Karen R Savage

So I went to see Star Trek this weekend and I must say I enjoyed it. I liked the choices they made with the various actors; Karl Urban seemed to be channeling DeForest Kelley’s McCoy, which was fine for McCoy (he’s such a specific character), but I was glad the other actors did their own takes on the characters. I liked Scotty a lot (“Are you from the future? That’s brilliant! Do they still have sandwiches there?”); I found his accent to be more authentic than James Doohan’s – he tended to do a more stereotypical accent. I was a little weirded out by the Spock/Uhura thing, and I didn’t even realize that Winona Ryder played Spock’s mother till I got home and looked it up. Chekov was adorable, and seemed much more competent than in the original series.

As far as the plot went, I’ll bypass the fact that they used time travel as the main plot device (they comment in the film that this is cheating). I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept that Spock and Nero ended up 154 years in the past, but what really bothered me is that the way they got to the past was by passing through a black hole. I mean, isn’t the point of a black hole that the gravitational forces in them are so great that nothing can escape?? I mean, putting aside the passing through it, even if they could, shouldn’t the ships have broken up completely, or been crushed to teeny, tiny, dense lumps?

For the rest, there were quite a few things that made me giggle, a fair few in-jokes for the fans of the series and movies, and enough explosions to satisfy the most rabid mythbusters fan.