It’s Good, Bottom Line, But It Won’t Change Your Life

Star Trek Review

Riding on a ton of positive reviews Star Trek comes loaded with positive expectations. So that may unfairly bias viewers going to see it.

It is without a doubt a very polished film made with a lot of skill. Visually it looks fantastic, the special effects seem first-rate, especially compared to the shoddier ones of last week’s Wolverine.

The ship design of the villainous Nero’s (played by Eric Bana) vessel is really neat, it looks like it’s basically made of black daggers. While his role is actually fairly minimal the writers gave him a strong motivation.

The movie is basically the origin tale of the Enterprise spaceship and her crew.

The Writers

Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are fast becoming pretty much the biggest writing team in the game.

They wrote this Star Trek, which is a model of pacing with its stakes kept high, conflict kept in every scene, and simply an unflagging pace which keeps the 2 hour + movie from dragging.

They also humanized it extremely well, making Kirk and Spock’s relationship very understandable and getting the audience to connect to the two characters by showing their childhoods and personalities.

Orci and Kurtzman also wrote on Mission Impossible III (fantastic action, also humanized) and Transformers (again humanized it, making us care about giant transforming robots).

Spock

Zachary Quinto is best known for his role on TV’s Heroes as the villain Sylar, but for me personally he always came off a bit soft to play a villain, and I found myself not able to take him seriously as a bad guy.

But he fits right in as Spock. He doesn’t overdo the logical speech nor the indicators of human emotion underneath. It was a great performance. Chris Pine was effective opposite him as Kirk, giving off a lot of charm and charisma.

My Favorite Part

The actor who plays the ship’s doctor, Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, is Karl Urban. Karl is one of those actors with “oh, that guy” status. He tends to show up as serious characters in movies like Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Riddick and etc. But here he plays very broadly comic, almost like something you might see in a stage play.

He also gets lines like, “Dammit man! I’m a doctor not a scientist!” Which I found absolutely hilarious. I don’t care if every line he had was some variation of that, it would’ve been fine with me.

Action Scenes

There’s definitely some creativity in the action, most notably the scene where Kirk and Sulu jump through space into the atmosphere and finally onto a giant drill.

But some of the fist fights are still choppily edited, which is a bummer. All in all, I honestly enjoyed the action of JJ Abrams previous film Mission Impossible III, more than this.

What Will Happen With Star Trek?

I suspect the franchise has been succesfully rebooted. This movie may not have the depth of something like The Dark Knight, in that sense it is less likely to be something people say one day, this was my favorite movie.

And to some degree I feel like I respect the craft behind this movie more than I enjoyed it.

But you would be hard pressed to say this is not a good movie.

I think it will be a leggy hit and we’ll be seeing Star Trek 2 soon enough.

-Dan Benamor