Okay, Spock is hot.

[metawidget]

I watched the new Star Trek movie tonight (for the first time, unlike some of the people I watched it with!), and enjoyed it. To cover the territory of most of the reaction I've seen to the film so far, Zachary Quinto as young Spock is uncanny and by far the cutest member of the cast.

The film was fun; I think the feel was as true to the old Star Trek as would've been achievable this decade. I found it felt less epic than I was expecting, though. It felt more like an action film than I remember the others being. The updated look of everything was very nice, even if it was obscured by shaking and violent lighting a lot of the time. There were lots of fun and/or funny nods to previous incarnations of Star Trek, and things flowed along at a brisk and generally exciting pace.

One minor complaint is the Pike interrogation scene felt like a bit of a wimp-out. You have Nero the crazy Romulan, traumatized by the destruction of his planet in the future, looking for someone to blame and having captured Capt. Pike and strapped him to a board in a room full of water. Rather than follow through and go all Bush administration on him, we get a filmic quotation of Wrath of Khan instead, with the bug insertion. Couldn't they have been just a little subversive?

Comments

[teinm_laida.livejournal.com]

Criticizing the Bush administration is subversive now?

You know what my dad said the second we walked out of that movie? "The Vulcans are the Jews." (Watch out Israel!)

I maintain that people need to stop bringing real life into my sci-fi.

[metawidget]

Letting politics of any sort into a summer movie is subversive, as far as summer movies go.

And roughly half of USians might need to see a crazy Romulan do it to realize it's unacceptable*. I think it's more the torture thing than who's doing it; seeing a sympathetic character (and not even one in a red shirt) get waterboarded might shut down any questions of whether it's torture for a while.

*and any Canadians and others with similar delusions, although I haven't seen polling data up here, attitudes don't immediately drop to zero at the border.

[teinm_laida.livejournal.com]

The Star Trek movie was a military recruitment film. So's Transformers. That's what summer movies are always for ... so there's some politics.

Lots of people know that it's torture. They just can't find much sympathy for terrorists who murder innocent civilians. I can't either. I'm only against torture for my own self-interest/personal ethics, not because I give a damn if these monsters get a tiny taste of the suffering they've inflicted. It's hard to be outraged at the CIA when part of your brain is saying "hit him harder!"

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I thought it was pretty good, too. And I've been explaining to non-Trekker friends that it's accessible to them and not just fanboys, which it is. But there's plenty enough for us fanboys, too :)