This season splits 12 people (vs. 10 for last season) into 2 teams to complete in the “Japanese-like” game show Majide.  This season is allegedly supposed to have more games and less behind-the-scenes dorama, which even I felt was the show’s biggest weakness last year.

Indeed, initial interest in the show was fairly decent (the season premiered at #2 in the time slot vs. America’s Got Talent, only to fall out of the top 4 by the end of it’s 7 episode run).  I’m guessing that the success of the zany obstacle course game Wipeout has caused ABC to decide to try again on ISaJGS since it’s very much up the same alley.  It’s just that Wipeout was obstacle course from start to finish while maybe only 1/3 of ISaJGS actually consisted of contestants competing.  We’ll have to see tonight how much ABC increased that ratio.  I’m not expecting start to finish games, but hopefully at least a majority of the episode is dedicated to games.

The show was orginally supposed to start airing in July, but was pushed up to this week (maybe the Goode Family wasn’t faring that well?)

Star Trek is a sequel/prequel/reboot/whatever/all of the above of the Star Trek franchise which has been dead in the water since Star Trek: Nemesis flopped in 2002 and Enterprise ended prematurely in 2005.  This 4 year span was the longest stretch without any new Trek episodes or movies since the end of The Original Series in 1969 and Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979 (unless you count the animated series, which aired in 1973 and ‘74).

J.J. Abrams decided to go back to Star Trek roots for this movie, ditching the tendency to extend Star Trek’s legacy by extending the story further into the future (obviously Enterprise is a rather significant exception to that) and by exploring  the origins of the original Enterprise crew.  However, to do this he decided to do something that no one had done before, and which probably wouldn’t be possible for virtually any other franchise but Star Trek: make a movie which is simultaneously a sequel, prequel, and reboot all in one.

What results is an overall exciting and action packed movie which should satisfy a good number of original Star Trek fans, but is still palitable enough for those who may be new to the Star Trek universe.

Scores

Story: B/B-
Acting: B
Sound: A
Special Effects: A+
Music: C+

Overall: B

Stop reading if you don’t want spoilers.  If you want the full review with spoilers…see below the fold.

Now that you’re decided to go into spoiler land, let’s get the big and heavy stuff out of the way:

Yes, Vulcan is destroyed.  Permanently. This has the obvious effect of altering any future episode or movie which includes or involves Vulcans or which the planet Vulcan is either seen or mentioned.  Of course, there are ways to get around this.  We don’t know who survived the destruction of Vulcan, but it would seem that the odds are against seeing characters such as Saavik or Tuvok in this universe, given that the number of Vulcans existing dropped from about 6 billion to an estimated 10,000 in this universe.  Obviously scenes in movies such as Star Trek III and Star Trek IV and episodes such as Amok Time are altered, though I supposed they could take place on Vulcan II or whatever the new Vulcan homeworld is to be called instead.

Yes, this Enterprise and this Kirk exists in an alternate universe which has been altered by the appearance of Nero from the “prime” universe, so this isn’t a true “origins” story, at least for the purposes of all the Star Trek series and episodes that already exist.

The big shocker to me was that they killed off Spock’s mother, Amanda, thus obviously erasing her from any episode or movie she had been in (Journey to Babel, Star Trek IV).

And, of course, the Federation knows about the Romulans and knows that they are related, both biologically and culturally to Vulcans by the time the primary events of the movie take place – probably due to communication between Star Fleet and Romulus in the aftermath of the USS Kelvin incident.  This obviously blows away episodes such as Balance of Terror in this new universe.

Now, let’s evaluate each of the five areas I scored above:

Story

I gave the story a B/B-.  There are two reasons for this.  The primary reason is that the movie felt very rushed to me.  It maintained coherency, which is good, especially for a fast paced movie, but it did feel rushed.  Part of this might be due to the fact that it was my first time watching the movie, but there were some instances where things just happened too quickly.  Kirk realizing that the distress call from Vulcan was a trap came too quickly I think, as did the crew’s acceptance of this fact.  Spock concluding that Nero came from the future also seemed to have come, and been accepted, too quickly and easily as well.  The saving of Earth also seemed to happen to quickly and easily to me.

The second reason was that the plot was kind of thin.  However, I don’t think it necessarily hurt the story too much.  However, it did has a rather sizable back story which had to be explained, resulting in at least 2 rather lengthy expository scenes where people were just explaining what was going on.  However, to keep the pacing of the movie up, these scenes seemed to be edited in a way to speed up the dialogue, once again making it look almost too fast.

