Star Trek: The Demise

It's got the logo, and the name, and the character's names, and a pale reflection of some old Star Trek one-liners. But this movie is not in the lore. Let me enumerate the ways it's not Star Trek and a few things which were just annoying.

The look.
One of the hallmarks of Star Trek is futuristic design. You can place a Star Trek by period in time and by humaniod race based on how the set looks. The Enterprise series (the Captain Archer show) carefully looks pre-The Original Show (TOS). Voyager was the most futuristic. The Voyager crew ran into a group of Klingons whose culture came from the Klingon past - and their Klingon ship looked it. This movie is set on the bridge of the original Enterprise ship from TOS. We all know exactly what that looks like. It certainly doesn't look anything like the gleaming rounded white with translucent panels appearance of the ship shown in this movie. That may have been another ship - although even then, it wouldn't have fit with the correct time period of Star Treks. White on the bridge didn't appear until the second movie and then on a research vessel. In order to put me back on TOS, they would have had to return to the sharp edges and clean look of the red, black, and silver on the original Enterprise bridge. Update it a bit if you want to but those are the colors and there had better be some unlabeled blinking colored lights, too.

The various humanoid races of Star Trek lore were also designed carefully enough to be identifiable. Although the makeup for Klingons changed quite a bit over the years, you can always spot a Klingon in a crowd. When the baddies in this film were identified as Romulans, I was completely confused. The guys we saw looked and acted nothing like Romulans nor did their ship appear to have any Romulan symbols or design. Even granted this was a 'rogue' Romulan, he should have shown something of Romulan culture. This is no devious, scheming, double-crossing Romulan. Jolan tru?

Where's the fanfare? I can hum you the fanfare melody from every Star Trek series and movie and the Klingon battle music as well. This movie doesn't even have an identifiable drum beat and offers up a weak rendition of TOS music at the closing credits. The teens have great word for describing this movie's soundtrack - lame.

The plot.
Oy, where to start. Kirk and 2 crew spacedive to the drill platform. The guy carrying the crucial explosives needed for the mission suddenly gets thrill happy and doesn't open his parachute on time. Could the writers add some motivation here? Maybe his chute malfuntioned or he was overcome by hypoxia and didn't know what he was doing, but no. With the destruction of a planet hanging on the outcome, he's going to abandon his training for a thrill. Really? Then, during the ensuing fight scene, fire randomly shoots upward in order to incinerate a bad guy and never shoots upward again. And gee, it's a good thing Sulu's opponent also brought a sword to a phaser fight. Miraculously, a couple guys with guns can blow up the platform just as effectively as the crucial explosives which were destroyed. That part I can buy - there are a lot of technological miracles in the ST universe.

The Federation's Star Fleet should win an award for cluelessness. A huge Romulan drilling rig from the future destroys their flagship with George Kirk at the helm. After the attack, Star Fleet decides to ...ignore it? We never find out what they did after that. For the next 25 years, said ship wanders aimlessly around the galaxy but Star Fleet apparently sees no need to keep track of it and nearly forgets all about it...until it decides to wake up and begin attacking Vulcan. Oh right, the rogue Romulan was waiting 25 years for Spock to show up, doing nothing in between time. Okayyyy.

The ending leaves us in an alternate universe. The denouement of all Star Trek time travel is that by the end of the show, the timeline has been restored to its original OR it's taken us to a point where we haven't seen any alternate reality played out that the crew will ever remember (think of the end of Voyager series). Instead of going back through the black hole to our regular universe, we are left with the Vulcan race destroyed. Every bit of Star Trek lore since before the TOS began is worthless. If all we've got left from the original canon is the Enterprise series, you can have it back.

Poor editing also didn't serve the plot well. Whether it was hand to hand fight scenes or laser blasting starships, it was hard to tell who had landed a blow on whom. How can you get excited about the outcome if you can't tell how it's going or who's winning during the fight? Instead we have lots of flashing and crashing, followed by insane pummeling. The victim succumbs and then we discover who lost. If it was a bad guy, he's dead. If it's Kirk, he walks away no matter what happened to him. Hospitals are for wimps.

