Friday, November 20, 2009

BD impressions: Star Trek (2009)

2:41 PM / BD Impressions / Comments9 Comments

BD Impressions
Blu-ray

Anyone remember the infuriating trend in the 1980s of resurrecting classic cartoon characters and creating baby versions of them? This creativity-deprived craze gave rise to The Tom & Jerry Kids Show, Flintstone Kids, Tiny Toon Adventures and other such dreck. Watching J.J. Abrams' 2009 reboot of Star Trek, I felt that something very similar was being done to the Gene Roddenberry's venerable sci-fi saga, albeit with the scenes featuring Kirk and Spock as actual children mercifully kept to a minimum. I'm probably the only person on the planet who has never seen a Star Trek movie or a single episode from any of the various TV series, but given that the new movie was widely publicised as a complete reset I assumed this wouldn't be an issue.

Unfortunately, I found precious little to enjoy in this loud, over-long reel of explosions and lens flares penned by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, Abrams' go-to script guys and the people responsible for giving us Michael Bay's Transformers movies. I definitely got something of a Transformers vibe from this film since, while thankfully not infested with that film's peurile humour (which I suspect comes from Bay anyway rather than his writers), it felt similarly empty and devoid of any real substance. Kirk comes across as a smug, irritating little attention-seeker and Spock a pompous boob, while no-one else actually has a personality to speak of, and Simon Pegg is squandered as a gurning ninny with a dreadful Scottish accent. Instead, Abrams and his writers rely on having the characters spout nudge-nudge wink-wink catchphrases and gestures that are obvious to even a Star Trek neophyte such as myself. Really, though, it feels somewhat pointless to be even mentioning the characters, since they're really just there to fill in the gaps between one computer-generated explosion and the next.

Okay, so it's a summer blockbuster and people generally go to these things because they want to see a whole lot of explosions and chase sequences, not because they want to ponder the meaning of life, but Star Trek's reputation led me to hope for a little more than just another wall-to-wall CGI effects show with a plot held together by sticking plaster. Serenity this ain't.

Image quality: While the standard of catalogue titles on BD continues to fluctuate wildly, I get the feeling we've reached a stage where we can pretty much guarantee that a new release of a major blockbuster will look excellent, and for the most part Star Trek is no exception. Abrams and cinematographer Dan Mindel have a tendency to go overboard with the lens flares, but the film's photography is sumptuous, and this translates very well to BD. There is a dense veneer of grain throughout and this is encoded with aplomb, while detail is often strikingly crisp in a way that I tend not to associate with anamorphic Panavision productions (which normally lean towards "smooth" rather than "razor sharp").

I really am extremely happy with this presentation, and it would unquestionably be a 10/10 affair were it not for an isolated mishap. For some reason, during the scene in which Spock and the other Vulcans are teleported off their home planet, both the compression and the resolution go all to hell, resulting in a few moments of brief but truly, utterly awful image quality (see Example 10). It looks somewhat reminiscent of a similar problem on the Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest BD, albeit with a far longer duration. This issue is particularly egregious when you consider how good the rest of the encode is, and I can only guess as to what happened to cause such a marked decrease in quality. 9.5/10

Star Trek (2009)
studio: Paramount; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 39.3 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 44.37 Mbit/sec

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9 Comments

1. Marcus said:

That's unfortunate, but I hope it doesn't stop you from checking out the amazing television series (Once again, first two seasons on Blu-Ray) or the other films.

Don't worry though, plenty of fans of the franchise didn't like it either. In a weird way I can understand why someone wouldn't like it, but I did enjoy Chris Pine's performance (completely different from William Shatner) and other aspects. It's a hell of a lot better than Abrams' other 60s TV show adaptation M:I III (curiously both M:I and Star Trek were shot in the same studio and with the same crew back in the day).

(Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 8:09 PM)

2. Marcus said:

On a related note, although I agree that a lot of the shows you mentioned were indeed dreck (A Pup Named Scooby Doo, Tom & Jerry Kids)Tiny Toon Adventures was actually pretty good and by far the best of the "resurrecting cartoons for kids" (which according to my knowledge was more of a 90s trend than 80s). The writing in Tiny Toons as far as I remember was pretty sharp, it led us to even better shows (Animaniacs, Freakazoid) and it introduced us to the talents of Bruce Timm and Paul Dini who went on to create what I consider the best superhero cartoon show Batman: The Animated Series.

(Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 8:14 PM)

3. Kram Sacul said:

Does Muppet Babies fall into that category?

(Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 8:21 PM)

4. FoxyMulder said:

My disappointment is that i was led to expect an epic Trek movie but it simply had too fast a pace and they were afraid to slow down to let the film breathe.

Some scenes filmed ended up on the cutting room floor due to the makers wanted a fast paced summer action movie and i suspect there may be the possibility of a longer special edition nearer the release date of the next trek movie.

Still i have to say i enjoyed it for what it was but i consider the original motion picture a better epic natured film and Star Trek II, Star Trek VI and STar Trek VIII better trek movies.

Thats a nice find with the compression issues. I didnt notice it when i viewed it.

I tend to spot edge enhancement issues easier than compresison issues which bother me slightly less to be honest.

I wrote a review for a new site i have been working on for wordpress here. http://www.darkrealmfox.com/film_reviews/2009/11/19/star-trek/

I hope you don't mind me linking to that. I'm looking for link partners though as it helps the net visibility so if you fancy linking with me i'd be happy to put up a links partners page and put you on it.

(Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 11:18 PM)

5. Kram Sacul said:

My biggest problem was the overdone shaky camera work and extreme closeups. I like my Trek films wide and slow.

(Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 11:28 PM)

6. Todd S. Gallows said:

I have never seen a Star Trek movie either. I guess it's just laziness, but I hardly find myself able to get into long lived series with a canons that warrant encyclopedia sets. I was on the fence about this movie since it hit the reset button on the franchise, and the Star Trek fan boy community would have had Abrams's head on a stick if this were as bad as say the 2005 Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy so I thought something would have been done right.

But if it's one thing that I've learned, it's to be wary of summer movies. I'm not one to be impressed by HUGE effects and bland characters. If that's all there is to it, I'll spend my time watching something else.

(Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 3:05 AM)

7. CraigTheRave said:

A touch harsh on this one, but for me the main gripes were a rather paper-thin villian and a slightly confusing time-travel plot device. Zachary Quinto was good and so was Chris Pine, and as an admirer more than a die hard fan of Trek movies, I found a lot to smile about. A good starting point for the rest of the imminent franchise then, in my opinion.

(Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 2:58 PM)

8. Marcus said:

"I guess it's just laziness, but I hardly find myself able to get into long lived series with a canons that warrant encyclopedia sets."

Not counting this 2009 installment, there are only 79 episodes and 6 movies featuring the original crew (Kirk, Spock, Uhura). Not as much as you'd believe. The Star Trek franchise seems as large as it is because of all the dull 80s and 90s spin-offs (The Next Generation, Voyager, Deep Space 9, Enterprise, etc...) which all lasted way longer than the original series.

(Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 5:17 PM)

9. Anonymous said:

The accent was really that bad, eh?

(Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 4:16 AM)

 
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