Review - Star Trek (2009)

Star Trek, the decades old TV and movie series get a makeover~! Unlike other movie franchise, Star Trek is the one where we can easily decide that most of the movies are below par and only a few are good. The old movies mostly made up of a better looking set and slightly larger special effect. Some the stories are so pointless it look more like a two-parter of the TV series episodes.

But it is not the case with the latest entry to the franchise. Simply named Star Trek directed by J. J. Abrams, it follows the recent trend in movie franchise of rebooting the series, but in a way that only science fiction or fantasy film can do.

James Bond and Batman simply choose to ignore all previous movies in the franchise, but not Star Trek. Although the film is about young Kirk, young Spock in their first mission in Enterprise, and how Kirk got to be the Captain, the film take place in an alternate reality. This means than all those previous adventure by William Shatner's version of Kirk may still be part of the canon. This can be achieved by simply adding time travel in the plot.

The calm Spock and the cocky Kirk (thank god there is no fatty Shatner)

So far, this film has one of the best, engaging and emotional pre-credit sequence. It is the introduction of our film's villain, the Romulan, the death of Kirk's father and the birth of James T Kirk. The acting is good and despite just a few minutes screen time, we can feel the dedication and connect with the character. For other films, this sequence usually consist of rather poor and wooden acting, but in Star Trek, it is just nice.

For the special effects, nothing to shout about, since mostly CGI and we hardly will be amazed anymore with the usual outer space stuff. But the production design is just really nice. It depicts the future as a very clean and nice place to live in, unlike Blade Runner or Equilibrium. The internal of the Enterprise is just awesome, like an ultra futuristic high tech Apple / Mac -like computer shop, clean, while and stunning user interface.

The Enterprise has never look nicer.

Plot wise, still rather typical Star Trek stories, but nowadays it is rather hard to come up with a new idea for science fiction story. So, it all depends on the execution, and Star Trek has done it nicely it is fun to watch and make us want for more.

Bad guy - the Romulans

I think it will be a far more enjoyable experience if the viewer has some prior knowledge of Star Trek universe. You will get to see how those main characters been rewritten and introduced. The main bonus is there is no William Shatner, but Leonard Nimoy returns as the older Spock and serves as the McGuffin of the story. But even if one have no prior knowledge, it is still an enjoyable journey, just miss a few Easter egg here and there, but it has nothing to do with the main plot anyway.

We can never have enough of Nimoy, it is just fun to see him as the wise Spock again.

Bond, Batman and Star Trek; three rather important movie franchise has now successfully being brought back to life. Hope that future filmmaker won't kill them again. Now just hope that Bryan Singer can give us a Wrath of Khan for the next Superman film.