This weekend I watched the latest Star Trek movie starring Chris Pine as James T. Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock. This movie is a prequel to the original television series and was released in May 2009, so I'll try to avoid spoilers.
The movie opens with an attack that didn't make sense to me at first, not until I realized it was a kind of prologue. The movie really gets started when Jim Kirk gets into a fight with some Star Fleet personnel in a bar. Captain Pike stops it and convinces Kirk to join Star Fleet. He does--of course--and we follow his adventures as he meets Uhura, Bones McCoy, Spock, Chekov, Sulu, and Scotty. There's a bad Romulan out there fighting Star Fleet and Kirk finds himself thrust into command through a set of circumstances no one could have foreseen.
I loved this movie! I honestly didn't expect to since I've found most of the Star Trek stuff kind of boring since the film where they rescued the whales. Was that Star Trek #4? But this was totally awesome!
It started off with a bang and never lost momentum anywhere. I found the movie fresh and fun and the portrayals fit, something that surprised me because the characters of Kirk and Spock are so set by Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner. The movie was high energy and fun and it seemed as if the cast was having fun, too.
I seriously only have one nit with the entire movie and that's the time travel aspect that changes everything. I think this was a cheat because the writers didn't want to deal with the parameters they'd been given in the series, but by sending a Romulan back in time who changes things before Kirk is born, now they can do whatever they want with Star Trek without worrying about breaking canon with the series. This does bug me, there's no reason why this film couldn't have honored the pasts/setups done in the series, but whatever.
Everything else about the movie was awesome and I'm going to buy a copy so I can watch it again and again when the mood strikes.
My rating: 5 Stars (And two enthusiastic thumbs up!)
