I saw it on IMax, and it was seriously good. This is coming from a guy who's never seen a Star Trek episode or wanted to. I saw it purely because it had J.J. Abrams directing, and looked seriously badass.
It didn't disappoint. I'm not up on Trek's mythology, but if the Trekkies dare to complain about the film, I'd very much like to shove the wide end (that part that looks like a UFO) of their scale USS Enterprise model right up their asses. They got gold here, and they have no right to complain about anything.
Abrams proves himself to be blooming into a Sci-fi genre master. Sure bits of the "time travel" malarkey brought flashes of the latest season of Lost to the forefront of my mind as I watched on, but the writing was excellent, funny and it felt like such a full experience. I hadn't known how badly I was starving for a truly great and enjoyable movie until I saw this last night, because amidst the whole of the past several months all I'd glimpsed was mediocrity and above average popcorn poppers.
It was like living on a diet of bagel pizzas only to realize once more how satisfying a hearty meal can be. Not that Oscar films aren't excellent, they're just...well, boring. I mean, I liked Gran Torino, but I can't say I came home thinking fondly of the experience for a while after. Trek feels very much like the pleasant confirmation (I don't say "surprise", because the general predictions were that the film would rock) that Iron Man was last year. Oh, and once more a film worked on by ILM, those seamless geniuses who have restored my faith in modern day CGI after it was tattered by the utterly *beep* effects in Wolverine. Once more, Fox comes to wreck the day! Seriously, some company buy Fox out and be done with this *beep* they've lost their right to make films in my eyes.
Back to Trek-land now, I loved the casting. Now, I don't know my Shatners' and Nemoys' from a deep laser cut hole to the center of Vulcan, but when you've got Simon Pegg as Montgomery "beam-me-up" Scotty and freakin' Harold of Harold and Kumar as a segmented-sword wielding badass with a penchant for kicking Romulan grunts onto active laser heat-exhaust vents and then shoving another off the edge of a giant drill-thing a la "300" style (THIS! IS! VULCAN!!!) then already you've got something that will draw people to your film.
The thing I love about this film is how it was able to humanize these characters and give color to a series that seemed unnaturally sterile and boring. This film proves you can totally alter the original story in making a new film and still make something everyone will love. Fox aimed to do this with Dragonball, but their combined incompetence coupled with their apathetic attitude toward film-making of late (come on, even towards a successful film series like X-MEN for the love of God!) drove it into the ground. But anyway, a good detail about the film I loved are the Earth segments. It's obvious the world we know has changed wildly, yet we still have agricultural Iowa, and the Golden Gate Bridge stands proudly, unchanged from the way it looks, old roadsters still travel the highways on tires instead of hovering over things. It grounded it all into something that felt like a much more believable world.
) will find fault with the movie (and, more so, the characters) not being a carbon-copy of the original series, but the writers, in my opinion, did a decent job of covering for any inconsistencies and/or ret-cons.
