New Trek Stills Give Me Bad Muppet Baby Vibes

I’m trying hard not to pre-judge the up and coming Star Trek film, but it’s hard knowing that Shat won’t be a part of it. But looking at the latest batch of stills that are “leaking” onto the net I’m not getting a good vibe. Shown above is a still image from UGO showing off the crew — maybe it’s the lighting or the costumes but they all look a bit too baby faced for me. There’s this next shot from MTV:

That set for the bridge looks a little too much like the cosmetics section of the drug store — this worked well on the old Space:1999 but here there’s no style holding it all together. Again the lighting is just a tad too bright, although the actors look a bit more animated. But I fear this film is committing the sin the Star Trek: TNG where the captain sits around all day and yammers — while what I loved about the original series was that Kirk wasn’t afraid to have a fist fight. But there’s some hope below in this next shot of Spock from AICN:

But this begs the question of why Spock is so hands on? However at least Spock seems to be doing something rather than enjoying a cup of earl gray while having a conference call with Star Fleet command on what he should be doing about the situation. This last shot from TrekMovie gives me the most hope:

This looks like some good action is going on — I mean even if the actors are only worthy of a bad soap opera having spaceship blow up could be entertaining. But there should be more to Star Trek than that! Here are some thoughts I’ve been having:

1. Except for Wrath of Khan pretty much every Trek movie has been unmemorable. The concept works best as an hour long TV show — and Galactica has proven there’s an audience for this. I’ve always felt that the las series Enterprise was never given much of a chance, although to be fair they did too many filler episodes. But it’s sort of ironic that J.J. Abrams who is so well known for Lost is doing this as a film.

2. If you are going to do this as a film I would rather have seen someone like a Quentin Tarantino do something that’s very different with the brand. If you’re going to reinvent then don’t go half way when doing it.

3. This cast looks so baby faced that I’m getting the bad feeling this is going to be Muppet Babies on some level. Granted I’m being very superficial but when I see the whole crew together they look a little homogeneous — they feel too generic. What made the original series work was you had A+ character actors with faces that didn’t look so clean cut.

4. Please God don’t let this be yet another Star Wars fiasco! I don’t want to sound all Republican but throwing money at something doesn’t always make it better…

But any way none of this matters as I know full well I’ll be standing on line come opening day…

Thanks to filmschoolrejects.com where I swiped all the photos from!