This Isn't Your Father's Star Trek

Rating: 2/10 (8 May 2009)

Actually this isn't Star Trek at all.
JJ Abrams has been doing the rounds of talk shows and news programs. Shilling for people to come out and watch his movie. I find it amazing that in every interview, he makes a special point to go out of his way to say that he didn't like Star Trek, he didn't watch Star Trek, he was never a fan of the show, he didn't know any of the history or mythology of the Star Trek universe and that he didn't really understand or care for the Star Trek phenomenon.
Trust me. It shows.
Abrams has made this new Star Trek movie with all the meticulous attention to detail and tender loving care that a McDonald's burger flipper puts into an Egg McMuffin. Slap it together, throw it at the customer, and grab their money before they notice you just served them a cold pile of pig fat.
The characters seem to be genuinely confused and bewildered that they have stumbled into a Star Trek movie. Each character gets to utter one or two recognizable catch phrases. I suppose so that the audience can make an educated guess about which actor is supposed to be playing which role. They mouth their painful dialog with all the emotion and sincerity of a seventh grade debate team member who just dropped their index cards.
The film is bad on so many levels, and so devoid of any possible connection to world of Star Trek, that it is difficult to imagine this is not intentional parody. If only Syler and Pine could have brought half the subtlety to Spock and Kirk that Chase and Belushi did, it would have been a better movie.
Set design had all the verisimilitude of the psycho Trekkies who build Enterprise bridge sets in their living rooms. Special effects appear to have been pieced together on a old, broken down Amiga 2000, with the climactic battle taking place between the most pedestrian and geriatric Enterprise ever seen and a giant space tumbleweed. They producers loved this footage so much that showed it twice in the movie, for two different generations.
The evil, creaky, leaky, fungus ship was crewed and captained by Romulan gangbangers, whose prime motivation seems to be that they wanted to get paid for appearing in the movie. (They should have asked for more money.) Star Fleet seem to have replaced the velour material of their uniforms with shower curtain material.
Orci & Kurtzman, the Click and Clack of Hollywood writers have thrown together another two hour bathtub full of endless, pointless explosions and laser blasts without a semblance of logic or continuity. They no longer seem to feel the need to have any detectable plot or story come out of their work. Just write a script thin enough that Burger King can cover it on four collectible glasses and cash the check.
The only grace note of this travesty was Leonard Nimoy. Returning one final time to hold a mirror up to humanities foibles, his Spock is always insightful, gentle, playful, and a tower of steely strength in the midst of disaster. He shows us why we liked Star Trek in the first place, and how little this rip off has to offer by comparison.
R.I.P. Star Trek, you deserved a better sendoff than this.