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edenfallingI saw Star Trek again today. I still like it inordinately. :-)
However, on second viewing I started noticing some pacing things that bugged me. Like, the chase onHoth Delta Vega really did not need to be that extended. Likewise the Scotty-in-the-coolant-tubes scene. Both could have been trimmed by, oh, at least a minute, I think, which would have allowed time for some extra continuity bits or character moments elsewhere.
Also, the mind meld scene is... on the one hand, the echo effect is kind of cool, and the visuals are interesting, but that monologue. Ouch. It is just too damn vague -- why no name for the star that went supernova, for one thing? Did Spock know Romulus had blown up before he got close enough to 'launch the red matter'? Nero and his crew apparently had time to shave and tattoo (or paint, in anticipation of later tattoos) their heads between Romulus blowing up and traveling back in time, so there must have been some gap between the planet's death and their confrontation with Spock, and that confrontation seems to have happened right after he turned the supernova into a black hole (speaking of which, don't supernovas turn into black holes naturally anyway? or at least neutron stars or something? so maybe he wasn't trying to collapse the star but instead was going after part of the expanding sphere of stuff the dying star throws out? I dunno, astronomy is not my strong point, but there's something fishy about that whole scenario) so there has to have been at least a several hour gap between Romulus-go-boom and Nero catching up to Spock at the new black hole. But you'd never know that from Nimoy's monologue.
He delivered it as well as anyone could possibly be expected to deliver that mess, but this time around, I was not so distracted by 'Spock! It's Spock! It's Leonard Nimoy playing Spock!' and actually tried to make sense of the plot and it made me want to beat my head against the back of the seat in front of me.
Hmm. When I saw the film on Wednesday, the theater was nearly empty. This was not at all surprising -- 3:10pm on a weekday is never going to be busy -- but it made for a sort of... well, I had to provide all my own excitement, because there was no crowd to have synergy with. This time, 4:10pm on a Saturday, the theater was nearly 3/4 full, and people laughed and gasped and cheered at occasional appropriate moments. For example, at any of McCoy's "I'm a doctor!" lines, or when old Spock introduces himself and Kirk says, "Bullshit," half the theater cracked up. And there was a brief round of applause as the credits began to roll. I like that atmosphere better, because it's sort of validating to know that everyone else is loving the movie as much as I am.
Amanda's death came off even more pointlessly objectifying on second viewing. Seriously, how hard would it have been to drop a nameless Vulcan elder off the cliff, have Amanda lunge toward him or her, and lose her balance in that motion? Then you could still have her fall out of transporter lock, and have Spock reaching fruitlessly for her, but her death would not have felt so utterly gratuitous. I know why she had to die. But why, why, why couldn't someone have taken a minute to give her death purpose?
...
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 problem with humans knowing that Romulans and Vulcans are the same species even worse -- in the film, there's no indication that anyone on the Kelvin knows that, and I can handwave that the Vulcans admitted the truth specifically because of that mess, but in Foster's novelization, that connection is already common knowledge something like, IIRC, thirty years before it ought to have been known at all. *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 I started noticing some pacing things that bugged me. Like, the chase on
Also, the mind meld scene is... on the one hand, the echo effect is kind of cool, and the visuals are interesting, but that monologue. Ouch. It is just too damn vague -- why no name for the star that went supernova, for one thing? Did Spock know Romulus had blown up before he got close enough to 'launch the red matter'? Nero and his crew apparently had time to shave and tattoo (or paint, in anticipation of later tattoos) their heads between Romulus blowing up and traveling back in time, so there must have been some gap between the planet's death and their confrontation with Spock, and that confrontation seems to have happened right after he turned the supernova into a black hole (speaking of which, don't supernovas turn into black holes naturally anyway? or at least neutron stars or something? so maybe he wasn't trying to collapse the star but instead was going after part of the expanding sphere of stuff the dying star throws out? I dunno, astronomy is not my strong point, but there's something fishy about that whole scenario) so there has to have been at least a several hour gap between Romulus-go-boom and Nero catching up to Spock at the new black hole. But you'd never know that from Nimoy's monologue.
He delivered it as well as anyone could possibly be expected to deliver that mess, but this time around, I was not so distracted by 'Spock! It's Spock! It's Leonard Nimoy playing Spock!' and actually tried to make sense of the plot and it made me want to beat my head against the back of the seat in front of me.
Hmm. When I saw the film on Wednesday, the theater was nearly empty. This was not at all surprising -- 3:10pm on a weekday is never going to be busy -- but it made for a sort of... well, I had to provide all my own excitement, because there was no crowd to have synergy with. This time, 4:10pm on a Saturday, the theater was nearly 3/4 full, and people laughed and gasped and cheered at occasional appropriate moments. For example, at any of McCoy's "I'm a doctor!" lines, or when old Spock introduces himself and Kirk says, "Bullshit," half the theater cracked up. And there was a brief round of applause as the credits began to roll. I like that atmosphere better, because it's sort of validating to know that everyone else is loving the movie as much as I am.
Amanda's death came off even more pointlessly objectifying on second viewing. Seriously, how hard would it have been to drop a nameless Vulcan elder off the cliff, have Amanda lunge toward him or her, and lose her balance in that motion? Then you could still have her fall out of transporter lock, and have Spock reaching fruitlessly for her, but her death would not have felt so utterly gratuitous. I know why she had to die. But why, why, why couldn't someone have taken a minute to give her death purpose?
...
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 problem with humans knowing that Romulans and Vulcans are the same species even worse -- in the film, there's no indication that anyone on the Kelvin knows that, and I can handwave that the Vulcans admitted the truth specifically because of that mess, but in Foster's novelization, that connection is already common knowledge something like, IIRC, thirty years before it ought to have been known at all. *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.)
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Date: 2009-05-18 01:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-18 02:22 am (UTC)