Star Trek

Rating: 7/10 (11 October 2010)

Owing to the six Star Trek movies and the voluminous Star Trek series that have come out over the past few decades, it is fair to ask whether the latest Star Trek movie (which starts this story all over again) has anything new to show us. What director JJ Abrams has demonstrated with this film is that the answer is a definite yes. There are many things I like about this new Star Trek. To begin with, the film looks great. I have grown really tired of the fake-looking CGI that George Lukas employed for his last three Star Wars movies. So I was pleased when J.J. Abrams actually presented us with realistic looking images. The spaceships look like real spaceships in space. The planets with alien monsters look like real planets with real alien monsters and not something designed by a computer. Compared to Lukas' last three Star Wars pictures and Peter Jackson's gargantuan insects in King Kong, the alien life forms in this movie are constitute a remarkable technical achievement.
The other great thing that Abrams, the producers and the writers did in this movie was to make the characters more human. Chris Pine's Jame T. Kirk, for example, is a lot more interesting that the stock character that most Trekkies grew up with. On the hand, this movies' Kirk is a dare-devil and a bad boy who often gets himself into a lot of trouble and is a bit of a lady's man. On the other hand, Kirk happens to be brilliant and has natural leadership skills, though the question of whether this potential will be realized is by no means certain. Zachary Quinto's Spock is also more developed than the old Spock in the sense that he is presented as more human and flawed and not simply as a caricature nerd. Moreover, Spock is shown to have more empathy as demonstrated by his ongoing relationship with one of the crew. By doing this, it is now possible to relate and sympathize with Spock.
Finally, I found the story to be quite interesting for the first two-thirds of the film. The last third is more problematic. To begin with, this film drags on for too long and could have been trimmed by 30 minutes or so. The other problem with the new Star Trek is that it falls into many of the sames traps as many Hollywood films do. What strikes me is that in a futuristic age, the best that the writers could come up with is a mundane and quite boring physical confrontation between James Kirk and the evil Rumulin at the end. Then there are the pathetic celebratory scenes at the end which come from the same Hollywood mentality that was behind "Independence Day" and "2012." Since most of the beginning of the film was quite good, I would have to attribute the last third to a case of writer's block and innovation fatigue. It is regrettable, because the set up was quite good and the story was quite interesting most of the time.
6.5/10