Movie Review: Star Trek

I went to see Star Trek at the Imax last week and although it shouldn't be considered for any academy awards, it was a fun and entertaining movie. One thing that clearly stuck out to me about this film was the cast of fairly unknown young actors. I loved this decision by the director. The problem with doing a movie like this is there are already attitudes in the audience head of how the character should be betrayed. I think when you use actors that do not have a long history of characters for the audience to look back at, the audience can better identify them in the roll that they are playing. I thought the two leads Captain James C. Kirk, Played by Chris Pine and Spock, played by Zachary Quinto, were just wonderful. I felt like they were able to portray the characters there own way, and that may have been hard if they were more familiar actors. Not to mention they are both very young which opens up the option for a few more of these movies down the road. The next thing that really stood out for me was the special effects, with any movie that is shot almost entirely in space, the special effects must be believable. This I am guessing is not a very easy thing to do, but director JJ Abrahams came up big with the visuals. Spending the extra 4 dollars to see this at the IMAX was worth it. On these two points alone, an up and coming cast, and great visuals I give this movie a recommendation. However, it is far from a flawless film. The story is one I have seen done a ton of times and I absolutely hate it. A villain that is from the future comes back in time to alter that future. I absolutely cannot stand when a movie does this, the idea of time travel is a relatively cool concept, but understand you open yourself up to many plot holes when you do this. Another big problem i had was with action scenes. The actors although are very good, were somewhat unbelievable in there fight scenes. I am a big fan of the Michael Mann type action sequences that are well choreographed and believable. In this movie I was bored by all the fight sequences and they all felt pretty similar. The last flaw I had with this film were the villains. They were not scary, or interesting at all. I was surprised by that too because the lead villain, Nero, played by Eric Bana, is one of my favorite actors. I don't know what it was but I never once felt like there was an overriding theme of good vs evil, like you typically see in these types of movies. All the interesting conflicts were between the crew members of the USS Enterprise.

The parts of the story I really did enjoy were how the crew of the enterprise came to know each other, and how James Kirk became captain of the ship. Those conflicts were pretty interesting, however as the movie carried on, all I cared to think about were the cool special effects, and I lost interest in the story. However it was a good popcorn flick and worth checking out.