Star Trek
Tammy. Are you ready to sit still for a while?
Big fun, this Star Trek moving picture item. In fact, I bet that the less of a Trekkie you are, the more fun you’ll have. Early on, the movie’s less-than-sacrosanct intentions are clear when one of the franchise’s catchphrases, “live long and prosper,” is delivered not as a bromide but as a dis.
For my money, the best of all the Star Trek movies is Galaxy Quest, a hat-trick of a movie. It’s a parody, it’s a valentine, and it has its own air-tight perfection. This new Star Trek nearly matches Galaxy Quest in sheer self-awareness. For a while there I thought the Requisite Cosmic Thingamabob — “Red Matter” — was going to be a cheeky homage to GQ’s RCT, “Omega 13.”
The secret to Star Trek’s entertainment showed up the big screen before the feature even started. Half of the trailers concerned the destruction of Earth. (Fingers crossed for a Barbie cameo in that headache-inducing G.I. Joe contraption.) Michael Bay is squeezing out another Transformers doohickey. Mention Bay and I think of one thing, that beautiful, poignant and all-too-true love song from Team America: World Police:
Why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies?
I guess Pearl Harbor sucked
Just a little bit more than I miss you.
Michael Bay makes movies for saps, poor self-deluded males who need to indulge in two hours of surreptitious violent prowess. J.J. Abrams, who directed Star Trek, is Bay’s direct opposite. Abrams came to the project after making TV a somewhat smarter place. He likes graceful puzzle-stories and he likes the way humans interlock — as opposed to being exploded — when they grapple for position. Star Trek is so good that you forget that no matter where Abrams takes us in space, it’s always sea-level Earth gravity; and that although Romulans can destroy entire planets in jiffy, their henchman prefer to go mano-a-mano armed with giant can openers.
1 Comment so far
Guess I’m one of the saps, the poor self-delude males that Michael Bay makes movies for. [Even though I'm female]. “The Island” had too many macho explosions and car chases, but the story about abuse of cloned humans was fascinating. Someday I will suffer through the gratuitous violence again for the sake of seeing the good parts. There’s another movie about cloning coming out: “Never Let Me Go,” based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. It stars Keira Knightly, so perhaps it will get a more high-class treatment than “The Island.”