I was worried about Spock. The actor, Zachary Quinto, scares me, not only because he plays Sylar on "Heroes" (so convincingly that I'm too nervous to watch week to week and have to wait until the season ends to watch the whole thing on DVD, so that the suspense doesn't damage me) but because he seems a bit chilly himself -- there's his name: Zachary Quinto, which sounds like something out of Nabokov, and the fact that in the photos from the movie's opening in Sydney, London and Los Angeles, he is never smiling.

I need not have worried about Spock: it is his movie. I read a review today that stated the opposite, that the movie was Kirk's. But I say no. Chris Pine is perfectly fine as young Kirk -- cocksure, cocky, impulsive, violent -- but the character is less interesting. He's a show off; he gets the crap beaten out of him; he struts around the campus of Starfleet Academy; he is publicly called out before the class; he gets the crap beaten out of him; he gets the crap beaten out of him; he ... well, there's a pattern here. For all the pow! pow! pow! damage inflicted on him, it takes a lot to "get it through his thick skull" as a certain doctor, not an elevator, might say.

Spock, however, is a revelation. The smallest unfavorable observation bruises him, and as as an actor -- and a character -- he registers the hurt without any demonstrable display of it, in true Vulcan manner. He is conflicted, cautious, wounded, evolving and adjusting. And because of all this, way sexier than Kirk. And very witty.

The whole thing was terrific fun. Most of the younger incarnations worked for me -- dry Bones, excitable, blushing Chekhov, awestruck Scotty. Mr. Sulu, whose original role was to sit on the bridge and be Asian, got to display some grit and valor for a change. An ensign in a red shirt went on an away team, and those in the know can guess his fate.

Lt. Uhura has caused some controversy, but I don't care about the [I cannot reveal it] as much as I was bothered by seeing the character "upgraded" into the "Dr. Babe" phenomenon. That is, where women were once just babes in short skirts (see, Ensign Rand on the original Star Trek), now, due to those nagging nasty feminists, they are babes in short skirts with PhD's and exceptional language skills. We know they are smart not because they demonstrate it but because they announce it. I speak "all three dialects" of Romulan, sir. But they never get a piece of the action, except when they are the action.

Speaking of action, a bit too much of it for my liking -- I mean the video game kind, where spacecraft hurtle through tight spaces while things fire at them, or crash into a larger spacecraft, or SPECIAL EFFECTS, BLARING SOUND, INDUSTRIAL LIGHT AND MAGIC.

Give me a little snogging in the elevator any old time.

Edited 5/11/09 -- because it is Uhura, not Uhuru

posted by Elizabeth at 4:55 PM