Star Trek (2009)

I hadn’t been to the movies for a while, let’s see… since Twilight actually, so that would be about six months ago. I hadn’t even been looking forward to this movie particularly but after hearing that it was getting rave reviews I suddenly felt the urge to sit in a broken seat and have my shoes stuck to the floor for a couple of hours.

There were rumours that this was not going to be the same old Star Trek and I was absolutely fine with that. Although I enjoyed the original series, some of The Next Generation and a few of the movies, I am definitely not a Trekkie or a Trekker and would never bother driving through Vulcan on my way to YYC even if it only meant a ten minutes longer trip. Okay maybe, but probably not.

As long you make a good movie, go ahead and make all the changes you want; I really don’t mind.

Changes were definitely made; it’s just the “make a good movie” part that they seemed to forget.

-Spoilers ahead-

The opening scene is excellent, action packed, dramatic, and even a little emotionally moving though we’ve just barely met these people. If the rest of the movie is going to be like this… Well, unfortunately it’s not.

What starts with great promise quickly degenerates into a generic sci-fi ‘splosion fest that turns out to have little heart and no soul. Lots of stuff getting “blowed up real good” and with that oh-so-trendy shaky-cam thing going on all the time and so many bits and pieces flying around it is hard to tell what bits are whose. (Hey I can’t really tell what's going on but there are so many explosions, so much stuff flying around and the camera is shaking so badly it must be awesome right?)

I soon got the feeling that I was watching a mixture of Star Trek, Star Wars and Transformers. Upon returning home I checked IMDb to see who the writers were and funny enough one of them (Roberto Orci) was the same guy who wrote Transformers. (If I’d have known that I wouldn’t have bothered going in the first place.)

It is Star Trek mostly in name only. They did a fine job of finding actors to play the younger versions of the Enterprise crew but were inconsistent in that some of them did an excellent job of recreating their original characters (e.g. Dr. McCoy) while others made no attempt whatever to resemble theirs (Kirk.) Either have everyone emulate the originals or have no one do it. To have some doing it and others not seems silly to me. The Enterprise looked fantastic, on the outside, and was much more spectacular than previous versions when letting loose her full fury on the enemy. The interior, especially the non bridge areas, however, was significantly less awesome. Other than the names of the characters and the shape of their ship, there is nothing Star Trekky about the movie so the only real reason to call this Star Trek is to milk it for all it's worth and make as much money as possible... Oh, okay then.

It is like Star Wars because there is much more fighting and billions instead of tens die. Instead of a hopeful future of exploration and getting along with your freaky alien neighbours, conflict and destruction of entire planets are the order of the day. In one particularly Star Warsy scene Kirk is fleeing from a slobbering sticky monster (no not a human toddler) on an icy planet. When he ends up running into an ice cave I almost expected him to find Luke Skywalker hanging by his feet from the ceiling and trying to remember the accio charm to retrive his light sabre... Oh, wait, forget that last bit.

Mixing Star Trek and Star Wars is not necessarily a bad thing but tragically this film is most similar to Transformers. It has the same obviously expensive CGI effects, explosions, baffling shaky cam (hey the movie is getting extra awesome again) all accompanied by a lame story and no characters I was able to get invested in. It seems to subscribe to the philosophy of, if we can keep their brains dazzled and bewildered with lots of flashes, noises and general sensory overload they won’t have time to figure out that it’s all way too much theatre and not nearly enough play.

If you like to slam Mountain Dew while riding down hills in shopping carts and use the word extreme several times when describing your day to mommy while she nukes your pizza pop for you then you’ll probably think this Star Trek is like totally like awesome dude. (OMG! LOL! j/k! idk.)

If you enjoy all the hard work done by the computer people but also need a good story and characters to be the foundation for all the other less important elements then you may well be disappointed in this Star Trek. It’s got a few fun moments and a few great visuals but is completely forgettable.

I give it 6 drops of Red Matter out of 10.

P.S. No one knows exactly what Red Matter is but it plays a huge roll in the movie. It either creates a black hole and/or enables time travel. In both cases lots of stuff blows up so it's like super extra awesome, we just never are told how or why. So dude, just like, try not to like think, eat your like $7 popcorn and like enjoy the ride.