So I’ve just come back from watching Star Trek with a couple of friends, one who is a Trekkie, and two who aren’t. There’s just so much I want to say about it, but firstly, something not about the movie, but about the camera work involved. This will be the only part of this post related to the title, by the way.

Aside: I know, I know, it’s a Sci-Fi movie, what camera work? It’s all green screen, ain’t it?

There was so much lens flare it actually took my attention off Spock’s ears and Uhura‘s ass. WHAT KIND OF IDIOT LET THIS COME OUT OF THE EDITING DEPARTMENT? Lens flare is not in fashion anymore, people. In fact, from the earliest days of cinema, photography directors have been trying to reduce lens flare as much as possible! The thing is, it got accepted as the norm by the average moviegoer, and so they kept it around, even artificially adding it as in many, many SF films, including this one (since, I presume, they weren’t able to film in space, where the most gratuitous lens flare abuse takes place).

Okay, now that that’s over with, onward to the review/summary (Beware of spoilers.):

Oh, the rest of this post is rated NC-17 for content, okay?

THE USS ENTERPRISE vs GIGANTIC JAPANESE TENTACLE MONSTER

Okay, the movie opens with some ominous music. We see the USS Kelvin (presumably named after Lord Kelvin, since it appears to be a research vessel, I think), it’s floating around, looking at what appears to be a lightning storm – in space. Yay. Then something appears out of the lightning storm, something big and sinister spiky and… are those tentacles? At first I couldn’t see it very well, because it was set against the backdrop of a star and there was a heck of a lot of lens flare ( I said I wouldn’t talk about it anymore, sorry). THEY ARE TENTACLES. THERE ARE TENTACLES IN MY STAR TREK. At this point I had my first sniggering fit.

So this sets the stage for a hilarious (to me) and high octane movie which is completely unfaithful to its roots.

So we see Kirk’s dad get killed by some time-travelling Romulans on a mining ship (just because they’re from the future, some crappy mining ship can beat the crap out of state of the art Federation vessels, right?). Kirk’s mom happens to be there and she has him while escaping from the bad guys (led by a badly made up Eric Bana, seriously, he looks like the frontman from a death metal band that has no confidence in their act, he has tattoos on his head for god’s sake). Cue some sentimental silliness.

Cut to the future (a bit). We get to see Kirk and Spock when they were little snot-nosed kiddies. Suddenly this reminds me of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, that stain on the wall most Star Wars fans would rather forget. Long story short, there’s another cut to the future, and Kirk and Spock (now played by Zachary Quinto Sylar from Heroes) (and Uhura (who’s pretty hot) and McCoy) wind up on the Enterprise.

Oh, the Enterprise looks really good, if I may say so. It looks… sexy. And there’s lots of blinky lights where the old one had plain off-white hull. Unfortunately I couldn’t see it too well because of all the lens flare. (Stop it, bad alien hand syndrome…)

Then they go off to Vulcan to try and stop the tentacle thing (from here on called Cthulhu) who’s apparently doing something to the planet with a giant laser tentacle drill. The other six ships that were sent get blown to hell and stuff, but  of course no one really cared about them anyway. Then Cthulhu Eric Bana tattooed biker guy demands the Captain (not Kirk yet) go onto Cthulhu for some unspecified reason, otherwise the Enterprise gets blown to hell too.

So the Captain leaves Chekov on the bridge (oh, didn’t I mention, we meet Chekov, whose accent is so strong it’s almost offensive). And he gets Kirk and Sulu (played by a decidedly not-Japanese Korean-American John Cho Harold from Harold and Kumar, he doesn’t even try to talk like George Takei) and some random redshirt (who obviously bites it later) to go and knock out the drill and leaves Spock in charge.

Lol harold and kumar

So Kirk and Harold and redshirt parachute out of a shuttle (in space) and go through the atmosphere and try and land on the ‘bit’ of the drill to blow it up. The redshirt’s got the blowy uppy things. So the redshirt pulls his chute too late, overshoots and gets caught in the laser, bye bye redshirt. Kirk lands okay, but immediately gets set upon by an understandably angry Romulan. In twisting said Romulan’s gun away, he shoots some holes in Harold’s chute. Harold almost overshoots but his chute gets caught on something or other.

So he pulls out his Amazing Folding Katana (y’know, since he’s supposedly Japanese and so obviously has training in such weapons) to cut himself free. And then he tries to off his martial arts skill against the second angry Romulan but gets his ass kicked until he pushes said opponent into the backwash of the laser. Then he stabs the first angry Romulan and Kirk and him shoot the thing until the laser stops. Then they get beamed up and Cthulhu destroys Vulcan by means of a black hole bomb and escapes… Yeah, I’m serious. Spock goes down and tries to save the Council of Elders (including his mom and dad) but his mom dies via falling a few hundred feet – cue much angst.

Then Spock has an angsty fit and it turns out him and Uhura have been doing this and that together. What the heck. Following this, Spock has Kirk dropped via escape pod on some unnamed icy planet (remember, Kirk stowed away) that reminded me of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. So Kirk, being Kirk, sets out for the Federation outpost 14 km away despite warnings from the escape pod computer to stay there and wait for rescue.

He encounters a wolf-bear-monster thing and gets chased by that for a bit. Then this thing comes out of the ice and kills the monster thing and starts chasing him too. The new monster reminded me a lot of Starship Troopers and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones in that it’s a giant bug thing. So anyway Kirk runs into this cave, but then… The monster uses its tentacles that come out of its mouth (which looks like an anal sphincter surrounded by teeth by the way) to capture him. Right. So if this scene wasn’t written by some demented Japanese porn director, I don’t know who – oh wait… didn’t George Lucas do something like that in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi? I believe so. Damn.

So then someone comes with a blazing torch and drives it away. It turns out to be Spock. No Sylar-Spock, Real Spock (Spock Prime as listed in the credits). Leonard Nimoy Spock. Oh my god. He says some lines he’s said before in preceding movies (Oh Kirk, I’ll always be your friend, yeah?) and other sentimental stuff. Then they mind meld (Vulcans are telepathic, y’know) and Spock tells him that basically, everything is his (Spock’s) fault. Hardy har har.

Apparently, in the future, some stuff happened, and an unspecified star was going to go supernova, and as a result, Romulus (home planet of the Romulans) would be destroyed. (I don’t know if it was Romulus’ sun, but if it’s not, a supernova would take quite a while to affect it.) Why is it going to go supernova? No clue. Hello, Trek writers, STARS DON’T GO FREAKIN SUPERNOVA FOR NO REASON. Especially when they’re regular yellow stars. Only very old, very large stars have a chance of going supernova.

So Spock promises to save them by – get this – using a black hole to absorb the supernova’s energy. WHAT THE HELL. Using ‘red matter’ (oh you think you’re so smart, don’t you Trek writers?), which is kept in a glass (well it sure looks like glass) canister, and is extracted via SYRINGE, apparently one droplet can create a black hole if it went outside the canister/cartridge. Right. Unfortunately he arrives too late and Romulus goes bye bye. He tries out the bomb anyway and he and Cthulhu get sucked into it, and that’s how they wound up back in our time. IT’S A BLACK HOLE GODDAMMIT!