STAR TREK REVIEW in breif

"My ex-wife got the planet in the divorce. I have nothing left except my bones."
-Dr Leonard "Bones" McCoy

Overall reaction: lots of fun, I liked the movie and was not disappointed. The trailers made me fear it was going to be Dawsons's Trek with teen heart throbs and angsty soap opera plots. Thankfully it wasn't. The good guys were stellar and the bad guys were mean, although a bit ambivalent (nobody seems to want to write a really bad bad guy any more), and the time travel (yet again) plot wasn't as cheesy or lame as I feared. Overall it was well done and I recommend the movie. Kirk's dad was a huge hero and the first scenes were amazing and very powerful.

The good: Spock was well done, Scotty was great and loads of fun, the story was engaging and interesting without being overly complicated, Captain Pike was a great leader worthy of the respect he was treated as in the original series, and the effects were well done. They kept a lot of the original tropes: a red shirt gets offed, the signature lines are used, McCoy and Spock clash in ideologies. The space combat scenes are faster and more impressive, and they tried to show once that space is silent despite all the sound effects.

The Indifferent: McCoy was too forced, he was trying too hard to sound like DeForrest Kelly. Kirk wasn't really Kirk, he was fun enough, but just a pretty boy without charisma or leadership. Uhura's character exchanged irrelevance from being a very small part for irrelevance from being a pretty face; nothing gained. Chekhov and Sulu were about as significant as in the original show.

The Bad: Holy lens flare, Batman! Excessive light effects, especially in the first half of the movie. The two main scenes of the bad guy attacking planets leaves you to believe that the only defenses an entire planet can possibly have are space-based and part of the Federation of Planets. I hate it when a sci fi story about a far flung, high-tech future makes the tech worse than it is in present day just for a plot device. Not enough Scotty, but he's my favorite character. Chekhov's one big scene made him look like a spaz, which is sort of insulting to the quality of actor that the original Chekhov (Walter Koenig) is. Chekov still has a bizarre speech impediment that prevents him from saying the final letter in his name... unless he's saying his name. Kirk's "id" status from the original three (Spock=super ego, McCoy= ego) is blown out of proportion, he's all impulse and rash action and little else.