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Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Into Darkness, Memes and Other Things

"At great cost, yes."
- Spock Prime

Be warned, spoilers abound.

So we caught Star Trek: Into Darkness last weekend. I'm not exactly what someone would call a Trekkie, nor can I speak Klingon, but Star Trek has been around for so long that anyone who's been running all over the Internet is bound to have seen something connected to the franchise.

I want to get the one single annoyance out of the way first - JJ Abram's signature lens flares. There are lens flares everywhere, even indoors, in low light conditions. It isn't too bothersome in itself, but the fact that using it in a lot of scenes full of dialogue makes the scenes a bit too artificial, especially when the audience is supposed to concentrate on what the characters have to say. As Simon Pegg so eloquently said it, it's understandable that Abrams may have wanted the pseudo-documentary feel of raw, unedited footage - which quite frankly doesn't work very well in a science fiction film set in the far future. Figure that out.

Anyway, if one was familiar with the infamous Khan scream (from the Wrath of Khan movie) meme, you're in for a treat. Abram's Star Trek series is a reboot set in somewhat the same continuity (hence the existence of Leonard Nimoy's Spock Prime) and how they paid homage to that scene is quite funny - even if the scene wasn't supposed to be funny.

Speaking of Khan, I liked how cold the character was portrayed and it reminded me of how Alan Rickman portrayed Snape in the Harry Potter films - even if he wasn't exactly of the same origin as the original Khan.

Perhaps one last thing I wanted to point out was that the original Kirk, played by William Shatner, was written to be a womanizer of sorts. It was often joked that he slept with all manner of aliens, especially the infamous green alien woman - referring to the Orion slave girl - hence, the scene where he wakes up with those cat people, among others. And yes, all these one can learn if they've been on the Internet for long enough.

Jeez, I'm old.

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