Reviews

"Star Trek: Deep Space 9" remains my favourite sci-fi space-opera of all-time, with "Firefly" coming second (would be first if not canceled so soon). I love "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and still watch it, it had interesting plots. "Star Trek: Voyager" is where the series began to go downhill in my opinion, though I still enjoyed it. It started out well and began to sink, getting cheesier as the series went on, finishing up with one of the worst finales in history.

The problems I see with the modern Star Trek franchise are the same problems with all forms of mass-media-produced "art": dumbing down to a small set of clichés, overly simplified plots, pointless action scenes.

An example is enemies: in Star Trek: TNG, enemies were not black and white, there were no "outright evil" races. The races all had good and bad qualities, including humans. There were moral dilemmas, and when there was action, it served a purpose. Now it is merely Distinct Good vs. Distinct Evil, ala The Lord Of The Rings.

You have the "evil enemy" which is portrayed using:

Dark corridors; dark bridges; dark computers; dim green lights; pools of dark water; dripping water; slime; residue; smooth curves coming to sharp points; vampire-styled cloaks which come up above the shoulders; high places everywhere to fall from; enemies can't hit anyone with their hand-held weapons; etc.

You can see this clichéd viewpoint becoming more prominent as time passes. The Borg went from having extremely bright and quiet ships in TNG, to being extremely dark, green-tinted and "creepy sounding" in Voyager.

I didn't think the clichés could get worse than they were in "Star Trek: Nemesis", with all of the ones I listed above, but this new "Star Trek" movie has succeeded. From start to finish it is one cliché after another. The first 1/4 of the movie I rated a 6/10, it was moderately enjoyable though left a lot of questions unanswered. As it progressed it became cheesier, and it seemed clear there would be no dealing with the gaping plot holes.

To name just a few that come to mind:

A black hole magically doesn't destroy the ship, but sends them back in time to the exact point in time and space where Kirk's father is on a mission for the first time.

Kirk is left on an ice world and runs away from some random monsters before finding a cave in miles upon miles of wasteland, then goes into a cave where he finds old Spock. Why would Spock be living in a cave rather than going to the Starfleet base a couple miles away? Why is Spock randomly on the same planet that Kirk is left on? Why is Spock randomly on the same part of the planet as Kirk? Where did Spock get firewood from when there are no trees around for miles in every direction?

Why are there open sewers on the Romulan ship? Actual shin-deep dirty water sewers with water dripping from the roof and no lights, on a spaceship. Why are there cliffs on the ship everywhere you look, without so much as railings? No spaceship designer would possibly be that stupid. Why are there no lights on the Romulan ship? The ship is powerful enough to destroy planets, yet it can't light up its hallways, or even its command bridge?

In the opening scene it is said that they can't take another blast like they already sustained, yet they take dozens more blasts over a period of almost ten minutes, without being destroyed. They manage to very slowly fly their ship into a collision Romulan ship, a ship that is shown to be able to turn and go to warp in a couple seconds flat, stands around doing nothing for minutes while the Starfleet vessel rams into it.

The whole scene with young Kirk driving the car off a cliff and diving out. Not to mention the security would merely have transported Kirk out of the car to a holding cell. Why must movies have scenes of people hanging on to cliff edges for their life? It's painfully cheesy to watch. This movie had 4+ scenes of people hanging onto edges for their life.

The last scene where the enterprise ejects its warp core (well, apparently it has a half-dozen warp cores?) to "push itself out of the singularity". Um, no? They were unable to escape the singularity at Warp 4, that is far faster than the speed of light, why would a regular explosion help? Warp speed is thousands to millions of times faster than a mere explosion. Exploding warp cores have been used many times throughout Star Trek to blow up enemy ships, but we're expected to believe that it instead gently pushes the Enterprise out of a black hole without a scratch on it?

The movie throws out the "Star Trek: The Original Series" plot by changing completely what happens, yet magically we are expected to believe that despite the universe drastically changing, somehow all original members of the Enterprise crew are reunited during a series of unbelievably unlikely events on random planets and places.

If anyone has read The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy series, book 5 "Mostly Harmless", there is a new guidebook that is able to traverse possible timelines in the way that best suits its own goals. This perfectly matches the plot of this movie: unbelievable coincidences coming to a particular conclusion. This is insulting to anyone with common sense.

I can not believe that this clichéd and cheesy movie is on the IMDb Top 250 list. My rating of it went down progressively from 6/10 to 2/10 as the movie progressed from clichéd scene to clichéd scene. This movie has no artistic merit, no plot, no meaningful action, nothing to it at all. It is empty, Hollywood drivel.

For me, this is by far the worst Star Trek movie ever. It has all the clichés you have come to expect from the Enterprise series, and only 3 or 4 scenes in the entire movie did I actually find interesting or emotionally moving.

From start to finish it was loaded with cheesy, clichéd crap. I was going to rate it 4/10 until the event that happened near the ending tried to redeem the movie somewhat from its clichéd cheesiness, so I have given it a 5/10.

I could not believe just how many clichéd, fake, unrealistic, unbelievable, lame scenes this movie had.

First off, the "aliens" looked just like the stereotypical 1950s style aliens, the ones that are prominent in the Enterprise series: massive latex/plastic suits all shiny with huge goofy shoulders, evil orc looking faces with rough skin and large sharp teeth, etc. No originality at all here. Even the Star Trek: The Next Generation series, on a low budget, had vastly superior alien designs.

Through-out the movie Picard and other officers mowed down dozens of enemies without ever getting hit. I saw *one* secondary no-name officer get hit, everyone else was without a scratch during the fire exchanges. Give me a break.

Beverly Crusher looks through a microscope rather than simply inserting the blood sample into a DNA scanner.

They broke pre-defined Star Trek concepts over and over in this movie, sadly they do the same thing in every couple episodes of Enterprise as well.

The rest of the plot flaws fall into the category of spoilers, they are posted to an IMDb message board at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0253754/board/nest/13298101

This movie review is 97.5% spoiler free !

Forgetting for a time that it is [very loosely] based on Asimov's book, and just looking at it as as stand-alone film, I would call it entertaining, but sometimes painfully cheesy/corny/lame.

Fortunately the scenes that made you cringe were fairly rare, leaving most of the movie quite interesting.

Most of the action sequences were well done, though there were a few that got rather cliched. I already laughed at Vin Diesel flying through the air on a motorcycle guns blazing, I didn't need to see Will Smith repeating this !

The special effects, especially the cars and robots, were exceptionally well done. If anyone has seen the music video called "All Is Full Of Love" by Björk, the robots look and move almost exactly like that. Makes me wonder if one of the special effects crew saw that particular music video.

There was a good amount of humor that wasn't cheesy, but then there were a few of the scenes between Will Smith and Bridget Moynahan that were just so cliched it made you feel like throwing up.

I gave it an IMDB rating of 7 out of 10.