Rating 5/10 5/10
Star Trek 11 Poster

Well folks, this is it ... grumpy old man Greg’s review of Star Trek XI. Hang on to your bloomers.

Some of the following content may only be comprehensible to devoted geeks and fans of the original series. And it’s long.

My rating is $13.50 worth of value out of the $16.00 ticket price, which is pretty good for me. Note that I think it wasn’t a good SF movie in the general sense, but it was a good Trek movie.

The eye-popping opening was fabulous, perhaps a bit emotionally manipulative with the tragedy of Dad, but a memorable action-packed movie opening. All of the characters were introduced and developed quite well in the short time available, and I was satisfied with their similarity to the corresponding 60s characters. The new Spock and Bones were exceptionally good reproductions of the originals. The new Kirk was a bit irritating at first (wasn’t he always!), but I quickly got used to him and he progressively took on more and more of the cartoon-like Shatner persona we should all know so well.

The stories of the childhood development of Kirk and Spock were nicely integrated into the overall plot. We all knew that Spock rejected the Science Academy to join the fleet (and we saw it live!), but I don’t recall any back-story about a delinquent youth for Kirk, although I suppose it fits the character well. Fans would appreciate seeing all this Trek historical folklore coming alive on screen. Likewise with the Academy, which looked like the bustling “West Point of space” that I always imagined. Thank heavens they included the famous Kobyashi Maru training incident, a titillating historical tale that was left hanging in The Wrath of Khan (1982). Why did they skip to “Three Years Later” so suddenly and we saw nothing else of what happened during Academy training? Fans would appreciate the irony of seeing a “red shirt” buy the farm during the space-drop.

There must have been some other hard-core fans in the surprising full Sunday morning first session, as when some subtle Trek jokes and lines were sprung on us, I chuckled, and I heard other people in the distance behind me chuckle as well, but the majority of people made no response whatsoever. Ah! I felt so special. Bruce Greenwood was a fabulous Pike, with the swaggering guts of a real starship captain, and it was quite touching to see him in a wheelchair at the end (non-fans need to see the 1960s trailer episode The Cage to understand this).

As John said, there were shades of Starship Troopers, Flash Gordon (1980) and 2001 in the movie, perhaps with a bit of Babylon 5 as well, but I don’t mind. It’s hard to know if it’s accidental or not, or maybe a small tribute. John thinks the Romulan ship looks like an aloe vera plant (I’ve never seen one), but I was reminded of a Vorlon or Shadow ship from B5. In any case, that was one helluva mining ship, armed to the teeth no less and it must have been 20 kilometres long. Think of the metal and plastic you need to build one of those things (including all the water in the floor).

I found a nice summary of the 11 movies and their popularity ratings here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek

Scroll down to the Feature Films section. I’m pleased to see that the movies with the highest ratings are the ones that myself and fellow fans generally agree with. Khan (1982) and First Contact (1996) are at the top, and they deserve it because they were intelligent and exciting SF movies. Final Frontier (1989) is at the bottom as expected and tragically Nemesis (2002) is runner up at the bottom. Tragic because it was the last one with the Next-Gen cast and it may have triggered the reboot of the series with the young cast.

But look ... the highest rating movie is the current one. Yoiiks! This is encouraging for the franchise, so I just hope the figures aren’t based upon novelty appeal.

Now the bad news: Why I think this movie was only “pretty good” and not “fantastic”.

All of the mistakes were blatantly obvious and could have been easily fixed and the movie would have been elevated to cult status. I have this tingly feeling that the executives got their sticky fingers on the original script and perverted it so they would imagine it could appeal to a broader audience and put more bums on seats (the most important thing in the universe!).

Now comes the really critical part from me (and I know Steve is on my side):

It’s called science fiction, but don’t mix the science and the fiction.

Let me explain: You are sure to dig a hole for yourself and irritate an important percentage of your audience if you try to pervert real/known science and blend it into a fiction plot. In this movie’s case it’s the nonsense about a supernova expanding and destroying planet Romulus, and then dropping out of warp near Saturn’s rings to mask their arrival with some kind of electromagnetic interference (they actually arrived inside Titan’s atmosphere) and then drilling to the core of a planet to drop some red stuff in. Expanding novae, electric rings, planetary drills ... this is blithering hard-science nonsense . It would have been better to replace all this quasi-scientific stuff with pure techno-babble. For example, Romulus could have been threatened by an “intergalactic plasmonic vortex” (copyright by Greg © 2009), and if I saw that in CGI glory I would have been impressed. But to see an expanding shockwave of a supernova was just stupid, and to heal the damn thing by dropping some red anti-matter into it was shark-jumping idiocy. Finally, Scotty and Kirk beam from a drab ice-world through light years of space into a starship hurtling along at top speed. Sure, just like I can jump directly from my back porch in Cheltenham onto a speeding bullet train in Japan (although Steve that would be much easier than what they did in the movie). Drilling to the centre of a planet, through thousands of miles of radioactive super-compressed moving magma ... pull the other one!

Notice that I don’t actually mind the “red stuff” itself. It was total SF nonsense that is vaguely based upon a whiff of science, and it looked great as they removed globs of it in suspension. Why they had about 3000 litres of the stuff remains a mystery, as that much seemed powerful enough to collapse the entire observable universe.

I just remembered ... the soundtrack sucked. We had two hours of the brain-dead monotonous blasting orchestra with doubled blurting brass and percussion that has infested all big budget movies for the last 15 years at least. I’m utterly fed up with these McDonalds music scores that are churned out by the likes of John Williams. This one was by Michael Giacchino, who? Do these guys just click a button on their Macintosh and a new cloned score is automatically generated? Also, what the hell were the Beastie Boys doing in the car chase scene? I had my fingers in my ears. Did you see the product placement in the car? Some of the most exciting scenes were the ones with no music at all, like the start of the space-drop (why can’t they learn this technique from 2001?).

Anyway, in summary, Star Trek XI was a pretty good Star Trek universe flick with the expected mix of emotions and action, a bit of corn, a bit of overacting, some jokes, some jokes for fans only, and some great effects. If this wasn’t a Star Trek movie, just a regular SF movie I would have given it $7 out of $16, because it’s really not that good in any critical sense. It’s only because it’s a Trek movie that I rate it so well, in relation to the history of Trek movies. This movie is arguably one of the best of the 11 movie franchise and I look forward to a new, new generation of Trek movies. Please future directors, don’t forget Roddenberry’s original ideas and sentiments that fuelled the 1960s series and don’t let future movies suffer from the dreaded diseases commercialitis and seconditis.