Entertaining, but..

Star Trek was an awesome movie experience. It had phasers and transporters and cores and “I’m a doctor not a physicist” and Simon Pegg and pissed off aliens destroying everything in sight.

JJ Abrams really knows how to entertain the audience. I’ve been a total lost sucker since the start, and I loved Cloverfield. It certainly shows that he tried so very hard to be true to the original Star Trek movies in this one. The lingo makes sense, the characters are recognizable (if a bit flat, but I guess they always were) and modern.

But my god, the plot.. It’s possibly the weakest plot I’ve ever suffered through. I don’t mind the fancy action sequences or the unlikely weapons at all, that’s the “fiction” part of “science fiction”, but what I DO mind are the horrible and frequent total coincidences in the movie.
It’s never explained why certain insanely improbable things happen, and sometimes it’s even suggested to REALLY be coincidence. I assume these things are in there because it makes for a more entertaining movie, which kind of makes sense, but when writing science fiction, you really have to be able to answer the eternal question:

Why?

Deus ex machina is usually not entertaining, and it’s even less so when it’s just used to set up the basic plot in a movie several freaking times.

Still, other than the plot, the movie kicked ass. Overall score 3/5.

posted 15 years ago