Starring Eric Bana,Winona Ryder,Leonard Nimoy and the new guys.
Top to bottom awesome.I feel I can just leave it at that,but some people would like to know why.Whens the last time you heard the Beastie Boys on a Star Trek soundtrack?
From the music to the actual origin of the main characters,this movie is great on many levels.A quick head scratch for the casting of Winona Ryder as Spock's mom.She was made up to look older of course,but why not just go with an older actress?And my only other tiny complaint was with young Kirk getting it on with a green girl who's make up looked amateurish (just a hot girl spray painted green).Other than those minor infractions,this is a rip roaring good time.
Eric Bana as the head baddie is virtually unrecognizable and does a fantastic job as the out for revenge psychopath.The new cast does an equally impressive job and come into their own with ease and in an entertaining fashion.Then we have the humour tacked on for good measure,and while the other movies in the series have all had their funny parts,this one has a fair bit more than the norm.
To give you an idea of how enjoyable this movie was,about an hour and a half into it,the power in the movie theater went out and typically in that situation,people will moan and groan and the odd one or two people will actually get up and go do something about it.Well in this case,there was an absolute uproar.People were shouting and swearing and people left in droves to go alert the staff about the power outage.The manager had to come in and ask people to remain in their seats.Ive been to a ton of movies and maybe seen the power or sound go out about a dozen times overall,but I've never seen a reaction like this.People love this movie.And they should.Star Trek doesn't rely on special effects to tell the story either,mind you,there are some pretty sweet scenes.The story itself is so rich and interesting that you are enthralled from the opening sequence til the end credits.After all,people have been wondering about these characters backround's for more than 40 years now,so its cool to watch it all unfold.
Fan or no fan,its easily the best movie out right now and is deserving of your hard earned money.
Rating 3 3/4 green chicks out of 5
Posts
There is something poetic about this Star Trek movie coming out almost 10 years to the day that Star Wars Episode I came out. OK, not really, Ep. 1 came out on May 19, 1999 and ST debuted May 8, 2009, but stay with me...
ReplyDeleteThe original Star Trek: The Motion Picture, came out in 1979 in response to the popularity of Star Wars two years earlier. George Lucas finally proved that there was big money to be made in Sci-Fi and the Star Trek team wanted to capitalize. The goal of this original ST movie was to take special effect to levels unmatched in the relatively low budget Star Wars. Costing over 4 times as much as Star Wars, Star Trek: The Motion Picture certainly did have some hi tech special effects, for the time, but it also had one of the more convoluted, contrived and nonsensical storylines in the history of film. It was style over substance in it's purest forms. George Lucas even made a bit of a backhanded swipe at the ST film during the making of Empire when he stated, "a special effect without a story is very boring.".
Fast forward to May, 2009, when Phantom Menace premiered, setting new standards for gratuitous CGI and special effect for absolutely no reason. After two more sequels of style over substance, I had basically resigned myself to the fact that Sci-Fi with an intelligent and enjoyable story was dead. That was until this past weekend when I finally saw Star Trek. What a great film! Your review was pretty much dead on. This was exactly what the ST franchise needed, but not only that, it is the blueprint on how to reboot a franchise. It is everything that I had hoped the SW prequels would be and were not. My only complaint is that I don't want to wait another two years for a sequel.