Jul 24, 2009 0
Anthony Lane’s Lazy Star Trek Disdain
Anthony Lane does not like J.J. Abrams’s new Star Trek movie. His substantive comments on it, however, are limited to bashing the excesses that come of J.J. Abrams’s kid-in-a-toy-store enthusiasm for his role as “rebooter” of “old myths and tropes that feel overloaded or fried.” Abrams, Lane says, “gorges on cinema as if it were one of those all you can eat buffets, piling his place with succulent efforts, whether they go together or not.” Setting aside Lane’s jollily unexamined equation of stereotypically working-class suburban food with cinematic crap, he’s correct that this newest Abrams film is, like many past ones, a fumblingly quixotic overreach. But that’s his sole point about the film, and the sole point on which he dismisses it. The rest of Lane’s review amounts to philinistic jokes about Star Trek’s general, indisputable dorkiness and digs at its audience, many of them anchored in Lane’s ignorance of the Star Trek world, an ignorance he wears almost as a badge of honor.