Star Trek

Diana and I went to see Star Trek last night. It is a really good movie - not great. Diana loved it so maybe I had my expectations set a little too high and the movie really is a great one. Either way, I was entertained but I had some problems with the movie. If you haven't seen it (and are going to) or you just don't want to know what happens - you should stop reading.

**SPOILER ALERT**
Problems I had with Star Trek:

The car chase scene: Why did kid-Kirk jump the car down a ravine? Just does not make sense, and there is no way Kirk does not slide off that ledge, he jumped out of a car doing 50-80 MPH and stops (with nothing to grab onto) within 5 feet. Ridiculous!

Time travel: Whenever you bring time-travel into a movie you open up huge plot holes. How did Nero know where Spock would come out of his black hole? He was just there waiting for Spock and captured him easily.

Where did this Red Matter come from? Why did they make so much? If one drop could destroy a planet why would they keep so much - on a spaceship, where there could be problems? Also, the black hole at the end when Spock's ship is destroyed would have been much larger (I know, it started to suck in the Enterprise but they got out of it). Think about it, one drop destroys a planet, the whole ball blowing up would/should destroy the universe!

The transporter: At the beginning of the movie could barely grab someone that was moving (and could not get Spock's Mom), yet by the end they are beaming during warp speed and while flying/falling/all kind of other things. I know you will say that it was Scotty upgrading the software or something like that. I just think that the transporter is more of a hardware thing and there would have had to been some serious upgrades to do what they did (I am a computer guy - what do you expect?). This was more than a firmware update, if you know what I mean.

Kirk becoming first officer: Really? This is how he gets his ship? Pike leaving and just casually saying that Kirk is now the first officer. Things were really so bad that there was no one else? I mean, Spock was a Commander, Kirk was a Cadet that should not have even been on the ship and then five minutes later he is first officer? Makes no sense to me.

Kirk dropping his gun: How many times did Kirk drop his gun? I swear, they did it once and then just green-screened different backgrounds. It happened in both hand-to-hand combat scenes in the movie!

**END SPOILERS**

The one thing I will say about Star Trek is I left the theatre thinking about how this is how the Star Wars prequels should have been. Action upon action with little to no sense, but the film should always be moving towards what we (the audience) know will happen. In Star Trek I was never that worried about Kirk and the rest of them because I knew they would be OK (I have seen the TV shows you know). Star Wars got too caught up in their own words and trying to make a story that we did not know that would eventually lead to what we did know. Hence, Star Wars got bogged down and had some good scenes, but altogether the movies were not that good. I swear, I could edit all three of them into a 3-hour epic and you wouldn't miss a thing.

Wolverine: The Movie

I saw the new Wolverine movie last night. It was pretty OK. Not a great movie, but much better than the last X-Men movie (X3). I have two main problems with the movie. My first is that the language of this movie is just not family friendly. The other X-Men movies I have no problems with the kids watching. The kids will not be watching this movie for quite a while. Sometimes every sentence in a conversation would have some foul language in it. I don't know why. I guess they just wanted the movie to be "edgy" with the language.

My second problem is that they wanted to have an emotional side of the movie and it just got in the way. All very predictable and not very well done. The movie-makers need to stick with what they know how to do, which is have Wolverine kick butt. He does that a lot in the movie. It was very fun to see how Wolverine was "made" and the history of him.

I really did like this movie. I just wish they would have fixed the two items above. I would say go see it and have a fun time at the movie.

Next week, I hope to see Star Trek, we'll see.