I'm not that much of sci-fi action movie fan but I have to say this was one of the best times I've had a movie in a while. Great action, a serviceable plot and acting, a nice sense of humor, and great, and I mean great, effects. It just looked spectacular and you can see why if you stay through the credits. Must have been well over 100 digital artists involved.
What really made this movie for me though, and made it better than the rest of the Star Trek movies ( or at least those concerning James Kirk and crew) is that the movie used all the members of the crew to great effect.
I don't know why the series and the early movies concentrated so much on Kirk, but this movie was about a group of people and their first voyage. It was not just the log of one man. And the actor playing Kirk was able to create his own version of Kirk, taking just a little of Shatner's persona with him.
My only minuses would be a few scenes were a little too reminiscent of STAR WARS and there were too few women in prominent roles. They could have brought more women into it--the plot would have allowed them to do that. Maybe the next movie will remedy this. Still is has to get an A+ from this reviewer.
21 comments:
As a Trekkie I might just have to check this one out in the theaters where all these effects will probably look best... And I'm glad to hear Leonard Nimoy popped up in this one.
The reasons the series and movies concentrated on Kirk so much have been well documented. Shatner is an egomaniac. James Doohan would not speak to him off camera and Nichols, Takei, and Koenig weren't fond of him either.
He used to take over some of their lines on the show, saying it was to make the story "better."
Absolutely a big-screen movie. And try for the best theater you can find. We had an enormous screen and it was thrilling.
Why am I not surprised, Randy? He reeks egomania/
I agree with your review of STAR TREK. My only reservation is the massive coincidence on the ice planet.
George-Do you mean the meeting up of three key figures?
Yep. What are chances of that...a trillion to one?
"Sci-fi"--while this is less true for some folks, who are tired of the arguments, and not true for others who never felt this way, there are a lot of sf people who look upon Forrest J. Ackerman's coinage of a rhyme for "hi-fi" as a pejorative term for sf generally, or use it mostly for the kind of excrement the Sci-Fi (soon Sy-Fy) Channel prefers to deal in.
I haven't liked anything J. J. Abrams has been involved with so far, so I'm a bit dubious here, but the quarry sequence was shot in my father's hometown of Barre, VT (standing in for Iowa, which kinda lacks for quarries), so I might be treating him to a viewing for the hell of it.
Actually, increasingly through the film series the movies have tried to showcase the other actors, to please fans and give the actors a reason to come on back (quite aside from the money and profile of the gig). But most of the ST movies have been at least goofy or dull or both, with the fourth being the best of what I've seen (with a bit role for my adolescent crush-subject Jane Wiedlin); I gather this one has a small role for my brother's adolescent crush-subject Winona Ryder.
Also, Kirk was egomaniac Roddenberry's stand-in. Harlan Ellison tells a good story about Shatner coming over to check Ellison's "City on the Edge of Forever" script just after HE finished it.
Discussing the product-placement in the new STAR TREK on NPR's WAIT WAIT, DON'T TELL ME today, Paul Provenza: "The Enterprise is built by Chrysler. It's the new K-Enterprise."
Yes, there was a long list of such at the end. The K car: my father had one. It had the longest credits I've ever seen. (We went with a couple who insist on seeing the credits.)
Patti, Glad you enjoyed it. As for the ice planet coincidence, yeah, it's a stretch. But, hey! It was still fun.
BTW, for any out who haven't seen it yet, spring for the extra cash and see it on an IMAX screen. Incredible!
It's definitely a must watch for me.
Egomaniac or not, I can't imagine William Shatner ever had enough power (certainly not on the original series) to make any demands.
From what I've seen in my brief time on series TV, the networks want one star and don't like the idea of ensemble casts if they can help it.
One of the reasons for this is budget - the other actors only have to work one or two days a week - and that's all they get paid for - unless it's a top rated show (which Star Trek never was).
For the movies it might be different, of course.
I liked the new movie. It reminded me how much of the original series was played for laughs.
John-Okay, what if the series takes off, and someone, let's say like a Michael J. Fox or the actor playing Sheldon on Big Bang, is a comet. The show is only succeeding because of his/her presence. Wouldn't he probably begin to get the best lines? Wouldn't he begin to command a bit more "hand" than the blander cast members?
Yes, from what I've seen if the series takes off and one character stands out more than the others, that character would get featured more.
NYPD Blue is a good example. The David Caruso character was supposed to be the star. He was difficult on set, there's plenty of evidence of that, but more importantly, the Dennis Franz character scored much better in focus groups, which no one expected. So, the scripts started to feature Sipowicz more.
