Star Trek

When talking about the new Star Trek reboot, it is important to make a distinction between the words ‘reboot’ and ‘remake’.

‘Remake’ is a word that Hollywood has been particularly trigger happy with in the past decade. The noughties have seen many remakes, particularly of horror films from the seventies. Remakes show a tendency to want to pillage the past, to take a well-known name like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and slap a fresh bunch of attractive faces onto it, add some computer generated effects and slow motion, and make a whole bunch of cynical, dirty, money.

Apart from a few exceptions, if a movie is a remake it is undeniably awful. Case and point: Steve Martin pirouetting on the grave of comic genius Peter Sellers in 2006’s The Pink Panther. The best advice anyone can get about a remake is to leave it alone. Don’t spend your money seeing it. Just ignore it. Hopefully it will go away.

A ‘reboot’ on the other hand is often an unexpected and glorious occasion. A reboot takes a long running series and says “screw it, let’s start from the beginning.” While this process can be stressful for hardcore fans of the show, what often results is a solid and vastly improved piece of entertainment. The most successful example of a series reboot in recent years is Chris Nolan’s peerless re-jigging of Batman with the formidable one-two punch of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. A duo of films that will surely go down in history as the greatest series reboot of all time. The reboot of the old, camp seventies sci-fi franchise has also been done successfully before with Ron Moore’s brilliant Battlestar Galactica. Which took everything that was bad about the original series and threw it away, adding in political intrigue, emotionally complex characters and biting social commentary to sweeten the deal.

It was with great hope that I went into the cinema to see J.J. Abrams new take on Star Trek. To put it simply: my expectations were met and surpassed. With its fast pace, charming cast and gorgeous special effects Star Trek is a fantastic and cinematic piece of entertainment.

Abrams’ direction takes the franchise into the new millennium by fashioning a plotline that completely removes any need for the story to maintain the mythos of the original series. This is done while including enough references to the original that it doesn’t completely alienate the existing fans. That being said, the hardcore Trekkies are still finding plenty to complain about. On every Trek forum on the internet you will find the hate fueled bile-sprayings of jilted fans who have made it their duty to diligently list everything that is wrong with the film, and everything that they would do to Mr. Abrams if they ever saw him on the street.

Ignore these people. They won’t ever go away, but pretend they aren’t there.

Star Trek is awesome, and I can’t wait for the inevitable sequel.

All hail the series reboot!

My Score : four buckets of fanboy bile out of five.