Saturday, 25 May 2013 11:52

Space: The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship, Enterprise. Its 5 year mission – to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before – well, that’s not entirely true!

Truth be told I am not a “trekkie”, however I will confess that in my younger years I watched “Star Trek: The Next Generation” religiously.  In my defense, I had a thing about Patrick Stewart’s voice.

I recall years ago being on a plane and one of the inflight films was the 2009 J.J. Abrams “Star Trek”. I avoided it during the whole flight and when I decided to watch it, there were only ten minutes left. I did however watch those ten minutes, and well, it failed to entice me to watch it in the future.

That said, the recent release of “Star Trek: Into Darkness” has piqued my curiosity. A story of revenge with a good old-fashioned villain, who would pass that up? However, I have rules, and the rules are: you can’t watch a sequel without watching the first part. So, this weekend I sat down and watched the 2009 “Star Trek”.

The film begins with the Starship Enterprise  under attack by a rogue Romulan ship. The Romulan captain Nero (played by Eric Bana) has a serious beef with Spock, however Nero has gone back in time , and Spock is only child and has presumably done nothing wrong.

Don’t worry, I found this quite confusing myself, but it does end-up making sense – just watch for another ten minutes and everything should fall into place – ish!

So, the Romulans take down the Enterprise and Captain Kirk’s wife and just born child escape from the ship. Little Kirk then grows up and decides to follow in his father’s footsteps and joins the Space academy. Kirk, is a bit of a smarty pants and no one likes him very much, especially Spock.  Starfleet receive a distress call from the Vulcan planet and off they go to the rescue, but Kirk realises that it is a trap and lo and behold, he’s right! Nero’s cockroach-looking ship turns up, declares war on Spock and Starfleet, (but mainly Spock). They then discover that Nero is from the future, and somewhere in the future Spock destroyed Nero’s planet.

OK, I’m not saying anymore, because either you’ve already seen this film and are probably thinking this isn’t the best description of it or you will do as I did and watch it before seeing the new one. And frankly, I can’t bring myself to describe the rest of the film, just watch it.

Considering “Star Trek” is directed by J.J. Abrams, it’s only natural to feel Lost in the film, but I think he did a rather good job. Obviously, no one will ever replace William Shatner as Captain Kirk or Nimoy as Spock, but Abrams shows us a younger version of these characters while maintaining the cheesy humour.

I was pleasantly surprised  how much I enjoyed “Star Trek” and I’m most certainly looking forward to “Into Darkness”. Now the question remains, Abrams vs Meyer (director of Wrath of Khan) will it be a case of: anything you Khan do, I Khan do better?!

written by Amy Thomas