Star Trek

We begin with a battle. Awesome. George Kirk (Chris Hemsworth), is forced to take command of the ship after the captain is killed. They are clearly outgunned by their enemy but Kirk saves the day by crashing the ship into the Romulan's ship, killing himself but allowing most of the escape pods to get away. One of said escape pods was carrying his very pregnant wife Winona (Jennifer Morrison).

Years later James Kirk (Chris Pine) is all grown up and a rebel without a cause until he gets into a fight with cadets from the Starfleet Academy and Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) decides he is Starfleet material and convinces him to join.  On the flight over he meets up with McCoy a.k.a. Bones (Karl Urban) and they become fast friends.  Kirk unfortunately becomes enemies with Spock (Zachary Quinto) in his third year at the academy when Kirk cheats on a program that Spock designed. Before Spock can have him drummed out there is a distress call from Vulcan and since most of the fleet is off somewhere they call up the cadets. We jump on the USS Enterprise the new flag ship for the Federation, captained by Pike.

On board are Spock, and Bones but also Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Sulu (John Cho) and Chekov (Anton Yelchin). Kirk shouldn't be there but is snuck onboard by Bones in a very funny scene.  He tries to convince Pike not to go because of a lightning storm type phenomena that was present before his father's ship was destroyed.  Pike doesn't listen but they arrive after the battle and all the other ships are destroyed. Pike goes over to the Romulan ship to talk with Captain Nero (Eric Bana) and for some reason leaves Kirk as acting first officer with orders to stop the drill that the Romulans are using on Vulcan.  

Well the drill is stopped but Vulcan is still destroyed and Pike is captured. Spock kicks Kirk off the ship and goes to meet up with the main fleet. Kirk meets up with Spock from the future (Leonard Nimoy) who explains that Nero is also from the future. There was a black hole that was about to destroy Romulus and Spock was trying to stop it but failed and his ship along with Nero's ship got sucked in and transported back in time. Nero has now gone psycho and, having destroyed Vulcan, will now be moving on to Earth.

The two of them meet up with Montgomery Scott (Simon Pegg) who has been posted on a remote station for his insane ideas, but he helps them transport to the Enterprise where Kirk takes command of the ship, heads back to Earth, somehow makes it in time to stop Nero, rescue Pike and save the day. Most importantly, he becomes friends with Spock.

I went into this movie with such high expectations because several of my friends enjoyed it and gave me such great feedback from it. Surprisingly I was disappointed after watching this movie. I have to admit that I was not a big fan of Star Trek TOS, but I was a fan of the other series; this one was my parents' thing not mine. Still it was an enjoyable movie,  just not to the extent that I was led to believe.

The are very odd plot holes during the film. The one that makes the least amount of sense is that fact that Pike left Kirk in charge of the ship. He was about to be kicked out of the Academy for being a cheater and you leave him in charge of the entire ship? Also I never understood how someone can go from being a normal person (let's say a miner or a ship full of miners in this case) to a homicidal maniac bent on revenge? Even more confusing to me is how Nero and his entire ship can justify genocide simply because Spock failed.  He did try to help, it wasn't as if he personally hunted down Nero's wife. He tried to help and failed.

Also, I was watching this documentary on black holes and that is not at all how they are. I have no idea about the time travel or lightning storm or anything, but according to the scientists, black holes are sucking in so much material into such a small spot that most of the material is spewed back out into space. I believe his exact words were something along the lines of  'it's like trying to fill a dog bowl with a fire hose'. 

The other main problem I had was with the acting. It wasn't the actors themselves, although I'm not really convinced most of them were the correct choices for the roles they were cast as. However I have to give the casting crew props for finding a father and son that looked so much alike I thought it was the same actor playing both roles.  I have an issue with the way the characters were portrayed. It was almost as if they took one aspect of the original character and played it to death so that all of the characters in this movie felt like one dimensional cartoons of themselves. OMG Chekov has an accent! Sulu fights with a sword! Uhura.....communicates? The only one I truly enjoyed was Scotty. I freaking love Pegg. Don't get me wrong the acting was excellent, the characters...not so much.

Anyway, as I said I wasn't a big fan of the Original Series, so I might be completely off! Who knows!

Grade: 6/10