Star Trek I and II

In preparation for the new Star Trek movie (which I've heard great things about), I've been re-watching all of the Star Trek films with the original cast (i.e. numbers I through VI). Now, although they don't exactly break down this way story-wise, I'm going to blog about each of the six films in chronological pairs, so here's the first:

When I first saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture, I was only in 5th or 6th grade, so seeing how dry and slow the movie is, I think I fell asleep watching it. So, it's possible that this recent viewing was actually my first time to see the whole thing through. Even after all these years of maturing, the film is still rather dry and boring, especially when compared with any of films that followed it or with The Next Generation, which was airing about the same time I watched the movie for the first time. Ultimately, my biggest complaint with the movie (besides how dry it is) is how absurd the whole V'ger premise is...usually, Star Trek plots center around other generally understandable (although foreign) species, not near-omnipotent alien machines whom we never hear from again... Whatever.

Now onto perhaps the best Star Trek film ever made, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Talk about a night and day difference between two films. This film is far from dry or boring, involves a reasonable enemy from the original storyline, uses sci-fi in a more realistic manner (it's not all that unreasonable to suppose we might one day be able to do terraforming of some sort), and leads up to an exciting climax which keeps the story arc going for another two films. Khan is a great villain, the crew of the Enterprise is back to their more cavalier selves, and there's even an emotional scene with Spock at the end which made me tear up a little bit (during Kirk's eulogy). Now, while this film is nowhere near as good as one of the original Star Wars films, it's still a pretty great Star Trek movie, and that's gotta count for something...