The film owes a vast amount of it's visual impact to 2001 - not that this is a bad thing, because that sheer sense of scale and spatial disorientation is lacking from a lot of modern sci-fi. I really like the graceful production design of a lot of the models in Star Trek: the shots of the Enterprise flying over V-Ger are incredible, and make me wish I'd seen the movie in the cinema. It's also used to great effect in the final battle of The Wrath of Khan - remember the two ships, flying blind, trying to search each other out, flying within meters of each other at crazy angles. It's one of the main problems with all the movies since the Next Gen cast took over - no sense of cinema, no startling images, all dull talk between shite "characters."
This is making me remember all my fave sad fanboy moments. I just love the close of The Search for Spock, the way the destruction of the original Enterprise is captured, the saucer section blowing to smithereens, the ship flung headlong into the planet's gravity, while the crew watch it descend like a shooting star (I'm pathetic: I still cry everytime, even at the corny "Good God, Bones, what have I done," "What you had to, Jim. What you always do. Turned death into a fighting chance to live." Oh, and: "You Klingon bastards, you killed my son. You Klingon bastards, you killed my son," with the backwards stagger where Kirk, the fucking Shat Himself, misses his command chair and collapses to the floor, almost broken. But fuck no, no, they'll never truly break the Shat). I love the way that, in the apocalyptic destruction of Genesis, Nimoy sidesteps the action for the briefest second to show us the beauty of the last sunset on the dying world. And the shots of the Bird of Prey coming into land on Vulcan easily equal (if not surpass) the grandeur of the cloud city in The Empire Strikes Back.
The original cast Trek movies rock in every respect (apart from the one where they meet God, which is awful beyond belief). Yeah, I know I'm a hopeless fanboy, and I know they're totally flawed, but give me Kirk bluffing and lying and cheating his way through the galaxy any day. The crime of the Star Trek franchise is that it's incredibly unlikely that these films will be equalled by any future Trek movies: the only crew worth space on a cinema screen is Deep Space Nine's (the best actors and characters of any Trek series, period, and that series is so bogged down with continuity and bloody-mindedness that it'll never get any viewers. I hope to my sweet Saviour the Lord Jesus Christ that we never see Janeway, Paris and Kim poncing their way across celluloid, the daft, useless pitiful pricks that they are.
(Although I have seen the trailer to Star Trek: Nemesis, and it actually looks pretty damn good. I hope it is. I hope the Next Gen crew get at least one good movie. If one out of every four features is good it'll already have surpassed the success ratio of the series's decent episodes). |
