Spoiler alert: its hard of anything that happens in Star Trek that isn’t obvious in the first 10 minutes of the movie (heck, if you watched the trailers closely there’s no surprises), but if you haven’t seen it and are particularly dull, be forewarned — this might ruin the plot not only to Star Trek but also to every formulaic summer action/sci-fi film.

So JJ Abrams’ take on Star Trek is an enormous hit and garnered relatively good reviews. It is not a bad summer movie in the same way that, say, Armageddon was not a bad summer movie. If all you want from a movie is to watch some cool effects and an occasional explosion or fifty, both of those films will deliver, and without any fealty to any internal consistency on the science. Fine, I could live with that. But what Star Trek combines is a complete lack of a meaningful story in conjunction with the  worst aspects of the Star Trek franchise.

For all of the media commentary about how Star Trek films (of all things) were too cerebral and Abrams’ movie represented a break with that, Abrams draws on the most overused hackneyed plot device that pretty much ruined Trek in general — time travel. And here we’re talking about time travel that supposedly results in a supposedly new timeline so Abrams can presumably discard the long history of Trek. Abrams should have called his movie Star Trek: Crisis on Infinite Worlds — given his history on Lost and Alias, the next movie will almost certainly feature retcons galore and soon the continuity will be orders of magnitude more complex than it already was.

Oddly, though, Abrams proceeds to simply fill in the details of his new film by borrowing liberally from the previous films and series, so it is difficult to understand what the point of the time travel reboot plot was in the first place (in fact there are brief but interesting homages to Star Trek II and Star Trek IV — both of which were much better films than this). Perhaps Abrams thinks time travel is the alpha and omega of science fiction; one can almost imagine script meetings these days…oh its a sci-fi film, don’t forget the time travel subplot!

Once you get past the pretty explosions and the incoherent time travel plot, there’s not much else to Star Trek. There’s very little of the humor or the character interactions that made Star Trek sometimes interesting. The characters wear familiar outfits, but they’re cookie cutter depictions that could be applied to any generic space opera film. Whereas Gene Roddenbery once called Star Trek “Wagon train to the stars”, Abrams model is more like “Friday Night Lights with spaceships and phasers.”

Leonard Nimoy’s in there, but his presence just reminds the audience of just how poor the new replacements are — ultimately they’re little more than placeholders for the original actors and the entire movie is a pale shadow of what it could have been.

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1. Star Trek Fan Films
2. Star Trek Must Die
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4. Star Trek Cufflinks for the Well Dressed Nerd
5. Star Trek: Nemesis — Beginning, Middle and End of Final Journey