I don't know what it was like for Star Trek, but I can say for the show I'm working on the actors can't trade lines on the set - it would be a continuity nightmare, it would be too hard to get coverage (two cameras run at all times) and it might affect the story - which is being shot out of sequence and so on.
It may have been different in the sixties, but even then I'd imagine the director was in charge on set. And Star Trek was never a hit and my guess is Leonard Nimoy has just as big an ego as Shatner (listen to HIS albums, read his poetry, etc., etc.,) he just used it differently.
I bet working with the two was a nightmare but things may have been more fluid then. Or maybe it was why the show had a relatively short run.
The original show never got very good ratings. I heard the only reason it was kept on the air was because it was produced at Desilu Studios and the network wanted to keep Lucille Ball happy.
Oh, the politics of TV - I'm discovering how real that backroom stuff is.
Of course, we Canadians always hear about how Shatner played the leads in all that Shakespeare at the Stratford Festival before he went to Hollywood, so he would have had quite an ego then.
Also, I think actors need big egos. For years, before they get any part they get rejected from hundreds of auditions - if they have no ego they just give up. Usually the difference between the actor that gets the part and the next ten in line is so small it's really a toss-up.
Of course, the key would be keeping those egos in check ;)
The reason Shatner was so wildly unpopular with his fellow cast was apparently if any scene didn't revolve around him, he'd tend to sabotage it, through conscious or perhaps unconscious upstaging, bad line readings, etc. Given his florid actiing style, it is notable that Nimoy chose to go, after the first two pilots, toward a very obvious underacting, that helped set him apart from the rest of the hams on the series, as well (I'm hard pressed to think of anyone else among the regulars on the first series who wasn't emoting for the ages at any opportunity...perhaps Majel Barrett).
The short form of the Ellison script story is that Shatner rode his motorcycle over to Ellison's house when he learned that Ellison had finished the first working draft of "City..." (and had a minor accident en route) and asked to see the script, which Ellison took as a sign of serious dedication, when Shatner, scuffed up, sat down and appeared to read it on the spot. It turned out, apparently, that what Shatner was doing was counting his lines versus the number of lines given to any other actor. Presumably, he would hassle Roddenberry and others if he felt he didn't sufficiently overshadow the others in an episode.
My favorite Shatner anecdote from early in his career was actually delivered by his FLOWER DRUM SONG costar France Nuyen, in her LIFE profile covering that production, wherein she notes that Shatner "needed" massages from her every night to do his best performance. No fool, he. (She, of course, was the Guest Babe on one episode of STAR TREK, but was married to occasional I SPY costar Robert Culp by then...Nuyen and Culp had kissed several times "interracially" on that series before STAR TREK went on the air.)
Ratings drove the short run, Patti...it was never a hit while in production, and the famously even goofier third season followed NBC forcing Roddenberry out of his show-runner role in favor of one Fred Frieberger, who would later ornament the craft with similar bad work on the worse SPACE: 1999. Odd how little-mentioned the cartoon version of the early '70s is, despite getting scripts from some "real" sf writers, such as Larry Niven (who was dabbling in children's television in those years).
Sorry, it was the Broadway version of THE WORLD OF SUZIE WONG that had Nuyen and Shatner in it. (And it was Shatner's florid acting style I referred to, vaguely.)
Shatner gains points for his knowing self-parody in the recent decades, never better than in the lampoon of the film SE7EN he did for an MTV Film Awards cablecast, with all the major roles in the film filled by Shatner in one or another of his major television roles (Shatner as Kirk in the Morgan Freeman role, Shatner as TJ Hooker in the Brad Pitt role, etc.).
Yes, the show limped on because of good writing, creative plotlines. It was certainly not a success because of the acting--unless you count the camp factor.
She was so beautiful, wasn't she (Nuyen).
Gorgeous, particularly in that point in the mid-'60s when she'd lost the baby-fat in her face, but was quite as anorectic as she seemed by 1970 or so. (Getting there by the latter '60s, really.) Still a handsome woman, was very happy to see her and John Astin as a couple in the last seasons of ST. ELSEWHERE.
Sadly, the third season of STAR TREK saw little good writing, either, as most of the better writers who'd helped elevate the first two seasons where they could (Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Ellison, Jerome Bixby, the young David Gerrold) were not sought out by Frieberger and co. Though they did have the good sense to run the most embarrassing episode, in which Kirk and an old female rival switch bodies, to be the absolute last to be broadcast.
Todd-you really should have a column, a website or at least use your blog to write about all things you know about. Like everything.
Post a Comment