Star Trash rides again.

Well, I can't say I enjoyed the new Star Trek movie. It had all the prerequisite nods to the old crew, but I think they forgot that even in the 1960's that Star Trek was there to express ideas. They might be hackneyed, even corny or ridiculously politically correct, but there were ideas in there worth thinking about. There are no ideas in this one, no catch all bit of wisdom or homespun philosophy to tie it together. In four words, it's a comic book. On several levels it's not a very creative comic book. It's a ho-hum fan-fic of a comic book, not a first-class fan-fic. The current movie is all action, the silly kind of action of Star Treks past blown up to point it's hard to sit still for. The movie is cut so choppily that it looks like it's hiding a thin budget, though it must have cost a hundred times what the whole first year of the original series did. The score is not especially good, though it was appropriate that it ended with a nice version of the original theme.

Still it could have been a lot worse. Zachary Quinto is quite good as a young Spock. The other characters aren't what we'd expect for reasons explained in the film. Pike is too old. Uhura is too old, at least compared to Kirk, and she has a lot more in common with Nichelle Nichols than the old Uhura. Nichelle probably wished her whole life that her Uhura was more like the new one. The new Bones is a caricature of the old one, but the old one was pretty much a caricature. You'd expect the meeting of the crew to be all too convenient, and it was, but again it could have been far worse.

This Star Trek version is aimed at teens and die-hard fans. They will like it more than I did.