Patrick Gage Kelley

David thought it would be a good idea to watch all of the Star Trek movies, I consented – watching through a set of films that are certainly part of the backbone of American-dork-sci-fi-culture seemed prudent, especially with the release of the new J.J. Abrams: “Hey Look We Are Building The Enterprise On Earth Because We Can Even Though It Is Clearly Non Canon,” sometime next year. As the movies go, I have firm memories of all the The Next Generation films, and then some brief memories of whales and caves, also knowing that I certainly had not seen all of the older movies. But while this seemed like such a good idea at the time, within about ten minutes of the first movie I was seriously questioning what I got myself into.

The first installment of Star Trek on the silver screen is not good. At all. It does all the things that are frequently complained about of bad science fiction movies of the last few years: it has a poor script, no character development, an unrealistic (OK, maybe they all are) story, and most severly puts all of its marbles into special effects. Unfortunately special effects, and definitely 70s era special effects look so childish forty years out that this is painful to watch. The music visualizations in Windows Media Player outshine these scenes which just drag, and drag, and drag you down into the heart of an early voyager probe which has transformed into a monster killing, Milkdrop cloaked, machine that just wants to hang with the creator.