raven | Star Trek (reboot!)

Oh, oh, Star Trek. Oh. I went to see it with

emerald_embers, and I think we have the same opinion on it, which is.... wow. Just, wow. That was... oh, beautiful, and funny, and smart, and utterly silly and in-your-face and flawed, but in the right ways. Where to start? The look. The jagged, high-coloured aesthetic with all the mad lens-flaring, which could be bad, and I suppose objectively is rather silly, but I like it. I especially like how it's shiny and the surfaces look hard, so when people smash into things it looks like it would hurt, and everything is so bright and ecstatic but the noises - the beeps and whistles of the computers, and so on - are taken straight from the original series.

But mostly I love it because of the characters. Kirk is... okay, he's all right, he grew on me. But I started making noises of squee at Uhura - Uhura, and her roommate! who is an alien! Because they finally had the budget to put aliens in every shot, because this is Starfleet! this is getting to be a long parenthesis! - who is just, made of awesome, and then when McCoy appears I made small cheering noises. Yay, yay, they did not make them all the same age, they remembered that McCoy is the oldest, and gave him the ex-wife he had in TOS, and he's so... him. Snarky, and smart, and I kind of heart him as much as ever; I wasn't expecting to like Karl Urban, but he really did make McCoy-as-was awesome. I like how his role is mostly to yell at Kirk, which is how things ought to be, and be rude to Spock, as things also ought to be, and generally be competent and awesome. Apart from the bit where he's injecting Kirk every which way, which I thought Kirk sort of needed by that point. But the dialogue is marvellous - self-consciously silly, and I love how they're finally unafraid to go for the humour. (Sometimes one feels Starfleet cadets have their sense of humour surgically removed, in the original series and TNG.) And I guess I wouldn't like it so much if it didn't rise organically from these characters being Kirk, Spock and McCoy - it's how they are.

Look, I got to my third paragraph without mentioning Spock! And... Spock. Oh, Spock. McCoy is my favourite of the TOS characters - but Spock was just... wow. Zachary Quinto, please may I have your babies. He's... right. He's just right. There's nothing more to be said about him, except that he is Spock, yes, that's exactly how Spock was at that age. And I'd heard about the Spock and Uhura thing, and I was expecting to hate it, and may I just say, I was wrong. I was totally wrong. That scene where they're in the stopped turbolift, and he's utterly still, and she's kissing him and there's this beautiful visual where her nails are shiny painted black against his skin - that ought to have been stupid and pasted-on-yay, but it was delicate and romantic and I loved it.

Hmm, what else? Simon Pegg! Scotty and his mysterious green friend! How awesome were they? And Leonard Nimoy! I loved him, and love how young!Spock mistakes him for Sarek at the end, because, well, I did too, throughout.

Basically, I think about the only gripe I had with the movie was the weird, gratuitious red lamprey thing that chases Kirk across weird gratutious ice planet, and Kirk's way of getting there is really, really pasted-on-yay - what, of all the places in the universe, Kirk happens to get dropped on the particular point on the particular planet where he's going to meet Spock? And I appreciate the point of the reboot, and the interesting way they spun that in the in-universe context - history changing, and all of that - but I do wish they hadn't killed off Amanda. Every scene in the original series, and in The Voyage Home, with her and Spock together is beautifully done, so... yeah. But we got Sarek, and we got Leonard Nimoy, so I will stop complaining.

In short: I think it was silly, I think it was over-the-top, I think the plot was probably superfluous... but it was full of love for the characters and their world, and really, you couldn't ask for more than that.

I am sure I will babble more when I think of more. Darlings, where are the fic and the icons?