The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Star Trek is a movie that could have sucked so badly. It was taking a series that is not known for action and making an action blockbuster out of it. It was applying some crazy stupid time travel plot in order to bring back the original Kirk-era Enterprise and characters. It had someone nobody had ever heard of playing the key role of Kirk himself. There was so much stacked up against this film. So much that could easily go wrong.

And none of it did.

Star Trek blew me away. (IGN.com) It was, by far, the best remake/re-imagining/reboot of a series that I can remember.

Most of the time, when bringing a series to the screen or rebooting it, you are making a devil’s bargain. If you play too close to the original canon and concepts, you’re tying yourself up creatively, meaning you can do less that is interesting and effective with the film. Newcomers won’t be interested, because so much of it will exclude them. And no matter how good a job you do, you’re always going to get SOMETHING wrong, which will piss off the fans, who will always recognize every little mistake. On the other side, if you cast off everything the original had besides the premise, you gain some appeal to the mainstream, but you’re still going to turn people off, because they’ll assume they need prior knowledge. Additionally, your fans, who are your main source of income and who are the reason you picked up the IP, will hate it, and not support you. There seems to be nothing you can do.

Still, Star Trek found a way. If you were to read its time travel, alternate reality plot on paper, it would, seriously, sound like the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard of. However, they treated it not only with respect, but intelligence, and the result was amazing to behold. By establishing clear connections to the canon as well as establishing very clearly WHY what’s happening on the screen is not canon as the fans know it in very Star Trek terms, it freed up the movie to take any liberties it wanted. It let them make the movie their own. It let them set up a Star Trek movie that was full of balls-to-the-wall action that didn’t upset fans, and could even surprise them.
All the characters you love are here. The cast is amazingly well done. They are new takes by new actors, certainly, but they’re also very clearly the roles they are cast in. Each person is different, but completely fitting. They are who they are playing. Somehow, they even managed to fit in almost all of the characters’ well-known catch-phrases in places where it didn’t seem joke-y or like a wink to the audience. Hearing Scotty tell us that “She can’t take much more, Captain!” is awesome in a fan service way, but when he says it in a completely action-filled situation where it’s extremely visually clear that she really CAN’T take much more, you get to have your cake and eat it too. The only downside, really, is that you’ve got this great ensemble cast, but the movie is Kirk and Spock’s show. Everyone gets a little time in the spotlight, but it’s not nearly enough, especially for Bones.
The action, too, was really good action. I watched Wolverine: Origins, which was supposed to be an action-blockbuster, but it was downright tame compared to most of the action sequences in Star Trek. The fistfights were brutal, the firefights were intense, and the ship to ship combat was, somehow, exciting while not betraying the almost time-honored tradition of the ships seemingly staying in one place and just firing at once another.

Will fans as a whole bash the film? I don’t know. As a lover of Next Gen and general appreciator of Star Trek, I loved the crap out of this movie. I know Spaeth, who is a huge Trekkie, enough of one to watch all of Voyager and Enterprise, loved it as well. If an action-y Star Trek seems like something you will enjoy, I will tell you: This won’t disappoint. It is good stuff.