Tag: Star Trek

My review of the Star Trek movie *spoilers*

I just saw the new Star Trek movie, and I was expecting it to be kind of like “Cloverfield,” which was a total crappy monster movie. Now, I’m a major nitpicker with all things Trek, I prefer them to stick with the canon, so, even though I watched all 5 series and 10 movies, I was expecting this to be like most other re-boots, a total disaster. It wasn’t, it was kind of like Batmans’ reboot, a pleasant surprise. The alternate universe idea was done right, in my opinion.

First off my nitpicks. I’d say the first fifteen minutes of the movie(I checked my watch) after the prologue, I was disappointed or annoyed with, because it just made no sense to me that anyone would have a Corvette 200+ years after it was made; but, if we’re supposed to see that Kirk is a rebel even as a kid, well I guess it makes some sense. What’s up with the cop robot by the way? The whole bar scene thing, well, it reminded me of Star Wars a little bit. Plus, aren’t Orion slave girls supposed to be just that, Orion Slave Girls? Why is one in the Academy? Plus, they never explained why a starship was being built on Earth in Iowa, what happened to Utopia Planitia? In the books and in the original series, wasn’t the Enterprise something like 15 years old by the time Kirk took command? Isn’t there supposed to be at least one or two starships or some kind of fighter craft protecting Earth and Vulcan? What about those space stations? Isn’t the universe supposed to explode when young Spock meets old Spock? At least that’s what Doc Brown always said!

Now, what I liked. This movie had all sorts of references to TOS, TNG, Voyager, Enterprise, and a couple of the movies. Scotty said something about Admiral Archer when he was younger(wouldn’t he have been way too old by then?), the scorpion thingee reminded me a lot of the Wrath of Khan, but this time you just assumed Captain Pike told them everything. Then, when Nero yelled “Spooock!!!” it flashed me back to “Khaaannn!!” The whole time travel revenge thing kind of reminded me of the Voyager episode “Year of Hell” where the scientist kept making changes to history and kept ruining it and taking it further and further from where it was originally. Too bad destroying the Romulan ship didn’t reset history. When Kirk first meets older Spock, I thought it was cool when he told Kirk that he would always be his friend, referencing Trek 2 and 3. I found it funny when they explained away Chekov being there by having him be 17 years old, which would make him at least 4 or 5 years younger than everyone else. At the end, when Leonard Nimoy as Spock spoke the “These are the missions of the starship Enterprise…” plus the TOS music, that was awesome!

I thought everyone had their characters down pat. I thought I would see Sylar instead of Spock, but he was close to mirroring Nimoy almost exactly. Chris Pine, I thought, is a good replacement for Shatner, the guy playing Scotty was funny, the new guy playing Chekov had a little too thick of a Russian accent though, Sulu was good, and Uhura seemed more like a copy of Lieutenant Hoshi from Enterprise than the original. Even the guy who played Sarek reminded me a lot of Mark Lenards’ Sarek.

Overall, I thought this was a good movie and I hope J.J. Abrams doesn’t disappoint in the future. As long as one person is the director instead of more than one for a movie series, then it should do really well. Live Long and Prosper, Star Trek.

Why I write

I just thought I’d take the opportunity to post why/when I  started writing.

I started around 10 years old. I found that I enjoyed writing short stories, you know, the stories you have to write for English class in elementary school. I even wrote sarastic little surveys for people to fill out. Here’s an example:

Where were you born? A) Pluto B) Romulus C) Tatooine D) I’m not born yet E) other

Favorite movie? A) Back to the Past B) Wars Trek: The Wrath of Max Headroom C) False Grit D) other

I’m sure you get the idea. Being nearly 20 years since I actually made up a survey, my imagination for making up that isn’t what it used to be. I’m sure I have copies somewhere in all the Rubbermaid boxes I have, since I usually keep all my writing.

I also found I enjoyed being a proofreader and editor, especially when the teacher had everyone pass around their essays and have others edit it, I enjoyed taking a red pen to someones’ essay and correcting their errors. I know it sounds mean, but I’m a major nitpicker, its what I do. ha ha. This whole phenomenon in cyberspace for shorthanding everything drives me nuts, I had to figure out what “idk” meant. I really want to put it all in a Word document and spell everything out.

In high school, I took mass communications, Science Fiction, and Creative Writing classes, which ended up being the same teacher, Mr. Saggio at Mountain View High School in Mesa, AZ. He was an interesting teacher to say the least. Mass Comm showed me how all these corporations try to mass market to the masses, I’ve learned over the years that I don’t generally fall for the crap they advertise, I guess I’m a bit of cynic with everything. Science Fiction class is learning about various sci-fi books, in this case, books written by Aldoux Huxley, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and sometimes more radical SF genres. When it came to creative writing, Saggio had us write for contests in magazines like Reader’s Digest. Well, one I wrote, called “Role Reversal” won 3rd in the nation for a magazine published by the Methodist church, called Youth!  I had never heard of it, and when I try to google it now, I can’t seem to find it. Anyway, the story was about what if a white racist teen ended up in a parallel world where he was in the minority, does he learn that racism hurts? You bet he does. Anyway, I received $35 for it, which my mom used to buy a picture frame to frame the check stubb along with my senior picture and an article about it she managed to get in the Mesa Tribune. 

I even wrote, or attempted to write at least two novels in high school. One was about world war 3, or at least my attempt to make it a war novel. I used actors as the main characters, people like Alyssa Milano or Kirk Cameron(they were popular at the time). I ran out of ideas 150 pages into it and I wasn’t even remotely done, and this was on a typewriter. I usually hand-write everything, not this one. I even attempted to re-write it a few years later, but it was so bad, I gave up. Another one, was purely science fiction. I used everyone I knew in high school, but I made the mistake of letting those people read it, they all had different ideas on how to make it “better.” There is definitely no structure to it, you can’t tell who is speaking, and it mostly rambles, so as with the other one, I gave up trying to fix it.

For a time, when I lived in Amarillo, I went to Amarillo College. I signed up for their Creative Writing class thinking it was the same kind of class from high school. I was wrong. All that class did was analyze short stories and poetry, which I ended up dropping because I want to get into print. I even submitted a short story to the Star Trek New Worlds contest, it was about Voyager. After re-reading it years later, it was really sub-par. I even tried that L Ron Hubbard Writer’s of the Future contest, playing on their idea that aliens came to Earth and messed with our history, or whatever it is they believe. Well, that was rejected.  However, I’m turning it into a novel, and this time the aliens are humans who left Earth around the time of Noah’s Flood and come back every thousand years or so to see if we’re advanced enough to help them fight little brown aliens, who just happen to crash land at Roswell….

I will post my saga of writing, editing, and self- publishing Out of Time at a later date.