Star Trek

I watched JJ Abrams’ reboot (swiftly becoming this decade’s most annoying word) of Star Trek again recently. By gum it’s good. Some things I love about it:

• Jim Kirk’s Dad, in the opening scenes, is heroic to the point where I caught a light sniffle and got something in my eye, but I soon manned up and got over it.
• Apparently The Beastie Boys’ Sabotage is still required listening in the 23rd century. This is excellent news.
• The whole idea of rebooting (sorry) the series by changing the course of time, and thereby creating an alternate reality for the Enterprise crew, is so genius you could give it a bristly moustache and a Doc Brown hairdo and call it Albert.
• I'm listening to the soundtrack as I type these words, and it's making the whole experience terribly multi-sensual. I think I can even smell Scotty's tribble.
• In a time where every rebooted franchise has to be so dark you need night-vision goggles to see it, Star Trek is bright, colourful and silly, and returns to the cinema a sense of fun not seen since Spielberg’s 1980s run of chucklesome blockbusters (which I hereby trademark as 'Chucklebusters'). In fact I daresay Abrams is well on the way to becoming this generation’s Spielberg. Yes, I actually said that. You read it here first.* 

I’ve never been a Treknologist; in fact I've never been even slightly Treknotronic. I might even go as far as to describe myself as a Treknophobe. But this film made me go back and watch all the old movies again. They’re actually quite good, except for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which is very very awful, and the 'Next Generation' films have a dangerously high Fidgit Factor. Furthermore, I don’t know any hardcore Trekoraks, so I don’t know if they found the new movie to be a joyous celebration of sci-fi wonderment or a poo on William Shatner’s grave. Not that he’s dead, obviously. But I think The Onion said it best, and not for the first time:

 *Unless you read it on my Twitter page a few days ago

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