Star Trek - A Second Opinion

First off, I'm sorry for the lack of updates. The last week and a half has seen me moving into a new apartment and aiding the family while my grandmother was in the hospital (she's out and she's okay, by the way), and I just got Internet service in my new apartment tonight.

So, now on to our subject matter. On Monday, just after a too-thick-to-drink chocolate shake from the Warren's diner, Megan, Julie and I went to see Star Trek again. For me and Julie, it was a second viewing, for Megan it was a third (which is just ridiculous since she'd never even seen a Trek movie before I gave her a crash course in the franchise over the last few months, yet she's seen the movie more than I have).
In any case, I walked out of the film with a more tempered opinion of it than the one I put up in my initial review.
Frankly, I was still on a contact high of brand new Trek after the disappointment of Star Trek: Nemesis in 2003 and the cancellation of Enterprise (which was just starting to get really good) in 2005. The movie was certainly quite good, but I definitely overlooked some of its flaws because I was still giddy from having just seen it.
So how does it hold up now? Aside from some science-geek and cinemaphile nitpicks and a highly-underdeveloped villain, quite well. It's still fast-paced and incredibly fun, it still has some superb special effects and it still has some great acting. Where it falls flat are the characterization of Eric Bana's Nero and some glaring logic problems (that, admittedly, most movie viewers would not cue on to).
Nero simply didn't get enough screen time nor enough to do. I probably did not catch on to this initially due to the fact that I read IDW's comic Star Trek: Countdown, which featured a story by the film's writers, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. This comic gives the details of what happened in the 24th century that made Nero as insane and vengeful as he is in the film. When I first saw Star Trek, I didn't question anything about Nero because I knew why he was the way he was. However, this time I noticed that all that's really said is that Romulus, Nero's home planet, was destroyed by a supernova (a science nitpick I'll get to in a bit) and he wanted to make the whole galaxy suffer for not helping to save his planet. Nero simply isn't developed enough. I think the writers aimed to make him more of a tragic villain, yet other than an image of Nero's wife who died in the calamity, we're never given any real reason to connect with Nero. There is nothing shown to make the audience connect with him in some way, to feel any sort of sympathy. Had we seen Nero as a man so torn by grief that he's fallen into insanity, he would have been a high effective villain - and Trek movies have a tendency for great villains, like Kahn, Chang and the Borg Queen. However, all we see is an insane, flamboyant, tattooed Romulan who we know very little about and who simply seems to want to watch the galaxy burn.
Another thing that irked me this time was not glaring but flaring (pun intended). For the most part, I love JJ Abram's cinematographic style in the film - with it's documentary style camera movements and angles. What I didn't like was the fact that every other second, there is a lens flare. Most were small and subjected to the sides of the screen, but on occasion there would be one that would totally white out the picture and it started to get on my nerves. The little ones I could deal with, but the big ones that interrupted my field of vision started to annoy me. I even found a humorous edit of the trailer for the Original Series episode "Space Seed" with the lens flares added in, so I apparently wasn't the only one who noticed. It's not really a problem with the film itself, but it started to bug me. It's something I can learn to ignore, however.
The science-geek in me had some problems with the science of the movie, namely supernovae and black holes. Generally, Trek has been really good about keeping to actual science (for the most part), so it was a bit of a disappointment to see problems like that. Apparently, Romulus was destroyed by a supernova that hit with little warning (an event depicted in Countdown, which likewise gave me the same thought). However, even a supernova of a nearby star to Romulus would have taken years to reach the planet, unless it was the Romulan star itself, because supernovae move at less than the speed of light - so there would have been plenty of warning and, thus, Nero would have no reason to be so angry. Also, a black hole is created at one point in the film, and the subsequent destruction shows that everything that is destroyed by it is simply sucked in. However, the debris would have formed a visible accretion disk that would orbit the black hole. That's a minor quibble and doesn't present much of a logic problem for the story as the supernova one does, but oh well, that's just me griping cause I've taken an astronomy class and actually learned something.
All in all though, I won't contradict everything I said in the first review, because those opinions still held true. I loved the acting and the story. I loved the action set pieces and I was still just as blown away by the incredible special effects. It's not as perfect as I initially made it out to be, but it's still a great movie in all respects.

One more gripe about it: I never want to watch it in anything but High Definition, because the film is simply gorgeous to look at. Unfortunately, I don't have an HDTV or a Blu-Ray player. So when this movie hits home video, I'm out of luck. Anybody have any high paying jobs to offer me?

- Nate