Feel Our Love

It's a good season to be a geek. There's going to be 3 new phones (new iphone, Palm Pre and the Nokia N97), and the summer's turning out to be an extended comic con. Wolverine, Star Trek, T4, Transformers 2, GI Joe - oh man, someone realized us geeks have dollars to spend in the theaters.

I saw the new "Star Trek" film last weekend. I even had female company thanks to my sacrifce from months ago in watching a chick flick. She'll figure out the Vulcan salute soon enough. If you've seen even a single episode of the old Star Trek, you'll know it's so damn cheesy it looks like they tried hamming it up in every single scene. If I find time later (and have the patience), I'll edit this post to link up some shining examples. In the meantime you can search youtube for "star trek wtf". After you read this post, that is.

The film opens with an overdramatic childbirth, and yet it has pretty cool explosions, people scampering and even a moment of comedy. In short, they nailed everything about the series in the first 10 minutes and kept it going for the next hour and a half. Kirk grows up as a bad ass rebel with no obvious reason - he's just made that way, accept it, okay? It was refreshing to see all the characters we've seen over the years getting introduced. The near-lack of wrinkles and the new found "serious treatment" in reboots seems to payoff. Speaking of wrinkles, Nimoy shows up and looks like he may drop dead any minute now. There's no Shat, and frankly it's a good thing.

The managed to weave all the cliches (set phasers to stun, live long and prosper, dammit man I'm a doctor not a phycisist) and somehow pulled it off without sounding like a Futurama parody. They even vaporize a redshirt. While the inside jokes are for fans to snigger about, the movie is quite the ride even for people looking for a solid sci-fi/action film. There's plenty of lasers, spaceships, punches to the groin, a little cleavage, samurai swords, histrionics, tragedy and all that jazz.

I was grinning ear to ear by the time the credits rolled, and I'll probably see it again. I think rebooting of every franchise kind of reflects the times we're in and the times that passed by. The people in the 60s and 70s seemed to have been so baked nothing from that era had a shred of seriousness in it. Batman anyone? Now we're all about being sensible, environmentally responsible - "serious" in general. Our superheroes are getting bad ass, sensitive and more human. It's not a trend I'm very happy about, but it's refreshing to see the doritos eating community get some respect.

Next week : T4. Super.