Something different, good and bad

Rating: 6/10 (8 May 2009)

Now I am confident that die-hard Trekkers for the most part hated this movie, simply because this truly is Star Trek remade.
What I don't like is that in some aspects, the movie, more so the script, seemed to appear like a no-effort script. The authors were lazy to implement a few things that ultimately are the core of Star Trek.
Among such things is to have a Spock character, whom I actually enjoyed a lot, who makes a believable torn-between two extremely different cultures personality, but as I read somewhere else, by concentrating on such fine and good character development, which I sometimes missed in the old Franchise, they kinda forgot some other things, like for example that this entire franchise is set in Space, rather than on Planets, with ships traveling in-between. This is not Star Wars, yet it sometimes felt like a less love-story-fantasy oriented version of it.
In short, the epicness was lost. Volcan got destroyed, for crying out loud! And that's it. There were six billion people on that planet, only 10000 Volcans survived, yet it felt like some random earthquake in a sparsely populated area. The only sense of what this truly meant, ironically comes from seeing the old Spock watching the destruction of his home planet.
No offense, but even when the (by human standards) uninhabited planet Genesis was destroyed in the Cinema 30 years ago, it was more epic. Destroying Vulcan looked like the destruction of some arid mining moon somewhere far away, where let say the enemy is testing his new killer weapon, but it looked like the real thing was yet to come.
The movie lacked (not always, but too often) calm, but grand pictures, showing the vastness of space, the eternal silence, and how small everything humane is. One could have almost forgotten this is after all a movie about space-going scientists and explorers - just without the space.
And because of the lack of such grand pictures, a more epic feeling for the destruction of one of the core planets of the federation was lost.
This Star Trek is small in horizon, it focuses on character development, which is nice, but what made Star Trek special, and allowed it to last for 40 years, the epicness, was lost.
I hope that the sequel to this new series will, after having taken the screen-time (and space) to focus on those (new) characters, give us epic pictures, and give some of this old Star Trek feeling back - which is what made Star Trek so vastly different from Star Wars, that could have easily played in a medieval kingdom, with Darth Sidius riding on a black horse.
It is most likely related to the fact that Mr. Abrams actually always liked Star Wars more, and is a specialist for TV shows. I like them all, but I am not convinced that his genius there was applied correctly with Star Trek. I should mention that I am the targeted age group for this movie, but what made me, or friends, watch Star Trek, was the optimism (it's there), the grandness of scale (missing) and that it was not fantasy oriented, but scientifically oriented (kinda there). Let's hope that Mr. Abrams doesn't make it into a soap-opera simply set in space, Star Trek above all is an utopia, where in fact we do not see realistic characters, but ideal characters in many ways, and where we get a feeling on how it would be to truly explore the infinite vastness of space. That is the Star Trek feeling, a unique feeling, please don't make it a Star Wars reloaded, Star Wars simply never quite had the scope of Star Trek.
I believe I should mention what I liked about this movie as well: it wasn't drowned in CGI-effects, something very important. It truly felt CGI was not the core concept (unlike in Star Wars) but simply a means necessary to tell the story. I really liked how some simply cheap and old stuff from the low budget series was most carefully redesigned, while making it still visible where it comes from. I don't mind the AppleStore design, in my opinion there is no reason why a futuristic utopia has to look like a cheap 60s low budget movie (as the original series was in terms of design). This is what I likely liked most, an excellent transition.
And together with some really good acting (after all, those are young kids, not yet the seasoned veterans we got to know in TOS and the movies) I believe all the issues I brought up, together with the good things I mentioned, means this can go very well if certain problems are corrected, or more focus is put on making it a Star Trek movie (without the 'canon' issues), Abrams will make this an excellent re-run.
I know he can do it, a lot of sensitivity was shown in production design, CGI and cast, so in terms of story, epicness and more 'space feeling', things definitely can be improved.