It's still just a TV show.

Rating: 5/10 (6 January 2010)

This one was nothing more than just an extend version of the TV series in a way: the action is about the same; the story seems conveniently crafted to get the crew out of difficult situations with some silly/cute escapes; and everything is always OK at the end, with a bright look at the future. What I mean by this is that the violence wasn't really violent. The phazer shots surely do hit the bad guys and they all go flying and dying, but they're not intense, violent, nasty shots with blood and guts pouring out and heads flying. The torture scene even skirted away from actually showing Captain Pike getting the creature biting down into his brain stem. The bad guys didn't really seem like such bad guys, they all point fingers, speak loudly and bang their chests like gorillas but it all seems kind of hollow. Even the quick scene of the ice monster biting down on the other ice-cow on Delta-Vega didn't seem scary, it was more comical, ending up in another convenient escape for Kirk. All of the characters are supposed to be re-introduced and re-imagined, and besides Kirk and Scotty, all of them seem to be just a bunch of caricatures. Zach Quinto seems to be trying to figure out whether he needs to be more like the Nimoy Spock or his own version and never really is fully able to be just this particular Spock the entire movie. Chekov seems forced in this version by Anton Yelchin . All of Sulu's life seem to be drained out of him in this version as John Cho does nothing to bring the warmth and humor that we knew of George Takei (and perhaps that's because John Cho is Korean-American and Takei was Japanese-American - just because they're Asian, doesn't mean they're the same). And Uhura is all kissy-kissy sexy but she looks like she is almost put aside on deck and just tries so hard to get everybody's attention. As for the bad guys, Eric Bana is a complete waste in the movie, it didn't need to be him as he is so limited in this film. A major plot point was forgotten about and skipped: when Nero inserted the bug into Pike, I was waiting for the code that Nero was asking for to be spat out by Pike, so I fully expected the Romulan to head to the Federation to destroy it from the inside with the code obtained. So why go through that hassle of obtaining the code and tell us the story if you're not going to follow that tale? I gave it a pedestrian mid-grade for this movie, because just for once, I would like to see an intense, R-rated, truly scary, truly violent-action version of Star Trek instead of this child's play. I'm glad I only saw it as a rental at home on Blu-Ray, as I would not want to pay the money to go see a movie that's about as good as what you might see on TV normally. I'm glad I didn't pay the $10. People are blind to think this was a great movie for the big screen, it really isn't. It's just a slightly more embellished TV-movie. The SFX and designs are about what you would expect these days, so unless they do something spectacular, it's just an overblown TV-movie. Even the final sequence of the Romulan ship being sucked into the black-hole was tame and not very exciting, bunch of Romulans running around and bits of barely discernible broken ship parts edited together with swish-pans to make it seem exciting, but instead it just looked like Abrams ran out of ideas on how to make it look desperate and threatening and original and just sort of created a swish-edit sequence of bits and pieces as you might see on a TV show any given night on the networks. Just like Abrams' last effort MI:III, he really is a TV director, not a feature film director, where the intensity is always just a bit tame and not so serious and is always conveniently explained away or not explained at all and the story just sort of moves along to the next thing with a convenient edit. He still hasn't learned how to handle scene transitions: you can always tell where the commercial would come in between scenes with Abrams. I could literally pause the film at those moments and go to the bathroom and come back and I wouldn't feel like I left the movie in any way whatsoever. I hope Abrams sticks to doing TV and let a real feature film director take the helm when he produces.