Mr Sulu, set Photohop to lens-flare

Rating: 5/10 (2 September 2009)

The slightly depressing trend for "rebooting" older film series continues with this re-imagining of the origins of the original Star Trek crew. Having grown up with The Next Degradation, Voyeur and Deep Space Nine Inches I was expecting the standard po-faced, lumpen headed diplomacy that usually accompanies our forays into the universe of the United Federation of Plonkers.
Yes, you guessed it, I hate Star Trek. In my book there are two available options when you see an alien, either shooting it with a blaster (one that emphatically does NOT have a "stun" setting) or making it an ally in your fight against the tyrannical galaxy-spanning imperium you are rebelling against. Sitting down and negotitating with said alien whilst attempting to understand and respect it's culture simply isn't an option in my book.
Fortunately, Star Trek Begins is much more Undiscovered Country (or Khath of Wran, depending on your taste) than Final Frontier.
Spoiler In the opening sequence George Kirk (James' father) saves the lives of his ship's crew by heroically going to ramming speed against a sinister time traveling Romulan ship which emerges from a space anomaly. Said evil ship is piloted by the Hulk (not the Incredible Hulk, the other, arty one) sporting some natty facial tats. One of the crew George saves is his heavily pregnant wife who gives birth to James T during the escape.
We are treated to a short introduction to both Kirk (who is a total d*ck) and Spock before Kirk signs up for Starfleet at the urging of his father's friend, Captain Pike of the Enterprise.
After some fairly tiresome Starfleet Academy antics the film really gets going when the Enterprise is sent to investigate an anomaly similar to the one that killed Kirks father and everything goes to hell in a handbasket. The Hulk and his Romulan pals destroy a wave of Starfleet ships and then mash Vulcan using perhaps the most impractical super-weapon ever. This appears to involve lowering a big drill into the planets atmosphere and then waiting until it drills down to the core and dropping something down the hole. It is impressive that no one on Vulcan says "Oi, you with the tats! Stop drilling our planet or we'll blow you up and failing that we'll blow up your drill" but it doesn't really matter.
Spock, now captaining the Enterprise refuses Kirks plan to go head to head with the vastly superior baddie ship, when Kirk refuses to comply with the order Spock has him marooned on Hoth. By a coincidence of Godzilla like proportions Kirk is stranded on the planet where the original Spock (Nimoy) who's been thrown back in time along with the Romulans and is hiding out. By a rather universe breaking deus ex machina they end up back on the Enterprise, Kirk takes over as captain from Spock and saves the day by blowing old Hulky and his squid ship into a new black hole. Huzzay. Mr Spock (that's the old one not the young/new one) explains that as a result of the destruction of Vulcan they are now in a parallel dimension to the original crew. This means they can make new sequels or a new series and not have to worry about external continuity.
End Spoiler While I didn't like Chris Pine playing Kirk who made him seem rather unlikeable and emotionless everyone else is pretty good; Syler makes a convincing Spock, Uhura is likable if underused and Pegg's Scotty steals every scene he's in but the real shocker is Karl "Blood and Muscles" Urban's brilliant "Bones" McCoy who captures the spirit of the original brilliantly right up to and perhaps surpassing the inevitable "For God's sake, Jim, I'm a doctor not a...".
The film is however beset by a few issues. Blinding light and lens-flare all over the bloody place, nosebleed inducing sound and editing that isn't so much fast as psychotic. There's barely a frame in the film where there isn't some sort of lens-flare going off all over the place. Frankly if Kirk picked up a coffee cup there'd be lens-flare coming off it. Allied to this is the fact that for some reason virtually every scene ends with the entire screen slowly going blinding white. The sound team have obviously been influenced by the recent Star Wars films as everything makes some sort of incredible noise – this works to raise the adrenaline in the early part of the film but later on it becomes a bit too much. There is a fair amount of punching in this film (always good in a Star Trek movie) but the massively unrealistic two-pieces-of-wood-smacked-together punching noise beloved of Indiana Jones is rather out of place. The editing is very much the post-Generation-X attention-span-of-a-gnat type of affair that we're used to courtesy of people like Wachowski brothers but it is generally fairly simple to work out what is going on.
Minor stylistic issues aside, I enjoyed Star Trek. The plot is absolute rubbish but who cares? There are spaceships and explosions and punching and more explosions. Go with it and you wont notice that at the heart of the plot is a series of coincidences of galactic proportions.