It was a good weekend for tv, which meant I only saw 1 movie I’d never seen but revisited a whole slew that I’d forgotten most of. When I woke up on Sunday, SyFy was having a Star Trek movie marathon, and I decided to take it on. Which means I watched:
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
Star Trek: the Search for Spock (1984)
Star Trek: Generations (1994)
Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)
First off, I don’t see why everyone talks so much crap about the first movie. It wasn’t awful, it wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t great, but I didn’t think it was as bad as everyone made it out to be. A little cheesy at times, yes, but holy jeebus have you watched the show lately? Cheese is not excluded from the Trek franchise. Ever. It really just felt like a padded out 60-min episode, which is all I really wanted from it.
Second up, KHAAAAAAAAN! By far the best Trek movie; it’s got an interesting, consistent story that isn’t overcomplicated by trying to cram in as many bad guys as possible. Ricardo Montalban is fantastic, and Scotty on the bagpipes makes me a little misty every goddamn time. Bastards.
Search for Spock would have been a much better film if that’s all it was: the search for Spock. The whole Klingon subplot seemed to only detract from the film rather than add any sort of drama or urgency. I really liked the beginning, with the Enterprise crew taking back the ship. And I really liked the end, the ceremony on Vulcan and even the kind of silly way they brought Spock back . But Christopher Lloyd as a Klingon felt awfully forced, and even the death of Kirk’s son didn’t strike me with any feeling. Even when Kirk repeats it three times. “You Klingon bastards, you killed my son!” We got it the first time. Take out the Klingon stuff, and you have a kickass long episode that I’d watch any day.
Generations? Don’t get me started. A friend and I got into a heated debate via Facebook as I was watching it, he an avid Generations fan and I experiencing it for a second time and being wholly unimpressed. If the whole movie was Kirk and Picard running around saving the world, cool! I’d watch that! But as it is, there’s 20 minutes of kinda cool Kirk and Scotty and Chekov…then there’s an hour of Next Gen stuff that seems flat and pointless, plus Data being emotional is far from funny and mostly just grating…and then the last 20 minutes are devoted to Kirk and Picard kicking ass. But before that, they ride horses. Maybe it’s because my attention was phasing in and out, but the whole “nexus” idea seemed convoluted and thin. I never really understood Guinan’s part, and Malcom McDowell’s character could have been so much more than a sort of generic mad scientist. And did I mention Jean Luc Picard crying? No, really. It’s awful. Just awful.
So then there was Nemesis. This has a few things going for it: 1) Remans, a new-ish villain with some pretty wicked makeup effects, 2) Tom Motherfucking Hardy, a stupendous actor who chews the scenery, swallows it, shits it back out, and flings it against the wall, and 3) Patrick Stewart with a bigass gun. If you’re a Riker/Troy shipper, this is the one where they get married. That really has nothing to do with the story, but it’s there. It has a storyline that’s mostly plausable, some really cool effects (it’s from 2002, so the CGI is well done and feels current), and no weepy captains. Is it brilliant? No. Is it entertaining? Sure. Is it worth watching to see Tom Hardy and Patrick Stewart act each other into the dirt? Definitely.
So that’s my Trek-a-thon for Sunday. There are a lot of worse ways one could spend a cold rainy weekend day. And at the end of it, we had s’mores.
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