For those who don't know, I am a die-hard Trekkie. I have seen every single episode of every single Star Trek series as well as every movie. I own two shelves full of Star Trek novels, the entire Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series on DVD. I also have all collector's edition DVD of all ten prior Star Trek movies. So do not expect this to be an unbiased review of the 11th Star Trek movie.

The aliens, spaceships, lasers and explosions are exciting but that is not what I liked most about Trek. After all Star Wars has all these but I do not like Star Wars. The best of Star Trek is its roots in Science Fiction. Science Fiction that talks about the human condition. The best Trek stories reflect issues we humans face as civilization and Star Trek movies tend to be the largest mirrors of society at large. For example, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was a look at Life, Death and how we Live. In 1986 movie, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, was a story about environmental conservation 20 years before Al Gore sounded the alarm about Mother Earth in 2006. Stories like these get me excited.

The new Star Trek movie is certainly a blockbuster, guaranteed to make at least 200 million for Paramount Pictures. And as a blockbuster, it has its share of spiffy starships, computer graphics and action sequences that make it a spectacular to watch on the big screen (and as a Trekkie I have duly watched it twice). Sadly, the new Star Trek movie is missing the most critical aspect of Star Trek, it did not hold up a mirror to the human condition.

The review by Christopher Orr of The New Republic sums it up well:

Yet, for all the amusement Star Trek provides, it's hard to shake the sense that something has been lost in translation. Abrams's film is in some ways a throwback not to the original series, but further still to the pulpy exploits of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, in which sneering villains were forever threatening to blow up the heroes' home planets. Gene Roddenberry's original "Trek" aimed higher than such space opera, toward the moral, political, and technological sophistication of Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke. It didn't always succeed--and, when it did, it wasn't always terribly exciting--but it was something new, and important, in the pop-cultural universe. For his rookie outing at least, Abrams has focused on simpler cinematic diversions. There's no question that his Star Trek radically revitalizes the franchise; but it does so in part by setting aside what distinguished the show in the first place.

As some of you might know, I am a huge fan of Star Trek. So it is no surprise that I am happy Star Trek is once again returning to the big screen on Christmas 2008, thanks to producer and director JJ Abrams, producer Damon Lindelof as well as executive producers cum writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. These four people combined, has over the decade produced some of the top hit television shows such as Hercules, Xena, Felicity and Lost, as well as movies such as The Island, The Legend of Zorro, Mission: Impossible III and Transformers.

So far, what is known about the movie is that it features a completely new cast of actors portraying young versions of the original Star Trek characters such as Captain Kirk, Spock and Doctor McCoy. However, the quartet has kept all other details about the movie under a very tight security. Some of the measures they've taken include using fake scripts in the audition process, only giving out real script fragments to the production crew on a need to know basis and requiring all actors and extras to walk between shooting locations under either a huge black cloak or be ferried around in shrouded golf carts. All this security has piqued the interest of the Star Trek community, and started an intense competition between the various tabloid papers and websites to get the largest Star Trek exclusive/scoop they can. As a result, all sorts of rumors are flying all across the web.

Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban are respectively cast as young Captain Kirk, Spock and Doctor McCoy

For example, a late 2007 news leak claimed that The Guardian of Forever (a huge fan favorite) is in the movie. The very next day, an angry Harlan Ellison who is creator and rights owner of The Guardian responded, demanding to see the quartet over the use of his creation in their movie. A few days later, someone posted very blurred, long distance spy shots of young Spock and Captain Kirk at some unknown shooting location.

Just yesterday a popular rumor mill website, Ain't It Cool News, claimed to have inside sources who have not only read the entire script, but went further to describe the writing as lackluster and that the character of Kirk were written as if young Kirk was "a dumb after school special".

Comedian Simon Pegg as Scotty and Zoe Saldana as Uhura

Of course being rumors, this information could very well turn out to be unfounded and downright false. However, I do believe that there is a slight element of truth that the script writers, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, are not exactly well rounded writers. Don't get me wrong, I think they're excellent at writing action oriented movies, which is no doubt why all four movies they've written thus far (The Island, Legend of Zorro, Mission Impossible: 3 and Transformers) are all action flicks.

Kurtzman and Orci's main weakness is in writing characters that the audience would care about. All you need to do is compare the 2007 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) movie with Kurtzman and Orci's 2007 Transformers movie. Both movies essentially took popular children's comic book/toy characters from the 1980s to the big screen. TMNT was decidedly true to its roots in depicting the four turtle brothers, their camaraderie as well as internal conflict with each other. In other words, the turtles felt very human and by the end of the movie the audience were rooting for them.

John Cho as Hikuru Sulu and Anton Yelchin as Pavel Chekov

Transformers on the other hand, does not even focus on the Transformers. Sure, the movie contained Transformer-specific words such as Autobot, Decepticon, Optimus Prime and Megatron, but you would be hard pressed to identify who's who given that (a) the transforming robots looked visually different and (b) most of them barely said a word. Any "script line" given to the transforming robots were largely comedic one-liners or classic "must have" speeches like Optimus Prime's classic declaration, "One will stand and one will fall". The audience is simply expected to assume that some of the robots were bad guys because they looked menacing or made evil sounding noises while the other robots were good guys because they took on the form of cool cars or ambulances. Even human characters suffered from bad writing as many of them were no more than clichéd, two dimensional caricatures.

While this level of characterization would be grudgingly acceptable for a summer blockbuster flick where the plot is simply an excuse to setup scenes with huge special effects, explosions and car stunts, it simply would not be sufficient for a Star Trek story. A Star Trek story, particularly one about the original Enterprise crew, is a story about humanity driven by characters that are larger than life. The kind of one-liner filled scripts written for Transformers or even Mission: Impossible 3 simply would not be sufficient for Star Trek.

Having said all this, I am ultimately still a fan of Star Trek and still hope that the new movie would be a success beyond my wildest dreams. I put my faith in Leonard Nimoy (the original Spock), the only remaining Star Trek elder whose judgment I still trust. If Mr. Nimoy believes Star Trek XI is going to be a great movie, then I believe it too.