7 May 2009 by Chris     No Comments    Posted under: Entertainment

Star Trek movie – great. Mainly.

(Minor spoilers only)

OK, here’s the thing which we thought was really clever about the new Star Trek movie. We all know the film is a “start all over again” effort, going back to the beginning of the Original Series. But the smart thing is that you quickly realise what they’ve done is to take (yet another) time travelling premise, where a character from the Star Trek we all know and love comes back in time to tell the new cast that they’re now in an alternate reality where everything he knew is going to be different. Very clever. So in this (and presumably subsequent) movies, we’re now seeing the characters we know and love in a new timeline. See what they did there?

Most of the characters are terrific, as they needed to be if they were to stand comparison to the originals. Although the new (young) Kirk doesn’t try to be Shatner (good decision), the new Spock is more Spock than the old one (extraordinarily so), and the guy who plays Bones quite brilliantly takes all the best characteristics of the original and does great things with them. And we loved Simon Pegg as Scotty, the comedy relief of the whole film.

But here’s the bit we didn’t like, because we just couldn’t explain it. Spock throws Kirk off the Enterprise, sending him down in some sort of escape capsule to a planet (“Delta Vega”) with a remote Federation base nearby, where presumably he’ll be safe. OK so far. He lands in a frozen icy wasteland. But then, bizarrely, he bumps into the time-travelling “Old Spock”, who just happened to be knocking around down there. And then they both meet Scotty, who happens to be about the only person in the universe who can get them back to Enterprise. WTF? Have they discovered Infinite Improbability Drive too? The only explanation I can offer is that “Old Spock” was marooned there by the baddie because it was the nearest planet to Vulcan, and he wanted “Old Spock” to see what happened to Vulcan; and Kirk ended up there because, well, Enterprise was leaving Vulcan when he was ejected from the ship. How they managed to bump into each other defeated us though; it can’t have been through chance.

Any theories would be gratefully received.

From chud.com: “The script relies endlessly on coincidence and happenstance. In one scene young Kirk is marooned on a frozen planet. Chased by a succession of monsters (shades of going through the Core in Phantom Menace, but thankfully the only place where Star Trek compares to that film), he ends up in a random ice cave… where a Spock from a hundred years in the future happens to have taken refuge. Oh, and they find Scotty 14 miles away. Lucky! The whole movie is like that…”

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