Star Trek Again.
Okay, I'm just going to post this. I don't intend to make a million of these posts. I know the vast majority of my flist and the world loved the star trek film and are uninterested in my hate. But when I try to write different posts this one just keeps coming out. It's the same as before but with slightly less sarcasm.

I mostly gave up on cinema about *mumble* months ago when I saw Hellboy 2 and The Mummy 3 in the same day and I realised cinema had stopped reaching my RIDICULOUSLY LOW ACTUALLY, RIDICULOUSLY LOW standards. Turns out cinema didn't improve a whole lot while I was away. I didn't go into this film all negative, though, I really didn't. I love star trek quite a lot, and I generally enjoy star trek films while I'm watching them, but I don't genuinely believe they're canon. So I wasn't overly invested in whatever happened in it. I didn't have huge hopes just waiting to be dashed.

And I am so entirely against the complete lack of original thought in tv and cinema at the moment. So I was fairly positive the film wasn't going to convince me that making an au-re-imagining of something I love was the best thing in the world ever to happen. But I expected a decent film and some fun/interesting ideas and . . . less lens flare. I was totally prepared and expecting to come out of it going 'I like some of the things they did, that was interesting, la la la'. MY EXPECTATIONS WERE LOW, that doesn't mean I was too negative to give things a chance. It means that I was thinking they would easily meet them. I know I think this all the time and it just goes wrong but I DO TRY.

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Obviously the lack of women and the way that Uhura was treated was my least favourite thing about this film. I can't bring myself to believe that Uhura in this film is actually what people are looking for from a female character, standards can't have dropped that low. And I cannot fucking believe they made her get undressed. I don't think Uhura and Spock are easily explained by being in an au, unless you accept that it's an au where women only exist to serve men's emotions. Even the emotionless ones. That is very much the au they wrote. I just don't think it's an acceptable one unless that is an issue you're thinking of addressing. I don't think it's acceptable that THEY DIDN'T PUT ANY WOMEN IN THEIR FILM. They put three in, who got more than a scene. Two mothers and a romantic interest. There were extras. Obviously. But you know.

Uhura didn't do anything. She didn't join in with anything. She overheard a message that allowed KIRK to save the day, by putting things together, and she told him about it inadvertently while half dressed. She got herself on board the enterprise, by going 'actually you're discriminating against me there' which is fine, it's important to stand up against discrimination, I just don't think it's entirely the point they were trying to make and I don't think they knew it happened. It would have been nice if they had made some effort to be a universe where there was equality already. If they weren't going to treat the women well they could at least have let us believe the universe did.

She wore a ridiculous outfit, that clearly meant she wasn't expected to have any need to defend herself or actually leave the ship or really do anything - I'm guessing there might be places - huge ice planets with cgi monsters on them for example - where bare arms and legs might be kind of unhelpful. I just thought she was appallingly treated, and I expected so much more. Not even that she should leave the ship, or have a fight, or any of that. It's not her job on the ship and that's fine. But if she's your ONLY WOMAN you might write her job into the script a little bit, or at least SHOW HER DOING IT, instead of just telling us how good she is at it and then letting us watch her kiss people. FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

I am so so so capable of loving something despite it having really dodgy gender issues, and I can totally see how you might here - I didn't like the rest of the film, but you know, if I had, if I'd liked the slash, if anything - I'm not judging you, I think that's why I've been deleting this post a lot.

I think even just if Uhura had been NORMAL and not serving as the heterosexualiser for BOTH main characters, I might have got over there being no other women there. If she had actually been *shown* to be good at her job and a part of the crew, in really small ways. That might have been enough, but for her to be the ONLY ONE and then just sexualised and . . . did she have any lines that weren't about her love for Spock?

I can't stand that they basically got all excited about how they were going to make an au and it would be great and at last they could have this star trek they've always wanted, without having to whine on about how the original series was so much more fun, blah blah blah aren't starfleet regulations dull, and it was going to be so super, and oh, how lucky we are! And then THEY MADE A UNIVERSE WITHOUT WOMEN IN IT. Great. That'll totally be more fun. It upsets me so much when I really think about it. I know I sound really naive, but I didn't know that's what they meant when they said tos was so much more fun. Or I guess I didn't know that people were accepting that so readily.

