star trek

Star Trek (Two-Disc Digital Copy Edition)
$34.98
Wow, I read some of the bad reviews and was blown away that they hated it so much. I'm a star trek fan (I cant tell you all the details of every single event that ever happened in star trek) that loved, loved, loved this film. The haters have to get over themselves and their big brains.

Of course there are some plot flaws that are obvious but ITS A MOVIE!! They couldn't have done a better job on the casting, Bones was a little over the top, but after watching it at home he grows on you. I simply cant believe the haters were not enjoying this film. Chris Pine is awesome as Kirk.

Sorry I just have to defend this film, I think some people want to hate on something so they can pretend to be "smart trekkies". I know 99.9% of the people who watch this will think its awesome like ME!

Star Trek: Original Motion Picture Collection (The Motion Picture / The Wrath of Kahn / The Search for Spock / The Voyage Home / The Final Frontier / The ... Captains Summit Bonus Disc) [Blu-ray]
$139.99
I just got this and haven't finished ST 1 yet but this is what I have noticed. Some scenes look great while others not so great. In the beginning where the Enterprise is leaving spacedock there are a few big black spots that appear on the enterprise and I mean BIG. I can't beleive that these were allowed in the transfer. Also, when the Entperise has entered V'Ger and Kirk tells Sulu to take them 500 meters above and 200 meters out there are three smaller black spots on all the outside shots of the enterprise in the scene. When they go to interior shots they look ok. The other thing I have noticed is that when a character is the main focus visually for a scene, almost everything outside of the focus is highly blurry. Not sure if this is the same on the VHS and DVD releases. I'm gonna check this but it is kind of annoying.

As for the movie itself, by not including a lot of the extra scenes the movie seems to jump and not make sense at some points. Also, the deleted scenes are included as extras but not all the extra scenes from the directors cut made it to the deleted scenes section.

Once I see more, I'll review more.

Star Trek: The Original Series - Season 1 [Blu-ray]
$129.99
I bought this because I wanted to replace my standard DVD copies and I love the star trek series and I will buy each of them as they are released on blu-ray, however I am writing this review because I have read most of the reviews that others have left and not one of them has touched on the problem that when you play an episode in the enhanced or original effects the audio drops out completely. At first I thought that it was limited to just the first disk but no I played an episode that was on disk #4 and encountered the same problem. I also bought a copy of this from borders and encountered the same problem so now I have to return both of them! I was playing it on a pioneer player, which is considered to be one of the best players around! I am planning on waiting until the second release if there is one so that this problem can be addressed.

Star Trek (Single-Disc Edition)
$29.99
You know, it's funny. I've said, in the past, that I hate movies based on things, but when I look at the movies I've watched over the last ten years, the vast majority of them have been based on something. So be it, then. Maybe I just like to risk causing myself unreasonable pain and suffering.

Fortunately, I didn't find myself experiencing such unreasonable suffering with Abrams' remake of Star Trek, though I couldn't say I really enjoyed it either.

This movie did a lot of things right, which is more than I can say for most movies based on things, so before I get into the gripes, let me tell you what it got right.

First, there are scenes of people flying through space in starships. Their technology is mostly workable and realistically-portrayed, with the exception of one scene of a voice-recognition program that apparently can't penetrate an accent. Most of the character portrayals are dead-on and believable, and someone in red armor dies at one point. There's a plot involving time travel that needs to be resolved, and James Kirk handles the no-win test in the same way we heard about during previous Star Trek movies.

That may seem like a lot of things to get right, to the point where the movie should deserve a high grade, but I'm afraid that it got quite a few things wrong as well. Most people who've never heard of Star Trek before won't notice most of these, but then, those people are probably in comas or hiding under rocks, and won't notice this movie either, so here goes.

First, this movie is a movie about war, and the Federation is depicted as an armada, yet, without the strict, military discipline that was previously Star Trek's defining characteristic. This is a complete reversal on nearly every level. What made classic Star Trek stand out from every other science fiction series before and since then was that in Star Trek, the characters didn't need to fight everything they came across. Most of the time, the solution could be arrived at peacefully, and frequently, it was just a matter of thinking about the problem a certain way. Furthermore, military discipline was the overall mood of everything Star Trek; which differentiated it from Star Wars, where there was little or no discipline among the heroes.

