Catalyst Castle: Movie Review: Star Trek

Movie Review: Star Trek

Posted by Catalyst at 2:42 PM

Star Trek is a 2009 film that offers a new take on the classic series. The film features time-traveling Romulans from the future causing events that create an alternate timeline. This allows the movie to go back and explore the early adventures of the original show’s characters without facing continuity restraints. The film focuses primarily on Kirk and Spock, showing bits of their early lives and how each of them ended up joining Starfleet. Things quickly escalate when Starfleet is called on to aid the planet Vulcan – a mission that goes sour quickly, leaving many Starfleet vessels destroyed and the enterprise without a captain. The fledgling crew of the enterprise, most of whom are still cadets, must pull together to overcome the Romulan threat.

This film was very well written. It captured a sense of epic adventure and heroism that Star Trek often seems to lack. They also did a good job writing and casting the characters. I felt like I could be watching younger versions of the original cast. This film actually made me like Kirk. I didn’t much care for him in the original series and movies. It also gave a new perspective on Spock, my favorite character from the original show, which only made him more intriguing. I like how they made Spock’s repressed emotions an actual plot point, rather than just a minor background element.

This film definitely revived the franchise for me. I’m looking forward to a sequel.

Roleplaying
Because of my obsession with roleplaying games, I tend to watch most movies and shows with an eye for what I could take from it and apply to gaming. Here are some ideas from Star Trek.

Space Exploration Adventures: This movie got me excited for the idea of playing an RPG about space exploration adventures. I’ve been working on an RPG of my own for a while now that would essentially be Star Trek with the branding removed. Some of the things I like about Star Trek that could make for interesting roleplaying are the galactic politics, the alien cultures, and the random encounters made while exploring new regions of space.

Character Driven Plot: To a large extent, the plot of Star Trek is tied very closely to the characters involved. I think the film did a great job of making the characters matter to the overall story. This could/should be done in any RPG, but this film made me a little more alert to strive for that kind of character involvement in RPGs.

3 comments:

One of the things I appreciated about this movie is that it explored things which had been written about in novels but wasn't necessarily cannon. For instance the prejudice that Spock faced being half-human was discussed in several books, including being bullied in school. So I thought it was great that they latched onto that and decided to show it.

Also I've read in interviews that the original timeline that older Spock came from is still in tact. Which makes me think that this is more of like an alternate universe, or parallel universe. There's always been a mirror universe and there was a TNG episode which featured Worf and showed that in Star Trek a seemingly infinite number of parallel universes exist. I believe it's likely that Nero and Spock managed to travel through not only space time but between dimensions. I mean it's happened before via transporter accident, travel through the Bajoran Wormhole, etc. I don't see why travel through a Red Matter singularity couldn't do it.

I absolutely loved the characters. I'm with you Kirk was likable as an older man in the movies. But as a younger man he tended to annoy me. Now that I look at him again he is not so bad, I think people tend to focus too much on his skirt chasing and some of his more irritating qualities and mannerisms. He was a good Captain though. But I loved the way Chris Pine played him...he got the character right without trying to copy but the times he did do things that emulated William Shatner's Kirk it was really cool rather than irritating.

I think my personal favorite although he didn't do a LOT was Bones. I expected to like him the least, something about the bits they showed in the previews just seemed out of place and I had trouble picturing the burly future King of Rohan as the scrawny southern doctor McCoy. But...once he actually showed up in the movie he was an instant favorite.

Spock I really enjoyed, although I couldn't help but think of Sylar here and there, it really made me see how an actor who was good in a particular role could be type cast. But he did a really good job , I can't think of someone who could've done it better. I was kinda shocked about his relationship with Uhura. But when I watched it with my mom she seemed to feel that it actually had some basis from TOS. And I've found on youtube clips of Uhura trying to flirt with Spock a bit and then another where he was playing his instrument in the rec room and she started singing a song about him. He actually smiles at her and it's quite interesting. The more I've seen it the more its grown on me and I've come to accept it.

I look forward to seeing the rest of the characters get a little more chance for development in whatever future movie they make.

And I'm really excited while my friend is here we're planning on going to Kennedy Space Center which is showing it on their IMAX. I can't wait. =D

Lady0ftheSith said...

June 10, 2009 at 10:36 AM

Oh dear...my response was longer than your original post... >_<

Lady0ftheSith said...

June 10, 2009 at 10:36 AM

No problem. Thanks for the enthusiastic response, and I'm glad you enjoyed the movie as much as I did.

Catalyst said...

June 10, 2009 at 10:07 PM