Saturday, May 25, 2013

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Guess what movie I saw the other night!  And will now blog about in an unstructured and random and not-even-a-little-bit-thought-out way!


As you may have guessed from the title of the post and the spectacular gif, it was the new Star Trek!  It was...good, I guess?  No, it wasn't nearly as good as the first one, but I still had fun watching it.  I think part of the problem is it felt somehow smaller than the first one, which is rarely a good thing with a sequel.  Though still, fun to watch.  I admit I did laugh my ass off when they pulled that Wrath Of Khan flip-ending thing.  That was pretty goofy, it felt almost like a parody (that scene was supposed to be funny, right?).  Also I didn't entirely get the point of making Kirk no longer captain for all of...what, ten minutes?  Seemed like pointless drama.  The death of Pike was pretty rad, though, and I really liked Spock mind-melding with him to experience his death.  I gotta wonder how that could have fucked him up, though, because for serious that is some traumatizing shit.  There will be good fanfic to read, I am sure.

I'm sure the entire internet has already lost its collective shitstack over this, but what was the deal with making Khan white?  The character was like, Indian or something, wasn't he?  And a Sikh, if I'm remembering right, it's been a while since I've seen the original series.  How the hell did they get away with casting Sherlock Holmes instead of somebody who looked the part?  Yeah, Sherlock did a good job in the acting department, I guess, but it seems kind of shitty to replace a dark-skinned character with a super-pale-skinned character for no reason, especially when it makes absolutely no sense; even if you wanted to use the argument that this is an alternate reality, it's only alternate from Kirk's birth or so, it wouldn't have any effect on the people who were frozen hundreds of years ago and only just got thawed out.  I guess maybe the movie was trying to avoid the possibly unfortunate implication of having the villain be a dark-skinned person.  That sort of makes sense, but you'd think that in interest of not looking like they're whitewashing the series they'd make one of the good-guy characters a minority, to make up for the switch.  Like, the new girl could have been Indian or something.  Speaking of her, what was with the random stripping scene?  And while we're on tiny little nitpicks, why didn't Spock ever give away the conn?  He constantly runs out of the bridge while he's acting captain person.  I am not entirely sure on the rules here, but shouldn't he hand off the conn to the next highest-ranked person in the room before dashing off?

I know that me going on about all these little flaws makes it sound like it was a terrible movie, but I did have fun watching it.  Not nearly as much fun as I had watching the first movie, though.  I'd say it's probably about equal to the newest Die Hard film, or one of the Hugo episodes of Bob's Burgers.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to track down some original-series Star Trek to watch.  It's been far too long.  Also eventually I have to start buying TNG dvds, because that seems to be the only way I can watch some shows.  Drama-ish shows especially, I am far too easily distracted to have internet tabs in the other window when there's a slow or quiet scene.  Next Gen was a good show but I couldn't even get halfway into the second season while trying to watch it on my computer.

No comments:

Post a Comment