Star Trek: an emotionally compromised review

Warning: do not read if you haven't seen it. Too many spoilers (just can't help myself)!



Stardate 210509 point something, or is it just an ordinary thursday evening in my 25th year on planet Earth, when I get a box of popcorn and decide to get back into the theater for a classic cinema experience, that my first contact with the new Star Trek film happens. You've got a surprisingly well-chosen cast, with very few exceptions. The original characters are instantaneously identifiable. Zachary Quinto (Heroes) makes an intensely believable young Spock, quite close to flawless. Doctor McCoy is brilliantly portrayed by Carl Urban (remember Eomer?) - a face that I grew to love. "I'm a doctor, not a phisicist!" irritably concludes McCoy and suddenly the entire Star Trek universe comes to life on screen once again. Star-packed cast you say? Let's talk about Eric Bana and Wynona Ryder then, or maybe you'd like to throw a few critical sentences toward Chris Pine in the role of James Tiberius? He may lack William Shatner's classic captain-like demeanor, but he had learned the original Kirk's movements so well, that he even walked like him. The effort the filmmakers put into gathering the right early Enterprise crew is remarkable, gotta give them that.



Needless to say, for a hardcore sucker like myself, this film is a voyage into sci-fi nirvana. Action-packed sequences, amazing Vulcan landscapes (I wish there were more of those, indeed), spacecraft docks that look like my dream crib. The director of photography has decorated every frame with exceptional flare - the flare of sun, lights, laser beams, star radiance and neon bling. In other words - you have a hip pop-prequel targeted specifically to the younger folks, since the story is about starfleet academy students, after all. Apart from some unanticipated soundtrack-dorkiness on Earth before Jim decides to join Starfleet (sorry guys, but musically you could have put more effort in it), the film seems just right. That is, until we get to the core - the story.



What puts me into the position to say that the story could have been better? The fact that Trekkers have already seen much deeper, more intense and challenging stories in the series themselves, and in previous full-length ST films. And how can any scriptwriter with such ease allow some Romulan outlaw, in his quest for revenge, to destroy an entire planet and thus erase so much history and logical brainpower from the Star Trek universe?! This is beyond me. Among all else, timetravel, parallel timelines and appearances of original characters is simply no surprise for the fan. Neither is the personal man-to-man vengeance that we are so familiar with. Only it was never done with Spock before - perhaps the most original and cult character of the entire Star Trek saga.



The "green-blooded goblin," as Dr. McCoy likes to call him, is half-human, half-vulcan, making him an emotional bomb, challenged to hide his feelings under the vulcan mask of logic. A story centered around him was probably the strongest idea the writers could come up with to lure fresh young fans into their cunning sci-fi nets, hehe, concidering that we live in an overinformed, overstimulated age and it becomes harder and harder to think of something original that hasn't been done before. Open the archives and you'll see what I mean: we already saw captain Picard's crew travel to Earth before First Contact with the Vulcan race was ever made, we saw captain Janeway travel in time to lead Voyager back home after an amazing few seasons of being lost too far from the known borders of the Federation, we saw James T. Kirk himself being hurled back and forth in time in Star Trek: Generations, meeting the crew of the USS Enterprise some 200 years in the future, and now the same has happened to Spock - naturally, in the middle of a "situation" with a Romulan. Somehow I think the target here are teenagers who never saw one episode of the series, or the previous films, for that matter.



To make the long story short, blasting onto the screen at warp speed and remaining there for two hours, was like an acid trip for my eyes. Finally a visually brilliant Star Trek, if not a new story... Because now CGI can do what Gene Roddenberry only dreamt about in the '60s. I envy everyone who is only now starting to dive into the sea the USS Enterprise has been exploring for almost half a century. I definitely recommend seeing it: it's worth the hot discussions it will raise, hopefully taking you some place where no man has gone before...