I grew up on scifi. It started with Mazinger Z. Galaxy Express 999. Future Boy Conan. Gundam. Robotech.
Then I discovered Star Trek. The original TV series with Capt. James T. Kirk. Spock and others made the show rather enjoyable. And then the Next Generation came! Capt. Jean-Luc Picard is da man! He made Star Trek cool! I didn’t care much for Deep Space Nine and the Voyager series… but then Star Trek: Enterprise returned and it was awesome again! However, it wasn’t popular enough and they pulled the plug.
The movies weren’t great most of the time and Star Trek seemed to disappear… until this movie came around! The reason why the review is bittersweet is because of what the movie is doing to the entire Star Trek license! Just like “Dark Knight” did to the original (and lame) Batman from the ’60s, this movie kickstarted the Star Trek into the 21st century, so to speak. The movie was good. Lots of action and effects with a decent plot, it gave what the license needed to enter the mainstream. It was great if you weren’t a fan of the original.
So to someone like me who has been a fan, but not a fanatic, it was rather… bitter to swallow. The plot threw the entire history upside down, like Chung had warned me yesterday. The original series and some of the movies had always done one thing and one thing right: addressing a load of ethical and cultural issues and differences. It had its own … traditions and history of sorts. Now, it was all thrown away for the sake of making the series popular again.
It still was a good movie and the twist was… intriguing. I suppose it was a necessary evil of sorts. I mean, I’d rather have it back this way than to have lost it forever. Bittersweet, indeed. Bittersweet.