I seem to have been quiet for a while. Saturday and Sunday were mainly spent traveling, though I did have a 4-hour conference call to California for a World Fantasy Con committee meeting on Sunday night. Things never slow down. I did get quite a bit of reading done while I was on the move, but unusually I also watched two movies: the in-flight entertainment on the trans-Atlantic flight included the new Star Trek movie and also Galaxy Quest. They proved an interesting combination.

Everyone seems to have been saying really good things about the Star Trek re-boot, and I have to admit that I was rather disappointed. It was cute in places, and amusing in places, and I do like the way that the new versions of the minor characters have so much more personality than the old ones. However, if you strip away all the bits that meant so much to people who have been watching Star Trek for 30 years you are left with a rather poor film with a silly plot that felt horribly artificial in places. (For some reason the scene where the Enterprise crew are loading photon torpedoes as if they were on a WWII submarine particularly annoyed me.) When the new cast get a film of their own it may be a lot better, but this wasn’t a patch on Watchmen or, I suspect though I haven’t seen it yet, on Coraline.

If you don’t believe me, try watching it back-to-back with Galaxy Quest. That’s also a film that means a lot more if you have spent a lot of time watching Star Trek, but I think it also stands on its own. It is much funnier, and being a comedy it can get away with not making a lot of sense at times. Indeed, the whole meta-narrative that it is indulging in cries out for it to do the sorts of silly things that the TV shows it parodies are famous for — for example the bit where Gwen and Jason have to dodge through the moving pillars.

Of course I still expect the new Star Trek to win the Hugo next year. Worldcon members are nothing if not sentimental. But I won’t be voting for it.