STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS REVIEW–Back To The (Stupid) Future

ALL SPOILERS ALL SPOILERS ALL SPOILERS

———————-You’ve been warned————————-

So I saw Star Trek Into Darkness (STID) last night.  Greg and I also saw The Darkness in Lancaster, PA, a few weeks back.  They were awesome.  Justin Hawkins is the sole remaining living embodiment of Rock and Roll.  He literally climbed the walls and rode around on some guy’s back.  I personally would like to see the new cast of Start-Wreck (cause a lot of things were wrecked in this movie) join The Darkness–or more precisely, vice versa.  Frankie Poulain would make a mean-looking first officer.

Anyway, I kinda think I saw this movie before, but backwards.  Kirk dies in the warp chamber, and Spock screams “KHAN!!!”.  Okay, so it was decent.  I do like the new cast, particularly Karl Urban as Bones and Chirs Pine as Kirk.  I think Kirk makes a few “unKirklike” choices in the movie, including one part where he whines that he doesn’t know what to do, yet mostly, he does fulfill that poster: he can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome he believes he is.  He also signs on to assassinate Khan early in the movie, but that’s just not Kirk-style.  There was a robot dude on the bridge, I suppose a tribute to Data in Next Gen, but at first I thought he was a Deltan.  You don’t really know until you see some big Matsumoto dial sticking into the back of his head.  Well, maybe he’s a cymol–human with a robot brain, I think Jack Chalker came up with the term back in the 80s.

The best character by far has to be the diminutive, speechless alien that Scotty refers to as a walking oyster.  I was thinking cabbage, really, or Nien Numb from Jedi.  I would say that he’s Scotty’s mini-me, except that Scotty doesn’t look like an oyster.  He was fairly pickled in once scene, though.  It really does sound like the ghost of Jimmy Doohan.  The all-time best though was Peter Weller–that’s right, Buckaroo Freakin’ Bazai!  Man, he looks old.  Sorry, Buckaroo, we love you like nobody’s business.  Blue Blaze irregular here in the Garden State.  But why’d you have to try to blow up James Kirk?  And your own daughter?  Sheesh.

So you know that this movie is basically Wrath of Khan all over again, except that Khan doesn’t die, he just gets turned back into a popsicle after they use his blood to bring Kirk  BACK FROM THE DEAD.  That’s right, folks.  And he wasn’t even wearing a red shirt (Checkov was though).  Kirk is now a zombie, who, along with an army of reanimated tribbles, will attempt to eat yer brainz in the middle of the night!  Or the next movie.  Well, he might try to eat Carol Marcus first.  Yummy, though you would rather see a little meat on her bones.  (Ahnold: Vhat have you been feeding dis theeeng? Kirk: Blondes….)

I liked the Klingon face-spine ear piercings.  Uhura claimed to speak Klingon, but hey, we’ll never really know, since she just could have had a bad cold with a lot of mucus.  What do Klingons call their face-spines anyway?  If a kid gets food on it, what do the Klingon parents say?  Oh, yeah, that’s right…nobody can tell because it seems like they are just having a tasty cold.

In short: much better than the first Star Trek reboot, which I liked.  It’s neat to watch the good ol’ NCC-1701 go atmospheric, but you know they stole that off the BSG reboot.   One lingering question: if most of Starfleet’s Senior Staff was machine-gunned (err, layered) by Khan in the Khan-ference room, who is left actually in charge of Kirk?  And why exactly are they sending him on a five-year mission when war with the Klingon empire is so apparent?  Well, maybe they ARE building ten more ships of the Andromeda class to take on the White Comet, that would do it.  Oh, wait….that was StarBlazers….I would like to see ten Andromeda class ships go up against the Klingon D4s, though, they seemed much more wimpy than the D7s of yore.

