I saw Star Trek over the weekend. I thought it was a fun, refreshing “reboot” of the Trek franchise. I could get into what I liked and disliked about the movie and its plot, but I’m not a movie review blog, I’d be hard pressed to talk about that without spoilers, and there are plenty of other websites to go for that.
What I do want to talk about is the J.J. Abrams universe, and how it kept popping up in Star Trek. There were a lot of visual and story elements that, to me, were highly reminiscent of other J.J. Abrams properties. Let’s investigation:
First and most obvious was the “red matter” sphere. This was highly similar to the floating red liquid sphere of that Ramboldi device in Alias. Something in-between the tabletop version (pictured below) and the warehouse-sized one.
The red matter, of course, led to time travel, which brings us to Lost. In Lost we have, presumably, “whatever happened, happened.” There is no changing events. Star Trek seems to take the opposite theory. I couldn’t find a good visual element that strongly tied the two stories, so this might be the weakest connection.
Next up is the creature on the ice planet. Remember the Cloverfield monster? You didn’t get to see much of it in the film, but it was certainly all about a big mouth with gnashy teeth, long spindly legs, and joints that seemed perhaps a little backward. Although the mouth was a bit different in the Star Trek creature, the whole basic bodytype and design was that of the Cloverfield monster.
Finally, we have the closing title sequence: 3D words that just sort of hung in space. Although we could match them up with the Lost title sequence, I think they better match the location subtitles on Fringe: 3D words that just sort of hang there as the camera moves around.
Did I miss anything? Are there stronger connections than the ones I made? Do you disagree with any of this?
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
There was also a Slusho at one point, I think possibly someone ordered one in the beginning scene with Kirk in the bar. I’m only familiar with Slusho because of the Cloverfield ARG-like thing, but I think it appeared in Alias at some point. I got all excited in the theater (Slusho!) but then absolutely no one else cared. Lame, fellow viewers.
Also, I read your posts through the LJ RSS feed, and I read Neil Gaiman’s blog the same way. He posts more often, and the tops of your posts are formatted the same way because of the RSS feed, plus the tone tends to be similar, so I keep reading your posts thinking that they’re written by Gaiman. This happens ALL THE TIME. I went through this entire post thinking it was Gaiman, and then I got to the end and saw no one had commented and was totally baffled by how it was possible that no one had mentioned Slusho. Then I clicked through and saw that it was your site, but, man, THIS KEEPS HAPPENING. I think you need an “I AM NOT NEIL GAIMAN” disclaimer at the top of every post.
yep, Slusho definitely… The red sphere isn’t actually an Abrams thing, it’s Scott Chamblis’ “thing”, IIRC. Read that either in a movie magazine or on scifiscoop, can’t remember. Maybe it’s a JJ/Scott thing.
But yep, great movie
That’s most definitely Yale University.