The plot’s thickness pretty much consisted of getting from point to point, which acting scenes getting us from one point to the next.  We had the Start of the movie, with the initial battle with Nero linking us to Kirk’s childhood, with the car ride linking us to modern day Kirk, with the bar fight linking us to Kirk at the academy, with the distress signal from Vulcan linking us to Kirk on the Enterprise, and so on.  I guess what I”m trying to say is that, while it was still told reasonably well, it probably could have been a little more fluid.

Acting

The acting was, overall, solid.  Chris Pine as Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock, Karl Urban as McCoy, Zoe Saldana as Uhura, Bruce Greenwood as Pike, and Eric Bana as Nero all get solid As with their acting.  Pine and Quinto did especially well with their roles.

I’d give Leonard Nimoy as Spoke Prime and John Cho as Sulu Bs with their acting.  For Nimoy, I don’t know if it was rustiness or editing or both, but it seems like he didn’t do quite as good a job as I expected (though it was still good).

I give Simon Pegg as Scotty a C, and Anton Yelchin as Chekov a D.  Part of the problem with Pegg is that I just don’t think Scotty got enough screen time – and definitely not enough screen time as anything other than a gag character – to really build on the character of Scotty.  Meanwhile, Yelchin just tried too hard to be Chekov, I think.  His accent was too fake and too thick, I think.  I’ve never had problems understanding Chekov before, but Yelchin’s Chekov was very difficult to understand.

If I do some GPA calculations, I have 6 As, 2 B, 1 C, and 1 D, that averages out to a 3.0, or a B.

Sound

I’m not sure how much I can say about this, but the sound editing was excellent as far as I could tell, from all the sounds in the starships, to the lack of sound out in space (for the most part), something which most people are afraid to do in space movies.  I can remember several instances where I was impressed by the sound, and I cannot recall anytime when I thought that the sound was odd, so this gets an A.

Special Effects

Wow, just, wow on this one.  From start to finish, the special effects are off the charts on this movie.  Star Wars Episode III, which might be this movie’s closest cousin in this department, has nothing on Star Trek.  Even watching the effects in this vs. the special effects for some of the upcoming big movies I saw previews for, perhaps Terminator was the only one which might compete with the level of effects Star Trek presents.

Music

Frankly, I could hardly tell that the score existed in this movie, and when I did notice it, it was a little underwhelming.  The score should boost the film, not disappear in it, so that right there is a sign that something might be amiss in that regard.

Theater Notes

While this has no impact on my review, I thought I’d note some things about the theater.  The showing I was at (7:00 pm) was clearly sold out, and I know the 9:50 show after ours was, and thus the 7:30 and 8:00 shows probably were (I don’t know about the 10:30 and 11:00 shows).  I’d say 3/4 of the theater was full no later than a half hour before the scheduled movie start time.  There was some pretty good applause at the end of the movie and, something which I have never seen before, probably 2/5 to 1/2 of the theater stayed all the way through the ending credits.

Final Thoughts

I think the biggest weakness of this movie is it’s pacing.  Someone elsewhere described it as “a three hour movie crammed into 2 hours” and they’re probably right.  This movie probably would have been served being a full 2 1/2 hours rather than just 2 hours, even though movies that go beyond 2 hours tend to start seeing a drop off in their attendance.  As long as you’re not a Star Trek fan that was expecting a true prequel or who find any reboot of any kind blasphemous, there is a good chance that you’ll at least find this movie appealing, if not greatly enjoy it.

As for my comment about it being a sequel/prequel/reboot all in one.  It’s clearly a reboot as the universe that this movie leaves behind is, as I’ve described, significantly different from the one that exists in the pre-existing series and movies.  However, it’s a prequel of sorts, as it explores the origins of some of the characters, some of which may or may not be different, and we still get to roughly the same place at the end of this movie as we are at the start of The Original Series.  However, it’s a sequel as well as the events of this movie cannot take place without events occurring in the “prime” timeline that already exists, so think of it as your standard time traveling, time altering movie and/or episode except…the timeline doesn’t get restored as it usually does.

However, having said all this, considering that it is a reboot, it is overall well done.  I wouldn’t describe it as the best sci-fi movie ever or even the best Star Trek movie ever, but it does avoid the curse of the odd numbered Star Trek movies.  It is a very competent and entertaining movie which, unlike most of the recent Star Trek movies (say, anything that doesn’t have the TOS cast in it), can be enjoyed by just about anyone.

