Crisis on Infinate Kirks

We went to see the new Star Trek movie this Sunday. It was during a wild day of moving friends and visiting my mother for Mother's Day. My friend offered to pay for my ticket to the movie as a thank you for my assistance with the move. That spoke greatly of his desperation on needing people to help with the move.

I had read a little on the movie so I was not going into it completely blind. I was however very worried about the differences displayed in the characters and the comments on continuity with the main story line. All of this is there, but there is very good reason. The reason may actually lie in comic books.

In the past DC and Marvel comics would spawn new series with a plethora of characters in them. Most are promptly forgotten in the shadow of prime heroes such as The Batman or Spider-Man. I mean really who remembers the Gibbon or the Mathemanic. Oooh the powers of Math and a Monkey ... hey if they combined the two it's Math Monkey. There would be so many characters that they would need to take up valuable space in the comic mentioning a little about the character to let the readers know why this monkey is talking to Spider-Man. However they could not just kill off characters willy nilly through a vast number of comics. There would be fan complaints and the fear of American Congressional action that spawned the comic killing Comics Code Authority. To solve this the comic companies tried a number of things

Marvel is always one for spawning a completely new universe at the drop of the hat. The latest Ultimates series (that is really good) is one example of this. You just drop everything every character has been doing and recreate them for the current times in a series that has nothing to do with the events of the past. The X-Men had multiple time lines that at times I was not sure which one I was reading and just went for the action rather than the higher level plots.

DC always used multiple universes (multiverse) that could be linked by the Flash being able to vibrate between them. This way you could ignore that Lois Lane married Superman in one comic in Universe 2 (even if the explanation is magic stole is memory) and still have the Man of Steel in Universe 1 do his normal things. This was brilliant as it gave writers the ability to ignore the continuity forced on them by past writers. Any mistakes could be given off to "Oh it happened in universe 785 rather than Universe 1." This sort if freedom was often taken to an extreme in Earths where Batman begins his career in 1889 (Earth-1889) fighting Jack the Ripper (Joker) or one where all humans are actually weres (Earth-387). To stop the growth of these universes DC introduced Crisis on Infinate Earths.

All this did was merge all of the historys of the Earths that they wanted to keep, kill of any Earths they did not want, and alter the historys of any character they wanted to clean up. This is why it is related to Star Trek. Paramount has now cleansed the Star Trek universe with a reset.

!!!SPOILER ALERT!!! IF YOU CONTINUE READING AFTER THIS LINE THERE IS A VERY GOOD CHANCE THINGS MAY BE RUINED FOR THOSE WHO DO NOT LIKE KNOWING THINGS ABOUT THE MOVIE AHEAD OF TIME!!! YOU HAVE BEEN FOREWARNED!!!













The movie's villain is a time traveling Romulan that makes his way back with a ship and crew on the day of Kirk's birth just in time to kill his father. Once the bad guys were here all of history as we knew it went out the window. There were a dozen of things where I was going well this happened like this, that never happened, and this was just funked up just in the first few minutes. After the time travel explanation I just went "Oh its like the mirror universe episode!!!"

The writers ignored current character development but seemed to pull more form the books than the last original cast movies did. Spock and Kirk not caring for each other had been mentioned a few times, but never on the screen. They were able to use that decently and most likely used it to play up the more emotional portrayal or Spock. Since they used Leonard Nimoy as Old Spock they can play the differences significantly more than if the actor had died and was replaced by CG or a different actor entirely.

While the character personalities are a bit different the core of the characters is still there. Scottie is still Scottie, Sulu is now much more Sulu, and Spock is more realistic portrayed in his youth. The only ones I found disappointing were Chekov and Uhura.

Chekov they did OK with, but they played on the Nuclear Wessles line to much. The accent worked, but the hair cut and look just seemed off. I simply did not like it terribly and hope that future sequels and spin offs due him better justice.

Uhura was actually very well done personality wise, but I still think that Nichelle Nichols was far more attractive especially Mirror Universe Uhura: