I’ve been meaning to write about the new so-called “Star Trek” film starring b-graders such as Chris Pine and Zoe Saldaña and directed by star trek noob J. J. Abrams for more than a week now but I’m still quite speechless. More than speechless really, I’m shocked. Every time I think about it my stomach does another turn and the sweat starts beading on my brow. Again.

What makes it worse, so much worse is everybody else. All around me I hear cries of how great the film was, one of the best ever they say. I feel alienated. I feel like that poor escapee from Plato’s cave. Any minute now I’ll be beaten to death by blind, witless, unthinking Star Trek wannabe fan-boys.

It’s a blindness that staggers my mind. It’s usually informed people babbling nonsense when they should be perfectly capable of seeing the film for the hack job that it is. (Oh, and what a hack job.) My only question for J.J. Abrams is this; “Have you even seen a bloody Star Trek film in your life before you directed this lousy imitation?”

I wouldn’t be surprised if he hadn’t.

The intellectual content of the film rates just below Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that… is very low indeed. This semi-futuristic teen movie is filled with the sort of scenes designed to please today’s young mall-dweller audience. The costumes worn on earth look about the same as what I see today, Nokia phones still have the same ring tones and bar-music hasn’t evolved one iota since current times. (Although that could probably be forgiven as the bar where Kirk and Uhura meet is in Iowa, USA, where strong anti evolutionary forces are known to hold sway.)

It is in this bar in Iowa where the first of a long series of dreadful, needlessly embarrassing and probably just plain stupid sins are committed by Zoe Saldaña, an actress who admits that she never saw the original series before starring in the film. (How stupid is that?) Saldaña (Uhura) gets chatted up by Kirk and introduces herself as O’Whora. O-Whore-A!?? I’m torn between maniacal laughter and dejected sobbing at this mistake. A mistake that gets repeated throughout the film by all the characters except young Spock (Zachary Quinto), who gets it right at least once.

I would have thought that with a production such as this some one would at least have checked back on the original series and noticed such simple mistakes. But. No. I don’t think they did much checking back on anything. They didn’t have to. The entire film is set in an alternate parallel universe created when Spock, far in the future and long after the original series, generated a time-altering black hole with a massive red billiard ball. This scenario gave Abrams an opportunity to make an entirely new movie that breaks with canon completely.

Which brings me neatly to my next point. The big red billiard ball of death.

While pretty much all modern science fiction tries at least on the surface to stick with technologies that could be viable in future, this new film somehow wants us to imagine that matter, red matter as they call it, can somehow be dense enough, or reactive enough to spontaneously form black holes when it comes into contact with normal matter. As if this is somehow possible believable. Of course judging by the overall quality of the science in this “science fiction” film I think we can safely assume that Abrams and his crew have never heard of Gravity. May they all fall on their faces.

There’s also the excruciating scene where the Enterprise has to make a speedy escape from Vulcan before it gets sucked in by the black hole. As if turning a planet into a singularity would somehow increase it’s mass. (It won’t.)

I guess I could carry on pointing out bits of the film I don’t like, but I feel I’ve made my point. The original Star Trek had a spirit of fairness and adventure, of boldly exploring the unknown, of honour and of style. Gene Roddenberry’s influence has truly been forgotten and the new film is an action-adventure that simply doesn’t stand out.

Date: June 2, 2009
Author: Diaan Mynhardt
Tags: crap, review, star trek, super crap