Star Trek: The Quest for More Money
First, let's get the unpleasantries out of the way: it's dumb. Dumb as a bag of socks. Trek has never been a bastion of scientific accuracy or internal consistency, but come on. The scientific illiteracy on display in this movie makes the evolution-based technobabble in "Heroes" look like a graduate-level biology course. One exposition scene in particular kept pimp-slapping me with so much Stupid that I started bleeding into my brain. The BadGuys' backstory, while intriguing in theory, fails in execution because their "mining ship" is, inside and out, an unambiguous Mobile Fortress of Doom. (Seriously, what the hell are you "mining" that requires self-guided torpedoes to hit?) The chief Maguffin is best described as the Lava Lamp of the Apocalypse.

It's the sort of movie that lends itself immense snarkery. It's also a hell of a lot of fun.

It wants to be big fat popcorn spectacle, and it succeeds admirably; this is kinetic big-budget effects-driven action at its finest. It also wants to hand off the characters to a new batch of actors, and does so amazingly well. The worst you could say about any of the main characters is that a few of them were underdeveloped (no surprise, all things considered) and left to the tender mercies of a script that loved it some pratfalls. (I'm thinking primarily of Scotty, particularly when he runs afoul of the previously unseen Wonka section of engineering.) But at best ... damn. Karl Urban owned McCoy; from the moment he comes on screen you know exactly who this guy is, even if you've never seen a minute of Trek before in your life. And Zachary Quinto (Sylar from "Heroes") came through in a huge way as Spock, bringing his conflicted inner self to life in a way that even Leonard Nimoy rarely managed. Nimoy's Spock was an icon; Quinto's is a person. Congratulations, Mr. Quinto: any fears you had about being permanently type-cast as a superpowered psycho are officially laid to rest.

In short, this is a movie of extremes; the bad parts are simply gawd-awful, but what it does well it does very well. Whether or not you enjoy it will depend entirely on which elements stand out the most for you, for good or ill.

(Of course, there was one plot hole that I haven't seen discussed anywhere else yet ... but it's so goddamn nerdy I'm hiding it behind a cut tag.)


Okay, the opening scene? Because the Mining Ship of DOOOOOM is only just now forking the timeline, everything prior to that point is supposed to be canon with the original series. And yet, the captain of the USS Kelvin recognizes the crew of the hostile vessel as Romulan, even though the original-series episode "Balance of Terror" made it very clear that up until that point, nobody in the Federation even knew what Romulans looked like. Revealing them as Evil Vulcans was actually a major plot point. Nobody in the movie should have had any idea they were Romulan!

I warned you it was nerdy.