Foreign Perspectives

As a standalone movie it certainly has all the aspects that you would expect to see in a big budget Star Trek film ie the grand CGI effects, the fast paced action, unexpected plot twists and so on. On all those fronts it succeeded very well with spectacular CGI sequences right from the impressive start through to the space battles towards the end, a number of Spock-centred surprises along the way and a sustained fast pace that produced a sense of urgency that made it feel like a normal length of episode.

However, the bigger question is: is it actually a genuine Star Trek movie or merely one that had that label tagged on to improve the box office success? Yes, there are characters that have the same name as those from the original series and, yes, you’d expect their younger selves to be less developed than they were in the original series and, of course, they’d be different in some ways due to changes in the timeline but, taking all those into account, was this a Star Trek crew? I think so but I’m not convinced that it was the crew of the Enterprise: it just didn’t feel that if you ran time forward a few years that you’d have a group of people working together in the same kind of way as you should have done. To my mind this film was created because the studio felt they needed another Star Trek movie but didn’t want to pay the big bucks to make one using an entire set of existing actors from any of the Star Trek series so instead they tried to create essentially another Enterprise style prequel but one that little bit closer in time to the original series.

Being really picky, as some have been, you might wonder where the Temporal Integrity Commission were when a rather major league change to the timeline was being made. Arguably this could be explained by the temporal change having taken place before the formation of the TIC itself thus they are never created (much like in Asimov’s End of Eternity). However, in other contact with the TIC this seems not really to be possible in that it appears to take a while before changes ripple up the timeline and, of course, there’s the issue of various people coming back in time in Enterprise (which, of course, is set before the events in this movie) to correct the timeline…

You could also wonder how come the Enterprise here which has just been built seems more modern than the older Enterprise as depicted in the original series? However, that’s not really as big a deal as you might at first think. Even in real-life places can change their look substantially over a few years and who are we to say what which Enterprise style would really be more modern? We’ve seen ourselves that really modern meant that home electronic devices must be silver (10? years back), that they must be black (5? years ago) and that they must be silver again: which look is really more modern?

What this movie does allow is for the studio to kick off another series based in the Star Trek universe but because it’s an alternate reality version of it, they won’t have all the baggage that’s built up over the years from the Star Trek franchise which, let’s face it, has begun to complicate life no end for the writers. After all, who but the most dedicated fan could remember everything that’s gone before and write a new series of episodes that’s consistent with that? What they’ve effectively done is the equivalent of firing Voyager off to the delta quadrant only more so in that there can’t be any contact with the regular Star Fleet headquarters which would, of course, require consistency with 40 years of episodes.

Worth watching, but don’t get too hung up on the inconsistencies.

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