Friggin' fantastic. Especially for old timers like me who grew up watching it in primetime on the television.
Points to be made (and I will try not to let loose any spoilers):
- Vulcans can be sexy and have a bit of naughtiness in them since there clearly was some "chain of command" issues going on.
- The main characters were recognizable without it being cheesy.
- Vulcans are hot.
- Now I know why Bones was always in a bad mood . . . lousy divorce.
- I am not sure it was all that bad an idea to keep the Romulans from destroying San Francisco . . . okay, they had a broader scope.
- Vulcans make me sweat.
- Never underestimate the ability to fence.
- Um, one small unresolved issue . . . what happened to the Centaurian slug attached to Pike's brain stem?
- Why do all Vulcans have the same haircut?
2 comments:
May 11, 2009
Still in Love with Spock After All These Years
First, a true confession: I, a sensible working woman with a husband, five kids, two dogs and two cats, am still in love with Spock. This is no passing fancy. My starstruck state was sparked at age 11, when I first was allowed to watch Star Trek on TV with my parents. At times I had to lie under the coffee table and close my eyes because the aliens scared me. Nonetheless, I saw the Vulcan mind meld and understood the bottomless depths of passion. I vowed to live long and prosper, and I wore a tight red turtleneck and blue jeans every day because I wanted to look as much like a member of the Enterprise crew as possible. (You can imagine what that did for my popularity in sixth grade.)
I could only do that weird split-finger salute with my right hand and never my left, due to some genetic quirk that I share with Zachary Quinto, the actor who plays Spock in the current incarnation. (Quinto had to have his fingers glued because he couldn't do it, either; William Shatner used fishing line to perform the trick in the original series. Don't believe me? Check out http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25459863-5012980,00.html)
Despite this minor physical shortcoming, I persevered. Whenever my best friend and I played Star Trek in her garage, with our very own Enterprise built out of cardboard boxes and her rabbit and my guinea pig and gerbil posing as crew or aliens, depending on our plot, she was always Kirk to my Spock. She was fearless. I was rational, yet conflicted. My emotions ran deep.
I revered Spock so much that he was the first man to whom I wrote a love letter, in return for which I received an autographed photograph, probably signed by one of Leonard Nimoy's minions. Nonetheless, I pressed that picture inside my favorite horse book, My Friend Flicka, for the next six years or so. (My father was a Navy Officer, so nothing was forever.)
I thought my lust for sexy Vulcans was lost for good, too, until I went to see the latest Star Trek movie with my youngest son, now 11, exactly the same age I was when Spock first ignited my passions. We saw Star Trek at an IMAX cinema north of Boston, at Jordan's Furniture, and it was a digital, full body experience far removed from the pale, flickering television of my youth. This theater had a towering screen, rumbling seats and a sound system that made me feel like the theater was being nuked the minute the credits start rolling.
But I didn't think about the theater at the time. While my husband and son were entranced by the battle scenes, I had eyes only for Spock. There were two of them on screen: Leonard Nimoy, as Spock of the future – a man as old as my parents, a man who can still do the most famous split-finger salute in the universe and say “Live long and prosper” and make you think he means it; and Quinto, whose role as Sylar (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0704270/bio) on the brain-bruising Sci Fi conundrum that is Heroes (http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/) calls for him to, among other things, decimate his victims by making the tops of their heads peel off. Could Quinto possibly pull this off, I wondered? Could he reignite my passion for all things Vulcan and make me remember why I loved Spock?
Yes, yes, yes! Quinto plays Spock with brooding bottomless dark eyes, a loyalty to his human mother that causes him to do untoward things like clock whatever dumb ass insults her, the classic arched eyebrow, the ability to easily subdue lesser men with a single shoulder pinch, and a true (albeit glued) Vulcan salute. And it came to me, then, what many women realize over time: that we want a man who is our very own science officer, a man who is logical, yet an enigma who offers us a lifetime of mysteries to unravel. A man who is so much fun to seduce because, hey, when you get under his skin, there's a whole lotta bottled up heat going to come your way.
Did I care whether the Federation, with its courageous Enterprise crew, subdued this latest rebel ship of the Romulan Empire (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Romulan_Star_Empire)? Not one whit. The movie brought my first love back to me, and I went out humming, holding hands with my own software engineer husband, a Spock all my own. I just hadn't realized it until now.
Holly, your commenting is absolutely delightful and one helluva great story!
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