Was John Cho perfect for Sulu or what?

[The Borgified Corpse]

Takei was unique because he had that distinct voice. a friend of mine heard a clip of him on the radio doing something for Howard Stern or whatever and asked "is that the Sulu guy?". he just has that extra little presence that Cho just didn't have with the whole voice thing. what is that, baritone or something? Nimoy had it for Spock but Quinto didn't and that was just as missed

Agreed. I think that's one of the things that the new movie didn't really take into consideration. Takei, Nimoy, & DeForest Kelley all have pretty distinct voices which Cho & Quinto do not have. And while Karl Urban came closest to imitating his predecessor, it seems a bit off because Urban is using affectation to try to resemble the lest affected member of the original cast. Urban is trying really hard to do something that Kelley did with absolutely zero effort.

For that matter, other than both being Asian, I don't think Cho looks at all like Takei. Takei has a very round face while Cho's is much more angular. (And Daniel Dae Kim would have presented the same problem moreso.)

But overall, it doesn't really matter. While he got to be in a pretty cool action set piece in the new film, his character was such a cypher on the original series that it kinda didn't matter who played him.

 

[Jeri]

...Daniel Dae Kim, i.e. Corporal Chang from ENT and Gotana-Retz from that Voyager episode "Blink of an Eye".

I'm willing to wait and see what Cho does further; but I loved the character, Gotana-Retz. That is a beautiful episode.

 

[barnaclelapse]

He kept up his end of the deal and added to the ensemble piece that Star Trek needed to be. He did a good job. I wasn't really surprised by that though.

 

[Classic Fan]

I wouldnt say he was perfect, but did a good job none the less.

Now unlike Urban or Yelchin where they work so hard to honour the previous actors characters they are portraying, Cho decided not to impersonate George Takei, and i admire him for it. Yeah, there are parts of his performance where i can see/hear Takei but thats where it ends, hes his own Sulu but with a touch of the old. Much like Pines Kirk.

Loved the 'Hand brake' joke, Cho played that flawlessly.



Still love Yelchin though, he did such a good job at Koenigs accent it was unreal.

 

[flemm]

Beyond Kirk/Spock/McCoy, the original crew didn't have much of anything in the way of character development to begin with. Basically, Uhura, Scotty, Chekhov and Sulu each had an ethnicity and a function on the ship. That isn't to say that the original actors didn't infuse these roles with a certain personality and presence, but there really wasn't much beyond that for the writers to work with in the current film.

Basically the writers tried to include what little was originally there and then added a new element. For Scotty that means: great engineer, especially with beaming + newfound comic banter. For Uhura: gifted linguist and translator + relationship with Spock. For Chekhov: ridiculous accent + new status as whiz-kid prodigy.

For Sulu, we have basically: pilot + swordfighting, so it does feel a bit like he ended up on the short end. The fencing landed him the action sequence but little in the way of new character development.

In the sequels, I would expect the writers to build up each character a bit more, so we end up with more of an ensemble, as was the case in later Trek series, though with the emphasis on the central three characters as always, of course. I thought John Cho was fine, but really there wasn't much there for him to work with.