Interesting Reboot Even If The Main Story Isn't Great

Rating: 7/10 (4 August 2013)

This was preceded on Film4 with a short interview with JJ Abrams where he stated that during the production of this film he wasn't too bothered as to what the fans wanted and only concentrated on making a film that would appeal to cinema audiences . This is only to be congratulated because I watched this on the say day as Peter Capaldi was cast as the Doctor in DOCTOR WHO . If Moffat has scrawled through the DOCTOR WHO boards on this site we'd be getting a 20 something pretty boy again , something the show doesn't need and if you're making a movie profits need to be taken in to the equation . You make a film a handful of sad anoraks will love and everyone else hates you're talking a major fail
Abrams task is going to be very hard . The characters in STAR TREK aren't James Bond or DOCTOR WHO , they're characters immortalised by William Shatner , Leonard Nimoy but Abrams manages to pull it off and it's fascinating to watch characters who are fundamentally the same we know from the television series played by different actors and having slightly different character traits . Spock is probably the closest to being the same as the TV character being an emotionless logic Vulcan but his character is fleshed out and stops him from being a one note cypher that he could have been and even has an emotional scene that might surprise you . If there's a problem with reintroducing these characters then it's because they're all allotted a five to ten minute sequence that screams " This is Chekov/Sulu/Scotty and the plot will now revolve around them for several minutes then we'll forget all about them after they've been introduced "
This interferes with the main story of a Romulan being on a revenge mission against the Federation and isn't all that strong a plot though to be honest it's much better than the one we got with the pretentious STAR TREK motion picture from 1979 . Perhaps one of the major problems is that the film never really recovers from the great opening pre-title sequence where a trick is played on the audience featuring Captain Kirk , and we're treated to a great action sequence and a couple of hours after seeing it I was very impressed by the sequence where a female crew member is blown out of a spaceship and her body bounces along the hull of the ship as the sound cuts to silence mirroring the empty silence of Space
In summary this is a relatively good action adventure Summer blockbuster featuring a legendary television franchise . I'm not a fan of STAR TREK but did enjoy seeing how a successful franchise can be reinvented and the character scenes work very well and I don't view this as any sort of heresy . It does get a bit loud , noisy and a little bit too spectacular but I guess this is down to it being a Summer blockbuster and believe me if it was made by Michael Bay it would have been a lot worse