Star Trek: A Review

Star Trek is a fantastic film, and a shining example of a summer blockbuster done right.


Our local cinema started screening this a month late. In internet terms, it might as well have been a decade ago. So I do apologise for the lateness and lack of relevance, but I like to fill the blog with things that have impacted upon me, so this demands a place.

Above all else, Star Trek is fun. When the lights went up Leen and I were both grinning from ear to ear.
The film moves quickly and wastes no time. It covers a lot of ground, and a fairly intricate plot, all without dragging. I want to see this again already, and it zipped by me in what felt like an hour.

It connects emotionally, it's funny, the effects are great and the action excites. It deserves to be used as the formula for how to make a 'blockbuster film'.

As a Star Trek fan I enjoyed the extra level of in-jokery that permeated proceedings, such as Scotty having killed the dog that appeared in Enterprise and Kirk cheating his way through a test that in the past, had been used as an example of his prowess.
But the joy of this film is that such knowledge is unnecessary. The old characters are recreated lovingly and acted superbly, and they're such a part of the culture that they feel familiar even to people who have only seen them via parody in the Simpsons and such.

The story is a masterstroke of reimagination. The mechanism of time travel effectively recreates the characters and allows a fresh direction without invalidating what came before. The original Spock lives in this universe, and that means that this timeline demands that the last once took place in entirety - you cannot have one without the other. I love that. It's smart.

The plot is unashamedly sci-fi, what with time travel and alternate realities and black holes and such. The mcguffin is red matter and is just that. It receives no further explanation beyond being red and creating black holes, because that's all we need and who cares about the science? Recognition of this fact is welcome.

The movies feels like Star Trek. I was worried going in that the movie would feel so new that Trek would be jettisoned, and I would be forced to admit that the secret to making a good Trek film was to get rid of Star Trek. On the other hand, even as a fan I recognise that the last couple of films have been terrible and stale. This line is straddled expertly.

Kirk and Spock were excellent. The souls of these characters were rock solid and I'm very happy to see them sharing the main role. Scotty and McCoy were standouts for me. I felt like the actors behind them (especially Pegg) were always about to turn to the camera and scream "I'm in Star Trek and it's awesome!". That enthusiasm permeated their performances.
The entire main cast was fun and useful. At the end when they are together as a unit and they're about to head off on adventures, I was genuinely happy for them.

My brother Kyle is a dedicated Star Wars fan who has spent a lifetime creating new and interesting ways to make fun of my love of Star Trek. He made the following statement:
"It depresses me to admit that I enjoyed this film more than I did any of the Star Wars prequels". I thought that in the cinema when Scotty's weird little sidekick came on and did not suck, and when Kirk is running across the surface of Hoth towards the cave where Obi Wan lives.
Star Wars Episode I taught me that alien sidekicks destroy films. Abrahms reminds that this is not the case. I can't help but wonder if that is deliberate.

The action is well done and very much in the vein of Firefly. The lack of sound in space is striking. The idea of this fantastic outer space action being physically filmed also comes across.
The world feels lived in without being squalid. It feels real. Leen pointed out that, after watching hundred of episodes where the transporter is used to do anything and everything, this movie shows the device in a more realistic fashion. It is not perfect, and if it doesn't work, it's serious. Whereas Enterprise rewound things to pre-transporters and robbed the show of a cornerstone of the setting, this one takes things back to when things were still great and high-tech and Trekkian, but before they were pedestrian.

Nero was a great villain. His actions brought about by events beyond his control, he is a twisted chap and not a cutout evil bastard. The idea that he is just a miner whose ship is large yet insignificant at home, but an unstoppable engine of destruction in the past, is great.

Due to me seeing this a month after the rest of the internet, I walked in with a general knowledge that the film was considered excellent, as well as some stray plot points I had failed to avoid under my belt. Burdened with sky-high expectations and robbed of total unfamiliarity with the plot, this film still managed to impress me beyond my hopes. This is very rare, and is to be cherished.

Photo of a thing I want provided by Timm Williams