Jun 10 2013

Star Trek Should Head to a New Platform

I am a girl gamer. I enjoy a great RPG with a complex story line. I love survival horrors game that you play in the dark. I enjoy simulations and making pixel people do my bidding. But I get really annoyed when games spend more time in CG or full motion movies than game play. If I wanted to watch a movie, I would watch a movie. The same can be said for movies. If I wanted sweeping CG action I would turn to a game. My point? Star Trek Into Darkness made me want to go play games instead of watching the movie.

The latest installment of J.J. Abrams version of Star Trek pits Kirk against a familiar enemy when a terrorist attacks Star Fleet buildings. Kirk is sent on a clandestine mission to kill the perpetrator on sight, instead of bringing him for trail. Influenced by Mr. Spock, Kirk does not kill the enemy on sight and, instead, learns a lot about the upcoming Klingon war.

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We all know it’s Khan. Quit lying to us!

Star Trek aims to be a soaring space saga. But it comes up short and leaves me nostalgic for the Mass Effect Trilogy. One of the biggest issues is that the movie is clearly 90 percent CG. And it is done very obviously. For me, effects should not seem like effects when they are done correctly. If I want something totally graphically created, I would play a video game. Mass Effect had more realistic graphics that were stunning and beautiful. This movie you could tell was overly green screened and computerized.

The second issue is the story itself. Had this been a 40 hour RPG, the crew would have had time to truly develop the ideas and concepts in the movie. Instead, the film drags on. Just when you think it’s over, it’s not. In fact, there is one place where the movie should have ended and I would have been compelled to see the sequel. Instead, most ideas and are left to generalizations and caricatures of our favorite characters. The movie had a lot of potential, but like many of Abrams works, it fails to live up to that potential.

I have one issue with the movie as being a classic Star Trek fan. For the first movie, I put away many of my misgiving about rewriting the story and the horrible casting of many of the characters. I was willing to put it aside because it was a new story and a new vehicle. But Abrams and crew can’t decide if that is the case. I got over Leonard Nimoy’s appearance in the first movie. But the second became more of an off shoot from the original movie plots. Spock breaks logic to tell them how they defeated the villain before. Into Darkness also take a familiar bad guy (Abrams quit lying to us! We aren’t stupid) and pits him in a parallel universe to “The Wrath of Khan”.

Had this been a RPG game, I would have loved it even with the plot holes the Enterprise could fit through. But as I a film, I grew bored, enchanted and ready for it to be over. I longed for “The Undiscovered Country” and Mass Effect. Those would have been time better spent.

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