Star Trek is now out on Blu-ray. If this is waiting for me when I get home, expect not to see me for days. Reviews have said the extra content alone will take a week to get through.
I’m not gonna lie: I was a Star Trek nerd since I was a kid. Yes, I dressed up as Spock for Halloween in 4th grade. Yes, I dressed up as Scotty in 5th grade. Yes, I used to regularly get my ass kicked by all the cool kids.
But dammit, I loved Star Trek. Watched the original badassness of Teh Shatner. Read the books. Cried in the theater when they blew up the Enterprise the first time. Dug The Next Generation. Really dug DS9.
Over time, I lost interest as the franchise faltered and became less and less good. It never evolved. Sci-fi had moved on from aliens with funny heads (see Farscape) and static, barren production design (see The Matrix).
After seeing this year’s Star Trek remake by JJ Abrams, I felt vindicated. Sitting in that theater half full of Trekkie nerds and half full of regular people, and watching all of them love the fuck out of this movie… it was amazing. I got a little verklempt. It hit on every cylinder. There wasn’t one frame of that movie that wasn’t AWESOME. I walked out of there with the same experience I did for The Dark Knight: This wasn’t just a great genre movie, this was a great movie period.
I won’t go into a detailed movie review. There are plenty of those out there that dissect the film by the frame. (I may change my mind after sitting down with the actual disc, so eat it. I’m not consistent.) I will only further say that Star Trek (2009) transcends the boundaries of AWESOME: it is FUCKING AWESOME.
