By James White, MSN Movies |  |
Star Trek: Excited?
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The first reactions have been favourable
Cannily realising that word of mouth might help kick the film’s awareness levels up, Paramount tricked fans in Austin into thinking they were attending a screening of classic Trek outing The Wrath Of Khan, before pulling a bait-and-switch and rolling out the new film. The response? Overwhelmingly favourable, with even hardened fans admitting that Abrams and co had cracked it.
Though no one can truly replace William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley and the rest of the original Trek team, newbies Chris Pine (Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Spock), Karl Urban (McCoy) and Zoe Saldana (Uhura) certainly seem to be bringing something fresh to the characters. And with Nimoy aboard to help pass the torch, it looks like the new crew will impress in the roles once they’ve settled in.
We recently got a glimpse of 25 minutes of the movie, and can report that much of what we saw was superb – with intense action moments and some beautiful starship shots on display.
…With some terrible cheese on top.
The one big problem that was revealed by the early footage was the humour – between a shot of Kirk being smuggled on board the Enterprise and having an allergic reaction to something McCoy gives him to fake an infection (cue comically huge hands and tongue) and Simon Pegg’s Scotty admitting he’d “love to get my hands on the Enterprise’s nacelles, if you know what I mean”, the humour seems pitched at warp factor cheese.
The writers’ work has not always been the most consistent- hell, Transformers mostly works because it’s got giant robots, not because the script is great. And while the pair do well developing high concept ideas (which, let’s face it, Trek already has in place), their actual stories/characters/plots etc aren’t the best. Let’s hope Trek shucks that trend.
It has been more than 40 years since the original series began, and in that time we’ve seen five series, 10 films and enough spin-off novels and merchandise to fill several warehouses. Despite the seemingly limitless possibilities of science fiction, surely most tales have been told in Star Trek and it’s time to move on now? We’d offer up the lacklustre latest series, Enterprise, as evidence.
Excellent
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