Saw it Friday. It's worth a viewing.

Yeah. SWMBO and I watched it last night. We both really enjoyed it. Good action sequences, just enough humour. It looks like a good implementation of a series reboot. It'll be interesting to see if it leads to more...

Yeah. I saw it last night and I thought it was pretty good.

You've got the name of the evil guy wrong BTW...

Do they explain why Kirk is blond?

I don't think Paramount would have put together the current implementation if they didn't plan to serialize it.

According to wikipedia () the major cast members are all signed to do two sequels, and they are working on the script for the next one. I personally can't see Paramount taking this back to TV. I'm betting they keep it in movies.

I personally only had two problems with the movie.

Other than those I loved the movie.

Oh, when I said serialize I meant a series of movies, rather than a TV show. I think we'll see a new ST for TV at some point in the future, but not likely in the next couple of years.

I haven't seen it yet, looking forward to going to see it some time this week.

A friend of mine wrote this review in their blog...

Overall, I liked it, and have seen it twice now. Opening night at the Alamo Ritz proved to be an entertaining crowd. They even brought in an improv group for the preshow.



Oh, and Romulan Ale > Klingon Blood Wine. (From the Star Trek themed menu).

Gotcha! You're probably right, we will see Trek back on TV, but it won't be for quite a while as you said.

There's also this.

I clicked on that link then quickly closed the window -- does it need a Spolier tag?

Edit: I guess I should trust your judgement on that, apologies if my first instincts to close the window were wrong.

Kirk was always blond. Er Dishwater Blond.

Though Shatner himself may be legally blond.

Was wrong. Spoiler alert: Wikipedia is full of spoilers.

That may well be so. My hearing doesn't work so well when there is a lot of background noise.

I think that's a rather tenuous comparison. Certainly not something that would make me want to see the film, nor does it really disseminate any useful info regarding it. You could say typical 'blog' content.

I have, however, seen the film and the first thing I wanted to do afterwards was go and watch the original 5 films. It really ignited my interest in the franchise again. Although I don't think I'd want to see any of the series again. TNG when shown on the BBC always looked 'soft' to the point where it was pretty much unwatchable for me. Damn you Americans with your NTSC!

The film I cannot wait for is T4. I absolutely loved the first two, felt completely screwed over by the third. So I'm hoping Shouty McMom Beater does a good job this time.

I don't think this film is going to possibly rise to my expectations at this point. I kind of feel like I did when I went to see Dark Knight- except that one did live up. Hopefully I can make it to the movies this weekend so I can stop avoiding spoilers.

Haven't seen it yet, but will soon enough.

Meanwhile, I just saw this (weird) interview.

Saw the film. All I can say, sans spoilers, is that the film was stupid fun. If you try to think too hard about it, like if you ask yourself whether you buy any of the coincidences or if you try to do the slightest amount of analysis of military strategy/tactics... just forget about it. Instead, Star Trek is all about going back to the original characters and romping around with them for a while. They gratuitously have the Star Trek characters saying things that we all know are catchphrases from the TV show (e.g., Bones to Spock: "Are you out of your Vulcan mind?" or "I'm a doctor, not a XXX.") Kirk is precisely the womanizer you'd expect him to be.

Pretty much my only complaint is that they followed the shaky-cam style of film-making, which made the fight scenes very difficult to watch, particularly as I was in the third-row of an IMAX theater. When the action got moving, it was all just a complete blur.

As to Terminator 4, I dunno. I'm following the Sarah Connor Chronicles, and they're certainly worth watching (hey, anything involving Summer Glau kicking ass is worth watching), but I'm not sure about the film. The previews make it seem like they're borrowing a lot of footage from the Transformers.

What's the scoop SCC series 3? I thought there was supposed to be some announcement in May about whether it was going to be renewed or not.

My one fault is that there was way too much lens flare used. There are interviews with J. J. Abrams and they all say that he intentionally did them all to make it the shots seem more busy and bigger". He actually had somebody shining lights into the camera to do them.

It appears that E! was having some kind of vote-to-save-your-favorite-show poll thing and that T:SCC won (relevant blog posts). Not that it particularly means anything to have won.

I'll have to keep my fingers crossed then. Maybe some of the hype surrounding T4 will rub off on them.

