So I finally saw the new Star Trek movie last night. Overall I liked it. It was a good film. I enjoyed myself, had a nice time, would see it again – all the things that make for a good movie. There were times it felt very Trek and times it felt like something new and that isn’t bad, either.

Still I have some specific type thoughts, both good and bad, so I’ll put them under a cut. A cut that will act as a Spoiler Warning zone.

One last chance to turn away. Just sayin’

All right. So let’s get this one out of the way. Kirk plays Sabotage in his car. Not as soundtrack but as in movie music. Which means Kirk can hear it. Which means that the Beastie Boys exist in Star Trek.

And that’s fine. Except … well they have a song by the name of Intergalactic which has the lyric “Like a pinch from the neck of Mister Spock.” So does Spock travel back in time and tell the Beastie Boys or did the Beastie Boys somehow invent the neck pinch and Spock was all “Oh SNAP! I should try that!” I dunno, but it made for a funny moment.

All the actors, and yes this will be scattered around, did good jobs at feeling like younger versions of the characters we know and love. Karl Urban blew me away, specifically. Everyone else was good, to differing degrees but none of them really took me out of the film or made me sit there and go “That’s not [Character X].” so good on them for that one.

But it does make the movie a bit of a failure. See, I thought part of this was to get people who don’t know Star Trek to watch it. You know? New blood. Which is an awesome idea. Except all the characters were two dimensional if you don’t know who they are already. There simply isn’t enough to inform an audience who doesn’t know what they’re dealing with. Not in terms of character. And to say that this film is a break point and next film they can really delve into character, and I don’t mean this as a straw man I just see that that could be some logic they would use – well that doesn’t hold cause those folk you turned off won’t be back for you to do that. So that’s a problem, really. Well, potentially a problem.

I did like – and this was never spelled out so I may be extrapolating and this wasn’t meant – the way that the initial appearance of the future Romulan ship changed everything. I mean they scanned it, we saw that, and some of the shuttles escaped, we know that too. And the Kelvin looked like an old school Star Trek ship. And then, internally, by the time of the Enterprise, the future came early. Tech was further along than it would have been otherwise. The iBridge seemed to be a result of scanning future tech and applying it. Which also, to me, explains why engineering didn’t look all bright and shiny. They only got so much information from those scans, not much time for them and all that. So while some things could be all future slick early, some things wouldn’t be and would be built up by sheer force of necessity. Nice touch, if it was meant that way. If not? Nice accident!

Spock/Uhura? I love it! It makes great amounts of sense to my head. Well done.

Now my biggest love in Star Trek is Kirk himself, the character. Chris Pine did a good job finding that core of the character and bringing it out. This Kirk is different, even less subtle that the original, which makes sense. But there are these moments where Kirk-ness shines through and we can see this will be a different person he still has that innate core of being that Kirk had, only he’s younger and a bit angrier and less subtle – he has the potential to grow into himself. So hooray.

Why does the future have so much god damned lens flare though? What was that? It hurt me. It was constant and annoying. Simply overdone. Hysterically, however, someone took a bit of Space Seed and edited it to be shaky-cam and lens flare heaven. Making old Trek look like New Trek. Here:

Anyway. There ya go. That’s about all I got for now. Like I said, overall – well done.