Quo vadis Star Trek?

Rating: 3/10 (8 May 2009)

Personally, I usually don't think that people need to hear my opinion about movies, because after all there simply is no accounting for taste. However Star Trek isn't a personal but rather a political issue for me. Being in my early twenties I may not consider myself a 40-years-of-Star-Trek-Fan, nevertheless the franchise did have a share in my growing-up and it sure had a share in my personality development, too.
When I bought tickets for Star Trek I already had a bad feeling about seeing my beloved universe getting crushed down by a state-of-the-art Sci-Fi-Action movie, which wasn't that improbable after what happened in Star Trek X. The trailers which I had watched so far enforced my concern. I will not say, all my fears and concerns have proved true. (In which case I should have picked 0 stars instead of 3.) Since the cast at least seems to try hard, some jokes made me laugh (I honestly hadn't expected that to happen), and some scenes even seemed a little authentic I rate this movie with 3 out of 10. I wasn't upset nor was I furious about the whole thing, yet it left me with a deep feeling of disappointment. Why? Because the "Star Trek" (universe, franchise, saga, whatever you might call it) as I got to know it is gone - irrevocably gone. Of course, we fans have to adjust to new; new cinematography, new actors, new stories. We always had to. If you compared Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway and Archer, you could see five very different types of characters, yet we managed to adjust (..well to .. most of them...). We managed to adjust as we always did, because change was what kept Star Trek alive.
What did disappoint me so much was the choice for a time travel plot creating an "alternative timeline" which allows/allowed the film-makers to work with Star Trek while creating something new from the beginning, too. (I believe this has euphemistically been called a reboot, yet if you reboot your computer you don't actually get a new one out of doing so.) It seems to me as if they just wanted to make a Star Trek movie for the masses so badly and at all costs, but without even bothering to watch the shows and engage themselves in the history. I don't blame them for making a prequel - I blame them for thinking they could take Star Trek, remove all of what we fans knew and then put it back on the screen with still the Star Trek label on it. (...and actually believe they could get away with it...) You see, this attitude bugs me so much, and I haven't even criticized some of the weird stuff they present us in this movie. (What the frick is Red Matter?)
There was a time when I was laughed at and mocked by others because I regularly watched Star Trek shows. I always took comfort in the fact that Star Trek was something special, a show that invites you to think, that held more than just the visible, a show in which effects were used to support the plot - not to replace it. Today I don't feel like laughing back at people who have never even considered watching a Star Trek show and are now surprisingly caught by some other big budget Sci-Fi movie. I feel like I lost something valuable. If you go to the movies, don't expect a pleasant surprise. Prepare for the worst, and you might end up giving it 3 stars still. Next time you watch TOS, TNG or DS9 you will probably be even more thankful for what Gene Roddenberry has bequeathed us.