Nov 17, 2008 11:00 AM
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Wed Feb 10
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The HD version of the full-length Star Trek movie is finally online, and it wants you to know two things: Kirk and Spock are troubled youngsters who find their purpose (and each other) on a ship with a big tortilla in front. And there will be big splodey starship battles. Now that we've had a whole weekend to obsess about the trailer (which honestly looks fun to me), the haters are ramping up.
We've cast some doubt on the need for a new Trek movie before, but now other people are jumping on the bandwagon.
Ross Douthat at the Atlantic Monthly wishes J.J. Abrams and co. had just gone with the Batman Begins approach and rebooted the franchise altogether, instead of trying to do a Trek: the early years thing. The new movie
sounds like a straightforward, none-too-imaginative prequel to the original series - and worse still, one that's sufficiently insecure about its relationship to the canon (and the fan base, presumably) that it's shoehorned in Leonard Nimoy as a time-traveling Spock, in the same way that the first Next Generation film felt compelled to shoehorn in a quasi-time-traveling James T. Kirk. Nothing soured me on the Trek franchise quite as much as its promiscuous use of time travel (culminating, of course in the absurd "Temporal Cold War" from Star Trek: Enterprise), and Abrams' decision to haul it out immediately as an excuse for a Nimoy cameo is a pretty bad sign, both for this film and for any others that end up following.
Meanwhile, Wired is worried by the angry Spock, whom you can see attacking Kirk in the trailer. (That page now seems to be broken. But the gist of it was, nooooooo! Spock should be calm and rational!)
And the Observer says Trekkies are restless, calling the trailer "terrible" and saying it raped their childhood. Good times!
To be honest, after watching this trailer a few times, I'm surrendering a bit to the idea of a fun, kicky Trek that feels less like Trek and more like Trekformers, with a dash of Star Wars. Sort of generic space opera with Trek trappings. Why not?
You can view the new trailer in HD here. [Apple]
Send an email to Charlie Jane Anders, the author of this post, at charliejane@io9.com.
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