Thread: Star Trek

Originally Posted by chadb

Oh my gosh, you guys, GO SEE IT! I watched an advanced screening last night, and it was beautiful (if you can call a movie that) and absolutely AMAZING! The characters, the drama, the special effects...it's all superb. Whether you're a die-hard Trekker or not really into it, you will love this movie. It is EPIC, and I cannot recommend it enough. I could barely go to sleep last night because I couldn't stop thinking about it, and even now I can still hear the music in my head.

I can not wait until Monday when the kids go back to school so DH and I can go see it. I am a big trekkie

'Star Trek' has galactic $76.5M opening weekend
Christy Lemire, Ap Movie Writer
2 hrs 38 mins ago

LOS ANGELES – "Star Trek" beamed itself up to the top of the box office, earning $76.5 million in its opening weekend.

Paramount Pictures had estimated that the movie would make about $50 million for the weekend, but figured that strong reviews helped carry it to the bigger opening.

Director J.J. Abrams' reboot of the beloved sci-fi franchise made $72.5 million from Friday through Sunday, plus $4 million just in pre-midnight screenings Thursday, the studio said Saturday. That cumulative figure includes a record $8.2 million in IMAX showings.

"Star Trek," which reveals the back stories of Capt. Kirk, Mr. Spock and the rest of the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, is an unusual blockbuster that pleased critics, too, receiving 96 percent positive reviews on the Rotten Tomatoes Web site.

"Last year 'The Dark Knight' and 'Iron Man' both were embraced by critics as incredible filmmaking as well as big action-adventure movies. This one has been even better reviewed," said Paramount vice chairman Rob Moore. "You look at the level of critical response and the audience reaction, we definitely feel like the movie is set to play into Memorial Day and into the summer."

Moore said he expected the movie, which had a $140 million budget, should gross over $200 million total this summer, even with competition like "Terminator: Salvation" coming on May 21 and "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" arriving in theaters July 15.

Abrams got it right, he said, by appealing to both hardcore "Star Trek" fans as well as moviegoers who may not have been familiar with the 1960s television series and the many movies and TV spin-offs it spawned. It stars Chris Pine as Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock, and features an appearance by Leonard Nimoy as an older version of the half-Vulcan, half-human Spock.

"It just shows you how talented he is and what a great movie he made," Moore said.

"Star Trek" also beat the $6.3 million record "The Dark Knight" set in its opening weekend on IMAX screens last year.

"The DNA of this movie and the DNA of the `Star Trek' franchise work perfectly together and are very much a complement to what IMAX has accomplished," said Greg Foster, chairman and president of IMAX Filmed Entertainment. "IMAX was a company that had a sort of older-school, older-fashioned approach to things and we hipped it up and reinvented ourselves, if you will. That's precisely what J.J. Abrams and Paramount did with 'Star Trek.'"

The fact that the "Star Trek" haul improved from $26.8 million on Friday to $27.4 million on Saturday is a good sign, said Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com.

"Sometimes you will see a movie drop big-time," Dergarabedian said. "What this 'Star Trek' is going to have is legs, a rare commodity in this world where every week there's a new blockbuster."

As expected, last week's top film, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," came in at No. 2 with $27 million. The prequel to the "X-Men" franchise, starring Hugh Jackman as the mutant who slices and dices his enemies with his metal claws, has made nearly $129.6 million in two weeks.

"It's the same weekend drop as ('X-Men: The Last Stand'), the last one. That tends to be what fan-based movies do," said Chris Aronson, senior vice president of domestic distribution for 20th Century Fox. "To have $130 million in the first 10 days is sensational. We think we withstood the attack of 'Star Trek,' if you will, and will settle into a long, successful run."

The week's other new wide release, the stoner comedy "Next Day Air," came in at sixth place with $4 million.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Hollywood.com. Final figures will be released Monday.

1. "Star Trek," $72.5 million.

2. "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," $27 million.

3. "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past," $10.45 million.

4. "Obsessed," $6.6 million.

5. "17 Again," $4.4 million.

6. "Next Day Air," $4 million.

7. "The Soloist," $3.6 million.

8. "Monsters vs. Aliens," $3.4 million.

9. "Earth," $2.5 million.

10. "Hannah Montana: The Movie," $2.4 million.

___

On the Net: http://www.hollywood.com/boxoffice

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090511/.../us_box_office


Star-crossed lovers: `Trek' ship mates lock lips
David Germain, Ap Movie Writer
Mon May 11, 12:48 am ET

LOS ANGELES – William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols shared TV's first interracial kiss on "Star Trek" in the 1960s.

If you haven't yet seen the new big-screen "Trek" and don't want to know who actually kissed Nyota Uhura before James T. Kirk, read no further: Zoe Saldana's update of the comely communications officer has a boyfriend, and it's not the dashing captain.

