Last night we saw Star Trek at the cinema. I loved the film. Great plot, acting, etc. I only have two problems with it.
<spoiler-alert>
The first is with a little bit of poetic license they’ve taken with the science of black holes. Apparently when a sun going super-nova gets sucked into a black hole it gets crushed into a singularity but when a star-ship goes into a black hole they get hurtled back in time without a scratch. Phew! I just had some minor scratches on my car fixed recently and that was expensive enough - I can only imagine Eric Banner’s relief when the black hole didn’t write off his space ship! They probably cost a bit more than a 04 Magna!
</spoiler-alert>
But I can deal with the black hole thing, I mean how many sci-fi flicks are scientifically accurate? But the thing that really gets me is bloody J.J. Abrams and his fetish for blue lights! I mean we all like blue lights on things right but Abram’s love for them is unnatural! If you’ve ever seen an episode of the TV sci-fi series “Fringe” you may know exactly what I mean. You can’t go one episode of watching Fringe without there being a scene where there is glare from a blue light shining on the camera. It doesn’t matter if it’s dark at night or in the middle of the day. Apparently glare from blue lights is all around us in daily life, although the actual source of the light itself is conveniently out of our view. At first I thought it was mysterious and wondered what it meant, then I thought it was accidental and they just had some amateur lighting technician on the set who kept accidentally pointing a big, blue light at the camera. But now I’m convinced that Abrams is a big blue light whore as Star Trek is filled with them! Even in scenes where there are no phasers firing, stars going super-nova or vintage car’s pointing their headlights directly into the camera, you cannot go 30 seconds without light filling the picture.
Just check out these images I pulled from the trailer! Here is a frame that I was going to photoshop and cover with exaggerated white light.
But it turns out I didn’t have to because a couple seconds later in the trailer a mysterious bright light flooded this scene anyway!
This is constantly happening through the movie and drives me nuts. I’m sure Abrams thinks shining a torch into the camera every 30 seconds is subtle and artistic but to me he’s breaking the forth wall. Every time he does it I remember I’m not a star ship officer in the cool future with flying cars, holodecks and sexy robo-chicks but rather just a nerd watching star trek. Damn you Abrams!!