To boldy go back to the drawing board
Watched Star Trek on Tuesday. Don't need to distinguish it from the first motion picture because that was called Star Trek: The Motion Picture (as if the series it was based on was a series of stills). It was enjoyable as far as it went and some of the most interesting stuff was the characterisation while still on terra firma. The action was slam-bang, but the movie was at least 15-20 minutes too long and rather prosaic at the end, nothing really original. The enemy spaceship had a great outer appearance but was rather same-old, same-old inside. Moreover, the rogue Romulan commander was not really evil, but just had some anger management issues, which make his destruction of Vulcan irritating - not just because meddling with time should result in positive outcomes for a feel-good film, but also because his demise was not so special. When the Empire destroyed a planet in Star Wars Episode IV they got their comeuppance within the running time with the grievous blow of the destruction of the Death Star. Also, if the Vulcan singularity device creates black holes that transport things across time, then surely the villain will just reappear at another place in time. More pertinently, I want to know where that supernova fire that aged Spock managed to swallow up with a mini black hole went. For all that, it was good to see Leonary Nimoy in a meaty film role and it was great to see all the young stalwarts (and a youngish Captain Pike) in yet another origin story that has been released since Batman Begins. The international profiling was not in evidence here - indeed the Klingons (Soviet Russia) were only mentioned in passing and the Cardassians (1930s - early 1940s Germany) only had their sunrise cited on a cocktail menu. The Vulcans (Japanese post-war cerebral and passive) and Romulans (communist Chinese - impulsive and militaristic) were the only other alien races to be known by their names. J J Abhrams has done a great job, but next time he could employ some other screenwriters that the guys who made such a mess of the first live-action Transformers movie. Good, but not great. 3/5.
On another note, I was recently watching the throughly moderate Mission Impossible Two (another low note in John Woo's Hollywood sojourn) and during the climax of the film in the middle of a chase scene, ITV decided to go to the adverts. Admittedly, the tension wasn't great, but it's one of the basic rules of programming that you don't do that. Yesterday night, during the Champions League Final, they failed for most of the match to actually have the time and score in the corner of the screen. This is just rank incompetence. No wonder michael Grade failed to turn around the ship and is now leaving.
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