Star Trek

It's been a long time since I've seen Star Trek. I was never a fan of the original series or films although I must admit to a passing interest in The Next Generation with Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard although that was now 15 years ago.

As far as JJ Abrams, I was an initial convert to Lost before a few episodes in season 3 where it looked obvious to anyone that they were making it up as they went along and all my interest in the show vaporised into thin air.

Several years later he produced the interesting but ultimately unsatisfying Cloverfield and therefore it was with passing interest that he was directing a new Star Wars movie, essentially his 2nd feature film after Mission Impossible 3.

As with any Abrams film there comes a reasonable amount of hype and none more so when you are rebooting an all but dead sci-fi franchise that still holds its weight in gold with a plethora of, lets face it, geeks.

Early signs were that the director was taking a much needed step back, re-examining the behemoth and putting together a film that would breathe new life into old characters by taking us back to their formative lives and producing a coming-of-age action adventure set in the realms of federation space.

The result is a film that will satisfy most of those not familiar or indeed not interested in the Star Trek universe and should satisfy a fair few of the hardcore fans I would imagine and importantly for the studio, make more than enough money and interest for at least another sequel.

The characters of the Enterprise are well-rounded and enough background story is given to each where it matters with the main focus centering on Kirk and Spock without cluttering up a fairly straightforward storyline and keeping the action flowing.

As usual in these kinds of films, there is a bad guy up to no good and someone must step up and fight back. Cue Nero, played adequately by Eric Bana, a Romulan (that's Humans with facial tattoos to you and me) who has time-travelled back in time to reek his revenge on a young Spock for what old Spock does to him in the future.

It is a film to sit back and enjoy the action of rather than consider time-travelling hypotheses that makes it a good sci-fi film and not something to over-analyse in terms of plot depth or asking too many questions regarding logistics.

I would give this movie 7.1 tractor beams out of 10.