Good guys win, bad guy looses and the special effects are great. But it's not really Star Trek.

Rating: 6/10 (14 November 2009)

I am a trekker/trekkie. I have been all my life. And I wanted to love this movie. I really wanted this movie to re-boot the franchise so that I could continue to have new Star Trek movies to watch. Even after I first saw this movie, the day it was released, I was trying to tell myself that I loved it. I tried to excuse it for all its blockbuster simplicity and its lack of depth. But in the end I honestly felt like "Armageddon" had been remade with characters with Star Trek names. While it was a good action flick, even an excellent action flick, it just was not Star Trek.
The best Star Trek always asked questions. It always presented difficult social questions in a way that people could see them for what they were, without throwing them in their faces with platitudes and slogans. I remember the presentation of torture in the "Chain of Command" episode of the Next Generation. I remember the Voyager episode "Prey" asking questions about the sanctity of all life. And almost every episode of the original series asked very important social questions.
And there were the science elements of the fiction in Star Trek. The communicator became the cell phone of today. The Army is working on a real phaser (PHASR - with stun). And many of the ideas in the episodes were inspirational to real scientists (there is a real theory for warp drive in physics today).
So, what did the new movie give us: Red Matter and the importance of teamwork . . .
In the end I can't bring myself to consider this real Star Trek. It's a blockbuster action movie, and a good one, but it doesn't wrestle with serious issues, it doesn't play with scientific ideas, it really doesn't make you think at all. It's just a shoot-em-up where the good guys win, bad guy looses and the special effects are great. But it's not really Star Trek.