Review: Star Trek

After thinking it over, Star Trek, the J.J. Abrams re-master, is kind of lame.

I did like it after I left the theater the other night: it’s a well made movie, looks great and there’s tons of action. But goddamn is it ever cheesy.

I was told that Abrams was re-inventing Star Trek and wasn’t necessarily going to cater directly to the hardcore fans. Simply put, he was going to make a kick ass movie and not get too hung up on lore and canon.

Now granted he can’t make Spock a Klingon or have Kirk be a woman. That would not only be confusing but the sputtering outrage from the empire of geeks who treat Star Trek like it’s Genesis (the bible entry not the band…although I’ll bet they like Genesis the band too) would be deafening as they marched on Hollywood demanding Abrams head.

So Abrams, in fear of being decapitated by a replica Klingon Bat’leth (yep, I looked it up), totally sucked up to the geeks and did nothing but cater to their every Star Trek wet dream. The movie slowly but surely (emphasis on slowly) drags out every original character. Who in turn ham it up with some cornball line or a sly wink to those in the know. If this was a way of breaking free from the source material, they didn’t do a very good job.

Oh and then there’s the story. Any time a character from the future shows up and has to explain the movie to you, it’s probably bad. This happens at some point because the script does a fairly weak job of explaining why a Romulan ship has come from the future and has starting blowing shit up. Then it’s explained how that same Romulan ship has waited 25 years to attack again? Wait. What? Really? It kind of made sense, but at this point I lost interest. Also I had to pee but didn’t so as not to miss a cameo by an infant Jean Luc Picard. It never happened. What I really wanted was yet another character from the future to show up and explain what the first future character meant.

As I said before, the action is great and Abrams put together a very good looking movie. The sets are cool and the battles look great. Overall it’s a good Hollywood summer movie. But for the Star Trek faithful who are drooling all over it, I think they should be insulted. Abrams has spoon fed them a pretty bland bowl of what they think they wanted. Most sci-fi enthusiasts (read: nerds) are pretty smart so it’s puzzling how they would accept something this weak. Uber-nerd-douchebag Harry Knowles has sufficiently brow-beat directors like Abrams into not going out onto any limbs when it comes to their favorites. And to me this is sad.

It’s sad because no new ideas will come about when Nazi-Geeks get together and sink something before it even gets a head of steam. When rumors swirled about how Abrams considered changing a plotline to the Superman story, Knowles, like a fat Stalin, took to the internets to make sure that it didn’t go down. With someone like that policing what you ultimately can see and hear, it’s a wonder you see anything good at all.

So if you like Star Trek and all its accompanying spin-offs, you will probably dig this new one. When you’re done masturbating to the thought of young Spock and young Kirk arguing for the first time, think about how pandering and lame the script really was.

If you had trouble understanding what I meant in this column, please wait for future me to show up with the edited version I will be working on later this week.