That was fast! (Spoilers)

Rating: 8/10 (13 May 2009)

Star Trek was fast, even faster than The Last Crusade. Indy3 is one of my all time favorite movies, and I consider it to be the best popcorn movie there is. It is so fast and so good that you tend to overlook all the stupid things and coincidences and there are quiet a lot. For example, when young Indy whistles for his horse and right after the horse come the bad guys in the car. But the movie is so good, you just overlook all that stuff. Star Trek is faster, but it does not lend itself as easily to suspension of disbelief. The coincidences are too obvious. For example why SpockPrime and Kirk are on the same planet, same continent, same cave. It is hard to swallow that. Why does the black hole in the beginning lead Nero exactly to that time and place it does to meet the USS Kelvin, why Old Spock comes out of the black hole just in time so that Kirk is matured into a young man and is ready to battle Nero. These coincidences are grand.
The character moments in Indy3 are top notch. Indy talking to his father aboard the airship, discussing their plan on the motorcycle and the end of course where Henry calls his son Indy for the first time and Indy subsequently lets go of the grail and can be saved. Those moments never feel rushed or too short, they are, just perfect. In Star Trek, they feel a little rushed, it is just about acceptable. And the character moments are not bad. They are very good, just a little too fast. They are so fast and they take place in odd places. For example when Spock leaves the bridge after his planet imploded, Uhura comes after him and they talk in the turbo lift. The same when Spock leaves the Bridge after he was relived of his command. He goes to the transporter room? Does not he have quarters? Perhaps they did not have enough money to build the sets.
About the sets. In TLC the sets were perfect. You always believed that a certain interior set belonged to the exterior establishing shot. In Star Trek that is not always the case. The sets in general. I like them just so. The bridge is nice. What is absolutely unacceptable is the use of industrial locations for the bowels of the ship. You just do not believe you are still aboard the Enterprise when the action shifts to engineering or the shuttle bay. That pulls me out of the movie and that is not good.
The action and the SFX in Indy3 are perfect. Granted, some of the special effects look a bit dated by now, for example the plane dog fight, but oddly enough it does not detract from the movie. (Some of the mate lines were removed in the DVD versions) The action sequences are inserted so seamlessly, they come and go so fast, you do not even realize that you are in one, and when you do, they are over. (plane battle, plane car chase, tank vs. horse) The action in StarTrek is pretty good and the effects are top notch. The life action and the FX blend flawlessly, also because the lens flare that dominates the life action cinematography is copied in the CG stuff. Were it not for the industrial interior Enterprise sets, the movie would feel completely rounded.
What I do not like, and I am afraid that future movies will bring more of it, is the shaky camera and the quick cuts that Bourne 2 and 3 director Paul Greengras pioneered. You can not relish a good special effect when you do not see it properly. But hey, that is how Abrahms envisioned the movie, that is the way it is done. Certainly a great artistic achievement, to uphold the style, the pace and the look throughout the entire movie but it is to fast and flashy for my taste.
J. J.'s character direction and scene setups are a double edged sword for me. Theere are good scenes, some very good, but the Kobayashy Maru Test was a joke. Could Kirk be more pretentious and casual when facing Star Fleet's hardest test? And little bit more seriousness would have made the scene much better and not degraded it into a mere joke. And it was too fast. Too slow on the other hand was the Spock, Kirk scene on the ice planet. Are not they in a hurry? Do not they want to find the outpost? Need not Kirk get back to the ship? Yet they sit there, having a talk and barbecue around a log fire. (Where did they get the logs on a ice planet. Christmas trees?)
The music in the Indy movie was great, had the best music in any Indy movie, the best themes. The Star Trek score is great also, Kirk's theme is cool, the title theme is beautiful, although I missed the fanfare. I wonder why the film's composer was not allowed to use it.
The acting was very good, the casting perfect. They had so many actors from so many different genres, their fans alone would have made the movie a blockbuster. But since the movie is so appealing to a general audience it is/will be a huge success. It will bring in a lot of new fans. The sad thing is, I think that most of the old fans, as myself, do not think the movie to be so good. And do not get me wrong, I do not think it is a bad movie, and I hope it will make a lot of money and bring us seven sequels, but as a fan, I am a little bit disappointed. If the movie took its time, if it was a little bit more traditional, it could have been so much better.