pyat

I've just returned from seeing the new Star Trek film with

mar2nee, Daniel, and their kids. I largely liked it. I give it a... mmm.... 7.25/10?

What didn't I like?

Well...

The first 30 minutes or so almost entirely failed to engage my interest. Nokia ads, beer ads, 1990s rap music (albeit a song I like) and everyone was a jerk.

About the time of the air drop onto Vulcan, the film picked up enough momentum to keep me engaged. Also, I recall people making fun of that clunky, old-school Traveller RPG because it claimed that space marines would receive training in sword fighting. The SF nerd pendulum has apparently swung back over to the realization that sword fighting in space is cool.

The nit-picking that follows is the precisely the sort of nit-picking I would subject past Trek installments to, even the ones I really liked.

Apparently, Federation starships now carry a brewery on board. All those bits with characters running around storage tanks in "engineering" caused Blake's 7 flashbacks. While a little "grit" is good, the warp drive should not remind me of a summer job at a soap factory.

It was rather foruitous that Kirk should happen to run into the single cave on that whole planet that happened to house Classic Spock. Also, holy cow, but Vulcan was close to that planet. Was it a moon of some kind? And Vulcan turned into a black hole. You'd think that be a little dangerous for the people on the ice moon. Assuming it was a moon.

On that note, if Classic Spock knew where the Starfleet base was, why was he moping around in a cave instead of, say, going to the Starfleet base and warning people?

Scotty is entirely comic relief. I have mixed feelings on that. He was not as stupid as he seemed to be in trailers, at least.

Uhura did nothing except look leggy. Admittedly, that's about all she ever did in most of TOS and the old movies, but, heck, it was like they were going out of their way to prevent her from doing anything cool. "Only Uhura can speak Romulan! Take over, Uhura!" "There are no transmissions, Captain." "Very good. You can go home now."

Star Fleet Order 619 is stupid. And wasn't Kirk equally guilty of violating it by jumping up and down and making Spock mad?

And finally - the enemy ship has just had a black hole form inside it, and a spaceship crash into it. It's disappearing over the event horizon. Hey, Kirk, why not get a little closer to shoot phasers at it, hmmm?