Star Trek Zero — a Big Zero for Star Trek
By docapple | May 15, 2009
SPOILER ALERT: I am going to reveal stuff about this movie as I feel it is necessary in order to properly describe just what an awful movie this really is.
All I can say is that the critics must have seen a different movie than the one that we saw tonight. This movie has effectively rewritten all of the history of the first series and the second series in so many ways that it is weird even trying to list them. First, WHAT is this entire bullshit love affair with Uhura!!!! Second, no planet Vulcan!!!! Third, there is the pesky problem of two Spocks, including one who knows the next 100 years history thus changing the time line completely. 
Then, what happened to the Enterprise that we knew on the inside? Now, Spock has no mother? Who was that woman on the series? His father now confesses to loving her after saying that marrying her seemed logical at the time. And his father also confesses to being proud of him. This kind of throws the wrench into those episodes from ST and STNG where just the opposite happens. There are other things that were annoying such as a comic relief and just plain goofy Scotty, the slapstick schtick misadventures of Kirk along the way—tongue, hands swelling, etc. Okay, and Chekov.
I now understand that they are “rebooting” the series (complete with some real booty for Spock), but apparently they are even throwing out all of the old detail such as the appropriate ages of the characters. Kirk did not originally achieve the status of captain of the starship Enterprise until around the age of 30. Now he is about 21 and instead of being a seasoned and mature officer, he is a punk. Chekov would have been too young to be involved in this movie according to anything that we used to think that we knew about the series. Apart from my age issue, he was originally a security officer not a science genius.
Then there is the loopy and against regulations command decision of Mr. Spock to send his uncooperative, belligerent crewman, Kirk, to an ice planet even though logic would dictate that he needed to listen to Kirk after he had previously diagnosed and anticipated the Romulan trap at Vulcan. Apart from the regulations factor, Kirk 
might well have died due to the extreme cold and the hideous indigent monsters there. Any hope of being rescued in his pod was negated by the fact that there was no one there except the marooned engineer Scott. Apparently, this is not just a reboot for the series but also for the morality of the Federation. Cue the Ice Planet Hoth leftovers from Star Wars. This is where Kirk will 
conveniently find not only the aged Spock who can finally tell us what the heck is going on after 90 minutes, but he can also find an annoyingly Animaniacs like Mr. Scott (see the episode Star Truck—simply brilliant) who wants to start eating so he can 
begin to put on that girth that he sadly became infamous for in his later years. Scott, a formerly brilliant and serious engineer, is now reduced to a giggling, silly character in need of help from the aged Spock to even invent the thing that apparently made him famous according to Trekkie or Trekkor lore. I have always thought of myself as a big and reasonably knowledgeable fan of the original series and of the Next Generation send up, but I have never thought of myself as a serious trivia expert on it. I guess that I won’t have to be either now that they are starting a brand new history. Wouldn’t that be kind of nice to be able to do that with your own life sometimes? Naw!!
This movie suffers from Bourne-syndrome and Bond-syndrome in that it cannibalizes just enough from the original source material and then goes off, and off until the new film has very little to do with the original source material.
It rewrote the entire foundation for the series and killed off characters who should have (or never had) been killed. Spock is now in love with Uhura? Real human, kissy face love too!! Spock’s father tells him to make his home with and according to his human blood? A Romulan engineer on an engineering ship who suddenly knows how to become a time traveling, weapons master? Good grief, his engineering ship was the size of V’ger. Oh, and if this guy is so broken up about the loss of his home world, why doesn’t he warn them now that he has gone back in history 100 years and has all kinds of real nifty new knowledge for them?
Is this, then, an entirely new Star Trek series that does not know any of what happened to the one that we know? Except that this one also has a Spock who is 129 years old, at least, and knows all about the other timeline. I guess.
Were you teary eyed during this movie? Was it because of the pain of watching? It was for me. My Significant Other has what she calls the Cynthia Butt Test. In other words, she knows a movie isn’t cutting it if she can feel her butt before the end of the film. This movie didn’t make the Cynthia Butt Test for one hour.
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