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New Star Trek Movie bootlegged preview -revised -no longer bootlegged -official HD trailer -updated

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There is no golf in science fiction that I know of. This doesn’t keep me from enjoying science fiction immensely. The new Star Trek movie is coming out and looks to be a huge bangup. Among Star Trek fans, there are two factions. Those who prefer Big Action are offered up episodes and movies involving wars with Klingons, Borgs, and Khan, and even thrown a planet eating monster that looks like a giant doobie. Those who prefer Big Ideas are given time travel stories (including one involving a sarcastic, cloacal time portal), moral dilemma recapitulating the issues of the 20th century, and anything involving empaths (people who can sense the emotional state of others -WTF!???!?!?). Then you have tribbles and fembots.

JJ Adams takes a turn at the old wheel, coming off his Cloverfield and Lost successes, and the preview shows a definite red state Big Action tilt. You see a mavericky kid and young adult Kirk speeding along in various fossil-fueled vehicles. The bi-specied Spock is seen trying to bludgeon a crewmate in this preview. (J’ever notice that Obama may actually have some Vulcan in him as well?). And that’s the thing, when the quintessential blue stater Spock is kii-yaa-ing and hacking at people, you know where the movie is going.

The Star Trek vehicle needs reinvigoration after spending many years in the Big Idea doldrums. I triedimg_26771 watching the first season of Enterprise but just couldn’t get over the show being stupefyingly boring. Reimaginations of “classic” shows inevitably have to incorporate the mood and tempo of the contemporary audiences.The remade Battlestar Galactica is the greatest television show ever, and you should have heard the shrieking about Starbuck being a girl in certain geek quarters. The best science fiction balances the Big Ideas with Big Action. Ridley Scott is a master of this with Blade Runner and Alien.

There are elements of homage in the preview. There is a Dreadnought class starship getting blown up -this is a reference from the Star Fleet technical manual. This kind of detail shows that JJ Adams and the writers are shockingly incredible Trek geeks. This would seem to me that they took their custodial duties with regard to the Star Trek canon seriously. Or it may just be a random teaser designed to draw in the middle aged Trekkies along with all the teens and twenty somethings who know nothing about Trek. I’m holding judgement and praying it’s not Star Trek Kids.

The missing Dreadnought, inspiration for many pages of spiral notebook art

The missing Dreadnought, inspiration for many pages of spiral notebook art

Addendum: The ship in the HD preview (much clearer) is clearly not a Dreadnought, but rather a some kind of modification of either the Scout or Destroyer Class starship called the USS Kelvin with a topside crew/engineering pod in the picture shown from the back below:

Warp Nacelle on Bottom?

Warp Nacelle on Bottom? or Blinding LED Rear Light

This addresses a serious problem I had with Technical Manual where there was no differentiation between the Scouts and the Destroyers (identical) and all you had was the saucer section. The topside main section appears to have the sensor array in the appropriate place.
usskelvin
The USS Kelvin does not show up in the Star Trek Technical Manual, which means that this production deviates from the canon by a large degree. I do know this will greatly bother many serious Trekkies who have nothing better to do than dissect blurry Youtube videos.
Interesting for local readers, Kirk (young adult) zips alongside cornfields to end up in some kind of future alien cityscape. Kirk’s backstory is that he was born and raised in Iowa  (Riverside, Iowa -see below). Problem is, I don’t see a Kum & Go anywhere, which shows again how little attention to detail was given by Team JJ Adams.
Riverside, Iowa

Riverside, Iowa

Addendum: Prequel is available on iTunes as an iPhone App. Engaging comic book about the Romulan Apocalypse and time travel. Time travel is the sci fi equivalent of the dream sequence -it’s usually a sign of unimaginative thinking. It does allow for drastic changes to canon -after all -we are on another time line. The linearity of the timeline is something established by HG Wells, who avoided the going back in time to blow up your parents conundrum. The Planet of the Apes movies dealt with a non-linear timeline, and most recently, The Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles basically acknowledges that there is a fifth dimension -a history of time -meaning that linear views of history and causality can change so that the totality and end results are different over time. Kind of like seeing a full circle on the kaleidoscope rather than just a ray on the kaleidoscope. In this kind of world, there is no canon and JJ Adams can do what he wants. This is far more pleasing than the stupid negative universe where everything is opposite.

