{"id":2051,"date":"2009-05-12T17:12:45","date_gmt":"2009-05-13T00:12:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=2051"},"modified":"2009-05-12T17:12:45","modified_gmt":"2009-05-13T00:12:45","slug":"neo-trek-the-brick-wall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=2051","title":{"rendered":"Neo-Trek: The Brick Wall"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"uhura1\"<\/p>\n

Neo-Star Trek has been consuming my brain all goddamn week. The build-up was amazing, the onslaught of rapturous Twitter-reviews stoking my skiffy-lust as I made my way to the Cinerama dome on Saturday. I’ve loved this franchise since I was a wee one. The idea that it’s suddenly relevant again, that it’s back<\/em> in all its live long and prosperish glory, is a potent thing. It reminds me of the way I felt when I found that battered copy of The Lost Years<\/a><\/em> at my local library, or the way my heart just fucking stopped the first time Major Kira Nerys stomped her combat booted way through ops. Star Trek — like Buffy<\/em>, like various incarnations of the X-Men — is one of those icons of geekiana that just does it for me.<\/p>\n

So I suppose I went in with reservations, too. Nail-biting excitement mixed with a weird kind of fear.<\/p>\n

I wish I could follow that sentence up with some kind of definitive statement. Like, “but guess what? My ass was kicked<\/em>” or “and then it was stupid so I cried into my gagh and went home.” My reaction, however, was one of those frustrating, complicated things that I’m having a hard time fitting into a zippy one-liner.<\/p>\n

SPOILERS behind the cut.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So, okay. For big, fat sections of the thing? My ass was kicked<\/em>. The genius construction of the Kirk\/Spock dynamic, the spot-on casting, the brilliantly interwoven bits of sparky humor…all great. Spock Prime made me cry. The continuity re-set was handled well. And I just think Chris Pine’s performance is this amazing sort of thing that pays tribute to Shatnerian-brand swagger without going to that easy, hammy place of excessive vocal intonations.<\/p>\n

But as I was watching, I kept running into a big, brick wall that held me back from full fangirl mode. And…well. It’s basically the thing I said before<\/a>, when the previews started saturating our collective consciousness. Seven major crew members. One<\/em> of them is a chick.<\/p>\n

I know the cast breakdown was revolutionary in the ’60s, that it was enough for Uhura (and Chekov and Sulu) just to be there. But in the world as it is today? That same cast breakdown looks really fucking dated. Considering all the tweaks J.J. Abrams and Co. were able to make to the source material — yet still keep that special Trekkian spirit intact — would it have been so outrageous to flip this a little? Maybe go the Galactica<\/em> route and make Chekov a girl or something? Because I thought maybe I could just go with it, but…it stood out to me. It really did. It’s the one thing that didn’t get updated that kind of needed to be.<\/p>\n

To give credit where credit’s due, I felt like the filmmakers did a nice job of amping up Uhura, of really giving her a distinctive voice and some truly kick-ass moments (and my crush on Zoe Saldana is now even bigger than the one I developed after Center Stage<\/em>, shut up). Or at least they did in the first hour or so — after that, she kind of got turned into a love interest and while I enjoyed the ‘ship, I would have liked to see her get to do some stuff that wasn’t related to that in hour two.<\/p>\n

Maybe in Star Trek Reboot, The Second<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Now that the movie’s a genuine phenomenon, I’m sure it’s coming. And the internerds have already started speculating as to who will get cast as what and what old-new characters will show up and blah blah. The two female names I see coming up most often are Nurse Chapel and Yeoman Rand. With all due respect to the wonderful women behind those characters…that doesn’t excite me a whole lot. Those characters are kind of products of the time in which they were created — one of the biggest defining characteristics for both is infatuation with a dude. Something that always thrilled me about Star Trek was that as the franchise progressed, it gave us some truly inspiring, fully-formed female heroes. Saavik. Ro Laren. Kira and Dax. It was never enough for these characters just to be there or to pine away after a guy. They got to do stuff. Cool stuff.<\/p>\n

So if Chapel and Rand do appear, let’s really<\/em> update this shit and give them some of that cool stuff to do. Or better yet, bring in the original Number One<\/a>. Or even Saavik.<\/p>\n

Because I do see a lot of opportunity here — this Star Trek succeeds in being an engaging reboot, a re-establishment of classic mythos for a big damn audience, a new franchise with a vast universe to explore. I’m excited about that part of it. I’ll be even more excited if Abrams and Co. use it as a jumping off place to truly push that mythos into the future, where the gender breakdown reflects what I see right now, in my own present day universe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Neo-Star Trek has been consuming my brain all goddamn week. The build-up was amazing, the onslaught of rapturous Twitter-reviews stoking my skiffy-lust as I made my way to the Cinerama dome on Saturday. I’ve loved this franchise since I was a wee one. The idea that it’s suddenly relevant again, that it’s back in all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,27],"tags":[35,177],"class_list":["post-2051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fandom","category-movies","tag-star-trek","tag-uhura"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2051\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}