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Simply Spock On

With the new Star Trek movie being a Casino Royale-style re-launch of the
series, as die-hard ‘trekkies’, the Oxford Star Trek Society had our
reservations about the upcoming film. With the franchise having stalled in
recent years, many attempts have been made to inject new life into it (with
novels, computer games, and of course the last series), all with limited
degrees of success. The latter, Star Trek:Enterprise, was widely criticised for its
frequent and unnecessary breaking of the established canon, resulting in
its premature termination after four seasons. Star Trek is such a long
running show, that it is only natural for its keenest fans to expect to be
rewarded with a seamless continuity in return for their investment and
viewership. Thus, when JJ Abrams announced his intention to create a ‘new’
Star Trek canon (with changes justified by the alternate timeline generated
by the movie’s sinister villain, Nero), I expected to be disappointed.
Delightfully, however, I was wrong.
 
The movie was very easy to get into: the back story is built up in a smooth
manner for the new viewer, with a  pleasant number of unobtrusive nods to
the previous incarnations of Trek to suit long-time fans: it was nice to see
Uhura’s earpiece, for example, being almost unchanged amidst the gorgeous
new bridge set. Engineering was a mild disappointment, the familiar warp
core being replaced by a vast factory-like set of pipes and machinery, yet
the rest of the sets remained reasonably true to form, the ‘i-enterprise’
(as someone termed it) offering a more believable bridge between the gritty
technology of Star Trek: Enterprise and the later shows than the unique style of the
original series. The new USS Enterprise is a thing of beauty, and the
graphics in the movie really do her credit: long gone are the wooden, planar
ship movements of old, the effects screaming graceful action all the way
through. The music too, reminiscent of the classical pieces of the previous
movies, is excellently composed and sets the mood well.
 
One main critique would be the underdevelopment of some of the characters.
Scotty, McCoy and Chekov feel redundant, present only to complete the
original bridge crew set, and the villain of the piece is so little fleshed
out that his inevitable defeat feels almost irrelevant, and rather rushed,
at the end of movie. Perhaps, however, this is because of the core essence
of Trek, which has always been essentially about personal issues, rather
than the futuristic setting: Abrams has captured this well in the growing
trust between Kirk and Spock, while the frequent action scenes keep the plot
from getting too slow.
 
In the end, my only issue with this new show and its continuity was not that
it exists, but that such a wonderful film couldn’t fit exactly with the
canon I know and love: it seems only a shame the movie could not have been
written in such a way to make that possible. I look forward to there being

many sequels. This is a must-see, for old fans and for new.

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