Some observations on the new Star Trek movie:

• It’s fun. Lots of flashing lights and ‘splosions.
• It will give Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy a year’s worth of material. Did you know that supernovas can get cranky and change their expansion rate after they blow?
• This is, without a doubt, the mother of all reboots. 
• More bad astronomy: Did you know that black holes have a much greater mass than the combined mass of the things that go into them?
• The actors nailed their roles. All of them. Except maybe Simon Pegg, who nails a different Scotty to the original character…and is great anyway.
• Iowa has its own grand canyon (well, really big canyon). I didn’t know that, but it’s true.
• The characterisation is excellent. Kirk, Spock, and Bones have been tweaked to give them a little more substance but not too much to undermine their essential natures.
• The Romulan villain Nero is a man with a plan. An angry, angry man with a stupid, stupid plan.
• The Romulan ship design concept came straight out of Babylon 5′s shadow ships.
• Apparently you can’t drop black holes onto planets directly due to the crust’s magical anti-black hole properties; you have to drill a hole through the crust and drop the black hole down the shaft.
• What happened to the women? The only one with anything approaching a role is Uhura, and although she’s got a lot more spark than the original TV character, she does nothing to advance the story at all. They could have replaced her with a talking watermelon and the plot would have been exactly the same. There were plenty of new characters introduced. Why couldn’t any of them be women? And where did Kirk’s mother disappear to after the opening sequence?
• And as for the miniskirt uniforms…it’s not the 60s any more.
• Speaking of women, it seems that Winona Ryder has made the Hollywood transition from girlfriend to mother in record time. Ryder is 37. In this fictional universe she must have popped out Spock when she was like 12 or so.
• Which means, I guess, that Spock’s father’s name should have been Humbert.
• It’s a J. J. Abrams show, so it has to have a torture scene. Like most torture scenes, this one only demonstrates the stupidity of torture as a means of getting useful information. In the future, cutting-edge cryptography will revert to static passphrases — a system that hasn’t been useful since the fall of Constantinople.
• James T. Kirk was born in the shortest labour in movie history.
• Standing orders for commanding officers in Star Fleet apparently call for pregnant wives to accompany their husbands on tours of duty. When there is a need for risky personal combat, the most senior ranking officers must undertake the mission. No wonder Kirk gets promoted so quickly.
• Like the original Star Trek, it has equal parts Great and Woeful. Unlike the original Star Trek, it really doesn’t have any interest in exploring ideas. It’s just a big, glorious spectacle.

Tags: commentary, reboot, star trek, women and the lack thereof