It's Kirk's future best friend forever, the coldly logical Vulcan Spock (Zachary Quinto), a member of a race whose males supposedly get the itch to mate only once every seven years.

But in J.J. Abrams' relaunch of "Trek," Spock and Uhura definitely have a thing going.

"This is one of those changes that obviously we knew was going to incite a lot of potential rioting in the theaters," said Alex Kurtzman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Roberto Orci.

There's a hint early on that Spock and Uhura are more than just Starfleet colleagues. Then midway through the film, after Spock has suffered horrible personal loss, Uhura gets him alone and plants consoling kisses and caresses on the pointy-eared Vulcan.

Later, they go public with their romance in front of the abashed Kirk (Chris Pine), who had been pursuing Uhura for himself through the whole movie.

"It provides a tremendous sense of levity between Kirk and Spock and between Kirk and Uhura. But I think between Spock and Uhura, it offers a kind of depth and a complexity to those characters that maybe we didn't get a chance to see in the same way before," Quinto said. "I feel like Uhura ultimately represents a kind of canvas onto which Spock is able to project a lot of the emotions that he's unable to express in a more conventional way."

There is also a certain logic to Spock falling for a human: Spock is only half-Vulcan, his father having married a human himself. Co-writer Orci, a lifelong "Trek" fan, always felt there was an undercurrent of attraction between Nimoy's Spock and Nichols' Uhura.

"There's some hints in the original series of some flirtations between them," Orci said.

And Saldana herself figures that for serious, career-minded Uhura, Spock is more her type than an on-the-prowl guy like Kirk.

"I'm pretty sure that Uhura would choose a night in and studying 10 times over going out and partying it up and hooking up with a boy," Saldana said. "Who other than Spock to come in and sort of possess all the qualities that she sees in herself, that she would like to continue to obtain, and that she would want to see in a man? I almost feel like Kirk would be the opposite and be someone she just wouldn't go for."

The filmmakers thought it also might humanize Kirk a bit. Shatner's Kirk bedded human and alien beauties week after week on the TV show, but Pine's Kirk winds up humbled when he sees Spock and Uhura lock lips, particularly since he and the Vulcan have gotten off to a contentious start.

"It makes Kirk a little more accessible," Pine said. "He's the guy we've all been. He wants the chick who doesn't want you. He's trying really hard. She just kind of laughs in his face and goes off with the other guy. I relate to that. I'm sure everyone does."

The original Spock found the romance between Quinto and Saldana's characters deeply moving.

"Beautiful, beautiful. Wonderful," said Leonard Nimoy, who reprises his role as the older Spock in the movie. "Both of them played it so well. They were both so available to each other. Very touching, really."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090511/...film_trek_love

It was awesome! I didn't quite get all the little jokes that others did, since I really have not seen Star Trek, but even so, it was so good! We waited for almost 2 hours for an advanced screen and Luke, who usually complains about having to wait, said it was totally worth it! LOL that never happens. He loved it and it seems everyone in the theater did as well, I didn't hear any negative comments.

Capt. Kirk, American icon? New Frontier renewed
Ted Anthony, Associated Press Writer
2 hrs 2 mins ago

NEW YORK – There's a moment in one particularly silly episode of the original "Star Trek" that is, despite its camp, quite stirring. Captain James T. Kirk, on a distant planet that somehow developed into a twisted parallel America, rises to recite the preamble of the U.S. Constitution in a way that only William Shatner could.

It is pure schmaltz, patriotic manipulation puffed up by the swelling chords of "The Star-Spangled Banner." But it cuts straight to the heart of Captain Kirk, one of popular fiction's most enduring characters of the past half-century.

You can put him in a multiculti setting, dispatch him to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, entangle him with aliens and have him deliver speeches about the virtues of a United Federation of Planets. But there's no getting around it: Jim Kirk is unabashedly, enthusiastically American. "I'm from Iowa," he once said. "I only work in outer space."

Since his birth 43 years ago on mid-1960s network TV, the commander of the USS Enterprise has been a distillation of American ideals — one who finds himself suddenly reinvigorated for the 21st century now that the Kirk torch has been passed to a new generation.

"We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier — the frontier of the 1960s, a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats," John F. Kennedy said in 1960. "Beyond that frontier are the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus."

That stalwart but softer version of Manifest Destiny — a sense that American exceptionalism could be exported to the stars, despite the Cold War — was, in effect, the manifesto that created Captain Kirk and the "Star Trek" universe around him.

Kirk was supposed to be the leader of what "Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry dubbed a "Wagon Train to the Stars" — a convoy of travelers who bond while facing threats and exploring uncharted terrain. But from that framework, one of the most enduring characters of modern American fiction emerged.

Much is made of the duality of Mr. Spock, Kirk's half-Vulcan, half-human first officer who struggles to figure out where he fits in. Pundits have even compared Barack Obama to Spock, saying the combination of coolheadedness and humanity fits the times.

