Star Trek rocks!
The new Star Trek movie is fantastic! Everyone I’ve talked to, even non-geeks, are really loving this movie. If you haven’t seen it yet, definitely find the time for this one.
The acting from everyone was phenomenal. Zachary Quinto came along at just the right time for a Star Trek movie — he really looks and plays the part well. I was worried at first because Chris Pine looked very similar to Dexter in the advertisements, but that turned out to not be a problem.
The story was a little light, but I think they did a pretty subtle yet cool thing with time travel. Most movies that involved messed up time lines will eventually have their stars come up with some way to fix it, but this movie decided to not do that — basically clearing the slate by making all the stuff in the original TV series not happen. I’m not sure how the fans will appreciate that, but I thought it was cool enough.
The only questionable things I saw was the set brightness (really — is the future going to be so blindingly bright that you can’t take pictures of anything without a lens flare?) and the product placement. At least they did it early in the movie so it didn’t detract much, but as soon as Nokia and Budweiser showed up on screen it took me right out of the story.
I’ve never been a big fan of the original Star Trek series so I can’t really say if it did justice to that. It was just too campy and outdated by the time I came across it, so I’ve only seen a handful of episodes. I did watch a lot of The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, and Voyager though.
Overall I thought it did a good job of keeping with the Star Trek style of futuristic-yet-plausible. The more different looking alien races were either downplayed or not shown at all, which I think was a good thing because it helped keep it more realistic.
It appears everything J. J. Abrams touches turns to gold nowadays. I hope this does well so we can get more.
