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I saw Star Trek again today. I still like it inordinately. :-)
However, on second viewing ( spoilers and nitpicks )
...
I love all the characters to itty bitty pieces. I love the ships. I love the feeling of new possibilities. And I want the sequel yesterday, please.
I wish so hard this were the pilot of a new tv series. I don't want to just see the high points and grand adventures every few years. I want new Trek every week, damn it all. I would not buy a television, but I might possibly cave and find a way to watch it streaming online.
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In other Trek-related news, I bought the novelization (yes, I am weak and obsessive) and started reading it on the bus ride home. It's by Alan Dean Foster, which is two strikes against it right there. I do not like his writing style one bit -- it's too showy, too 'let me dazzle you with my writing skills and style and vocabulary and stuff!' Foster never steps back to let the plot and characters shine through; he's always standing between the reader and the story, smirking and winking and showing off.
(I have not read any of Foster's original work all the way through. The couple times I opened one of his novels, I was always put off by the style in the first handful of pages and set the book down, regardless of my opinion on the characters and plot. I did read his novelization of Transformers, but with gritted teeth, because I was never able to fully work past or ignore his style. It is, I think, a style designed specifically so it can't be ignored. I don't like that. I consider it abominably bad writing. The style should serve the story, not vice versa.)
But anyway, so far I think that the revisions made by the scriptwriters between the version of the script handed to Foster and the version that was filmed were good and wise choices. The opening scenes and dialogue are much tighter and less stupidly annoying in the film. Also (and I don't know how much of this is due to dialogue changes, how much is a credit to Chris Pine's acting, and how much is a black mark against Foster's writing) film!Kirk is an oddly adorable jerk and I was rooting for him all the way, but book!Kirk is just a douchebag, which is unfortunate since he's one of the story's two protagonists and the one more clearly meant to fill the 'heroic' role.
Nonetheless, I am going to finish the book. It is useful to have nearly official canon details for stuff that there just wasn't time to put into the film, and I am hoping (perhaps fruitlessly) that Foster may have addressed some of the plot holes and continuity gaps from the film. (Though I will tell you, already he's gone and made the ( spoiler ) *headdesk* That may not be strictly his fault -- it may have been in the early version of the script -- but it's not a promising sign.)
However, on second viewing ( spoilers and nitpicks )
...
I love all the characters to itty bitty pieces. I love the ships. I love the feeling of new possibilities. And I want the sequel yesterday, please.
I wish so hard this were the pilot of a new tv series. I don't want to just see the high points and grand adventures every few years. I want new Trek every week, damn it all. I would not buy a television, but I might possibly cave and find a way to watch it streaming online.
---------------
In other Trek-related news, I bought the novelization (yes, I am weak and obsessive) and started reading it on the bus ride home. It's by Alan Dean Foster, which is two strikes against it right there. I do not like his writing style one bit -- it's too showy, too 'let me dazzle you with my writing skills and style and vocabulary and stuff!' Foster never steps back to let the plot and characters shine through; he's always standing between the reader and the story, smirking and winking and showing off.
(I have not read any of Foster's original work all the way through. The couple times I opened one of his novels, I was always put off by the style in the first handful of pages and set the book down, regardless of my opinion on the characters and plot. I did read his novelization of Transformers, but with gritted teeth, because I was never able to fully work past or ignore his style. It is, I think, a style designed specifically so it can't be ignored. I don't like that. I consider it abominably bad writing. The style should serve the story, not vice versa.)
But anyway, so far I think that the revisions made by the scriptwriters between the version of the script handed to Foster and the version that was filmed were good and wise choices. The opening scenes and dialogue are much tighter and less stupidly annoying in the film. Also (and I don't know how much of this is due to dialogue changes, how much is a credit to Chris Pine's acting, and how much is a black mark against Foster's writing) film!Kirk is an oddly adorable jerk and I was rooting for him all the way, but book!Kirk is just a douchebag, which is unfortunate since he's one of the story's two protagonists and the one more clearly meant to fill the 'heroic' role.
Nonetheless, I am going to finish the book. It is useful to have nearly official canon details for stuff that there just wasn't time to put into the film, and I am hoping (perhaps fruitlessly) that Foster may have addressed some of the plot holes and continuity gaps from the film. (Though I will tell you, already he's gone and made the ( spoiler ) *headdesk* That may not be strictly his fault -- it may have been in the early version of the script -- but it's not a promising sign.)
