A Star Trek Movie Marathon

I do not like Star Trek.

That's not quite right.  I don't hate Star Trek, not completely and utterly.  I've watched episodes of every series that isn't Enterprise; I even liked a few of them.  But generally speaking, the world and ethos of Star Trek doesn't appeal to me.  It was born as a 60's television show, and I don't like the aesthetic of 60's era TV, and even though it's 45 years later, I think it still retains that part of it in its DNA.

So why the fuck am I doing this?  Well, first of all, so it's clear, I am going to watch all 11 Star Trek feature films, and only those things.  This is a movie blog, not a TV blog, and I am not going down the rabbit hole of watching a bunch of episodes of some TV show that I don't like that much anyway. So why?  Well, besides it being a relatively easy project to do, and something where I get the chance to perhaps snark on a sacred cow, I'm curious how these films hold up as films, as pieces of culture divorced from the TV show(s) that spawned them.  And I would like to watch the series evolve (or devolve) as the world around it changes.  This is 30 years of films (so far), and that fact reveals something about social concerns, even if the people making them didn't know it at the time.

Unlike the Bond films, I have actully watched more than half of these at some point, though I could only detail out the plot of 2, 6 and the JJ Abrams remake from memory.  So it's a chance to see a lot of these with fresh eyes, from the standpoint of someone who judges film with a critical eye and is willing to see the bad and the good anywhere it can be found.  To be clear, I am not simply watching these movies in order to take them down a peg.  I want to be surprised, and I expect to be surprised.  And I expect to be vindicated along the way too.  It's all part and parcel with the deal here.

So into the breach I will go.  We will begin with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (at some indefinite point in the very near future, I haven't quite decided yet), and I will try to recap some of the film's backstory as well as review it.