A carnival of technology

I saw the new Star Trek movie.  I can’t remember what’s in the promotional material and I’d be bad at filtering through that anyway so, if you care about that kind of thing, look out: oh noes spoilers.

So.  I thought the movie was merely ok instead of super great, and my problems come in three classes.  The first and most expected is the direction.  Mr. Abrams’ style is different from the usual stiff, thinky Star Trek we’ve seen in the past, and I’m ok with that.  I have come to terms with the idea of Star Trek looking like Mission Impossible 3.  What made me cringe was when it looked more like Mission Impossible 2.  There was one scene in particular where young Kirk was crashing a Corvette, andt it looked like he should have come flipping out of the car guns akimbo to complete the scene.  That was unnecessary.  Also unnecessary was the overuse of shaky-cam.  Some shakiness can be used to great effect to create a sense of chaos, but its use in every single action scene managed to destroy both the vastness of space and the submarine-like closeness of the ship.  A good slow sweep through an explosion or two would have a nice contrast.

Secondly, there’s the whole younger timeline bit.  This movie has to tread a thin line between appealing to nerds like me, who have seen that TV episode where Kirk shoots a guy in a rubber lizard suit with a makeshift cannon, and the new fans, who maybe haven’t even seen the movie with the whales in it, but there were just too many times where a character would show that their younger self has the same flaws and quirks as their eventual older selves, and it did nothing to build the character or advance the story.  They were brief nods to people like me who could catch the reference, and while it was funny at first to see young, good-looking actors playing the familiar roles of Kirk and Spock and Bones, sniping and rolling eyes and saying all the right phrases, it got a little too Muppet Babies after a while.  Just let the relationships, which are really pretty straightforward, build naturally.

And then there’s the plot.  My gripe here is that it’s a Cliff’s Notes Khan.  Part of what made The Wrath of Khan so powerful is that it’s Moby Dick—it doesn’t matter that you never read it; it’s still a universally understood theme—with a twist.  Kirk is the instinctive force of Nature, ignorant of the effects of his actions; but his essential drive is intellect and not the mindless hunger of the white whale, creating instead a movie with two Ahabs.  The Romulan Captain Nemo is a really shitty Ahab.  There was never any real menace to his presence.  He wasn’t a relentless, pursuing force, but instead more like one of those space anomalies you’d find in Voyager.  The movie became about building a relationship between Kirk and Spock, a relationship that half the audience already knew and the other half could figure out in fifteen minutes: Kirk is constantly looking for Spock’s human side and Spock is strugging to hide it, and McCoy is miserable about everything.  It’s a drama without a villain.

It sure was pretty, though.  I hope it can set up a really nice sequel.

#31: Shipyard Imperial Porter

This beer comes from Maine, the mysterious land of lobsters, Stephen King novels and murders happening whenever Angela Lansbury is around.  Shipyard, besides their own line is also a contract brewer for a handful of other New England brands, and the few notes I’ve bothered to read on Internet say that they’re pretty good at it.  This particular beer has a big paragraph on the back of the bottle that talks about hop selection and original gravity and other brewer-nerd kinds of things, and in all it seems like it’s made by someone who really digs making beer.  That sounds like a good base, and I like porters, so why not.

This beer is on the stronger side (7.1% ABV), but that’s really the only suggestion of “Imperial” that I get from it.  It smells pretty normal, and the the taste is big on chocolate malts, but other than that seems pretty regular.  Which isn’t to say that it’s not tasty.  The chocolate and roasted malts balance well with the hops, and the sour porter twang comes in around the edges toward the finish.  The bottle says to serve it at 55°F, and I probably started a little colder than that.  As it warmed up a little, the sour taste comes more into the foreground and the bite from the carbonation faded into a slightly more creamy taste and feel.  As it warmed up a little more some other taste started to come out a little, something sort of like artificial vanilla.  Don’t let it warm up that much.

I dunno.  This is an ok porter.  I wouldn’t call it an imperial porter.  And it got a little weird toward the end.  I just don’t feel strongly either way about it.