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You know, I just realized this movie was just called Star Trek… no more specificity than that. Interesting. I guess that’s how JJ rolls. Anyhows, it became clear to me that it was going to become exponentially more difficult for me to avoid hearing spoilers about this movie and I needed to rush to see it – so I checked out a late show yesterday. Disclaimer, I’ve never been a Trekkie, I lightly watched the original series growing up and never watched any of the new series (and actively disliked what little I saw of Voyager and Enterprise). I was in the Babylon 5 camp during those times.

The executive summary is that I really liked the movie – I think it was about as good a Star Trek movie as could be made in this day and age. It was laden with old school references, but it didn’t seem over burdened with them. It looked good, I liked most of the actors, I liked a lot of things about it. I do think it would lose a lot of impact for folks who weren’t at least aware of all the olde thyme stuff it referenced, though. Which is kinda ironic given the reboot of the franchise that the movie represents and the carte blanche to dump canon which the series oh so needed. On the felix scale of 0-10, I give it a solid 9.

Spoilers ahoy! Onward!

Ok, maybe this is strange, but my favourite part of the movie was the beginning where young Kirk goes for a joyride and then busts out Sabotage! That whole scene was all types of awesome. It kinda felt like something McG would do. If you know what I’m saying. But that’s probably just me.

Anyhow, despite it’s > 2 hour runtime, it felt like a tight little movie. Everything made sense, the gradual introduction of characters was nice. There weren’t any flights of fancy that some of these high falootin directors like to pad out their movies with, which I really appreciate.

Some highlights for me were that swashbucklin’ Sulu shoutout when John Cho’s all, “I took fencing” and then he gets his techno sword and totally saves the day! Hell yeah! Or when Chekhov isn’t understood by the computer. Good times. Anyhow, Chris Pine plays a really good Kirk, with the right amount of bravado w/out going too far over the top. Sylar is a good Spock, too, he looks the part and does a really good job. At (almost) no time do I expect him to eat anyone’s brains. (although I admit, I kinda liked baby Spock, more… it was great when he was going all A Christmas Story on that Vulcan bully’s ass). And Zoe Saldana get’s to keep Uhura’s totally military mini-skirt. And, btw, I’m totally ok with the whole Uhura/Spock thing. Spock needs love, too!

I also appreciated when Kirk’s dad was ramming the bad guys, that they didn’t sort of go for the ultra cheese of you know… having his dad going into the grips of that ship and hitting it the moment Kirk was popping out of his mom. You know the writers thought about that! Man, I would have puked right there, but they didn’t and the scene was ok.

Not much really bothered me about the show. I think it was weird when Nero somehow knew that he’d killed Kirk’s dad. I mean, how’d he know that? Shrug. I liked all the characters chosen, except for Bones. I don’t know – while all the characters represented their older models well, when Bones spoke his lines it just felt too campy and too forced. Kirk had one line like that when he burst back into the command center (whatever you call that) on the Enterprise towards the end and had an outburst of Shatnerism, but overall, it felt like while he was representing O.K. (original Kirk) he was making it his own, too. Not so much with Bones. Sigh.

Overall, it was some good light fare. You don’t feel like there was any real thought needed to watch the movie, no twists or turns to comprehend, no underlying message to decipher, no moral to learn – the plot line was predicatable and straight forward as a ruler. Which seems very anti-JJ Abrams. But it was a damn fun ruler and a good looking movie to boot. I suspect while it made (a little) less than Wolverine did opening weekend, it won’t have that tremendous drop off from week to week. What’d you think about it?

Oh, here’s NS, NK and OS on SNL. “To not like it… would make them dickheads.”