Bye-Bye Books

April 3, 2010, will long be remembered as the day the book died. Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating, just the tiniest bit… (and, I realize that only a total Apple fanboy like myself would assume that a couple generations in the future we’d still be referring to such tablet computers as the iPad, in general, as “iPads” – though I guess that’s what Star Trek predicted with its PADDs – and, hey, how come Trek didn’t get any flak on the feminine hygiene front, huh?). But, I’ve seen and touched the iPad for myself now, after fighting off some vicious crowds at the Freehold Mall Apple Store this past Saturday, and I have to say I was instantly lusting this device. It’s exactly the perfect size – makes the iPhone and iPod Touch seem very small and awkward to use once you’ve held the iPad, but it’s not so big that it just looks like you chopped a notebook computer in half, like some earlier attempts at tablet PCs did. The iBooks feature is just what I’ve been waiting for. I know, there’s the old Kindle with it’s e-ink screen that’s supposed to be better on the eyes. But the iPad is color, and has so much other functionality with web, movies, photos, music, games, etc. Plus, I’d rather have something backlit that I can read upside-down lying on the couch or in bed, than the Kindle which requires an outside light source. I know, backlight is bad for your eyes… we’ll, I already spend most of my day in front of a computer screen, so I don’t think it will make much difference at this point. Whatever the case, the iPad rocks, you’ve just got to check it out, whether you are PC or Mac or Droid or whatever… it’s just about the coolest gadget I’ve ever seen. I think it will really speed up the shift to digital books that Kindle and other e-readers started, just like the iPod mainstreamed digital music, even though mp3 players had been around for a while before it.

So, stash away any current books you have in a safe place – maybe they will be worth something someday as relics of a simpler age…

– Nigel Matrix

Keeping Up With The Cardassians

Menacing Aliens Fodder For Popular Reality Television Show

The Star Trek folks sure know how to make aliens ugly.  I mean, not like the Horta ugly–that was just a blob of rock.  Not like the Gorn ugly–that was just a big lizard.  But those darn Cardassians on Deep Space Nine, man, they make you want to barf just looking at them.  Give ’em eye ridges, sunken goopy eyeballs, and barnacles all over their faces, they said, and yeeeeecchh…there you go.  No science fiction is complete without menacing, ugly aliens, I guess.   And then give them slicked back mullets, because all aliens need those.

Let’s meet some of our Cardassian friends…there’s Dukat, and even though he has a few good moments, basically is just the evil leader-type, he would like nothing better than to get rid of our hero, Captain Benjamin Sisko (no, the good keptain didn’t make Internet routers, that’s Cisco).  Then there’s Damar, who sides with Cardassian rebels against the Dominion.  Finally, there’s Elim Garak, an ex-spy who opens a tailor shop on DS9.  Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a reality show that followed their exploits?

We could see their mom Kris and their adaptive step-Dad Bruce Jenner, who used to be on Wheaties cereal boxes–try to help manage their fashion careers.  Kim, Khloe, and Kourtney would get into various hyjinx involving photoshoots, trying to launch perfume and clothing lines, going on location, you know.  And you’d have to keep up with them.  Well, you could keep up with them by watching the show.  Not really the best title.  Wait…a…minute…those are Kardashians, not Cardassians.  Sorry.  The Kardashians aren’t ugly at all–far from it–and they don’t commit acts of Interstellar Aggression.  But check it out, even Wikipedia isn’t sure–they list them together on the same page.  To make things even more confusing, Khloe recently changed her last name to Odom.  Wasn’t he the shape-shifting sherrif of Deep Space Nine?  Guess I’d better grab a bowl of Wheaties and try to keep up.

Sulu Jonses White Castle

 

Medical Personel Mystified By Unprecedented Gristle Cravings

The casting for the new Star Trek  movie was mostly top notch.    Well, okay, a lot of people really could have been Kirk or Spock, your basic angry hothead or cold logic-driven types.  Nah, the one that was really impressive was Dr. Leonard McCoy.  We all know and love DeForest Kelly’s performance, but how would you describe it, really?  Cantankerous?  Is that even a word anymore?  If it is, McCoy owns it.  No matter, Karl Urban pulled it off with flying colors. Makes you miss the old sickbay scanners just a tad, though.

And John Cho delivered a spot-on performance as Hikaru Sulu.  Cho is a Sulu of action, not slowly delivered repetitions of the same line (“Captain.  Phasers.  Locked.  And.  Ready.”)  And he’s so good in the role that it’s hard to recall his earlier performances as stoner accountant Harold Lee in the Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle movie and all its various sequels (Harold and Kumar Go To Amsterdam, Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, and the forthcoming A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas…no, I’m not kidding….)  At least until you leave the theatre and start thinking about it.

