Cho The Fanboy
2 min read
Part of the fun of shooting Star Trek for John Cho was being in a different ship and sitting in “that chair.”
Cho has been a Trek fan since the days of Star Trek: The Next Generation and he got a real kick out of sitting in the captain’s chair.
“I tried to avoid sitting in the captain’s chair until it happened, but it felt good,” he said. “It’s elevated. It’s not the most comfortable chair in the world. It’s really big and it’s kind of hard, but it feels amazing.
“You really have to stop going outside and looking at yourself in the chair because it feels cool. You have to contain yourself and be in the moment. It was special.”
In the opening sequence of the film, Cho has a scene in another ship and the actor really enjoyed that. “I guess I can talk about the opening sequence, since it was part of the nine minutes that a lot of people saw,” he said. “That was me, Zach and Zoe. That was fun. It was some high-flying antics for Sulu. It was a chance to be in another ship; that’s what I took away from it. It was so cool. I can’t tell you how nifty it is to be in one of those vehicles and to pretend that you’re piloting it, because nobody gets to see what we see, which is that every detail of the design is so perfect. It makes our job, one, easy, because you don’t have to pretend to be doing things. You can feel like you’re really just doing them. And, two, it’s just a beautiful design. It doesn’t make it on to the screen, a lot of it. Let’s just say I took a lot of video.”
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I really and truly loved this part of the movie when he get to sit in the captain’s chair. Kirk placing his trust in Sulu, with Bones giving Kirk a hard time about his judgement of putting Sulu in the chair is quite brilliantly done, because you think he’d stuff-up for being so young. Yet when he does take the chair and announces to the crew his intent, he is both authoritative and competent, especially in light that the Enterprise and its crew faces almost certain total obliteration. When Bones honestly compliments him for his maturity – the audience can do no more than smile and totally agree. Combined with Scotty’s scenes and Uhuru’s emotions, it is all very riveting viewing.
JJ handles this this short scene so brilliantly, and it is one of those moments when the crew bonds together in the crises. Throughout the Enterprise crew we see them all click together as a unit, something we only see that has already happened in TOS. When they think they have lost the captain, their profound sadness feel very genuine and real, and this too filters to the audience. At the end of the movie, we all recognise the characters we have all grown and loved over all these decades.
Sulu’s main scene here is the real catalyst of bonding the crew together, and IMO, it is exactly what makes this latest ST movie among the best thing in a movie that is mostly just a roller-coaster action film around the characters of Kirk and Spock!
In the local non-US previews of this movie, the critics all highlight this as a very positive part of this aspect in characterisation and give the movie really high marks. Real ★★★★★ stuff!
Has no one realised that this movie is just a rehash of TOS episode Space Seed and TOS novel Dreadnought ?
Some people would rather wait until opening day to have their childhood dreams ritually sodomized by bad filmmaking, thank you very much.
The rest of us can read, and wish they had never lain eyes on FF, AICN, Wikipedia, or the internet in general.