(or Star Trek: The Next Next Generation)The new Star Trek movie will please hardcore fans—and peeve hardcore fans. It will (and won’t) make new Trek converts. It lives up to the hype and it doesn’t. It does respect the established Trek lore and disses it. It is simple and quite complicated. And if I go into too many details, it will spoil the experience for you.But I will give you one “spoiler” that was mentioned in just about everything I read about the movie that is absolutely not true. Ready?Nero, the renegade Romulan, does not come back in time to kill James T. Kirk.What else can I tell you about the movie?It references everything from the original series and movies to Austin Powers, Galaxy Quest, Eddie Murphy and… In Living Color. Trust me on this.The cast is excellent; you could envision Chris Pine morphing into William Shatner; Zachary Quinto looks like a young Leonard Nimoy and Zoë Saldana is given more to do in two hours than Nichelle Nichols got to do in two seasons of the show. But for me the standout is Karl Urban’s Dr. McCoy. Somewhere, DeForest Kelley is smiling.Gone is the super sleek just painted look we’re used to. This Starfleet has a lived-in look, with chipped paint, dents and scratches and the technobabble is kept to a minimum. This is not to say things are perfect: the Enterprise is scaled-up to give the idea that it is really big, but sometimes it looks more like a warehouse than starship. There are a couple of glaring potholes in the story and the action, while almost nonstop (and impressive), sometimes seems to be there just for the sake of having an action sequence.But make no mistake about it: the ads are true. Forget all you know about the old Star Trek because it exists no more.But this new one shows promise. Hopefully, it will live long and prosper.
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