Star Trek

Perhaps the hardest of all franchises for a new director to find his identity within is Star Trek. There have been eleven films and five different television series (let's not forget video games, novels and even an animated show). This is what J. J. Abrams had to contend with, and it has to be said he's done a good job. He did what is known as a 'reboot', but in a particularly effective way that can't be copied in any other genre (any fictional universe that can make use of time travel has the greatest deus ex machina available). As soon as you begin to think 'this didn't happen in the original show', you realise that's exactly the point of the film.We see Kirk and his crew grow up, meet each other, and have their first adventures on the Enterprise in an entirely new context. Indeed, this film in a way cancels out all the films that have gone before it. There are a few cheap moments that rely on our preconceptions about the characters, but this was probably inevitable. Overall, though, I in fact felt that the main plot-line to stop the Romulan ship at many points overshadowed the more interesting stories of who Kirk and his crew were etc. There were also a fair few plot holes and very convenient coincidences, some typical of actions films, but some just lazy writing. I have to say a word about the re-enactments the actors attempted. There seemed to be two different approaches: some tried to copy the  original actor, others gave a new reading of the character. In the first group, I felt Scotty and Chekov were quite awful, but Bones and Spock very good. Kirk and Uhura fall into the second group, and I think they both succeeded. Chris Pine is Kirk, but without imitating William Shatner, which is a very hard thing to pull off. It is though, as I said at the beginning, a very tough thing for all involved to be a part of, and they actually managed produced an enjoyable film which without a doubt can be described as a 'roller-coaster'. I wonder what original Star Trek fans made of it.