We Star Wars fans are an arrogant lot. Confident in our assertion that our Sci-Fi series is the best ever created. Battle Star Galactica? Cute, but not even in the same league. X-Files was a little too creepy for the mainstream. The only reasonable rival would be Star Trek. But every other movie was doodoo, and the TV show didn’t even last that long. And a big mark on the minus side of ledger for too many men in spandex. Lance Armstrong could pull it off. Paul Hamm, too. Not so much with the cast of Trek.
But things done changed. I went and saw that new Star Trek. When it comes to new incarnations of old movies, those cats have us Star Wars fans whipped after one movie. It pains me to have to admit that, but I’ll man up and do it.
The sad thing is, I was pretty content with SW: Ep I up until last month. It was a flawed movie with corny dialogue, but so were the all three films in the classic trillogy. The one unforgivable sin was JarJar, but I was even willing to overlook him in light of my joy for new movies.
Honestly, Star Trek changes a lot of that. It makes me realize that George Lucas would probably have been better off casting his vision to a contemporary director, and letting that new air take the series higher. And he needed to do a better job casting. Episode I could have been better.
All that being said, the next two films got way better. And Star Trek has never shown the ability to put together any type of winning streak when it comes to successive strong films, so there’s a chance we can catch them over the next couple of installments.
Renew and Restore