Given that Dragonball screened on 2,181 theaters and that average ticket prices are $7.18, that means a total of about 647,500 people saw this movie, averaging to about 300 people per theater, or 100 people per theater per day (and then spread that out to 5 to 7 shows per day per theater, assuming it was only on 1 screen per theater, it’s looking at something around 15 to 20 people per screen per showing.).  While Speed Racer was seen as a bomb as well, it still garnered 249 people per theater per day, even though it was shown in over 1000 more theaters.  Box Office Mojo rates it as the 84th worst opening for a movie that opened in over 2000 theaters.

This also continues a string of flops for Fox, whose last films have opened to bad performances, with 12 Rounds opening to just $5.3 million and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li opening at $4.7 million (in 1,136 theaters, meaning that, on average, it actually did better than Dragonball), and the studio only has 2 films in the top 30 this year so far.

Weekend actuals are expected to be released sometime this afternoon.

Dragonball: Evolution opened Friday with a non-existant $2.1 million, opening in 8th place after one day, and averaging $951 per screen (though, it would open at #6 based on how much money was made per screen).  If you say that each screen had an average of 6 showings of the movie, that averages down to about $158.50 per showing, or about 16 people in the theater every time it ran.

Just from a brief review of early movies, there is little consistency on whether Friday is the best or worst (or middle) day for weekend box office numbers, but at this point Dragonball is probably going to be looking at between a $5 million  and $8 million opening weekend – obviously a bigger bomb than even I was imagining it to be.

On the otherhand, Hannah Montana looks to open at #1, racking up $17.4 million on Friday, and looks to garner between $45 and $60 million in a huge surprise this weekend.  (though I”m not sure what this says about society in general).

Update: Also for some perspective, Speed Racer opened on Friday at $6.2 million, leading into an opening weekend of $18.6 million and an overall domestic haul of $43.9 million.  Now consider that Dragonball is making about 1/3 Speed Racer did on opening Friday…

Having said that, below the fold are some screenshots of the third and probably final Star Trek trailer and my thoughts about what we see.

Captain Kirk after a bar fight

I guess not many thoughts here other than I guess this is where Kirk learned how to kick ass in hand-to-hand combat so well.

Captain Christopher Pike

In Star Trek canon, Pike was the Enterprise’s second captain, and the captain of the ship in the The Original Series’ first unaired-at-the-time pilot episode “The Cage”, most of which was reused in the two-part TOS episode “The Menagerie.”  He was captain for 11 years, many of those years with Spock on his crew, after which Kirk finally became captain after serving on the Farragut.

This appears one of the big glaring background-canon changes as Kirk meets up with Pike much earlier than before, and appears to go straight to serving on the Enterprise, skipping his time on the Farragut (at least from what we can see from the trailers.  This isn’t set in stone, however).  In any case, there is no evidence from canon that Kirk served on the Enterprise as anything other than Captain or Admiral.

The Enterprise being constructed

I don’t believe there is any actual proclamation in canon about where, exactly, the Enterprise was conducted, but the most widely accepted answer was at the San Francisco ship yards per the plaque on the Enterprise’s bridge.  We can’t tell where it is being built in this shot, but there is some speculation that it is being constructed in Iowa.  Why Iowa? I have no idea.  However, one can’t really conclude anything from the trailer, but I do hope they keep it in San Francisco (or at least in the general vicinity of it).

San Francisco

I’m assuming this is a view of where Marine Drive and Old Mason Street is, a place which is currently a nice grassy field.  I just included this cause I thought it looked cool.

Starfleet Academy graduation ceremony?

That’s a lot of Starfleet cadets.  I’m assuming this is the graduation ceremony or something.  It’s obviously some very big and formal meeting of cadets.  Gotta love the Federation emblem, though.

Nero’s ship doing….something

I’m not sure what’s happening here, but I assume it has something to do with the time travel that’s going on in this movie.

Bye Vulcan!

This shot apparently shows Vulcan being destroyed via a black hole injected into it’s core by Nero.  Now, I have several theories about this:

1. It’s a part of some “oops, we lost Vulcan! let’s go back in time to fix it” type thing.  I hope this isn’t the case, as that kind of reeks of a dues ex machina ending, but it’s a possibility since we already have time travel going on in the movie.

2. It’s just a shot of a “this is what he wants to do” plan in the movie.  You know those scenes.  It gives the director an excuse to show Earth blowing up or something without really blowing it up by presenting it as a “this is what we’re trying to stop” scene.  This is kind of what I’m hoping for.

