spoilers

i saw the new star trek. spoilers follow.

i liked it, and i liked it a lot.

i had not seen any trailers, i didn't follow any of the pre-production stuff, or anything. i read a couple threads on slashdot before and after.

the dorks on slashdot make a lot of noise about how it's unfaithful to roddenberry's vision, and there are giant plot holes, and how it makes no sense that kirk gets command of the flagship at so young an age, and it doesn't make sense how stupid the romulans are, or how lame the villain is, and so on. all wonderfully valid points, but...

the movie was great. it was fun. it was engaging. i laughed out loud when "sabotage" burst out of the theater's speakers. whooooooeeeee! jj abrams was making this movie just for me. hops nudged me and said: that guy's dressed in red, he's going to die. sure enough, he did. ha!

when chekov opened his mouth and spilled out the most outrageous russian fake accent ever: ha ha ha!

the movie was alive. not stiff and boring and stillborn like all the TNG movies we've had to suffer through. it's the inheritor of STIV, my favorite of the movies. it's not about science, it's not even about fiction. it's about fans getting to spend a couple hours with people they love, kirk and spock. and though the new spock isn't really spock, fascinatingly, the new kirk is kirk, in spades. the closing shot of him on the enterprise bridge, his posture, his grin, all shatner. his swagger throughout the movie, his anger, his aggression -- kirk!

people whine about the "reboot" of the film, that now jj has erased all the "canon" of trek. who cares? trek had written itself into a corner and all we were getting was crap.

for example, the scene in "nemesis" where inexplicably picard rides around in a dune buggy. okay, sure, there were comparable inexplicable action scenes in this trek, but the point is in this trek they worked. the picard trek was so wrapped up in old-dude stodginess that such a seen seems forced and out of place. when kirk is running unecessarily away from an ever-increasing slew of monsters on some hoth-like ice world, it's silly, and pointless, and hilariously fun. and it's not in the least bit forced.

the original trek certainly was about ideas, and that's often what made episodes so painfully bad. likewise with the first two seasons of TNG. episodes that are so embarassingly unwatchable precisely because they were faithful to gene's vision of a hippie future of peace and love.

we got 4 excellent seasons of TNG to explore these themes, and about the same number of excellent DS9 seasons. but the movies -- the good ones, the ones with kirk and spock that weren't directed by shatner, weren't about gene's vision so much as nostalgic time spent with old friends.

and that's what the new trek does so brilliantly well (and what everyone on slashdot misses). the old guard of trek, the hippie vision of gene, the moral conundrum speechifying by picard, the kill now agonize later speecifying of ds9 -- those have had their run. the trek movies are about the fond memories, and in-jokes, explosions, and kirk grinning, swaggering, and kicking the shit out of bad aliens.

and this movie has all that, and the fans, and the non-fans, and everyone except my mother is loving it.