Star Trek: The Journey to Photogenic

I'm off to New York City tomorrow, so expect updates to be spotty in the next week, if they happen at all. I'm not bringing my computer, so it will be a shady Internet café or nothing. Before I go become a big-city girl, temporarily shifting my allegiance from smoked meat to pastrami, a few words on the new Star Trek movie:

These are the voyagers of the Starship Enterprise. Their mission: to rescue a moldy franchise. Secondary objective: to provide more attractive fodder for the cover of People magazine than William Shatner. They obviously succeed at the latter, trading up to Chris Pine, a videogenic (if large-headed) alternative for Kirk, who looks just enough like Shatner for the change not to be jarring- but like a Shatner who has gone through the Abercrombie and Fitch finishing school. This sexing up becomes the whole theme of the movie. As an origin story, it hits a faster and more Freudian note from the beginning, with Kirk's dad heroically sacrificing himself just as Kirk's mom gives birth in the black void of space. Even before the movie has a chance to be ground down by the academic mill, I think psychological analysis will be exhausted by popular critics.

Kirk grows up into a cocky teen, as expected, who's really kind of a dick. Concurrently, Spock is a prig over on Planet Vulcan. Fortunately for Spock, priggishness is more valued by the education system than dickishness, so he's well on his way through the Starfleet Academy while Kirk is still scrapping in bars and trying out pick-up lines that would embarrass a forty-year old who's been stewed in Brut. Still, a Commander takes to his scrappy attitude and high aptitude tests, or his gigantic noggin, and he's off to the Academy. There, he has time to make out with the required green-skinned alien girl, before he's introduced to Bones (Keith Urban hamming it up) and Spock. They foster an immediate dislike, since there are no copies of Austen in space, they don't know they're about to embark on a bromance for eternity.

Fortunately, here comes Captain Nero, killer of Kirk's daddy and sporter of tattoos, with the tragic backstory all villains require now, to break things up when something hasn't exploded in a while. He also forces Chekhov, Sulu, Uhura, Spock and Kirk to be on the same ship, while conveniently altering time so that the Trekkies can have their movie cake and eat the original series too: they're both canon, because they're happening on different timelines! None of the characters seem philosophically flabbergasted by this, or at least villainously excited by the possibilities. They take their mission seriously... so very seriously. The Trek movie is fun, when it joyfully uses new imaging technology to do things the old series could not. Seeing a tiny Starfleet Starship face off against a giant Romulan ship, which looks like a mutated crow, is beautiful and exciting. But the sexing up of the story has made it wear a permanent pout, and there are many times when it just takes itself too seriously.

Thank god for Simon Pegg as Scotty then. He cleverly punctures the film's self-mythologization, just by looking as if he's confused enough to be there, but along for the ride. I felt an awful lot like him when the movie was over.