“Huzzah! A top 100 entry! I should hopefully be back on track with these. I theoretically have time now, and my unwatched movie queue is at a manageable size. Kinda fitting to pick it up exactly at the halfway point.
And what we have here is Star Trek. (Its taking all my willpower to not type Star Wars outta habit). Yes, I’m talking about the 2009 JJ Abrams reboot. This film was actually my first real introduction to the Trek. I am nerd enough that I was at least aware of a lot of things about it: Shatner and Nimoy, Kirk vs Picard, unnamed red shirts getting killed, tribbles, set your phasers to stun, live long and prosper. But I still somehow never managed to watch a movie or an episode.
I went to a midnight premier with some of the Guildies. I believe there were nine of us. Our Trek exposure ran the spectrum. We ranged from Trek virgin (me) to people who had named their cats after obscure characters, and various points in between. Every single one of us \m/ loved it. That right there is a great testament to the awesome of this film. It was able to appease the die hard, presumably picky and tough to please, fans while at the same time keeping things approachable for us n00bs.
There were a few factors that I feel made it accomplish this task. First, was the way the plot actually addressed the reboot with the whole time travel black hole thingy. Most reboots just start over and dont ever acknowledge (except for a gag here or there) what’s happened. This one not only acknowledged a history, but found a way to preserve it, while still creating its own path. Genius! The other factor was that it embraced the quirks and camp and fun that people loved. Case in point, the dude with the red jumpsuit when they free fall to Vulcan.
Even without the rich geek history, I thought that Star Trek was the perfect summer movie. I’ll go one step further and say that it was my favorite movie of 2009. But for summer, it had everything you want in your blockbusters: ACTION, humor, star cast, adventure, ACTION, and all of it larger than life and state of hte art.
My single favorite piece of the film, Zachary Quinto. I’d loved him as Sylar on Heroes, and I was excited to see him here. If you just know him from Heroes, you might not have immediately thought of Quinto when casting the film, but he played it perfectly. And having met the boy (ZQ himself), I can assure you that this soft spoken sweetheart is infinitely more like Spock in real life than Sylar. I also just \m/ loved the character. Again, I’d never seen any old school Star Trek, so Id only been exposed to bits and pieces of Spock. I think its his whole logic thing that draws me to him. I consider myself to be a highly logical person, so he’s incredibly relatable to me. Granted, he’s far more extreme in his logic than I am, but that’s what makes it all so amusing.
This was also the first BluRay I watched when I got my shiny HD tv. I was absolutely blown away by the visual. This is a rare occurance for me. I called the roomie in adn the two of us just stared at the pretty on the screen. I was exclaiming that I could practically count ZQ’s stubble hairs.
Back to the characters, there were so many others that I came to love and appreciate that I was (for the most part) unfamiliar with. I adored Anton Yelchin’s Chekov. Easily my next fave after Spock. John Cho as Sulu was fantatic as well, as was Simon Pegg’s Scotty. Although I just cringed a bit at Scotty’s “”Im giving her all she’s got, Captain””. Here’s why. When the film was out, I ate at BK a lot so I could get a bunch of the talking toys. That’s the line that Scotty’s toy says. The’ve been in my closet since November (only a few toys made it to my desk at the new job). Every \m/ time I move anything in my closet, he gets set off and I hear that line. Its annoying.
Film’s wrapping up, but my one final note: major bonus points for the Leonard Nimoy cameo.