Sometimes I remember that posting my opinion of movies is a perfectly valid use for a website.

So Marq and I saw the new Star Trek movie the other day. I’m going to preface this by saying that I enjoyed it. I have to clarify that because it is basically all complaining from this point on:

I’m going to try to avoid spoiling the movie, but I must say that my biggest complaint is one that I and many others predicted. I went in accepting that this was the case, so I was actually thinking for some time that I liked the way they were going about it. They’d taken what I didn’t want to see and were showing it in such a way that I thought “Hey, they’re doing it differently than I expected, so that’s good” but then it all came crashing down.

I thought the point of the whole movie time-travel reboot relaunch thing was to do things in a new way for a new generation of viewers. The cast of the new movies is definitely good enough that I want to see them doing their thing. Their own thing, specifically. Large plot points in this movie are only significant in their relation to old Star Trek stuff and I think that that is a shame. At least, I suppose, now that they’ve shot their wad for this particular plot they will get to do something new next time around (Note: I will pay Hollywood as much as Ten Canadian Dollars to make a movie based off the Frog of Fortosia).

Secondly, I know I’m just a cranky old man, but can we have movies rely just a little less on setpieces? It really takes me out of movies when I have thoughts like “Did this fight scene really need to happen on a flying car?” I fully accept that plenty of people will just say that I don’t like fun, and those people are probably correct, but I stand by it. If a fight scene is meant to have emotional importance in the narrative, you shouldn’t have to try so damn hard to dress it up and make it interesting.

Finally, I honestly hope that this is the last movie I will ever see in which someone is hanging over a ledge, clinging on for their life and at the exact second they lose their grip someone appears to grab their hand. Honestly.

There’s at least two other things I consider worthy of discussion, but they’re both give away even more of the plot, so maybe I’ll get back to those some other day.