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As ‘alternative options’ for movie viewing become easier and easier to find, and more importantly, cheaper and cheaper to acquire, one may become increasingly averse to $10 theater tickets. I myself rarely go, but here I must admit that certain films do shine particularly brightly in a theater setting. I am referring of course, to space movies.
It’s a veritable American classic, the space adventure movie. Cowboys were awesome, but why not put them in space and thus achieve that excessively ultimate pinnacle that we Americans are known so well to adore and cater to?
The impressively advanced special effects of the cinematic world come to life in theater like nowhere else, and this certainly was the case with director J.J. Abrams’ 2009 rendition of Star Trek.
Old and faithful Star Trek fans both appreciate and criticize the film’s clever plot, which allows for a new timeline of possibilities to be realized within the film. Depending on your attitude, clever could be seen as perhaps ‘cop-out’ or ‘cheating’.
The film uses advanced time-warping capabilities of the future, thanks to a substance called red-matter, in order to modify initial conditions in the classic beginning of the Star Trek voyages. Thus the concatenation or unfolding of events is unlike that which old viewers are familiar with in the first episodes of Star Trek.
An entire new system of possible eventualities is created by tweaking events in the beginning, (see YouTube’s “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” for a fun mind-bender as well as a solid break-down of an interpretation of dimensional and string theory).
Several people I spoke to, self-acclaimed old-school fans of Star Trek, took opposing positions on this ‘cinematic/poetic-license’ red-matter ruse. On one side, which I will term the fundamentalist side, asserts that such a perversion from the original story is intolerable.
Such a shift in basic character development essentially raises questions pointing to the philosophical difficulties in questions of identity. Is ‘Star Trek’ still ‘Star Trek’ if the same initial characters develop under completely different conditions?
How much are you still the same person if you go back in time and convince your parents to move to a different state when you were five years old?
Anyways, see the film if you appreciate sleek spacecrafts, imploding planets, and epic heroism in effort to save the galaxy. “Star Wars Only” types, get over yourselves and just pretend that there are light-sabers.
The funniest character award goes to Simon Pegg playing “Scotty”, you might recognize Simon from either Hot Fuzz (a must-see if you appreciate well-delivered sarcasm) or Shaun of the Dead.
1 comments
The movie was wonderful.
Good article Catudal.