Addendum 5/14/2009: I saw it last weekend, took my seven year old and wife on Mother’s Day. The movie knocked my socks off. Everything makes intrinsic sense now. They needed to fluff up the old shaggy franchise, and they hit it out of the park. It was very entertaining. Iowa is elevated to the status of planet with cut scenes between Vulcan and Iowa. Also, it is clear to me that the canyon seen in the trailer is in fact a quarry used to deliver matter to be transformed Trek-style into starship plating. The Enterprise is made of Iowa dirt! Watching the movie in a theater in Des Moines was very special. My son who had been watching classic trek on the iPod Touch now thinks Star Trek is almost as good as his Clone Wars.

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The Entertainer

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img_1720This is a 17 inch Dell behemoth that weights about ten pounds and is useful for checking email. It also offers connection to Youtube, Hulu, iTunes, and Netflix, and offers more entertainment than my 42 inch DLP TV in the basement with a DirecTV HD account. On screen is the 2-3pm episode from the current season of 24. 

 

Broadcast television was supplanted by cable. Cable television and its prettier sister, satellite television, are headed for the attic of dead technology by video on demand over the internet. This was presaged by TIVO and the ability to time-shift programs. But Youtube and Hulu, iTunes, and Netflix, and shows available on the networks sites all presage a time when you don’t have to watch what is available, but rather you choose exactly when and where to watch what you want. 

Currently, with the offerings of Youtube, Hulu, iTunes, and Netflix, I canimg_1721 watch pretty much whatever I want whenever I want. If a program isn’t available in fact, I usually couldn’t care less. This is an important threshold -if something of critical value weren’t available -I would feel compelled to pay extra for it. This one quality that is keeping the satellite subscription alive is high definition programming. It is just valuable enough to keep it around for the sake of viewing on a large screen, but the fact of the matter is that a 50 inch widescreen TV at 10 feet is the same as watching a 10 inch screen at 2 feet (yes, I did the math -proof above). That means, streaming hi-definition images to a 10 inch netbook gives you the same images relative size as watching a 50 inch screen from a couch. 

We are about to cancel our DirecTV connection in favor of our home stable of laptops and iPod touches. The video time that we have as a family is spent in bed with a laptop watching one of 12,000 movies available over the ‘net on Netflix with a $10/month account, or downloaded to an iPod for 1.99/episode, or on DVD, again on a laptop. The large screen is okay for viewing sports, but time is short, and the networks are available over the airwaves in HD. Fact is, I prefer watching sports with other people at a sports bar. 

The purchase I am considering next is a small computer capable of streaming Netflix and running iTunes, with double duty as a email checking station. The cable company gets to stay in the house only for the internet -until fiberoptic broadband becomes available then goodbye cable. In fact, I am waiting to see what Apple does with AppleTV versus the Mac Mini.

What I discovered more recently is this: it is more fun to make TV than it is to watch it. Check out my friend Victor’s channel on Youtube (link). 

The TV is dead. It is now just a monitor.

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Movies not to watch with your kids -DVD’s for a long golf-poor winter

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cookthiefThis movie has it all -ultraviolence, haute-cuisine, a hot Helen Mirren, and cannibalism. It most closely matches (especially visually) the tenor and mood of my nightmares (see earlier posts about the golfing revelations). It is an allegory about how we treat the earth and ourselves. The final scene is so unpleasant that you will never look at glazed ham the same way again. Makes you think about the cannibalism in your life.

mongolMongol which was released last year is available on iTunes, and is a beautiful movie about one of my personal heroes, Genghis Khan. Filmed and produced in Kazakhstan, one of the countries peopled by Genghis Khan’s descendants (along with most of Central Asia), it has eye popping battle scenes filmed with thousands of real extras with no use of CGI. It also is a domestic movie about Genghis’ home life -you have to watch the movie to believe what his poor wife has to go through to keep the family together -it is a pretty decent date movie compared to the Lord of the Ring movies. 

 

 

 

 

 

Twelve Monkeys is a genius movie of frightening possibilities. The natural end of the green point of view is that people are the problem, and environmentalism is at its heart anti-people-ism. 

There, three movies to ponder this winter of golf discontent.