Set Your Phasers To Fun

I’m much more of a Star Wars geek than I am a Star Trek geek. I love Star Trek but I never suspended all my disbelief the way I did for Star Wars. The new Star Trek movie is opening tonight, and it’s the first one I’ve been excited about since… well ever. Star Trek, in all its incarnations, was a television show, and it never translated to the big screen well for me. The director of the new Star Trek, J.J. Abrams, seems to feel the same way. He’s famous for big budget Hollywood summer blockbusters – Armageddon is the most famous – and having beautiful women in tight clothes beat people up on television – Alias and Lost. He’s “rebooted” the Star Trek series and upset some “purists” along the way. Instead of a morality play, this is supposed to sell popcorn, and he couldn’t find a spot for William Shatner. I’m happy about the first; I’m sad about the second, but not angry. Abrams has told the “purists” in interviews not to see the movie; it will only make them angry. I don’t know if upsetting these people is a good idea. A bunch of them have a tenuous grasp on reality as it is. The early reviews for the film are very good, so I hope some psychotic trekkie doesn’t stab Abrams with a Klingon dagger before he can finish the sequel. I’m hoping that he can do something special with the franchise the way Ron Moore did with Battlestar Galactica. The less talky more shooty approach is a better way to tell Kirk’s story anyway. I do hope they bring back some of the camp that made the original series great, but they may have had to let it go so the whole thing wouldn’t wind up cheesy. I understand that the guy playing Kirk avoided everything Shatner while filming, which couldn’t have been easy. I see more Priceline commercials than I do Geico commercials. I may have to go see this one alone, though. MJ has never been a big Star Trek fan, and she’s even less of an action movie fan.