In case you’ve missed the news reports, Walmart has been in an online price war of sorts with Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It started with books: Walmart began offering deep, deep discounts on pre-orders for several highly-anticipated books, and Amazon and B&N had little choice but to try to match them. Earlier this month, that extended to DVDs as well.
I need to be worried about holiday gifts, but I allowed myself one indulgence, assuming that it’s something I would end up buying anyway and that it was silly not to do so at bargain-basement prices. My purchase was “Star Trek,” the combination prequel and reboot which hit theaters on my birthday this year. I loved “Star Trek” in the theater, and got to watch parts of it again on one of my Kenya trip flights.
Walmart is offering the movie on pre-order for $9.98, a price that will presumably disappear on Tuesday when the movie is actually released. Amazingly, the $9.98 price includes shipping (but not sales tax, which Walmart has to add because it also has brick-and-mortar locations in my state).
I’ve already gotten the shipping notice e-mail from Walmart, with the movie projected to arrive at the end of next week.
I was extremely pleased with “Star Trek.” As so many others have stated, it paid due reverence to the originals but had a plot device which allows the new movie and its sequels to diverge from the old continuity going forward. The cast was great, the special effects tremendous and the action sequences thrilling.
Karl Urban as McCoy probably came closest to doing an actual impersonation of the original series cast member, to hilarious effect. Simon Pegg wasn’t much like James Doohan’s Scotty, but that was OK because Simon Pegg is so darn funny.
Zoe Saldana’s Uhura has been reimagined somewhat and has a much more forceful and pivotal role; she’s no longer a glorified secretary, relaying messages.
The rest of the cast, led by Chris Pine as Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock, manage to capture the spirit of their original characters without doing out-and-out impersonations of the actors.
Pegg, as Scotty, and Anton Yelchin, as Chekov, have the advantage of actually having been born in Scotland and Russia, respectively, and their accents sound more authentic than James Doohan or Walter Koenig.
Bruce Greenwood, by the way, is wonderful as Christopher Pike, the captain of the Enterprise at the time the movie’s main action begins. His speech challenging the juvenile delinquent Kirk to enlist in Starfleet could have come off as hokey, but he delivers it so sincerely that it works pretty well.
If you’re not a Star Trek fan, I feel compelled to impart a little history. Gene Roddenberry’s original pilot for “Star Trek” starred Jeffrey Hunter as Capt. Christopher Pike. NBC did not like that first pilot for several reasons, but took the somewhat unusual step of commissioning a second pilot episode. Hunter was unavailable by that point and so William Shatner starred in the second pilot, which used a new name for the central character: James Kirk.
As the first season of “Star Trek” progressed, the show was behind schedule and over budget. So Roddenberry found a way to save time and money by recycling much of the footage from that never-aired first pilot as flashback sequences in a two-part episode. That episode set up the timeline that Chris Pike was the captain of the Enterprise before James Kirk. The newly-shot footage for that episode sets up the idea of Pike being confined to a wheelchair, which is referenced at the very end of the new movie.
I’ll probably also buy the DVD of “Up” at some point, but since that’s already out I’ve missed my chance to get the deep, deep discount.