I'm not actually being idealistic about star trek, I'm about to sound like I am, but I'm not. I do know that all star trek is so amazingly far away from perfect, and I know that EVERY incarnation has so many huge gaping issues surrounding it and pretends that it doesn't, and I know that it is just awful, and I know that their basic thing is to appear quite progressive while being determinedly conservative. But they missed out the APPEARING QUITE PROGRESSIVE bit. They seem to have made a whole alternate universe just so it can be MORE LIKE OUR UNIVERSE, and then forgotten to even add in a bit of social change. And that's fairly central to trek, isn't it? And I know it was a film that was also sort of a pilot episode, and if it was a series I would be hopeful for actual characterisation and some sort of essential star trek philosophy in the coming episodes. But I've seen both new labour and new who, and I have learned Lessons. You're not a clever trick, pretending to be something new to draw people in, and then secretly smuggling in your original Values. You're just a lie.

I think there might have been more women on Kirk's dad's ship than on Kirk's. And I don't think they were wearing skirts. (IMPRACTICAL RIDICULOUS SKIRTS THAT MAKE NO SENSE IN ANY UNIVERSE.) So maybe ridiculous inappropriate skirts were just a fashion trend that the federation accepted for some reason. Maybe people are allowed to wear bikinis if they really want to. Or suits of armour. They both make as much sense.

There were women extras. I'm not saying they actually made space without women in it, that would have required an explanation and some sort of thought process and possibly an important message. They just made a universe where women were defined by their relationships to men, and didn't speak. Wow! I'VE NEVER SEEN THAT BEFORE, WHAT AN INTERESTING NEW WORLD YOU HAVE CREATED, REALLY YOU ARE BREAKING NEW FRONTIERS. THANKS.

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There are so many other things I hated. Some were just not-my-sort-of-film type things. The only bit that reminded me entirely of new who was when the red shirt died in the entirely wrong way. Because he was HAVING TOO MUCH FUN FLYING THROUGH THE AIR???? What? I don't really understand what they meant or what they thought that was and I do want to write paragraphs about how wrong it was, but I would have to use words I don't approve of. So I can't.

Seriously did they explain why cadets got to keep the enterprise? Presumably the fleet came back, and they had some senior officers around. Or did I miss the radio announcement about how they all died? I might have done. I was bored and uncomfortable and BLINDED BY THE FUCKING LENS FLARE ALL OVER MY SCREEN. If you are making a high school au, either dive right in there, or make a reason for that to happen, but having a whole film just to get to that point and having it turn out to be a point YOU COULD EASILY HAVE STARTED FROM with it still making just as much sense, is a total waste of my entire afternoon.

The rest of it was just not my sort of thing. The loudness of the punches was all very well but really wore on me. I didn't think they did the slash entirely well, I mean it was fine, but not very beautiful to me. I didn't like the fight scenes, you know, space battles. I didn't like how Kirk won his test or that they thought they should put that in. I didn't like that they made the most boring au they could, so the only point of it being an au was that they could make the main characters SLIGHTLY MORE MUNDANE than they already were, and the universe slightly more like our own.

But mostly it was the women thing.

(It was so bad. But there were things I liked! I left them to the end and put them in brackets, but I made an effort. I really liked McCoy. Mostly because he looked like a real person and wasn't made of plasticine. And he was great. I like that (fake) Spock looked like (real) Spock occasionally, I didn't like when he used Damien Lewis's mouth. Pike was okay. I like that Jim wore black. I quite liked Scotty and I really wasn't expecting to. I liked the . . . Decima? and that he took a spanner off of Scotty and then threw it down. I liked when Kirk was ill and racing around the ship, I thought that could have been far more annoying that it was, I like that his tongue went dead and McCoy could fix that! I quite liked Red Matter. I loved (real) Spock and how he was beautiful and how he used his voice. I think they completely cheated at the end there with the original music but I'm glad that they did - it didn't make two and a half hours worthwhile, but at least there was a moment of relief right at the end. I really liked the bridge design; I imagine it looked quite nice if you took all the lens flare off it. I liked the eye liner. I think I could cut it down to an hour and a half and then I wouldn't have HATED it so much, although it would still have upset me a fair bit and been a bit pointless. Most of these things I liked were moments. Very much just moments.)