That was funny, thanks for making me laugh. 🙂 Nemesis was a lot, a Lot better then this crap. Okay, as only a sci-fi movie, it was good with some cool special effects (and R2D2… – yeah, real respect right there for ya!). But as a Trek movie it’s one of the weakest.

Most impressive to me is that the wife even liked it (I had to drag her just to go (She is an Enterprise fan))!

But now I think you can draw a line from the profound/cornball antics of William Shatner et al through the years to a range of great television science fiction, Farscape, Babylon 5, you name it. Would those series have happened without Star Trek? Maybe, but I think a case can be made they became possible due to ground broken by Star Trek. Even the existence of feature film science fiction in the 70s and 80s like Star Wars owes a debt to Star Trek for reaching audiences which simply didn’t exist before.

As for this film, I’m not sure what else it could have been. The earnest seriousness of the Star Trek franchise, at times brilliant, had finally crushed the life out of it. Abrams couldn’t possibly recreate the dynamic Roddenberry produced with the original crew (I suppose if Abrams stuck a member of Al Queda on the bridge that would have been something).

So how do you reintroduce a dead franchise? You can argue about whether or not that is even desirable (I probably could have gone the rest of my life without another Star Trek movie), but if it’s going to happen, it seems Abrams and the writers made the kinds of choices which had the best chance of drawing an audience. Star Trek with a whole new cast of characters would be pointless, so go with old familiar faves re-imagined to capture their original essence but enlarge it as well. Of course it’s a black woman, a Russian, and a Japanese (er, Korean) guy, along with a few crazy aliens and Spock and Kirk. What would be the point in even making the movie if you dropped them? But we now know more about who and why they are, we understand why they have the roles and relationships we remember. But we have open possibilities now. We’re not stuck in the past, but we haven’t lost the foundation of the past.

We also had a whole host of homages to the beloved (if also a bit corny) past. Sexy green women, Kobayashi Maru, red shirt on away team = dead, etc. In other words, it’s a Star Trek movie.

Ultimately, this flick is a diverting confection. Fast-paced, high-energy and fun. Brilliant and profound? Okay, maybe not. But so what. We don’t know what will happen in future movies, if the whole forward-thinking aspirations of the original Star Fleet will show through or be lost. But this movie shouldn’t have been about that stuff anyway. This movie needed to make us excited about what had become a smelly corpse. (“Enterprise,” anyone? Gag!) It did that quite well.

As for the science, well, what movie or TV show ever gets the science right? Hell, science documentaries can’t get science right half the time. I’m not going to worry about the space-time continuum or whatever else in the Star Trek universe.

Yes, but is that true when it comes to something with the Star Trek name attached?

I thought Star Trek was rather bad, although in predictable enough ways that I could enjoy it. The villain was a train wreck, the science was atrocious, the level of nonsense and coincidence in the plot was appalling, and the inclusion of all the various classic lines felt very forced. Equally, the problem with recreating something groundbreaking like Star Trek is that the more you recreate it in fact, the less you recreate it in spirit (cf. Watchmen) — nobody cares anymore if a black woman, a Russian, and a Japanese (er, Korean) guy are on the bridge. But while they didn’t do anything new there to recreate the “where no-one has gone before” feel of the original series, they did twist the whole aspirational aspect of the Federation as a vehicle for exploration and asking big questions to just another military SF story — Starship Troopers with the cast of Star Trek. Boldly going where every other SF story and intellectual property reboot has already gone before, and then blowing it to hell. Yay humans!

That said, I did think all the actors were good choices and did fine jobs, and it does all look pretty.

There. Now your expectations have hopefully been suitably lowered.