Current mood:	happy
Entry tags:	austin life, cinema, movie review, screenwriting craft

STAR TREK - A movie review
Saw STAR TREK yesterday evening in Austin's only iMAX, so it was huge! A huge screen totally filled with those fights and space battles and ice you-know-whats. Man, blew my mind! I'd heard the visuals were good, and I really agree. The TV show, bless its corny heart, never did a single impressive effect. Goofy aliens, easily sussed tractor beaming, etc.

But this! Whoa Mama! The scary Romulan ship is actually scary! The space scenes are glorious. Even the dorky polyester costumes from the old days have been redone with better fitting, textured, comfy looking costumes still in the same style and colors.

The iMAX ticket is $14 ($12 + $2 service fee online, and you HAVE to buy in advance because the 400-person theater sells out every show, days in advance) compared to $8 for a regular theater. But it's totally worth it for big movies like this.

I liked lots of stuff about the movie. The origin tales could've been ho-hum, since we know so much about these characters. But they were fun, and the casting was fun. The Chekov kid didn't look like Walter Koenig, but he's truly of Russian descent and his accent was vicked gutt. (And I'd seen Anton Yelchin as a child actor and didn't realize he was Russian!) They made Uhara a real special character with top-notch hearing and linguistic abilities, which I liked, since she was so much like Kirk's executive secretary in the old TV show. Zoe Saldaba was fiery and I very much loved the sly covert relationship they put into this film that makes you look at the old TV show and think, hee, what could have been happening on the down-low!

Simon Pegg played Scotty as wild and briliant; though he didn't look like James Doohan, he was fun. "Capt'n, I'm givin' it all I got!" got cheers. Oh, they made Pegg wear dark contacts and dye his blond hair brown, but still... Chris Pine, the kid playing Kirk, was a big, arrogant, brawly mess, which fit pretty well with both the series and how William Shatner played the captain. Pine didn't... Pause! ... for... Dramatic!... effect in his speaking, and that was okay with me. Nobody can do that anymore ever without making it come off like a shout-out to Shatner. Loved Karl Urban (who I remember mostly as the main bad guy in CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK) getting the squint and dyspeptic dialogue of Dr. Leonard McCoy right.

And Zachary Quinto has that unusual face and dark hair, so he was a fun Spock in some ways. I'd heard he felt he was born to play the role, and indeed, they didn't consider anyone but him. Still, his performance was not as faithful as it needed to be. He didn't work very hard on the voice, I felt like. There's a clipped and dry way that Leonard Nimoy did his dialog, and Quinto was Vulcan-like but not Nimoy-like. And there were only two times he lifted one brow and it seemed like it strained him. Plus he's taller than Nimoy, and they weirdly let the two actors stand side-by-side in some scenes to show the discrepancy.

The origin plot was fun, but the contemporary menace was only so-so. We had a Romulan named Nero (?! too much baggage in human history!) who looked like the shave-headed tattooed bikers written up in INK magazine. He had a standard sort of sob story in his history that was driving him to do a series of obvious, even banal, acts in revenge for something he blamed unreasonably on one person, thus driving the plot. Plus there's a magical element used they don't even attempt to sci-fi up... Luckily for the fun of the movie, this stuff is secondary and you really get into how the characters interact to form the Enterprise we know and love.