Star Trek

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Star Trek - what the fuck is it about?

The film begins when the villain, Nero McBlandson, goes through a worm-hole that leads him directly into a franchise reboot. From here he kills Kirk's Dad and alters the timeline just enough that the original fans shouldn't get pissy about the un-canon-ing of their favourite show, but not quite enough to change anything significant. As such, we see Kirk become Captain of the Enterprise with Spock being his right hand man. I guess if your job is to issue orders then it probably helps for your second in command to have a good pair of ears.

So was it shit or not then?

Well surely we all have to admit that this movie is just completely fucking brilliant, don't we? Apparently the fans of the original films and shows hate this movie, but I honestly can't work out why. I mean, it's a prequel, sequel, and re-boot, all at the same time, which is at such a level of genius that I reckon it'd have Steven Hawking's computer shouting “clap, clap, clap”. Over the years I've seen this movie quite a bit, however this was my first viewing having seen every previous film in the franchise. As such, I became kind of worried that this time the performance by Pine and Quinto might pale in comparison to their much more iconic predecessors. Thankfully though this turned out not to be the case as, although Shatner does have his justifiably legendary status, Pine's secret weapon is simply that he can actually fucking act. Nor is it a problem for Quinto either due to Nemoy showing up in the film to point at him and shout “this is me from now on”. Oh and it also helps that the cast are also borderline clones of the original crew. I mean, having looked at the two actors, I refuse to believe that Karl Urban isn't simply what happens when the original Bones dips his balls in a Petri Dish full of stem cells.

One of the things that has changed for me since having watched the original films however is how much more emotional this has become. The opening ten minutes alone has always had me in tears but this time I found myself fighting them back with such regularity that I had to check that I wasn't going through the fucking menopause. Not to slag off the previous movies, but with them I think that I only cried once, and that was tears of joy after The Motion Picture finally ended and I discovered I hadn't actually lost a year of my fucking life to it. In fact, just compare the introduction of the Enterprise in that film to its introduction in this one and you'll see the difference. Here we get one of the most amazing scores of modern times aiding a shot that's like being stabbed in the brain with nostalgia.. in The Motion Picture we got a five minute sequence in which William Shatner gave his best 'fuck-me eyes' to an air fix model.

Not that I'm saying that this newer movie is perfect of course. Eric Bana's Nero is so uncharismatic that I'm presuming the black hole that he travelled through came into existence when he looked into a mirror and accidentally created a vortex of boredom. He's got a weird run too and it's really distracting. It's kind of a waddle you know, like if a fat person had been entered into a 'race for a pie competition'. Or to make that sound more Star Trek-related, it's as if William Shatner had been entered into a 'race for a pie competition'. Oh, and even ignoring Nero, there's a couple of distracting plot-holes scattered throughout. Most notably when Kirk is blasted onto a random part of a random planet and randomly runs into a random cave in which he randomly meets the older Spock. I don't know though, maybe that's how life works. Like if you take three rights you end up going left perhaps when so many things randomly happen like that things lead directly to where you need them to. Which in this movies case, was bullshit.

However that's one gripe in an otherwise brilliant movie. Sure the fans can moan that there was too much action and it lost the intellectual subtlety of what the franchise should be about, but what it lacks in subtext it gains in being the most consistently brilliant film of the franchise since Wrath Of Khan. I'm sorry the movie couldn't please everybody in favour of a the larger audience of general film fans, but to quote Spock “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”, and this movie is fucking brilliant. Thanks for reading, motherfuckers, and see you next time.