Star Trek

Oh Star Trek, I wanted to like you a lot more than I ended up liking you. I found you to be quite often over-hyped, slightly generic and a serious case of flash and style over very little substance. I heard a lot of people talk about the rejuvenation of the franchise with this film, but I felt like it was too often just another Star Wars-lite tale of a farm boy making good on saving the universe from a vengeful, wounded bad guy. That and the lense-flare bothered after the third or fourth go round in the Enterprise. There’s no new ground being explored here, it’s just been pumped full of steroids and ignoring real science, which science fiction was based upon, and telling everyone that black holes make time travel much quicker! And the characterizations are beyond paper thin. Kirk is as cliché ridden as any other generic action hero as of late: troubled childhood, I’m told he’s a badass but he spends the entire movie getting his ass kicked, rebellious nature, ladies man, I’m also told he’s very smart but he keeps making stupid decisions (or he needs very obvious plot points pointed out to him). The best part of the entire movie is Leonard Nimoy showing up as the deus ex machine…I mean…Old Spock. He comes in to wrap up plot points, spoon feed information and basically act like the only intelligent human being in the entire film, which is saying something since he’s an alien who’s not supposed to have human emotions. I didn’t hate Star Trek, but it wasn’t the movie that everyone hyped it up to be. I do have a theory as to why that happened: in a summer with so many terrible films (Transformers 2 and Wolverine being at the top of the list), everyone was probably very glad to see a decent summer film. And that’s all that Star Trek was – perfunctory, generic, loud, slam-bam, brainless popcorn entertainment. I expected something more.