Fulltime Casual - An Australian Film and TV Podcast

Sure, it’s got overacting and bad dialogue and silly costumes and embarrassing alien marriage ceremonies and Wesley Crusher, but at day’s end, I still dig me some Trek. I like the old kitschy one with Shatner’s unique brand of swagger. I like Next Gen with its weighty pretentious pondering and its weighty pretentious captain. I like Deep Space Nine with its overblown prophesying and mawkish romance. Hell, I even like the one with the holographic doctor and that insufferable Neelix guy.

The movies, though, should always have been much better than they were. I mean, I’ll watch them, but more because I really like spaceships and rayguns than the quality of the flicks themselves. Wrath of Kahn is probably the only one that stands up on its own… although I confess to a soft spot for the comedy stylings of the Star Trek Christmas Special. Oh, and that zero-G japery in Undiscovered Country was pretty rockin’.

But really, after the ponderousness of the Motionless Picture led into Ricardo Montalban’s hilariously hammy Kahn, it was all downhill. By the time the Next Gen crew took over, it was all too late – there was just no vigour left in any of it. The final film of the series features a clone of Picard, for Christ’s sake. You don’t need a PhD and a Geiger counter to work out what happened to the whitegoods there.

So, when I hear that JJ Abrams is rebooting the franchise, I say hell yeah! Or, if there are no women present, I might say “Set course for planet awesome: maximum warp!”, or possibly, “Set phasers to fun!”

Everything that’s out about this film so far is sounding pretty good. They’ve got the always solid Karl Urban to be McCoy, which is good. They’ve got that Sylar guy from Heroes to play Spock, which is perfect, because he’s the Spockiest guy you’ve ever seen with the exception of actual Spock. They’ve got some dude called Chris Pine to be Kirk – I dunno what he’s about, but I’m sure he was chosen very carefully.

Most importantly, most awesomely, they’ve got Simon Pegg as space-engineer and miracle-worker nonpareil Montgomery Scott.

St Pegg, Patron Saint of Annoying Your Girlfriend by Quoting the Whole Film, is fuckin’ Scotty. He’s gonna get to say “She cannae take much more of this, cap’n!” And he’s gonna get to beam people places. And it’s gonna take four hours to fix the thingamatron, but for Kirk, he’ll get it done in two! Yay!

I can’t wait a whole year for this!

And, on the early teaser-posters that have come out, he looks awesome and serious and ready to kick arse.

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