I'm with Dan. I'm not sure about T4. I definitely love the universe they've developed with TSCC. I hope it gets a 3rd season, but it's sounding like it's a long shot.

And, of course, they left us with a hell of a cliffhanger at the end of season 2...

To not resolve that cliffhanger would be so annoying. It certainly had more to it than the end of S1.

Lots of axes dropping at all the US networks. NBC has to kill off quite a bit in order to have Jay Leno on five nights per week for instance.

I can't believe that Heroes is coming back at NBC and that Fox still feels 24 does anything for them. Two shows I watch but wouldn't mind a bit to see go away.

The way the networks are moving right now, I think a future Star Trek show would most definitely have to be a syndicated affair as TNG was. But even then, I don't know how the budget could be kept low enough and production quality high enough to make it a worthwhile venture. Maybe the TV landscape will completely change in the next 5 years and it can be made to fit and make some sense.

Maybe if they replace some of the bridge crew with a SuperNanny, and a couple of fat bastards trying to lose 1000lbs between them. Oh, and a compliment duo whore/manwhore giving out roses. Maybe that can be a recurring villain's role.

I saw it today and really enjoyed it, as other people have said it was a great romp. There was the odd clunky moment, where big chunks of plot development were executed in milliseconds, rather than the minutes you might have expected. They did certainly keep things moving along at a pace though.

I saw it at the IMAX screen at Waterloo, they first time I've ever seen a "normal" film at an IMAX cinema. I have to say I was very impressed, it is a great way to see a film.

I have to agree about Chekov, he was just a little too jokey for my liking, especially with the level of humour other characters were injecting into the film. I expected Simon Pegg as Scotty to be car-crash-watch-between-your-fingers-cringe-making, but it worked out ok in the end. He was a little over the top, but still enjoyable.

I've been avoiding going to the cinema for the last few years, the last film I saw was Dark Knight and I can't remember the film I saw in the cinema before that. After seeing ST, I've realised why I have been avoiding the cinema.

The reason was poor CGI, by poor I mean the over use of CGI that just wasn't quite good enough to be seamless. I saw too many films where I spent the whole film spotting the joins between the CGI and the live action.

When we got to the end credits of ST I realised that I hadn't spotted a single join, all the CGI was completely seamless. Is this typically for films now or is ST just particularly well done ? I notice that ILM were in charge of effects, but then some of the most annoying CGI that I saw before stopping going to the cinema came from them...

I guess it helps because they didn't have any crowd scenes to deal with. Those where the places in previous films where the CGI has been particularly jarring for me.

CGI is still hit or miss with movies these days. Star Trek was well done and never really distracted me. Wolverine on the other hand had varying degrees of quality in it, from complete crap to almost unnoticeable.

The CGI work in Star Trek was definitely well done. Better than most.

Something interesting to note: Whereever obvious CGI has bothered you in the past, you might not have noticed an equal number of CGI effects that were so seamless you didn't know they were an effect at all.

I've seen CGI effects that were so well done that I only learned about them long after-the-fact. Or realized only after thinking about it that they must have been an effect because there would have been no other way to do it.

It tends to be spotty; in a given film you might get a bunch of great shots and a bunch of crappy shots. It's very hit or miss. These days so many shots are farmed out to smaller companies, that any given film might have a dozen different CGI studios working on shots for the same film.

One shot in Trek that bugged me was the standard CGI effect that they always seem to have in every sci-fi movie these days...



That "transformers" kind of effect, where machinery unfolds into something larger and stronger than its original volume, or parts appear out of thin air where there doesn't appear to be any mechanical support for the parts, has always rubbed me the wrong way. Even when it's done incredibly well in terms of the visuals (the shot in Trek was seamless), I have to work hard to actively suspend my disbelief, and it pulls me out of the movie experience.

I'd agree with all that, but it make no difference how many excellent effects shots there are in a film if there are also jarring ones, it just ruins the whole experience when you can see any joins.

I've just remembered the last films I saw before Dark Knight, it was the LotR trilogy. Those three films were very good films and I enjoyed them a lot. However despite the huge amount of seamless CGI in them they also had plenty of jarring moments through out. I had to actively choose to ignore them to get through them.

The LotR films also had another technique that I'd forgotten about, moving the camera very quickly to disguise the fact that the CGI in the background of the shot isn't quite up to close inspection. Thankfully despite ST's rapid pace, there wasn't too much of that.