Sad. That's all I can say. A media icon has fallen, and to BASE it on a money-grabbing weak attempt of a show like Enterprise is beyond insane. Don;t get me wrong, Enterprise had it's moments, but when a show doesn't get interesting until it's fourth season, there's something wrong. And to try and revamp a franchise based upon it is ludicrous. The much-touted special effects were really things we've all seen a thousand times by now. The FX in the first 5 minutes of Revenge of the Sith were far better. Star Trek has never been about the special effects, but the humanity of the characters. This movie struck me as shallow, and not well thought-out. It destroyed the Trek legacy, apparently just for the sake of destroying it.
I really tried to go into this one with an open mind, I really did, even though I was fairly sure it would end up like this. And I'm sure my view will not be very popular on this board because it is mostly populated with neo-trekkies who started watching with TNG or DS9 or Voyager. This is not the Star Trek I have loved for more than 25 years. To wipe out 43 years of history-making franchise to try and get the teen ticket buyers in is not good motivation. Had this featured the TNG/DS9/VOY cast in a final send-off before resetting history, it might be more palatable. And a decent Trek director, like Nick Meyer or Jonathan Frakes, might have made it believable. They could have given it the attention necessary to at least mask the fact that this was a blind grab for money for Paramount. Instead, we get JJ Abrams, a very typical director for this day and age who focuses too much on "epic" shots and effects and completely glosses over the character interactions and social issues that made Star Trek great.
It was a fairly good Trek story, but it could have been told just as well, if not better, with the a new 24th century crew and a new Enterprise-F. I mean, how many times do we need a time-travel story? And rather than passing this off as an alternate timeline, or something preserving Trek's past, Abrams completely obliterates it in favor of this slick, glossy ghost of Trek that doesn't stand out at all from other recent sci-fi fare. What makes this inexcusable is not the execution of the movie itself, but the cold disregard for what came before. To throw a few random one-liners from McCoy into the movie is just a lame attempt to keep diehard Trek fans from burning this one at the stake.
The cast was actually pretty good, and this only throws into relief the fact that this movie could have been a solid and enduring installment of the Trek franchise. The only gripe I had was with the characterization of Kirk. Chris Pine did a decent job, but the character comes off as a jerk and and egomaniac. Is there something wrong these days with having a truly heroic character that we don;t have to weigh down with a lot of personality problems?
The new Enterprise has been discussed thoroughly for the past year. Some love it, some hate it. I for one hate it incredibly. It has taken the distinctive look of Trek and made it look homogeneous with every other slick CGI spaceship in the last 10 years. There's no character to it, and it looks so much like a 50's Cadillac that I expect to see spock beam out of it in a pimp suit.
There is one glimmer of hope for me as a Trek fan. With the movie being so Spock-centric, it is entirely possible that the older 24th Century Spock has fabricated all of this within his mind because of some mental disorder (Bendii Syndrome, anyone?)
In all, Trek is not finally dead, but continues on life support for the time being. Only time and sequels will tell if this new direction will live up to the Star Trek name, but the mission was definitely not accomplished here.