Random elements from other shows injected into the movie:
- the Romulan ship is from Babylon 5
- the clapping end sequence where Kirk receives his medal is from Star Wars A New Hope
- the bar scene with multiple aliens is from Star Wars A New Hope
- the little guy with Scotty is the toilet paper gremlin from Sabrina the Teenage Witch
- the chain to the drill platform comes from a ghost pirate ship on Scooby Doo

The characters.
Lt. Uhuru started out well in the first half of the movie. The dimension added to her character borrowed from Enterprise's Hoshi (alien linguist) enhanced the portrait of a serious and ambitious young officer, albeit wearing a miniskirt and go-go boots in the 60s. Suddenly, she begins acting like her roommate, the Orion slavegirl, draping herself all over Spock with no apparent prelude or motivation. This didn't work well for Nurse Chapel, who was more discreet but had a lot longer to work at it.

It shouldn't have worked for Uhura either - no matter Spock's state of grief. Making out on the transporter pad in front of other members of the crew? Even a half-Vulcan would never stoop so low. The two finger handrub would have been over the top for the original Spock. In this alternate reality, would his upbringing have been so affected as to change his personality by the appearance of the rogue Romulan ship? If so, why? His parents were still around.

Kirk is an arrogant, brash show-off but he's not stupid. In TOS he impresses Spock with his cleverness and his intuition. He thinks on his feet but also has an uncanny ability to plan ahead (think of the rescue from Rura Penthe in the sixth movie). In the second movie, The Wrath of Khan, Lt. Savik discovers that Kirk is the only cadet ever to succeed at the Kobayashi Maru scenario by reprogramming it. Spock relates that Kirk received a commendation for original thinking. But in this movie, Kirk lazily eats an apple after programming the simulator to disable the enemy ships. Yes, that would be cheating and clearly not original thinking. A better scene for this would have shown Kirk playing along with his crew in the simulation until his solution was revealed as an alternative not before available. He would have delighted in the surprise and consternation of his superiors. He wouldn't have tipped his hand by acting like a jerk during a mock drill. Also, as an adult, Capt Kirk can't drive in 'A Piece of the Action.' But in this movie, he's figuring out how to donut an old Mustang as a young teen. My guess is that the writers would explain all this away by the fact that Kirk's father died at his birth so his character and upbringing have completely changed who he is. Yes, clearly so - why not just create another character name to go with this unfamiliar person who has so little in common with TOS Kirk?

Ordinarily, Star Fleet academy seems to function in a traditional military fashion. Dressing down a cadet, as done to Kirk after his apple-eating performance, in front of his entire assembled class wouldn't fit into that. As we saw in the Next Generation, cadet actions are reviewed for discipline by a panel with only the cadet's representatives present.

Ensign Chekov didn't join the Enterprise until the second season of TOS. He wasn't aboard yet when Kirk began serving on the Enterprise. In an alternate reality such as in this movie, who cares where he was - the writers will put him any place they please at any time.

The final point - TOS, and the series and movies which came after it, were science fiction. With science fiction, you posit an alternate world with its own rules and logic. The story interest then comes from seeing how the characters react and what we the audience see of their humanity in these unfamiliar situations which flow from that universe. This is why ST fans get upset when the 'rules' are broken. It's happened a lot but all in all, the writers know they are expected to stick with the basics of Star Trek lore.

In this movie, all bets are off. Nothing in the Star Trek canon can be certain to apply. Thus, what you have is pure fantasy. In the fantasy genre, the author can change the rules at any time, swooping in to punish or rescue the characters. Daytime soap operas are famous for doing this - their characters routinely change personality, revive from comas, whisk off to distant locales or suffer from amnesia as plot devices. In the space opera that is this Star Trek movie, it's not the characters but the audience who must get amnesia.