Gabri

STF Ambassador
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    691

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Gabri

  3. Posted

    I'm feeling a strong urge to chop my hair into a pixie cut and dye it a weird color. :superhappy: Think I might do that this weekend. I'm bored to tears with longish hair.

    If you do that you'll just regret it later. You've been growing your natural color out for how long now and now you want to dye it?

     

    Oh I dyed it months ago, I'm just bored with the current color lol. You know I never stick with one style/color for long, change is too fun

    No blue or purple, please.

     

    I should be knitting, but I'm very lazy today.

  5. Posted

    Thanks, AE! Nice to see you again too. :P

     

    It was fabulous. I didn't believe they could capture the spirit of Trek so well, and I don't think I've ever been so happy to be wrong. I know that some longtime fans are less than thrilled with some of the movie, but my SW friends and I have been talking about it, and everyone either adores it or can't wait to see it - and these are mostly casual ST fans or not ST fans at all. It's awesome to see Trek be truly accessible to the general populace again. I rather suspect that the man who marketed Trek as "Wagon Train to the Stars" would be very pleased to see such a development. :D

  6. Posted

    I loved those scenes too. (Including the ones with Uhura and her Orion roommate, though not for the same reasons as Van Roy. :D ) One of the other ones that stands out in my mind is Chekov racing to the transporter room. "I can do this! I can do this!" It was great characterization. And Sulu taking out his collapsible fencing sword rocked.

     

    I also liked a tiny snippet - wasn't the shuttle that took McCoy and Kirk up to the Enterprise named "Gillian"? Nice nod to my favorite ST movie there. :P

  7. Posted

    No, doesn't bother me. To me, the line "not your fathers Star Trek" means Alive Again.

     

    Near it's end old Trek had bad baggage attached to it, it was considered too nerdy by mainstream and had become a rotting corpse of mediocrity. Only we hard core fans were following along anymore but we weren't enough to keep sustaining Trek in that form. ENT, INS & NEM were largely critical failures for the franchise, it couldn't continue in that state. Something had to change.

     

    Abrams has taken the nerds-only factor out of it, made it accessible to more people and (hopefully) breathed new life in to it.

    This.

     

    As far as the perception that the phrase is sexist, I disagree. Van Roy's right; when ST premiered, female sci-fi fans were few and far between. The cold hard truth is that they're very much the minority still, actually. Regardless, the fact that one gender was mentioned hardly indicates a derogatory swipe at the other. The old "not your father's Oldsmobile" commercials didn't mean that they didn't want women to buy the cars. Similarly, "Not your father's Star Trek" is catchier than "Not your parents' Star Trek", plain and simple, and that's what they're doing here. It's an advertising hook, nothing more. Reminds me of the time I was a restaurant hostess and a customer actively took offense that I asked "Smoking or non?" instead of putting the non-smoking option first, and demanded to know why I worded it that way. I said, "Um, because I say it a thousand times a night and "Smoking or non" is faster and easier to say than "Non-smoking or smoking." She blinked, said, "Oh," and dropped it. Sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one.

  9. Posted

    I totally agree. I've seen it twice so far, and I'll probably see it at least once more in theaters. It's brilliantly handled in every way, and I would have been so disappointed if they'd reversed the effects to the timeline. Taking Trek in a new direction like this was a fantastic idea, and is making Trek both accessible and appealing to many, many people who might never have looked at it otherwise. I think it'll wind up invigorating the entire fandom. :P

  12. Posted

    Probably few people even remember who I am, so for those who don't: I'm RikerChick's sister. I've been a member for a long time, but I haven't been around much because frankly, ST was no longer my cup of tea. This movie might have changed that for me. Perhaps oddly, I don't think my review is going to have many spoilers, but I'm putting the whole thing in the spoiler box for safety's sake.

     

    Click for Spoiler:

    I was skeptical going in. The commercials made me think it would be entertaining, at least, but I wasn't at all convinced that it would be good ST. My confidence was not bolstered by the most recent prior ST offerings, which hadn't impressed me much either. In fact, since DS9 was cancelled, I'd become increasingly disillusioned with ST. Don't get me wrong - I liked Voyager. I wanted to like Enterprise and the movies. But despite my best efforts, I didn't like Enterprise, and with the exception of First Contact (which I only liked, not loved), I haven't liked any of the post-TVH movies. Maybe I'm just overly picky, but the fact remains that I truly didn't like them. In fact, I was bored by them.

     

    I felt that ST had become set in its ways to the point of being stale. It had been pushed into overexposure; its attempts at originality were often strained and mostly fell flat; the ST universe wavered under the heavy weight of forty-plus years of intricate canon details to work around with every new installment. I was resigned to feeling as though ST had little new left to offer.

     

    No longer.

     

    Pretty much from the very first moment, this movie pulled me in entirely. It's an alternate universe, yes. Some details are definitely different, yes. But the feel, the spirit of ST, was absolutely dead on. I haven't been truly excited about ST like this since the end of DS9. I grinned through the entire movie. I laughed way more than I expected. I had to work at not clapping in sheer delight at least a dozen different times.

     

    I've been a ST fan for most of my life, but I'm also a SW fan, and SW has been my primary fandom focus for at least the last seven years. Additionally, my primary focus within the SW fandom is as an avid reader and sometime writer of fanfic, and a devotee of alternate universe scenarios. Speaking from that point of view, this is the absolute best type of story: This is an alternate universe that captures the original, essential soul of the story and characters so entirely that everything and everyone feels truly authentic despite occasionally drastic differences in circumstances. That's a really, really tricky thing to do, but they pulled it off more beautifully than I could have imagined.

     

    The story line and script maintained a positively brilliant balance between AU elements and canon elements. The cast was phenomenal, to the point that I forgot I wasn't seeing the original actors. (This extended to the minor parts. There was at least one moment where Sarek was so utterly Sarek that I hesitated - Mark Lenard was dead, wasn't he? This couldn't be him, could it?) I delighted in catching canon details and references even as I thrilled to the new possibilities opened up by the AU setting. The special effects were awesome - but most importantly, they still felt entirely like ST. The sound editing - oh, the sound editing. The Oscars are notorious for ignoring the non-technical accomplishments of science fiction and fantasy films, but doggone it, this movie better at least win the sound editing category.

     

    But perhaps most important of all for the ST franchise as a whole? This movie doesn't simply capture the spirit of ST. It captures the spirit of ST while remaining accessible to people other than diehard fans. This is ST that an average person can watch and enjoy without having to know the continuity of five television series (25+ years' worth, isn't it?) and ten movies.

     

    Last night as we were leaving the theater, Mandy and I overheard the conversation of some teenage girls from our ST audience. They were obviously not diehards; these were girls who were talked into coming to see this movie. They raved about it. They thought it was incredible; they all said they were so glad they'd come. Now, I am a female sci-fi fan. (Obviously.) I've been a fan of science fiction and fantasy my entire life; I've been a SW fan since I was seven; I've been a ST fan since I was twelve. Let me tell you, I have a lot of experience as a young female sci-fi fan, and I am able to state with utmost assurance that young women are not the core audience for this sort of thing. We never have been. We're more plentiful than we once were, but we're not who most sci-fi franchises, ST and SW included, aim to please. If this pack of teenage girls came out of this movie excited to have spent their Friday night watching ST, then something very special was accomplished here.

     

    This movie has revitalized ST in a way that I had no longer believed possible. For that alone, we owe it a huge debt. To echo Wil Wheaton, I hope that this creative team and cast make eleven more ST movies. And personally, I thank them for making me excited about ST for the first time in years.