Screaming Penguin

Let me start by saying, I loathe J.J. Abrams. His Mission Impossible outing is the only thing I have ever seen of his that I thought was of at least tolerable quality. Everything else he has ever made sucks. While many people will try to tell me it doesn't, they are either philistines or deluded. At any rate, the new Star Trek movie is good. I took in an early screening, so most of the people there were people who really wanted to be there, so it was a self selecting crowd. I think this movie may be better for the franchise than anything in recent memory... financially... but it still has Abrams stink all over it. There was a good bit of "fan service" in the film, but it was mostly token stuff. With the possible exception of Pine (Kirk), the casting is dead on the mark. The whole crew was great. John Cho and Simon Pegg were both great as Sulu and Scotty respectively, but I think the real standout was Karl Urban's Bones. He managed to both be Bones and be cooler than bones at the same time. I found myself just waiting for him to open his mouth. The special effects are phenomenal. Everything you expect from a modern big budget movie. The visual style is odd, and yes, the lens flare thing does get old, but it is at least a unique look. Outside of the new Enterprise, I found myself a little underwhelmed by the art/design in the movie. The new "Romulan Mega-Ship" draws too much from the ship from "Nemesis" which I thought represented too much of a departure from the established Romulan style in that movie anyway. Still, that was arguably forgivable because of other plot factors. This one just seemed both un-Romulan and cliche out of the modern space movies. All that aside, the Axis of Assclowns that are the Abrams-Orci alliance turned out another complete piece of shit script. The number of logical holes in the script put it somewhere on a par with Aerogel. Fortunately, the film moves fast enough from action set piece to action set piece you can somewhat ignore it while it is happening. And really, to talk about reaching out to new fans, you don't get a lot of the core of the characters in this film. There is no dichotomy between Kirks relationships with Bones and Spock. Indeed, the film moves so fast, there really isn't much in the way of character work at all beyond some exchanged looks and occasional one-liners. If you didn't have a history of these characters established elsewhere, they wouldn't seem that interesting at all. As thankful as I am that Star Trek is out of the incompetent hands of the Berman-Braga "let us see how much we can tank the most valuable franchise in entertainment" team, I am certainly not rejoicing. I enjoyed "Star Trek", but I hope against hope than the next one is a bit meatier. 3.8 on our scale of 5.2