Star Trek Villains

I did see Star Trek today. It was truly awesome. And not just because it's a new star trek movie. The writing is spectacular, the acting is skilled, the editing is superb. The story just FLOWS.

Except the villain is hollow. He seems really unexcited about destroying the universe or whatever. Which is a shame because if he were a fully developed character, the story would have even more points of resonance and awesome. There are limits to what you can do with horrible, wooden acting, I guess.

But that makes me realize that Star Trek has struggled (until now) to overcome its TV nature and have really dangerous villains who truly posed a danger to things around them. Great villains in stories are just as interesting as the hero. The Fugitive works very well because both hero and nemesis are strong characters, and the story is of their struggle against each other to achieve their own definition of justice. Day of the Jackal is a great struggle of two men against each other. Batman movies are good when the villain is truly imposing, and ridiculous when the villain is a joke.

So now a list of Star Trek movie villains:

1: A broken old space probe. Ugh. I watched that?
2: KHAN!!!! (Ricardo Montalban, Mr. Roarke from Fantasy Island.) Awesome.
3: Klingons (Christopher Lloyd, Doc Brown from Back to the Future. Well, not his fault the movie's stinky.)
4: Whales. Although this one's a comedy, so that kind of works.
5: God. Really? I know Shatner talked his way into directing, but you had to use THAT bad a script?
6: Klingons (Christopher Plummer, Captain Von Trapp.) God, I wish he had sung Edelweiss in Klingon.
7: Malcolm McDowell. Too bad they wasted time killing Kirk to turn the villain of Clockwork Orange into a ridiculous cartoon.
8: Borg Queen. Super awesome.
9: Super wrinkled Salieri. I'm sure I paid good money to see that, too.
10: A clone of Picard. Not played by Patrick Stewart. I don't know whose idea that was. Seems like if the whole concept is nature vs. nurture, they're biologically identical, and you write in a scifi loophole about accelerating age, why not just make him the same age? Then you could do all sorts of trading places identity theft stuff.
11: Romulan time traveler. Nice ship. Too bad you don't seem to really CARE about destroying the universe.