Review of Star Trek (2009) by Dan M — 18 Jan 2017

Star Trek has proven in the past to be a difficult franchise to write truly compelling movies for, which is telling from the relatively poor reception of the later movies. However this thankfully corrects all of the mistakes.

The real difficulty of rebooting Star Trek is connecting with what the audience finds familiar and the way this film blended the original series and continuity with this new alternate universe is simply genius.

This instead decides to focus on a younger Kirk and instead of him automatically being a relatively calm and experienced Starship Captain shows a more cocky and ultimately reckless Kirk. (A kirk which in the follow up movies would be built on to produce a pretty deep character progression) The blending of the old and new also gave the movie a chance to redesign the Enterprise and give a more larger and militaristic feel to it.

With Star Trek responding to the 23rd century ship decimating one of it's own the new enterprise feels correct for the big screen. These kind of more in-depth explanations don't really matter to the newer audience the movie will bring but do matter to older Trek fans or fans of the original series and follow ups as it gives the movie a good basis which it ends up developing well.

Overall this is a great watch for any Star Trek fan and any fan of action movies in general. Rating of 5/5 feels right for this because it did so many things right and rejuvenated a brand that by the early 2000's had begun to look very tired.