Review: Star Trek

I have never been made this upset by a movie remake, and that says a lot. At worst, I expected this movie  to mess with the continuity of all the other films: make people meet when they shouldn’t, get dates wrong, have technology be too advanced or too futuristic etc. But what happened was even worse…

Star Trek, which has a sequel coming, has changed the way Star Trek movies are made by concentrating on action and special effects more than story, acting, suspense, drama, and politics. They have effectively killed or wounded the drama of deep space opera films for years, even decades, to come. By having an over the top pace, blatantly stealing from the other Star Trek films as if they are out of date, and by disregarding or plain messing up on straight forward rules about time travel and the laws of sci fi science, this movie has hurt all science fiction movies even more than Star Wars Episodes I-III. I will never again be able to watch a new true to form Star Trek movie because from now on they will be reduced to this macho over the top action flick junk. I had a hard time figuring out Kirk’s age in the film, but I am quite sure he was made captain before he made it out of Star Fleet Academy, which would mean he went from not even having a real rank to skipping 5 officer ranks in a few days.

“So if I join a 3 century old organization and I yell at people enough, I can make captain and run the whole show in a few days on machismo alone?!” Yes. Apparently you can.

Alas, these may not be the worst aspects of this movie. Inspired by the an old Next Generation episode, “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” this new Star Trek tries to use the idea of an alternate timeline created by time travel. Now in the television episode, this alternate timeline was one where the Federation was on the brink of losing a war and the moral and ethical consensus was in fixing the timeline. In making things how they should be, the galaxy would be a better place, etc. In the end, the timeline is restored and we see the Enterprise crew as we know them with all their history intact.

In this new movie, that claims to be a prequel, we actually get a bastardization of this concept. You have the normal Spock and some Romulan mining captain going back in time through a black hole. Now, all Star Trek followers know that black holes are not used in time travel, so yes I was pissed. I mean, it’s not 1945 sci fi here people. Anyway, so Spock and this MMA fighter look-alike Romulan go back in time and Kirk’s dad is killed. Then, 20 years later or so, the planet Vulcan is destroyed by the Romulan, and then eventually the day is saved by the young versions of the original Star Trek crew headed by their young inexperienced Kirk. Problem solved right? WRONG.

They never fix the timeline! So all those episodes of Star Trek where they go to Vulcan will never happen. In fact, every episode of Star Trek will never happen! There is no way at all it can work out with Kirk being in the captain’s chair years before he was supposed to. Hundreds of Star Fleet personel are dead, personel who were supposed to grow old including Kirk’s father. Let’s also not forget to count the 47 Klingon ships’ crews, and did I mention 6 billion Vulcans?! So yes, the timeline is gone, and everything we ever saw in every Star Trek film and show (not counting Enterprise… gah) is nonexistent. It is as if it never mattered. I guess that’s the point though. I read quotes that stated they wanted to be able to do whatever they wanted with the story without worrying about going against past movies.

I believe we should be honest. This whole timeline thing was not just trying to give them free movement with a new series of movies. It attempted to obliterate Star Trek movies and shows from the past. They meant to make them irrelevant in both the fictional realm, by making them part of a now dead timeline, and in the real world, by completely changing the feel of the movies in to something unrecognizable.

This Star Trek is so unlike any previous Star Trek movie and so insulting to everything Star Trek that I must admit that the Star Wars prequels are truer and more authentic than this garbage. For even if they completely sucked, they didn’t ignore the other movies or the world they created.

This is, like the Star Wars prequels, another movie I won’t let my kid see until she or he is old enough to understand and see this movie for what it is: shallow crap.

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