Kirk, though, embodies a different, distinctly American duality: the tension between exuberance and impetuousness on one hand and seriousness and intellect on the other. All at once, Kirk manages to be both Democrat and Republican, hawk and dove, humble and arrogant, futurist and traditionalist — and, in the most American duality of all, childlike and completely adult.

He's JFK — a deep thinker and voracious seeker of knowledge who disdains intellectualism when it is untethered from common sense. He's Andrew Jackson — populist and anti-elitist, as at home in jeans and an untucked shirt as he is in his full dress uniform. He's Vince Lombardi, rejecting the no-win scenario and pushing on to victory.

He's Humphrey Bogart, the darkly driven loner intimate with fisticuffs. He's Edison, always thinking outside the box. He's Elvis — robust wooer of women, intergalactic California blondes in particular. And, as we learn in an episode that re-enacts the shootout at the O.K. Corral, he's Gary Cooper — not only a gangster of love but a space cowboy descended from frontiersmen.

"He's the George Bush that George Bush pretended to be — the compassionate conservative, the `uniter not the divider,'" says Richard Slotkin, author of "Gunfighter Nation" and a historian of the frontier.

"His style of action is George Bush's style of action — `I go with my gut and I have an indomitable will to win,'" Slotkin says. "It's essentially a right-wing style, but it's controlled in Kirk's case" — by an ingrained sense of progressivism, among other traits.

But while Shatner's Kirk was a reflection of mid-20th-century America as defined by Kennedy — eyes optimistically toward the future but girded for any fast-approaching upheaval — Chris Pine's take on the character is just as distinctly a product of the 21st century.

The Kirk of J.J. Abrams' retooled "Trek" was raised by a widowed mother and questionable stepfather after losing his father in battle. Pine's Kirk is Shatner's on Red Bull and vodka — rebellious and sarcastic, vaguely felonious, tragically hip, soaked in irony and maybe a bit ADD. He leaps, then — maybe — looks.

And yet the new Kirk, however brat-packy, remains the vessel of American exceptionalism — the regular kid from the Midwest who manages to be, in the eyes of his mentor, Capt. Christopher Pike, "meant for something better, something special."

The Kirk character is "the embodiment of the everyday guy becoming a hero," says James Cawley, who plays the captain in an elaborate fan-made production that picks up where 1960s "Trek" left off. "He's definitely a leader, someone we look up to, but if you could get inside his head, he wouldn't see himself that way."

With a few key exceptions (Atticus Finch, Vito Corleone, some comic-book superheroes), Americans have spent much of the past 50 years bringing our fictional protagonists down to eye level. Where once we had Captain Ahab and Paul Bunyan and John Henry, now we have Rabbit Angstrom and Jack Bauer and Tony Soprano, characters consumed by their faults or quirks or doubts.

That makes for great tragedy and great realism but, perhaps, not great myth. And "Star Trek," as a history of the future we desire, is unrepentantly mythic.

Through the "Star Trek" movies of the 1980s, the sense of nostalgia that had settled over the nation found its expression in Captain Kirk. He was looking back more, examining regrets, wondering about roads not taken. The Rabbit-style introspection fit him well, but somehow it reflected a gradual abandonment of the New Frontier's optimistic tomorrow.

That's why Kirk 2.0, rebooted to the beginning of his interstellar career, feels so fresh, so necessary for the times.

The world is more confusing, more ambiguous than ever. Change is everywhere. The contours of American life keep getting blurrier. "The new frontier," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told Congress in March, "is that there is no frontier."

A scary prospect for Frontier Nation. But if you accept that the Kirk character embodies American ideals projected into the future, here's a guy who — after 9/11, after waterboarding, after Katrina and economic meltdown — restores the balance of American duality.

Strong but caring. Deeply American but casually, completely multicultural as a simple matter of fact. Understanding of history but with eyes squarely focused on the things to come. And possessed with a just-do-it sense that while safety is important, risk, as Shatner's Kirk once said, is our business. America, after all, needs leaping and looking both.

Captain Kirk has endured for a reason: He shows us what we want to be. And whatever the answer, having a slice of American popular culture that is unashamed to help us figure it out is a refreshing thing indeed. A generation after the Enterprise first flew, we have met the future once again, and once again it looks like James T. Kirk.



http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090513/...s_captain_kirk

I went and seen it yesterday and it was really a lot better than I expected it to be. I enjoyed the familiar banter between the characters ("Damn it Jim, I'm a doctor not a "insert whatever here") but I was a little perplexed with the romance between Spock and Uhura and didn't really care for the part where the older Spock comes face to face with the younger Spock. Since they did that then I think that they should have had Shatner in the movie too. Overall though I enjoyed it and my brother (who is a HUGE Star Trek fanatic) even gave it an A-.