I only had one gripe with the new ‘Trek and that’s no matter how big a metaphor it is, you just can’t build a starship in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa.  You’re going to get corn weevils in the warp nacelles.  As a comedy, I only had two gripes about the first Harold and Kumar:  1.  There are White Castles in both Edison, NJ and Greenbrook, NJ that are closer, and 2.  There is no actual hill in Cherry Hill to hang-glide off of.   So that’s why it made sense to go to Canada to film it, I guess: if the actual geography of New Jersey doesn’t match the script, go to Canada.  Do not pass White Castle, do not collect “Slider” pack….

Trek On.
–Raven

Star Trek: What’s the Matter?

So, what IS the “red matter” in the new Star Trek (2009) movie? Could it possibly be some exotic form of Silly Putty? Remember that stuff? It came in a little plastic egg, and you could squash it and stretch it, and it also bounced pretty good. It was actually a type of strange material somewhere between solid and a really slow liquid. The grooviest thing was the way you could flatten it onto a newspaper or comic book, and then peel it away to reveal a copy of whatever was on the page, which you could then proceed to deform as you wished. Hey, don’t laugh, Generation Facebook! This was before scanners and Photoshop, and even photocopiers weren’t that readily available back in the 70s when I was a kid (and Silly Putty was around since the late 50s, so it really was the “analog Photoshop” of its time).

I did think the whole red matter MacGuffin was awesome. Although, I’m not sure if it totally qualifies as a MacGuffin, since it actually provides a function in the movie, even if we don’t really find out exactly what it is – just what it does, which is to (spoilerz) create massive singularities with a convenient script-enhancing, cool-cameo-enabling time-travel component.

As a huge Star Wars fan myself, I have to say this new Star Trek was just incredible – J.J. Abrams and his writers definitely injected some Star Wars genetic material into the Trek DNA, bringing a lot more energy and higher special effects standards to the mix. But the characters really brought the story to life for me – all of them were excellently casted and portrayed spot-on by the actors, with just the right balance of homage to the originals and a fresh take on them.

Nero, the tattooed, Romulan villain of the movie, wasn’t the most interesting evil space alien, but he had a few cool stand-out moments when he wasn’t busy napping or trimming his five-o’clock shadow. His facial tattoos did remind me of another famous sci-fi prequel villain who also sought revenge… someone a bit redder and, er, hornier shall we say (see, everything always comes back to Star Wars for me – sorry Trekkies).

– Nigel Matrix

Why Kirk Can’t Date Normal Women

Famed Intergalactic Explorer Prefers "Salt Vampire" Test to Turing, Voight-Kamff

Long before he sold out to eBay and Priceline, William Shatner produced some very disturbing material.  And not just that “T.J. Hooker” cop show.  I mean those spoken word versions of famous pop songs.  Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me.  (But please play loud enough that I can’t hear that spoken word dude next to you….) It’s kind of like a book on tape, except that it’s a song.  Or isn’t.  No, wait.  A song would already be on tape.  My point is, if you can’t sing, and don’t even want to try, why not make books on tape?  Oh, yeah, nobody uses tape anymore.  Except people who send things to random strangers across the country using eBay.  Tape, and bubblewrap.  Why didn’t Shatner make books on bubblewrap?  That would have been cool.  Oh, well.  At least he didn’t pull a “I Am Not Spock” and then turn around and say “I Am Spock” on his next record.  Well, he would have said “Kirk”, but you get the idea.   No, wait, I think he should have done “I Am T.J. Hooker” and then “I Am Not T.J. Hooker” thus ending the great Kirk/Hooker debate.  Which is irrelevant since due to all of his experiences with weird fem/aliens, he can no longer relate to normal human women.  Except for that time that he was one for most of an episode.   Ennh, he still probably couldn’t have related to them then anyway.  No matter.  Just remember the awesome, grusomely hysterical  expressions he made as Evil Kirk in “Mirror, Mirror” and try to sleep at night.  If that doesn’t work, put on some spoken word bubblewrap.