Who here else besides me hated the new Star Trek movie? And tell your reasons.

This is a translated version of a german review:

Better you burned up

In the new <<Star Trek>> movie, everything philosophical was replaced by miserably staged action against the laws of nature.

“J.J. Abrams is a brainless, overbearing bastard, who should be served

his own testies for breakfast.” It is the first sentence coming out of

my mouth as I, still shocked, stand in front of the Plaza cinema in

Zürich and light my already 3rd cigarette to calm myself down. Behind

me lie the 2 worst hours that I ever spent in a cinema, with the press

screening of the new <<Star Trek>> movie. Even worse than the

unbearable boredom of Sofia Coppola’s exotic kitsch <<Lost in

Translation>>.

Science fiction is called that, because the genre, no matter how

phantastic the presented stories are, always has one foot in science.
The new <<Star Trek>> movie, the product of the director of the

conceptless endless imposition <<Lost>>, J.J. Abrams, would not even

satisfy the simplest scientific demands which it needs to be counted

as science fiction, if at the end of the flick all of the invariably

talent free actors would be beaten to death with physics textbooks.

Preferrably, while the dedication to the inventor of <<Star Trek>>

runs on the screen, the <<great bird of the galaxy>> Gene Roddenberry

and his recently deceased wife Majel, that are both rotating in their

graves with 1000 revs.

Physics for Kindergardeners

That Abrams, an avowing fan of the <<Star Wars>> franchise and its

futuristically painted kung-fu-new-wave-esoteric-kitsch-crap, expects

us to put up with the possiblity that a spaceship can travel back

through time by falling through a black hole, is still the most

harmless of all mistakes – Star Trek was always marked by similar

exaggerations. But that humans can jump out of a spaceship from orbit

with parachutes onto a planet without being vaporised during

atmospheric entry, is something that no one who had even just one

physics lesson can smile about. And that Spock can witness the

collapse of his home planet, which looks bigger than a full moon, from

another solar system with the naked eye, is something that even an

averagly endowed pre-school aged child has to crack up about.

It doesn’t really help, that Abrams sees his role as director, as

shown in <<Lost>>, in showing expressionless faces in emotionless

close-ups – with the difference that he can now enrich it with high

class computer generated special effects, while even those don’t stand

up in comparison with other science fiction films of the past years.

And of course the movie runs into the same hammer as the second <<Star

Wars>> trilogy, by using spcecial effects to create a visual world

that was visionary back then, but looks cheap today.

Ideological Revisionism?

The Trekkies, the global movement of infinitely infatuated followers

of the <<Star Trek>> series, could live – after all they had to put up

with ten inthe best case mediocre movies, and that barely scratched

their love. Abrams however goes further and destroys all pecularities

that made <<Star Trek>> different from other futuristic visions:
Of course we live in different times than 1966, when Martin Luther

King himself convinced the actor of Lt. Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, not

to leave the the series, as she was a role model for black children

and young women in the entire country – but does a black US-President

make the discussion about racial equality really unnecessary and and

antiquated? Is it in times of the economic crisis really so wrong to

depict a world that overcame money and capitalist greed?

This philosophical heritage has disappeared in Abram’s <<Star Trek>>

movie so much that I am tempted to accuse the director of revisionism:

he takes the visual elements of the series, reduces them until they

lose their meaning, throws them into a mixer and fuses all that into a

petty action movie. An abominable action movie with little humour and

even less suspense – the only element his prestige project <<Lost>>

ever really had.

Abrams can be lucky that Roddenberry did not have to witness how his

ideas were treated today. The convinced pacifist Roddenberry would

feed Abrams his collected works on DVD. Bon Appetit. And should I have

encouraged you to watch the movie, even if it is to see if the movie

really is that bad, don’t do it. This movie is so bad that it isn’t

even worth pirating it.