recycled Gangnam Trek

Rating: 3/10 (2 June 2013)

I see anything Star Trek as a matter of lifelong habit, and don't mind J.J. Abrams' rich kid versions--as long as I'm not bored while watching them. But I lost interest in this one about half-way through. It is too formulaic not to be predictable, the hyperrealism of the refitted 1960s characters loses its novelty, the randomized emotional shifts become tiring, and the pile up action sequences get too relentless and implausible to be entertaining. There are moments of funny writing, and the total lack of originality is supposed to be a feature not a bug, so I often enjoyed the accents and personality quirks I remember from watching the first series as a kid. But the core group, led by the Boy Kirk, is too frat house to be very interesting, their girl sidekick less important than, say, Storm in the X-Men, and the male friendship issues repetitive and adolescent. Other reviewers have pointed out the CGI overkill, and that the somewhat desperate action sequences are coupled with a general emotional immaturity (one reviewer called it kill-cry-kill-cry). Both are true, and the result is that Abrams has come full circle not so much to the Saturday Matinée 2.0 as created by George Lucas, but to the cartoon, where implausibility and even idiocy are supposed to be part of the fun. One unintentionally hilarious sequence involves the Boy Kirk kicking some machinery until it works, and my movie date pointed out that this is a kind of metaphor for the film itself.
On to the "liberal philosophy" that someone points out is another of the film's direct borrowingsfrom the 1960s version. The movie is wrapped around the Global War on Terror: there's a conflict between using Starfleet for military or for exploratory purposes. You can guess which side the good guys are on. But everything in the film is threat and response to threat. The positions are (1) kill first, because they are coming to kill you, or (2) kill, but only in self defense. In contrast, the 60s show was full of cultural differences, philosophical divergence, emotional incomprehension, and an interesting fact about human life, which is that in many situations that matter most, "you're both right." 1960s Trek focused repeatedly on a situation in which the crew *believes* they face a military threat, but discover that it's not a military threat, and in fact not a threat at all. Seeing a threat turns a complicated counter into a threat, and that deeply militaristic habit of seeing threats becomes the source of the problem. In the current film, we have two positions: GWOT is regrettable (cry) tied to GWOT is inevitable (kill). In the original show, the GWOT frame would have turned out to be a mass delusion, while this film can't really imagine that things are *not* what they appear to be. So there isn't anything really to think about while you're waiting for the overblown action to die down, and by hour 2, I wanted it to stop.