Because of that, this movie is basically what the Star Wars prequels should have been. It has the right mood, feel and genre to be another Star Wars movie, and fans of Star Wars will probably enjoy it as well. However, it doesn't have the sense of peace that Star Trek radiated. In fact, most of the movie is spent in mindless fighting.

Still, that's something that most other Star Trek movies also got wrong, so I won't come down on the movie too hard for that.

Secondly, in this movie, Mister Spock is fiery and emotional, and so is James Kirk. Neither of them shows any signs of maturity or responsibility, and that makes many of their interactions painful to watch. Showing Starfleet officers as young people can work as long as they act mature, but removing their maturity carries all the feeling of a bratty toddler aiming a phaser at your head. These are not the kind of people you want to trust the fate of the Earth to, and no. That's not a good thing.

Unfortunately, when robbed of his logic and self-control, Mister Spock becomes an abrasive, selfish, arrogant jerk; easily infuriated by the people around him. There's nothing left of the Spock seen in previous films and episodes. Just the fact that Spock seems to be the most emotional member of the crew should have told Abrams that he was on the wrong track in this respect, though. Kirk, in turn, when he stops acting calm and composed, comes off as a hyper, overeager, self-centered and overconfident fool with a tendency to throw himself on women, and hope they give him the chance to take advantage of them. The idea of him being in control of the Enterprise is more of a crime than a joy in that state. In fact, at every stage, Abrams seemed determined to bring out and exaggerate the worst qualities of each of the two main characters, or even fabricate new ones, which does nothing to inspire or delight those who originally looked to Star Trek for hope that the future would be filled with maturity, peace, and intelligent thought.

I should also mention here that the plot of trying to rewrite canon Star Trek into a new, less-mature, less-likable timeline is a rotten thing to do, and I refuse to accept it, because I enjoyed the first Star Trek series' so much, and this so little, but it doesn't make a huge impact on me, because, as I said, my mind refuses to accept it.

On a much more minor note, I should say that given how far in the future this apparently takes place, I was disappointed with the appearance of the Enterprise engine room. Every other part of the ship seems nice and spiffy, but the engine room looks like a beer brewery, and there's no good reason for that. Antimatter fusion definitely does not make use of water as a coolant, nor are huge, bulky water tubes needed to keep the engines going.

The depictions of Earth and Vulcan are both nearly unforgivable. For starters, the vulcans are shown to have prejudice against Spock, despite their logic, which is entirely different from the way things originally were; probably intended to make me hate the planet Vulcan, so I wouldn't mind so much, when Abrams decided to blow it up later on. However, as much as Abrams made me hate Vulcan, he made me hate Earth a lot more. His depictions of Earth contained no scenes of good people living peacefully. Nearly every scene involved some kind of war, violence or sex; sometimes more than one of those things. How am I supposed to root for the good guys if they absolutely refuse to be good? Honestly, as much of a psychopath as the bad guy was, he at least seemed to take his actions seriously, to the point where I really would have rather just let him win.

So having said all this, why didn't I rate the movie lower? Well, the characters of Uhura, Mccoy, Chekov and Sulu were all very faithfully depicted. Scotty was a little much, but it was nice to see Leonard Nimoy again, if only as a guest chatacter. It also shouldn't be said that I can't appreciate a good action sequence or some nice dialogue, and the story isn't a bad one. As I said, it's just not Star Trek.

So in the end; no. This movie didn't cause me unreasonable pain and suffering; just the moderate kind. I didn't find it enjoyable, I wouldn't watch it again, and I certainly wouldn't watch a sequel to it, but in terms of what it gets right and wrong, this movie is a middle-of-the-road kind of experience. It's average, so average is the grade that I'll give it, in spite of my personal disappointment over the opportunities they wasted.