I managed to see the new reboot of Star Trek.*
Some background: I am, for my sins, a long term fan of the series although I lean towards TNG over any of the other offerings, and best not to get me started on the TNG films. I do not consider Star Trek to be science fiction, it’s space fantasy – the science is bad, the speculative elements minimal and the amount of tech predicted has more to do with the number of fans going into science than any hard graft by futurists. I do not dress up.
The point being I was sceptical about a) the need for another film and b) the wisdom of rebooting some of the most iconic characters in television. It’s hard to imagine anyone but Shatner as Kirk and no one has ever really successfully out Vulcaned old Nimsy. Throw in the painful wounds inflicted by Enterprise‘s attempt to go retro and….well: I was a hard sell.
Yet, despite not thinking of myself as a full on fan for some time, the thought of not going didn’t really enter my head.
For that I am infinitely grateful because JJ Abrahms somehow – in a trick worthy of Scotty – managed it.
The film takes us back to the moment of James T. Kirk’s birth but it soon becomes clear that something is wrong, things are not unfolding as the canon dictates: Kirk’s father sacrifices himself in order to save his crew and his family, James T. grows up fatherless, a perpetual troublemaker that has no intention of going into the fleet and people know what Romulans look like. Things change when Kirk meets Captain Pike in a bar room brawl and follows the pretty Uhura into the academy promising to beat his father’s record to the Captain’s chair.
Keeping up so far?
Yes, the plot is horribly complicated and convoluted as time travel based stories usually are but don’t let that put you off. You see the tricky plot is there to attempt to keep the likes of me amused and interested (granted many won’t be but I was). For the wider audience, that JJ is hoping to convert to new fans, the film is loaded with high action sequences peppered with light camp comedy (it is Star Trek after all) and some full on operatic villains. JJ was never going to please everyone but he’s done his best to create an accessible film and for the most part he’s succeeded.
There are plenty of nods to the original series including the pursuit of an abandoned storyline but it’s really the changes JJ brings that I think make the film enjoyable. The cast is more the ensemble piece the series was supposed to be, diverting some of the attention away from Kirk to Uhura, Sulu and Chekov. While Pegg is woefully under-utilised as Scotty, his performance is bang on the money without slipping into parody as does Karl Urban as McCoy with a wonderful homily to the late Deforest Kelly. Zachary Quinto, as the rebooted Spock, manages to riff off Leonard Nimoy, neatly sidestepping trying to match the elder Vulcan’s performance, and bringing his own strangeness to the part.
Chris Pine, stepping into Shatner’s boots as Kirk, is the man with the hardest job. Shatner is iconic not because he’s the world’s greatest actor – he isn’t – but because the Kirk was such a large part of sixties pop culture that he’s imprinted on western culture. He was the figurehead for Trek – so bad he was good. Pine doesn’t even bother to do a Shatner – it would be silly and risking parody – but lets the supporting cast provide the feeling of familiarity, while he injects Kirk with a character more recognisable from Star Trek’s apocrypha than its canon. It is only at the end of the film, when Kirk ascends to the command he will hold for the majority of his career that Pine allows an element of Shatner to enter his performance as he takes the chair, legs crossed in an improbably camp pose. It is, perhaps, the most well judged shot of the whole film.
A great romp and a successful if pointless reboot. See it – popcorn optional but recommended.
And yes: I don’t understand the lensflare either.
* Why they feel the need to reboot everything in sight I have no idea but that’s a subject for a different post.
Review: Little Brother
11 05 2009Thursday morning I was rooting around the shelves for something to read on the train into work (I can’t use the bike at the moment as I can’t get it through the house as we still have boxes everywhere). Anyway, I picked up Little Brother having ordered it some time ago and have been slightly embarrassed that I hadn’t read it yet. I started on the train on the way in, continued on my lunch break (I never do this normally) and continued on the way home, reading as I walked from the station to the house and finished up around about midnight having pretty much inhaled the whole book.
It’s that good.
Marcus is smart, Marcus is a hacker, Marcus is a teenager, Marcus is a gamer and Marcus is about to land himself in a whole pile of trouble when he plays truant for a game- inadvertently placing himself in the middle of a terror attack on San Francisco. Held prisoner by the Department of Homeland Security Marcus finds himself treated as a potential terrorist before being released back into a city that has been transformed into a Police state. Angry, alienated and fearful for the future of his country Marcus decides there is only one thing for it, to take down the Department of Homeland Security. Calling on all his technology skills Marcus goes to war with the Department of Homeland Security, a war he can’t possibly win – after all, a seventeen year old kid can’t defeat his government, can he?
It would be easy to wax lyrical about how topical this book is or how well researched or how it’s pretty much a handbook for how to manage your data in a world where before long even your toaster will be online. And all this is true. I mean: it’s Cory – did you really expect anything less? Yet, I feel this misses the true success of the novel and that is the quality of the writing. Not the story – which is great riff on 1984 – but the actual technical process of how the words have been put down on the page to provoke a particular emotional reaction from the reader, the nuts and bolts of the book. Artfully constructed – like a Swiss watch – Doctorow plays the reader like a fiddle carrying this one from laughter to fascination to outrage to horror to celebration and back to outrage, all the while peppering the tale with real world information.
Although relying on the Internet quite heavily for the story you really don’t need to be a geek to enjoy this story and, in all likelihood, you may get more out of it if you’re not. For those who do – like me – spend large amounts of time online through work or whatever, you’ll see some really elegant explanations for things you see day in, day out and probably learn some stuff you should have known already, I know I did.
I don’t want to give the impression the book doesn’t have its weaker points. Some of Marcus’s first person narration isn’t entirely authentic as a seventeen year old – at least to my ears – but this could be down to the culture differences between the US (where the book is set) and the UK (where I am) or the generation difference**. The peppering of information also gets a little OTT in places and skirts the white line of info-dumping but as someone who really enjoys Neal Stephenson’s work I feel churlish pointing this out because Cory is nowhere near as prone to this as Stephenson. The novel’s faults, such as they are, do not clunk or throw the reader out of the story.
I found Little Brother to be a gripping, page turner that I really couldn’t put down. I would happily recommend this to any reader, old or young, SF fan or mainstream junkie. This is an important book, it won’t just entertain you, it will give you pause and change the way you think about the world you live in now as well as the one you’ll be living in tomorrow, all the while entertaining your socks off. You can’t ask more of SF than that.
Read it, read it now.
* Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton, Eric Brown, Farah Mendlesohn, StrugglingWriter and too many more to go on listing.
** Though it pains me to admit it.
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