Double Blind

Usual spoiler warning (i.e. I’ll spill it all here).

From the perspective of a non-science fiction fan, and somebody that has not seen any Star Trek episodes or known anything about the franchise at all, I would have thought the movie would have been a fairly good action flick, albeit not memorable. It reminded me of a two-hour jazzed-up episode of Andromeda. It was also patently obvious that there will be a sequel to Star Trek.

From the perspective of somebody that has watched Star Trek and Star Trek : The Next Generation, I thought the movie was mediocre in terms of how they handled the plot. They really mangled up some elements, but they presumably did this to bust through the continuity issues that was plaguing the television show in general (specifically, Deep Space 9, Voyager and Enterprise were all severely handcuffed by what had been written in previous series) – especially how they managed to involve time travel elements to establish that the past is not going to be like the future (i.e. all the episodes that aired on television).

By getting rid of the planet Vulcan and Romulus and other such stuff, they can clear the slate for future stories.

The introduction of how Kirk, Spock, and the other people got aboard the USS Enterprise was nice. It was all very sudden, however, like they were quickly trying to clear this part of the story for the people in the movie theater that actually watched the show.

The thing that really disturbed me as a Star Trek watcher was the involvement of Spock and Uhura. Something was just weird about throwing that in, it seemed quite irrelevant. In a previous scene (before Spock/Uhura was established) Kirk sleeping with the green-skinned alien girl was a very correct scene in the movie, but having the gratuitous shot of Uhura undressing shortly after was just inappropriate – it just seemed to be an excuse to see her partially naked for “ratings”.

The movie was much more “lighter” than previous Star Trek Movies (except for Star Trek 4), which seemed to take away from any seriousness of the movie.

The new Spock and Kirk seem to be well casted, I thought they did very well together. The new McCoy wins on appearances but in terms of “personality”, something was off. There wasn’t enough interaction between the three of them, it was always one on one. Traditionally in the series, the three of them would always get into arguments. Plus, McCoy also used to be sent on the away missions as well.

The new technology, the bridge, and just the general appearance of the show was very well done. I especially like how the transporters work.

The movie was fun to watch. Although the reviews I had read made me thought it would have been a lot better, had I not read those reviews, I would have been happy, although not overly so. The writers had to get out of the lock that the previous televisions shows had bound them into, so they did an OK job getting out of that. I can imagine this is how fans of the original Battlestar Galactica felt when they saw the new remake.

One huge negative was that during the fight scenes, and the starship battle scenes, the camera angle would always keep changing, and it was very difficult to keep track of who was punching who, or what the ships were doing in combat, etc. This was very distracting.

I’m looking forward to the sequel, I can easily see how the sequel would have potential. This current movie is something that can be watched for the first time, but won’t be easily remembered, and I probably wouldn’t want to waste another two hours seeing it again. On the Star Trek Movie Scale(tm), I’d rank this one below Star Treks 2, 4 and 6, but above any of the “next generation” movies (7 to 11!).

This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2009 and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.