Star Trek for people who don't like Star Trek. Basically, it's Star Wars.

Rating: 7/10 (15 May 2009)

The Star Trek the Trekkies have been fearing since this was announced: a dumbed-down Star Wars clone. As such, it's okay. It's a fairly entertaining space opera. It's fast paced and exciting. What it isn't is Star Trek. Star Trek is about man encountering the unknown and dealing with it with science and philosophy. There is weird stuff going on in this one - time travel, in particular, which in the original series was discovered early on and which served as the basis for many episodes and a couple of the movies - but the situation is urgent and the characters have no time to think about anything. It's just rush rush rush. The film does get most of the characters right, thankfully. Except for one instance, which I'll discuss shortly, the casting is brilliant. Zacahry Quinto in particular makes a perfect Spock, and I absolutely loved Simon Pegg as Scotty. Likewise, John Cho of the Harold & Kumar movies was a great choice for Sulu. Chekov doesn't belong, of course, because he wasn't on the Enterprise until later, but they got that wrong in The Wrath of Khan, too, so I guess I can't complain too much. The one exception to the excellent cast is Chris Pine as Kirk. He's excruciatingly bad. I'm certainly not asking him to impersonate Shatner - God no. But he doesn't capture any of Kirk's intelligence, or even charm. He's not quite as bad as, say, Hayden Christensen in the Star Wars prequels, but he's in the same category. He's just a brash youngster whom you certainly wouldn't want captaining a vessel. The movie spends a heck of a lot of time showing how cool he is. Even when he's doing something smart, like outsmarting the Kobayashi Maru program, they never really depict him as being smart. We don't see him changing the program, as he infamously did, and it never feels like he believably could. There's some fun to be had here, but only dumb fun. Maybe they'll improve the formula some in the inevitable sequel. I'll definitely give it at least one more chance (the series that is; I have no desire to rewatch this film).