I am a lifelong Star Trek fan.Though I don't consider myself a hardcore "trekker", attending conventions in home-made costumes and spending every spare dime on collectibles, I do feel I have been a loyal and enthusiastic viewer for over 35 years.
I, like so many others, was waiting with palpable excitement for the release of the latest Star Trek film. I watched all the trailers, read all the fansites and patiently trod through my mundane real life looking forward to May 8th, 2009, when I would behold the return of my beloved characters to the big screen.
So Ric and I made arrangements to go to the huge IMAX theater at Pointe Orlando on I-Drive. I paid my $5 parking, and the $15 ticket price but skipped the $10 soda and popcorn since the line was so long. Once inside, we got great seats right in the middle for the full IMAX experience.
The place was sold-out but I expected that so the noise of the crowd didn't get me down. The seats and acoustics are designed well enough so you don't get that "cramped-in" feeling like in some packed movie theaters.
But right away, my overly high expectations were starting to be chipped away, little by little.
Prior to the start of the obligatory 10-minutes of preview trailers for other up-coming blockbuster-wannabes, music was being played to entertain the audience. It was some half-somber, half-bombastic bad classical shit that I joked to Ric sounded like some bad "we're coming to conquer the world" B-movie atmospheric score. Much to my chagrin, when the movie finally started, I found out, that was the score to this movie!
Ok, so the theme music is cliched and poor-quality, I can overlook that (though I'd rather not since a great score can really define a great movie...can you say "Star Wars" anyone?). This was no John Williams composition.
Unfortunately, it all went pretty much downhill from there.
Right from the get-go, I could see there were going to be "problems" with canon continuity. The captain of the "bad guy" ship, Nero, was supposedly Romulan. But he looked more like a scruffy mutant tattooed Reman, ala the also disappointing "Nemesis". In fact, it's revealed the ship he is piloting is a massive mining vessel from the late 24th century (shades of the whole Reman mining moon and approximate time period from the aforementioned previous movie). Further plot revelation via lame dialog exposes him to be a vengeful renegade survivor of another horrific surprise tragedy in the Romulan star system. Apparently the planet Romulus was disintegrated by a supernova (the Romulan sun one would assume but it's not presented specifically as such, only that its explosion "threatened to destroy the galaxy").
Several issues with all this, both in the canon of the Star Trek universe and in the hard science of the real one.
First, Romulans, an off-shoot of the Vulcans, were always presented much more Vulcan-like, both in appearance, outward-demeanor and civility. They always seemed self-confident, well-groomed, apparently utopianically-affluent and highly intelligent. They mainly differed from their Vulcan counterparts in their deviance, corruption, xenophobia and sinister designs upon other races. Like the Vulcans' evil twin. Here, Nero and his cohorts seem grizzly, and barbaric, driven by a guttural rage and bloodthirsty desire for vengeance over a perception of double-crossing done, allegedly, by a 24th century elder Ambassador Spock. They had more of an emotionally-charged, apolitical, primitive and defiantly aggressive attitude. Hmmm, like Klingons?
Next, the Romulan homeworld, and though not specifically stated, all or most of its inhabitants (judged by the highly-charged ire and angst of the Nero character and his rag tag band of survivors) are wiped out by a supernova. Well, supernovae don't "just happen", at least as far as we can tell. It is the death of the process of sustainable fission of a very aged star. The star would have swollen to a red giant or shrunk to a blue dwarf over millions of years before the eventual explosion that defines a supernova. Romulus would have had warning even before the events of any Star Trek episode, heck, even way before present time. What's more, the film shows a yellow star going nova. It doesn't happen to yellow stars (like our current sun).
And, BTW, a supernova, even occurring as a result of the death of a star the size of VY Canis Majoris (2100 times the size of our sun) would not endanger the entire Milky Way galaxy. But your average idiot movie-goer wouldn't know this, of course.
So within the first hour of this movie, I knew I was in for a let down. But that's not the biggy. The biggy is the end of the film...
All along, while watching, I kept thinking about the major, no, make that "universal" impact to Star Trek lore that a destroyed planet Vulcan would have. I kept thinking, that, like in "First Contact" they'll be able to wrap up the movie by correcting the damage done by this time travel and make it all right again.
But the ending came, the credits rolled, the other people in the theater applauded (even Ric!) and I sat there in shock.
They were going to leave it at that! Six billion innocent Vulcans murdered with a wink and a nod. And with a crowd of hapless, moronic movie-goers, throwing their half-empty popcorn boxes nonchalantly onto the theater floor in order to clap in appreciation!
The universe had unimaginably changed, two vastly different-aged Spocks dwell simultaneously in the same reality and the tried and true fans of the Trek phenomena get a kick in the teeth.
So now, in this new alternate vision of Trekdom, the diaspora of a mere 10,000 homeless and displaced Vulcan refugee survivors wander the galaxy in search of succor and pity from races they had once helped to civilize.
Hopefully they won't be greeted with their own now utterly ironic salutation: "Live Long and Prosper".