Star Trek: Into Darkness is a film I saw a while back but never posted about. I'm not a fan of this alternate universe Star Trek, where we get the same characters only not. I'm tired of re-hashing the same original series plots. And, as much as I love Benedict Cumberbatch, I'm disappointed in his casting as Indian Sikh Khan. It's a fine action/adventure/science fiction movie. Star Trek it ain't, except for the character names.
trailer:
The Atlantic calls it "a more recognizable heir to George Lucas than to Gene Roddenberry." Empire Online has a positive review. Moria says, "It is certainly the most action oriented Star Trek film we have had to date. .... I’ll set my misgivings and loyalty to the original Trek aside and largely embrace the show that Abrams and co have put to say that they have for the most part done a rather entertaining job."
Wil Wheaton calls it "a damn entertaining film that may just provide an infection vector for a whole new audience — the next generation if you will — to explore the existing Star Trek world."
Rotten Tomatoes has a critics score of 87%.
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I saw this not long ago and enjoyed it, but as you say, it is not really Star Trek as we knew and loved it. Cumberbatch is enjoyable in almost anything. We missed his take on Alan Turing, but I guess that will come along on television soon enough.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen the Turing thing either. I was disappointed in the latest Sherlock, but I do like Cumberbatch.
DeleteI am also a big fan of Cumberbatch. What is it about that guy that we all seem to love, even though the character or the movie might not be up to par. I haven't seen the latest Sherlock, but they are supposed to show one at midnight tonight on PBS. I hope it's not a rerun.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I was never a big fan of Star Trek. It was a bit too chauvinistic for me.
I just thought casting him as a character who -according to canon- is an Indian Sikh showed some whitewashing I was uncomfortable with. You'll have to let me know what you think about the Sherlock episode.
DeleteBack in the day, Star Trek was very forward-thinking in sex and race issues. The science officer/first mate was a woman in the first pilot and was only changed because the network thought audiences wouldn't accept a woman in such a position of power. We haven't really come a long way, baby, after all.
The Virginia Slim ads! I say that sometimes and of course no one gets the reference - the downside of growing up on a diet of foreign magazines... :-D
ReplyDeleteI read William Shatner´s "Star Trek Memories" on a beach one summer, and found it both entertaining and educating about just those things. Apparently, Martin Luther King intervened when the actress playing Uhura wanted to quit! He called her and talked her out of it, saying she was such an exceptional rolemodel for black women. She was a rolemodel for me too...
Yes, the multi-racial cast was ground-breaking. Roddenberry was trying for a show that would picture a more equal future for us all. I've been a fan since the beginning (although I've had my share of disappointments along the way).
DeleteI think this aspect of it, the racial thing, was pretty much lost on foreign audiences. For us, apartheid was something strange going on somewhere else. Not that we were a particularly mixed society; I think there is more ethic (we don´t use the word race) tension now when we are. Take the university, it is a way more multi-cultural place now than it was 25 years ago, and the better for it, I think! But on the Dark Side, we have the Sweden Democrats... :-(
Deletegoogling "Sweden Democrats".... Wikipedia says, "The party describes itself as social conservative with a nationalist foundation". Ouch. I'm on the way other end of that spectrum lol
DeleteHere race means black/white almost entirely when people talk about it, and we find ourselves remembering we also have growing populations of Hispanic and Asian immigrants. Memphis is a majority African-American city.