Dude, Where's My Star Trek

This post is penned by a guest writer. It's Brooke! He sent a letter ranting about the new Star Trek Movie that was so funny I had to share. It will give away many plot points, so don't read it until you have watched the movie. By the way, my sweetie is the best in the whole world. He makes me laugh so much my face hurts. Enjoy -- Traci

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******WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD***DO NOT READ IF YOU PLAN TO SEE THE MOVIE*******
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Here are my complaints and various things brought up by Traci and Andy as well during rant-associated discussions. Basically, it was miracle of implausibility stacked upon miracle of stupidity. They might as well have had the Easter Bunny and Santa show up as important characters. (OK, it's not as bad as Star Wars Episode I: The Reaming, so that was an exaggeration.)

I hated the boy-Kirk scene. Retarded, and not even needed for plot aspects. (Are there grand canyons in Iowa anyway? -- but that is just a minor annoyance compared to the rest of the scene.) I consider it a swell shout out to all the boy-Anakin scenes in Star Wars.

Kirk's dad a starship captain, in charge at a critical moment while Kirk's mom, also on the ship, is at the exact moment of birth? Cool!

While it worked great in the Venture Brothers for everyone to know each other and be roommates in college, I didn't like it at all in the Trek movie. Kirk meeting Capn Pike and Uhura and the security guards he meets up with later in a bar in Iowa? Kirk meets up with McCoy on the shuttle?

Kirk is screwing Uhura's roommate? Spock is the designer of the Kobayashi Maru sim? Uhura and Spock are lovers while Spock is her instructor? Cool!

Driving through a black hole puts you back in time instead of crushing you (unless you are the matter of the planet or supernova)? Cool!

A mining ship with a dozen miners on it takes out any number of Federation warships as well as the whole planet of Vulcan? Cool!

Lost communication from Vulcan? Well, it's time to put all cadets onto warships, including in all of the command positions (except maybe captain) and head on out. Guess they didn't have any other staff or past classes at the Academy.

Need to make a black hole to gobble a planet? Well, you need to drill down to the center of the planet rather than just plunk it down anywhere on the planet. Also, as we all know, magma is not a liquid, so it's certainly possible to drill through it to the center of a planet instead of just 1% of the way there.

Make sure your mining drill blocks out all communication and transportation within several light hours of the drill, with the effect apparently spreading faster than the speed of light, so that a ship with warp drive can't blip it on for 15 seconds and be outside the effect.

Are you a captain looking to avert destruction of a planet? Here's what you do. You pick three "combat trained" personnel who raise their hands on the bridge instead of a crew of ueber-trained Navy SEAL or Delta-force types (available in quantity on such a fleet ship), and you leave a newbie in charge of the ship and appoint a guy who smuggled himself onto the ship and isn't even part of its crew as the XO and who is going on the suicide mission anyway (instead of, say, someone who is a competent and trained XO). But hey, Pike liked Kirk's old man -- so why not make him XO of the equivalent of a nuclear aircraft carrier in today's Navy?

Make sure to have a whole series of people leave the bridge and finally delegate command of the fleet's flagship to a 17 year old ensign because I guess there's no one else on board.

If you are Captain Spock, when young dick Kirk is causing problems on the bridge, you throw him off the ship intead of into the brig (which is where you'd put even saboteurs and murderers).

When on a new planet and when the computer says it's dangerous, make sure to go traipsing off toward the nearest base without asking why it's dangerous or instead of trying to see if you can contact the base maybe and get a pickup.

In any movie you make, be sure to have a human outrunning bears, wolves, creatures that can run 40 mph, etc. Make sure to put in the larger creature snagging the 1st creature then losing interest in the larger meatier creature it just caught to chase the little scrawny one. Make sure that also the human is outruning the bigger, even-faster creature.

Make sure the big creature gets a hold of the human and, despite the fact that the bigger creature could lift an automobile, have the human's attempts to scrabble at some rocks and the floor slow down the ability of the giant creature's ability to reel him in.

Scare the giant creature off with a torch.

Run into a cave at random and find, not only is old Spock coincidentally on that planet, on the same continent, but in the same freaking cave you just ran into.

Make sure that a supernova can destroy a planet "unthinkably". Let's see. Even we can predict (by a long, long time) when a star can turn into a super nova, but OK -- let's say we totally forgot. If the star is several light years from a planet, it can go super nova, and it will take several years for the effect to reach the planet. If the star is the planet's own star, it will take a couple of minutes (not enough time to do a damned thing). So, it's either over long before you can do anything about it, or you have years to deal with it, know the timing about as exactly as if you were, say, working out a 6th grade story problem: "A train travelling 40 mph goes from Boston to New York. The train leaves Boston at 9 am.
Boston is 200 miles from New York. Assuming that the train has no stops in between, and assuming that Spock wants to arrive in New York before the train, what is the latest that Spock can arrive in New York?" But then the unthinkable happened -- red matter apparently turned Spock into a moron.

Go to the base and find Scotty! Why not? It's cool! (In fact, have everyone from Star Trek right on the bridge of the Enterprise right on its maiden voyage. Dude!)

Now how do you get back to the Enterprise? Well, just use some mumbo jumbo and the holo deck, oops, I mean the transporter to fix it. Invent transportation back onto the Enterprise -- don't worry about not knowing where the Enterprise is. I guess you envison what the ship looks like in your mind, and the transporter knows what to lock onto, or you can pierce some IFF beacon from your fleet's flagship from the shit station on ice world.

Have Spock (legendary for his logic) decide that, when a whole world is at stake and when he knows as many of the pieces to the puzzle as there are to know, he shouldn't go back and take control. He should instead gamble on a chain of envents (each having a substantial probability of failure), gambling on (1) Kirk being able to provoke young Spock into blowing it, (2) Spock getting removed from command, (3) Kirk being allowed to be in command right after that, and (4) Kirk doing the right thing thereafter.

Why? Because young Spock would get some nebulous positive bonding experience out of being humiliated into losing command and having then to work with young Kirk. That's worth the gamble of a planet, I'd say, even though the odds of that chain of events vs. the odds of old Spock just showing up and doing it all are so much lower.

Have young Kirk start insulting the hell out of the captain on the bridge, have it be allowed to proceed, have it work, then have all the other command staff be fine with this guy then saying, "OK! Now *I'm* the captain."

Have a nifty future-technology ship fly around in space like a bumblebee. Too bad it couldn't be making noises like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as it wobbled all over.

Blast your way out of the air-filled interior of the big mining ship apparently without it causing any trouble of inside air escaping.

Chase down your enemies easily inside a city-sized ship without any sort of scanner.

Go in there as a boarding party with a couple of people instead of boarding party of your Navy SEALs.

Have your ship sitting around 500 meters from an enemy vessel that is going to turn into a black hole. Whoop it up while it turns into a black hole and only when there is a problem decide, "Uh, maybe we should get out of here" only to find . . . d'oh, you are too close.

Jettison your warp cores so that the explosion can get you away from a black hole.

Did I leave out any miracle, rediculous implausibility, or juvenile plot twist that would be right at home in the shlockiest, crappiest of SF movies? I think they hit them all.

Here is one bright spot. This apparently all created a new reality, so someone in the future can go back and make a good movie totally different from this one, ignoring dimension Stupid-B.

I think they should have added more humor and called it "Dude, Where's My Star Trek?"

On a positive note, it is not the worst Star Trek movie. I'm just disappointed that they produced such a POS from so much money and acting talent because the plot was so bad.

-- Brooke