All across the board you’re seeing a depressing relapse in movies to awful 80s trends: hard right reactionary themes (300, Star Trek) and shitty teen slashers.

I’m a Star Trek fan. I went to the movie. I suspended disbelief and enjojed it.

That must be why, too, he’s trying to ‘sell’ it. That’s why I suspect him and his writer buddies are professionals and not an artists. Maybe then the right will be able to take him for their own, if JJ Abrams continuous to sell and change Star Trek.

So I don’t really think the rightist attempt to appropriate the mythos has much weight.

In these days, under the reign of beasts, it takes strength to remember that we still have a chance at coming out of the nightmare. The Trek stories do say somthing about friendship maturing over time, about improvisation and never giving up, the rejection of despair, about some compassion as an improvement of our species. And of course there is lots and lots of over-the-top hormonal action and hand-to-hand combat; but there was from the past to the present some reminder in these voyages about the limitations of our more brutal instincts. And I say good for Star Trek; it has become on balance a good contribution to our shared memory.

I know this not because I am a trekkie, but because I fence.

As to Star Trek there was no moral message, and the crew was multi culti in a 1950s sort of way. No Chinese, Indians, Mexicans, Blacks are refreshingly American (No Caribbeans, Africans).

As to SciFi, no pretense at scientific backing is there, and the sets are cheap and crummy. For example: When they drop out of the sky and land on the silly drill thing, no jet packs, they use parachutes I could buy today off the net. The Swiss guy, Fusion Man, has better equipement. Drilling to the center of the earth is a plot twist I remember from Pink Panther movies, and Austin Powers.

Action: Pirates of Outer space, the action was OK, but could have been a pirate or indiana jones movie. BFD

Not worth the money, or time. It was released in May because it could not compete with the Transformer movie coming out in the summer IMO.

The bad guy was pissed because a star explodes and destroys his home-world. Gets knocked back in time, eventually captures Spock and Spock’s ship and the stuff he needs to prevent a star from exploding. He’s got something like a hundred years, the fastest ship ever and the stuff to prevent his tragedy. He goes out for revenge. Doesn’t fix the star, doesn’t save his race. Just revenge preemptively. Stupid.

That off my chest I was sad Kirk was made into a rebel, a misfit, a repeat offender. How low is that at estimating your audience? Why not call him snake and have be from L.A? Are these repeat offenders ever promoted to officer or captain if their name isn’t McCain or Bush? It just doesn’t happen and if it does they don’t work out well. The original Kirk was plugged-in, was socially acceptable and was ruling class. He made it look good and modeled a system that appeared to work. Something like a Roman system with checks and balances, even including death for severe transgressions. Laurels for triumphs – dishonor for failure, not being congratulated in a soft patriarchal way at your school. The T was for Tiberius. The thing it stood for is just gone.

So are the rules of engagement. Just gone. Now enemies strike out of the blue and maximal force and cunning is needed to repel them. Give one superficial ode to peace and blast away. Why? Because coked out Lawyers and their sycophantic underlings control Hollywood and that’s the way they behave? I don’t know.

Oh BTW if you make totally inappropriate comments to your commanding officer about his mother in front of his crew on the bridge, he will step down, they will come together behind you and you can all be friends in 10 minutes. No court marshal.

Also if you love a show then turn three of it’s minor characters into comic relief.

In summery. The effects were busy but good. The blue LED look is already old on consumer electronics. Spock was the true lead character. Him and Ohura were sexy deep. Everything else was wrong, wrong, wrong, and shows a societal degeneracy from the earlier age of Star Trek.

In truth even Kirk is too cool for the right, his ideology informed by adventure rather than doctrine. They would be more comfortable with a Captain Pike, not the one from this movie but the one from the original unaired pilot. Cold, uncaring, distant and clearly woman-hating, without a Vulcan’s mind to attribute the first three to logic. And Pike’s fate would most clearly illustrate the conservatives in this world that has passed them by- alone in a box with wheels beeping only once or twice in paralyzed decrepitude.

Urgh.