Star Trek (2009)
So moving onto my rewatch of the new Star Trek films. These I have only seen once and while I remember being excited when it came out, it also marked when I began to feel like Star Trek went in a direction I didn’t care much for. Strange New Worlds has somewhat remedied that, but Abrams set the direction for a new flashy (god damn those lens-flares are annoying) and more action oriented style for Star Trek. Almost gone is the utopian outlook for a future and practically every week Earth is threatened with an universe shattering enemy. I miss the somewhat lower stakes plot. And while Kirk also frequently went into fistfights in the original series, the amount of hand to hand combat that has overfilled Star Trek since this movie is ridiculous in my opinion.
This movie has plenty of annoying problems. Like Nero isn’t a very interesting villain, he is just comically evil with planet destroying weapons. Every character from the original crew has to be introduced in some hokey way, some work better than others. The plot also gets overly convoluted since it insits on trying to create an explanation for the this timeline with new actors for old roles. And did I mention the lens-flares?
The saving grace for all this and the reason I can barely give it three stars, mostly comes down to the actors and their modern respectful interpretation of the original cast. I think all of them manages to pull it off pretty well, with especially high marks for Karl Urban as McCoy.
Rating: 3.5