The roads I take...

If you want to know absolutely nothing about the new Star Trek movie, stop reading now!

For everyone who can stand a few pointers but don't want to know the real story, you probably can safely read this article though - I just watched this new motion picture and am just conserving rough thoughts here without story details, probably not telling more on those than things I already knew before - at least when it comes to the real story trail.

For one thing, it's a great Science Fiction movie, with lots of action and special effect but a reasonable story, it pictures the characters well, in the style they are known, it ties in with lots of classic Star Trek mottos and themes as well as with the humor it always had - but it's re-inventing the whole story of how the famous crew of the NCC-1701 ("no damn A, B, C, or D") came together. It's not even trying to depict the events that led to the classic series and movies, as the villain travels back from post-Nemesis time to arrive right at the day of James Tiberius Kirk's birth, changing under what circumstances that happened and therefore everything happening beyond that point, creating its own parallel universe, basically.
Only "the old Spock", who has also traveled back (as we knew due to Nimoy being in the movie), remains with the knowledge of everything we know about what was canon up to now. Oh, and the Enterprise series remains canon due to happening before that point in time.

So, here are my surprises - without giving away actual story trails:

• "The only thing I got left is my bones" - this is, if I remember it phrased correctly, the best sentence in the movie IMHO.
• The Vulcan thing is going to be somewhat troublesome for this new Star Trek universe, I guess - but it makes the storyline told here believable. IMHO, it's OK, but still troublesome.
• The Uhura-Spock stuff is so unnecessary and completely unneeded for the story. If I were the producer, I would have cut it out just because it doesn't make any real sense for what's being told here.
• An Orion girl apparently being in Starfleet Academy doesn't make much sense for the part of the canon we still need to assume.
• Basing on the same lines, the parts of the canon we still need to assume to be true, it doesn't make sense for the Spock of that time (and apparently not only him) to know about the common ancestry of Vulcans and Romulans.
• A lot of really good comments and tie-ins to the original Trek are in the movie, so it's visible that those who made this production really liked the old stuff, even if they did put in some glitches.
• Pine is an excellent Kirk, Quinto's Spock has many strong performances but some weak spots - especially where he meets his older self, Nimoy - of course - really is Spock, nobody can doubt that, though his performance starts off slightly weak.
• Saldana's Uhura is really, really great, and towards the end feels much more like a bridge officer than that character ever did. Urban's McCoy is somewhat different than we remember that guy, but not untrue to what we know, I couldn't say one's the real McCoy and the other wouldn't be. Bones even has one of his "I'm a doctor, not a ..." sentences. He fits well and is good and still feels somewhat different.
• Yelchin's Chekov is very humorous with his somewhat-hard-to-understand accent and his incomparable pronunciation of the name "Kirk". Cho is a believable Sulu, but I always found that character somewhat hard to reach. He even keeps up with that and doesn't feel wrong in any way, so he can't be bad, right? Pegg's Scotty somehow comes into everything in a strange way and only starts to feel in with his job, and somehow that's also the impression he leaves for me. He can make it, but he probably still needs another movie to really settle in. Probably that's what the storyline sees the character itself in, so actually Pegg is bringing that across exactly as it should be, I guess.
• The "red matter" is even bad in terms of usual Science Fiction. Come on, something without scientific background and with an unimaginative name as well? At least Spock should have a technobabble name for it, even if Nero might not.
• And the whole thing of fleeing from a black hole is scientifically weak, as well as not explaining why suddenly a mere black hole is a space/time portal.
• The tie-in with happenings in the real world that Trek had in the beginning has been lots already in previous movies and mostly even series, but at least this movie has a message of "don't throw away your life, take what you have, use it to your best abilities and you can achieve great things" - and that, I have to say, is truly Star Trek.
• I wouldn't have expected that old Spock survives in this time period in the end. I wonder if they will try to get him into a sequel.
• The ending sequence of the movie is really good. Every Star Trek fan will completely love it

So, all in all, go and watch the movie, it's worth it. If you liked Star Trek previously, you will like the movie. If you don't take all consistency in the canon too seriously, you will even love it. If you like Science Fiction and action tied in with non-parody humor, you will like it. If you like stories of how people who haven't found the right balance in their lives can grow their personalities and become successful, you also will like this motion picture.
I see chances for improvements, but I have seen some worse things than this production in Star Trek. In fact, I enjoyed it and I conclude that I can like it.

Oh, and I want to see another movie based on this one and wish the whole team "Good luck!" with this and hopefully following productions.