Star Trek movie

Having a blog gives me an opportunity to live a dream: to be a movie critic. So, this morning, I checked out the matinee of the new Star Trek movie.

My initial response is: it made me mad. I can't go into too much detail without giving away the plot, so I'll wait until later to do that. Now, it didn't make me mad because of the different actors and changed set or anything like that. Just suffice it to say, now none of the old t.v. series exist. There's now no original series, Next Generation, Voyager or Deep Space Nine. They will now not happen. Okay, we could say that they are all existing fine in some alternate universe, but I'm tired of that line. It's been over-used. It just looks like the producers want a new sand box to play in because they didn't like the restrictions placed on the old one.

As for the movie itself, I was pleasantly surprised. It was a fun action romp. After watching the trailers, I was afraid it would turn into Star Trek: 90210. It had some great one-liners that payed homage to the original series and their characters. And, of course, the effects were great. My one complaint about them is the 'documentary style' camera work for the combat scenes. I prefer a good, solid camera angle. It doesn't make it more realistic to me to have a shaky camera look.

As far as the actors, I felt they nailed McCoy and Spock. I'm not sold on Kirk. I enjoyed the Chekov character, though he seemed a little too Wesley Crusher-like. The other characters were portrayed okay, though I'm not wild about the new Uhura personality. I liked the more spiritual type character that Nichelle Nichols portrayed.

One of my big concerns about movies is all the extra garbage they put into them. Overall, the language and violence didn't bother me, and there wasn't that much sex, other than that one stupid scene that had no importance to the plot, but was only put there to so that they could have a spicey blurb that they could insert into the trailers. That irked me about Iron Man, too.

This is something that I don't understand about Hollywood. In any other market, you want to create a product that can be as universal to as many people as possible. When they keep putting all this offensive material into movies, it just turns me off. I almost didn't go to this movie because of the Kids-in-mind rating of 5-6-4. I'm not going to let my kids go (so they are missing out on those sales) mainly because of that one stupid bedroom scene. I believe if movies would just cut out the '13' stuff and make it PG, their sales would be a lot better. Don't they want to make more money?

So, my final recommendation: wait for the DVD and watch it with a Clearplay filter, then it could be a fun film. And then try not to get annoyed when the Star Trek you know and love no longer exists.