Director: Justin Lin

Running time: 2 hours. 

Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urben, Zoe Salanda, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Idris Elba. 

This rebooted Star Trek franchise has finally done the thing which it secretly hoped to do, that is make me me think “maybe I should go back and watch some of the tv series”. The new cast now fell bedded in and oddly Chris Pine now sounds more Shatner than ever. I’m a sucker for a scene where we get to observe what an alien metropolis functions like and recently I got his same thing in Guardians Of The Galaxy, Elysium and now this. This delivers on the different alien environment front and also plays it right down the formulaic route of ‘chase the maguffin’ while evolving the team dynamic. The story follows a Marvel movies direction of baddie wants some thing you have and they need outsmarting. In a way it’s stuck in a box when it’s enemies all look Klingon and your teleporting out of certain death scenarios but other than that I still enjoyed the interplay between the crew a lot. Certain scenes had shaky cam and too fast fighting which left me staring at blurring images which I didn’t follow but others had well paced enjoyable action pieces which I could relish in. I do wish it would put down its nostalgia for the original series’ cast though. 

I really buy into the Spock/Kirk friendship these days and tha is played upon here even as new bad guy Krall throws obstacles at the guys. Idris Elba was unrecognisable to me until half way in under all the prosthetics but once I realised it was him, it was obvious. A colourful and action packed space adventure which was just what I wanted. 

I’m still not a Trekker but I will dig deeper. 

C Whitehouse 2016