3. They actually blow up Vulcan, in which case Star Trek canon is gonna be really messed up and fans will start rioting after seeing the movie.  I actually kind of fear this result due to some of the people making the movie making noises about changing the time line without changing canon due to the multiple universes theory as a result of quantum mechanics.  I kind of hope they realized that if they need quantum mechanics to justify anything they’re doing, that they don’t do it.

4. They actually blow up Vulcan, but this action is “undone” after they “restore the timeline” after defeating Nero.  I guess that’s a compromise between optiosn 1 and 3 and would still be kind of lame, but not as lame as option 1 and not as riot inducing as option 3.

Doctor McCoy

Just a character screen cap.  He sounds scarily like DeForest Kelley’s McCoy, at least based on the one line we hear in this trailer.

Kirk takes The Chair

Not exactly as described in canon, but it will still do.  And what about that new jazzed up bridge. Definitely not canon, but I guess what do you expect considering that the old TOS bridge is probably way outdated by even today’s technology at this point.

McCoy and Kirk on a shuttlecraft

I assume this is Kirk and McCoy on a shuttlecraft heading towards the Enterprise.  That will probably be one of those “try to hold the emotion back” moments of the movie when we first see the ship in space.

The Enterprise faces Nero’s ship

OK, not many comments on this other than the fact that it looks really cool.  And since when did Romulans get ships like that, or is that something Nero custom-made?

Uhura hugs an unsure Spock

Will this be a dramatic moment where Spock tries to comfort Uhura (or vice versa) when some bad thing happens, or will it be a chance to laugh at the fact that Spock has no idea what to do.  I’m guessing the former, but as I mentioned above, you can only conclude so much from just the trailer.

Sulu kicking ass

I’m actually fairly confident that John Cho will play a good Sulu, despite his past roles in primarily comedy movies.  Also, we hear a clip of Sulu in the trailer, and if it’s Cho saying that line, he sounds amazingly like the old Sulu, much like how the new McCoy mimicks the old McCoy quite well.

Nero taunting Kirk

In this scene, Nero is saying something like “James T. Kirk was a great man, but that was a another life,” just stressing the time traveling part of the movie (where apparently Nero himself has come from the future, which is why he knows so much about Kirk).

George Kirk?

I think the consensus thus far is that this show is showing George Kirk, James’ father, on the bridge of the Kelvin as it’s being destroyed by Nero.

The USS Kelvin being attacked

First off, you can tell this shot has been flipped because the numbers are on the left side of the saucer instead of the right, and “USS Kelvin” is mirrored, so in reality, this scene will be flipped in the movie (I also believe it’s upside down as well).  I’m guessing this will be at or near the top of the movie.  And it’s always fun seeing starships get blown up.

In the end, I’m very excited about this movie, but I’m not sure about some of the things I’ve heard – particurly the excuse of the “multiple universes” theory of quantum physics to justify changes to the timeline while saying that it doesn’t alter the timeline of the franchise as released.  As long as most of these changes are to relatively minor details (where the Enterprise was built, when Kirk got to the Enterprise, etc.) then I won’t really have much of a problem with it.  However, if they start changing major things (like the above suggested destruction of Vulcan) and then justify it by calling “quantum physics,” then there will be a lot of unhappy fans, including me.

However, here are some thoughts: We know that Nero attacks both Earth and Vulcan.  The question is when are each of these attacked.  We pretty much know that Vulcan is attacked when Kirk is on the Enterprise, but how about Earth?  Was it attacked when Nero first arrived and destroyed Kirk’s father’s ship, or around the same time Vulcan was attacked?  You can tell earth was attacked, because it’s clearly being hit at the 20 second mark of the Super Bowl Trailer, and at about the 1:02 mark of the new trailer, you can clearly see that the tower is above the Golden Gate Bridge and Richardson Bay.  However, Kirk and company clearly appear to be jumping onto the platform over Vulcan, as it’s clear there is no ocean anywhere near where the beam is hitting the planet.

It appears like the main space battles that the Enterprise are in are over Vulcan, so that appears to be the climax of the movie I would guess, meaning that it’s quite possible that the attack on Earth is the battle in which Kirk’s father was involved.  It also seems odd that the apparent shot of Vulcan imploding has no ship debris or battles going on around the planet at the time, which, on top of the fact that you would think that Sulu and Kirk would be killed on the platform if the planet imploded, makes me think Vulcan is going to end up pretty much intact at the end of the movie.  Meanwhile, I haven’t seen any angle to tell what planet, if any, the Kelvin is fighting over.

Basically where this movie ends should pretty seamlessly feed into the start of The Original Series and the rest of the franchise.  If it doesn’t, I think the movie will probably widely be panned as a failure by the fandom.