When it comes to the JJ Abrams port of Star Trek to a “new” audience, I admit heavy skepticism. After all, Star Trek, much like Star Wars fans, are among the lowest of social pecking orders, though probably somewhere inbetween anime and linux nerd in the geek circles. However Star Wars is more prominent among casual sci-fi fans and the general populace, because.. well, I have no idea.
So re-introducing Star Trek for the modern audience was the core focus of this movie, and my skepticism of course stems from the fact that I am indeed a hardcore Trekkie. Not hard to the point of FUCK YEAH CONVENTIONS, but hard to the point that I’ve done everything from imitating shit as a kid, to model building, to all sorts of other embarrassing things I won’t get into. I was mostly a fan of TNG, but I also loved DS9 and Voyager despite older fans mocking it for not being MOAR KIRK/SPOCK or even Picard begrudgingly. Can’t please TOS fans no matter how hard you try, I’m sure you’ll find a few anti-new movie neckbeard blogs somewhere.
Anyway, for what it was worth, this movie did turn out to be better than I had hoped. I won’t say better than I figured, because I already knew that this was going to be a “re-launch” as well as an “alternate reality spin-off” which is convenient way to basically nullify any previous series canon as well as previous series tech so as to employ millions worth of special effects. I am only disappointed they didn’t do this for Nemesis which could have used a little more SFX action.
As for the movie itself, I found myself liking many of the people they cast into the main roles, Scotty and Dr. McCoy for two, all of them fit their TOS counter-parts pretty much perfectly and “Sylar” as Spock was pretty damn good. The story was kinda weak, I mean, it all fits together in the end, but with time-travel being such an overused element in Trek, it would have been nice for them to come up with something that hasn’t been done yet. Kirk versus Nero to me was like an episode of Dexter’s Laboratory with Dexter and Mandark going at it and then Dee-Dee (or in this case, Spock) comes in and messes the whole thing up. It just seemed like they played it safe in order not to take it into a territory that their intended audience wouldn’t understand, even the famed Trek “technobabble” was kept to pretty much the words “warp”, “transporter”, and “subspace/black hole”
Overall it was an impressive movie and I dunno if they are planning sequels or what the next Trek movie is going to be. Personally I would like to see another series run on TV, something similar to Enterprise but set after Voyager. I know it’s probably hard to do another series after they’ve done three exploration ones and one about a space station and a war, but Enterprise had the potential to go somewhere as being a edgy sort of “early space exploration” feel to it, much like how our current space program is, and had it not been for it’s terrible run on the dying UPN and the stigma of being placed earlier in the Trek timeline, it might have had the chance.
Sadly I have a feeling that Trek is going to remain in stagnation for a long time, especially after the passing of Marjel Bennett Roddenberry awhile back.