Star Trek Midnight Showing

My review of Star Trek appeared later on this site.

Star Trek (official site) is coming out on May 7, 2009 which is a Thursday. I assume that this means that local theater chains will have showings at midnight on Wednesday night, so I'll probably go to those to (a) be with the geek crowd and (b) avoid the extra-young kiddies.
From what I've heard, this is sort of a reboot of the Trek franchise that respects the existing continuity when it starts, though it may not continue to do so by the time it's over. More than that I can't say, but if you're a long-time Trek fan, that's probably enough to see where they're likely to go with it. Every single review that I've seen so far has been glowingly positive, but it's entirely possible that this is from reviewers who have signed agreements to only present positive reviews prior to release. The real acid test will be the reviews that come out after I'll be seeing it, anyway.
So far, though, I trust Abrams on this. He's delivered one thing throughout his career: truly outstanding openings to new material. The first few episodes of LOST and Alias where brilliant, and while I think both shows fell down on the execution long-term, a movie doesn't have to execute long-term, it just needs to open, introduce, deliver and end. This is really his medium, far more so than TV, IMHO.
One thing that has worried me, though, is the trailers. Every trailer I've seen appears to be an attempt to alienate the existing fan-base ("Not... Your... Father's... Star Trek" flashes over the most recent TV spots). Now, I understand that the whole point, here, is to de-niche Star Trek and make it a box-office powerhouse with the 18-35 crowd again. That's a fine thing to do, but the ads didn't have to push quite so hard on the "young and angry" buttons, nor call out existing Trek as something to avoid (especially given that the most recent example, the final season of Enterprise was some of the finest Trek to date, though a sad way to end a short-lived series that had otherwise failed to deliver).
Anyway, I'll be there, ticket in hand. I'll follow through one more time, but Paramount: this is the one. You need to deliver. If this isn't the best Trek since at least Star Trek IV, an awful lot of us aren't coming back for the next one.

(note: image made available by Paramount and not distributed under this site's licensing. Used for illustrative purposes only).