Film review: Star Trek

As I have mentioned here before, I am an unashamed Star Trek 'addict', not sufficiently obsessed to have ever gone to an ST 'convention' or to have dressed in costume, but I do like the show and have done so ever since I saw the original Star Trek in the late 1960s on the black-and-white television we had at home then (colour television transmissions were available to most of the UK only from about 1968 if I recall correctly and colour televisions were pretty expensive then).

Anyway, at the weekend I took myself off to see the latest movie (the 11th I think) in the Star Trek series. The official website for the new movie is here and a cast-list is here. The main official Star Trek website is here.

This movie is supposed to be a new take on the Star Trek saga, set sometime before the time-frame of the original television series when the characters from that series were in their younger years (and therefore played by completely different actors, as all the original actors are either dead or quite elderly now) and sometime after the most recent television series Star Trek: Enterpise. I had never seen most of the actors before, but there are a few familiar faces from other movies and television series and of course Leonard Nimoy, 'Spock' from the original series and a number of the earlier Star Trek movies, has a cameo role as a time-shifted 'Spock'.

Basically the new movie is a very slick production indeed and I think the transition into a new storyline is handled very well for a new generation of younger 'addicts' as well as being readily-acceptable to people of my generation who watched the original series as teenagers. CGI plays a big part in the new movie, a technology which simply didn't exist in the 1960s or even really when Star Trek: The Next Generation kicked-off an earlier revial of the franchise on television. As with a lot of newer movies, I found the whole experience very loud and noisy - cinema sound systems are so much more powerful than in earlier years, but an extremely enjoyable 'wheeze' and no doubt it is a platform upon which Paramount can build in future years if they think it will prove commercially viable - and based on the evidence of this latest movie I think that is pretty likely. More please!