Sim1Live long and prosper
August 6th 2009 07:54
Today, dear readers, I am writing to you from aboard a plane. Where I have just had the pleasure of viewing ‘Star Trek’.
I was a little thrown at the beginning of the movie when Home & Away’s Kim Hyde (Chris Hemsworth) came charging across my screen. Don’t get me wrong- I LOVE Home & Away. Some people may even use the term ‘obsessed’, but seeing Kim on a space ship was a little weird, that’s all. They don’t usually have spaceships in Summer Bay you see.
Anyhoo, Chris, of course, wasn’t playing Kim Hyde, he was George Kirk, Captain of the starship Enterprise. For all of 12 minutes, anyway. As his wife gives birth to a screaming bundle, later known James Tiberius Kirk, George sacrifices himself to save the life of his crew, his wife and his newborn son, Armagedon-style.
We then briefly follow the troubled teen Jim Kirk as he goes hooning around in an old car and gets stopped by a police officer floating on air, calling people ‘citizen’. And we can tell pretty early on, our mate Jim is going to be a rebel. In my humble opinion, that whole car scene was unnecessary, you could easily have jumped to young man Kirk and we would have understood that it’s the same brat who was born on the spaceship earlier.
In a parallel storyline, we meet a young Spock. At this point, I would like to take my hat off to the casting peeps. I always love it when a movie has a young version and an old version of any given character, and the actors look so spot on, that you quite happily believe they are the same person, years apart. (They did this brilliantly in A League of their Own, for example) And they’ve done an outstanding job casting Zachary Quinto, who plays the young adult Spock. Don’t you think, dear readers, that he is a dead ringer for Leonard Nimoy, the original Spock? I do. But now I am putting my hat back on, because...Winona Ryder as Spock’s mum? Really?
Well, I must say dear readers, I was totally in love with Spock in this movie. He is so deliciously bitchy, suavely arrogant, he thinks he’s the dog’s bollocks. And in my informed opinion, he is. You rock, Zachary!
So as James T. Kirk and Commander Spock have cat and mouse fights (I really didn’t know that they used to hate each other so much, but I’m not a Trekkie, so I didn’t need to know anyway), we get a dose of J.J. Abrams/ Damon Lindelof magic. These two producers also provide the magic behind my favourite TV show LOST and I could definitely see some Abrams/Lindelof trademarks in their latest offering. For starters, we have the inevitable time travelling. Which, in this movie, made no sense to me at all. But then that doesn’t mean anything, I am usually very slow when it comes to following storylines such as this. Anything more challenging than Dirty Dancing and I’m lost. But I think what happens is that my favourite character Spock catapults Jim off the Entreprise and into an ice dessert in the future. Where he is chased by a dinosaur-type-looking creature (very Jurassic Park and very naff) and then bumps in to Spock the original, played by Leonard Nimoy of course (who else!?).
They then somehow find Montgomery Scott, better known to the general public as Scottie (yes, slow wits, as in ‘Beam me up Scottie). Now the casting people were definitely on drugs when they chose Simon Pegg for this one. My hat is staying firmly on. Not that I have anything against Simon Pegg but he REALLY is no Scottie now, is he?
And with Scottie and Kirk firmly back on the Entreprise, the action continues with the dishing out of black holes (as you do) and general mayhem. Sadly, some of the special effects are shot so fast, you have no idea what you are watching on the screen. It’s impossible to follow and there’s a lot of that. Which is probably why I missed half the storyline. That, and the fact that my plane was going through some major turbulence over Hong Kong.
So I shan’t bore you much longer. It’s an entertaining little action movie. It’s not the greatest thing I have ever watched, but by all means, go and see it. Just don’t do it on a plane passing over a ‘tropical depression’.
I was a little thrown at the beginning of the movie when Home & Away’s Kim Hyde (Chris Hemsworth) came charging across my screen. Don’t get me wrong- I LOVE Home & Away. Some people may even use the term ‘obsessed’, but seeing Kim on a space ship was a little weird, that’s all. They don’t usually have spaceships in Summer Bay you see.
Anyhoo, Chris, of course, wasn’t playing Kim Hyde, he was George Kirk, Captain of the starship Enterprise. For all of 12 minutes, anyway. As his wife gives birth to a screaming bundle, later known James Tiberius Kirk, George sacrifices himself to save the life of his crew, his wife and his newborn son, Armagedon-style.
In a parallel storyline, we meet a young Spock. At this point, I would like to take my hat off to the casting peeps. I always love it when a movie has a young version and an old version of any given character, and the actors look so spot on, that you quite happily believe they are the same person, years apart. (They did this brilliantly in A League of their Own, for example) And they’ve done an outstanding job casting Zachary Quinto, who plays the young adult Spock. Don’t you think, dear readers, that he is a dead ringer for Leonard Nimoy, the original Spock? I do. But now I am putting my hat back on, because...Winona Ryder as Spock’s mum? Really?
So as James T. Kirk and Commander Spock have cat and mouse fights (I really didn’t know that they used to hate each other so much, but I’m not a Trekkie, so I didn’t need to know anyway), we get a dose of J.J. Abrams/ Damon Lindelof magic. These two producers also provide the magic behind my favourite TV show LOST and I could definitely see some Abrams/Lindelof trademarks in their latest offering. For starters, we have the inevitable time travelling. Which, in this movie, made no sense to me at all. But then that doesn’t mean anything, I am usually very slow when it comes to following storylines such as this. Anything more challenging than Dirty Dancing and I’m lost. But I think what happens is that my favourite character Spock catapults Jim off the Entreprise and into an ice dessert in the future. Where he is chased by a dinosaur-type-looking creature (very Jurassic Park and very naff) and then bumps in to Spock the original, played by Leonard Nimoy of course (who else!?).
They then somehow find Montgomery Scott, better known to the general public as Scottie (yes, slow wits, as in ‘Beam me up Scottie). Now the casting people were definitely on drugs when they chose Simon Pegg for this one. My hat is staying firmly on. Not that I have anything against Simon Pegg but he REALLY is no Scottie now, is he?
And with Scottie and Kirk firmly back on the Entreprise, the action continues with the dishing out of black holes (as you do) and general mayhem. Sadly, some of the special effects are shot so fast, you have no idea what you are watching on the screen. It’s impossible to follow and there’s a lot of that. Which is probably why I missed half the storyline. That, and the fact that my plane was going through some major turbulence over Hong Kong.
So I shan’t bore you much longer. It’s an entertaining little action movie. It’s not the greatest thing I have ever watched, but by all means, go and see it. Just don’t do it on a plane passing over a ‘tropical depression’.
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