Anthony Lane is at his most amusing when lancing a movie with his quips (MILD SPOILER ALERT ahead for the new Star Trek movie):
This theme of alternative reality is clumsily worked, and not a patch on its tighter, more alluring, and thus much scarier treatment in “Coraline.” Its effect here is to saddle us with two Mr. Spocks, one from the vulnerable present and one from the comforting future, and its main purpose, I suspect, is to drag in Leonard Nimoy, who these days makes Bela Lugosi look like Zac Efron, and thus insure that all the “Star Trek” scholars in the audience will have to hurry home and change their underwear.
The movie works best at high speed, when it's hurtling at you off the screen so quickly that you can't stop and contemplate the plot but can appreciate the quick references to Star Trek mythology and character future. Amongst a crowd of Trekkies cheering every next Enterprise crew introduction, I felt a certain communal nostalgia, as if at a wedding watching the slideshow segment, or attending a Trek convention.
In the car, on the way home, unfolding the plot in my head, one finds many pieces missing, and the ones that are there don't really fit together. It feels like a cheat, all these prequels that draw on our affection for movies past but plotlines future, rearranging our childhood loves and selling them back to us in scrapbook form. But then again, those wedding slideshows whipped up in iPhoto and set to MP3s serve their purpose, if a bit brutishly, at least with sentiment and good intentions.
Posted by eugene at May 8, 2009 3:30 AM