Film - Star Trek

Disclaimer: I have never, ever seen an episode of Star Trek or any of the previous movies.

So, Star Trek. I knew it would be awesome, because, well, it's SF and it's J.J. Abrams. That's just a recipe for goodness. And it was completely awesome.

I just have to say that all three J.J. Abrams-related media (TV Shows - Fringe* and Lost, and the Star Trek movie) that I have watched recently are dealing with time travel and alternate realities. They each take a slightly different approach to time travel and/or alternate realities, but the overlap is kind of interesting.

The version in Star Trek is one that I can really get on board with. Basically, it is that when someone travels back in time - through a black hole in the case of the movie - they create an alternate reality. The place they came from, where in the past they had not traveled back in time, still exists, but it's an alternate future/dimension/reality. I really like this, because you can have it both ways here. In one sense, it's impossible to change the past. They can't go back into their own past and change what happened. But they can change it in an alternate dimension. It helps with the paradox problem (i.e., if I go back in time and change things so that I am never born, how did I get to the past to make that change).

We haven't quite figured out how Lost if going to deal with time travel, since we ended on a kind of cliffhanger. Fringe isn't about time travel at all, but it is about alternate dimensions. They talk about the fact that every time people make a decision, reality splinters, like a branch of a tree. So, that's consistent with the Star Trek version of time travel, because someone showing up today and claiming to be from the future would be one branch, and the reality where that never happened would be another.

I don't want to go into to much else from the movie, because I know my co-blogger hasn't seen it yet, but I do want to say one other thing. The casting was fantastic, except for one glaring, confusing, question mark. Winona Ryder as Spock's mother. She's only six years older than Zachary Quinto, who plays Spock, and they had to age her with make-up. Are you telling me they couldn't find a more age-appropriate actress? I've looked all over the internet to see if there was an explanation for this casting choice, but I didn't find anything. Very confusing. It actually took me way out of the movie.

But the bottom line was that the movie was fantastic. If you haven't already seen it, I highly recommend it.

*I didn't blog about the Fringe season finale, but it was fantastic. The major twist was COMPLETELY shocking, but also fit perfectly with the show, which is really hard to do. Just wanted to give them their props.