lot of room for more sequels that can be completely and believably independent of the previous Star Trek movies, including the last several train wrecks that they threw at us.

So get off your chair, put your hospital gown and stethoscope down, and head on over to the cinema to enjoy what will hopefully become a sci-fi classic before it leaves the big screen, and see if you laugh as hard as I did at Kirk's line as he is being choked by the Romulan.

2 enthusiastic - and slightly surprised - thumbs up.

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