Things:

  1. I’d been warned this movie was terrible, which was handy because with that warning in mind, I was pleasantly surprised. It wasn’t good in really any sense, but it wasn’t terrible either. It was just pretty bad. But I think no worse than Insurrection? So, y’know.

  2. But: Star Trek! I am way in the tank for Star Trek at this point. When Admiral Janeway had a little cameo, I was all excited (while also wondering what the hell was holding back Picard’s career, because honestly, he should have been admiral FOREVER ago). So there’s your calibration for how deeply you have to be sucked in to find this movie merely regular bad instead of unwatchable.

  3. That said, it was a little off as Star Trek, from the title screen (with a BACKWARDS R — what the fuck is this Toys R Us?) throughout various scenes. The actors know those characters, and so they were mostly able to save most of the scenes, but the script did no favors to anyone.

  4. An interesting thing to me is not about this movie as such, but about the movies in general. I was thinking that one of the “off” things was how actiony this was, and was like “See, the good movies like Star Trek VI weren’t all actiony!” But of course, that movie had tons of actiony scenes in it. They’re just not the scenes I remember, is all — they’re the forgettable filler in between the real Star Trek parts.

So while I’d been thinking that Abrams turned Star Trek all action-movie-esque, I think upon reflection it always was — or at least, had been for a long time; I guess Star Trek 1 isn’t particularly action-y — and he just made it a good action movie.

  1. Which makes me double down on my belief that Star Trek should quit being movies and should go back to being a TV show. Leave the movies to Star Wars, which is built around big actiony spectacle; Star Trek should be about little moments of discovery and diplomacy and humanity and all that.