Yes, you guessed it, I hate Star Trek. In my book there are twoavailable options when you see an alien, either shooting it with ablaster (one that emphatically does NOT have a "stun" setting) ormaking it an ally in your fight against the tyrannical galaxy-spanningimperium you are rebelling against. Sitting down and negotitating withsaid alien whilst attempting to understand and respect it's culturesimply isn't an option in my book.

Fortunately, Star Trek Begins is much more Undiscovered Country (orKhath of Wran, depending on your taste) than Final Frontier.

Spoiler In the opening sequence George Kirk (James' father) saves thelives of his ship's crew by heroically going to ramming speed against asinister time traveling Romulan ship which emerges from a spaceanomaly. Said evil ship is piloted by the Hulk (not the IncredibleHulk, the other, arty one) sporting some natty facial tats. One of thecrew George saves is his heavily pregnant wife who gives birth to JamesT during the escape.

We are treated to a short introduction to both Kirk (who is a totald*ck) and Spock before Kirk signs up for Starfleet at the urging of hisfather's friend, Captain Pike of the Enterprise.

After some fairly tiresome Starfleet Academy antics the film reallygets going when the Enterprise is sent to investigate an anomalysimilar to the one that killed Kirks father and everything goes to hellin a handbasket. The Hulk and his Romulan pals destroy a wave ofStarfleet ships and then mash Vulcan using perhaps the most impracticalsuper-weapon ever. This appears to involve lowering a big drill intothe planets atmosphere and then waiting until it drills down to thecore and dropping something down the hole. It is impressive that no oneon Vulcan says "Oi, you with the tats! Stop drilling our planet orwe'll blow you up and failing that we'll blow up your drill" but itdoesn't really matter.

Spock, now captaining the Enterprise refuses Kirks plan to go head tohead with the vastly superior baddie ship, when Kirk refuses to complywith the order Spock has him marooned on Hoth. By a coincidence ofGodzilla like proportions Kirk is stranded on the planet where theoriginal Spock (Nimoy) who's been thrown back in time along with theRomulans and is hiding out. By a rather universe breaking deus exmachina they end up back on the Enterprise, Kirk takes over as captainfrom Spock and saves the day by blowing old Hulky and his squid shipinto a new black hole. Huzzay. Mr Spock (that's the old one not theyoung/new one) explains that as a result of the destruction of Vulcanthey are now in a parallel dimension to the original crew. This meansthey can make new sequels or a new series and not have to worry aboutexternal continuity.

End Spoiler While I didn't like Chris Pine playing Kirk who made himseem rather unlikeable and emotionless everyone else is pretty good;Syler makes a convincing Spock, Uhura is likable if underused andPegg's Scotty steals every scene he's in but the real shocker is Karl"Blood and Muscles" Urban's brilliant "Bones" McCoy who captures thespirit of the original brilliantly right up to and perhaps surpassingthe inevitable "For God's sake, Jim, I'm a doctor not a…".

The film is however beset by a few issues. Blinding light andlens-flare all over the bloody place, nosebleed inducing sound andediting that isn't so much fast as psychotic. There's barely a frame inthe film where there isn't some sort of lens-flare going off all overthe place. Frankly if Kirk picked up a coffee cup there'd be lens-flarecoming off it. Allied to this is the fact that for some reasonvirtually every scene ends with the entire screen slowly going blindingwhite. The sound team have obviously been influenced by the recent StarWars films as everything makes some sort of incredible noise – thisworks to raise the adrenaline in the early part of the film but lateron it becomes a bit too much. There is a fair amount of punching inthis film (always good in a Star Trek movie) but the massivelyunrealistic two-pieces-of-wood-smacked-together punching noise belovedof Indiana Jones is rather out of place. The editing is very much thepost-Generation-X attention-span-of-a-gnat type of affair that we'reused to courtesy of people like Wachowski brothers but it is generallyfairly simple to work out what is going on.

Minor stylistic issues aside, I enjoyed Star Trek. The plot is absoluterubbish but who cares? There are spaceships and explosions and punchingand more explosions. Go with it and you wont notice that at the heartof the plot is a series of coincidences of galactic proportions.

However, be warned that is is not Star Trek.

My boyfriend called it a zombie movie. Everything looks quite good ifyou give it only a short look, the costumes are nice and stylish, theacting is fine, the design of the Enterprise is very good and thespecial effects are entertaining. What is missing is the soul – like azombie who still looks and speaks like the person he once was, but haslost its soul. That what made him himself is missing, it's a hullfilled with something else. In this case it is filled with thefast-paced plot. Very easy to understand for people who don't watchSci-Fi on television, fast-paced so that even people with a lowattention span can enjoy it, but all in all a bit brain dead.

There is nothing of the utopian Federation world the series featured inthe past, nothing of the deep humanism I came to love.

The plot is totally routine and predictable. Some crazy Romulan is madat Spock for having failed, despite Herculean effort, to save Romulusfrom some implausible disaster. So the nut decides to travel backthrough time to get even with everybody, even people who had nothing todo with the disaster. Besides being simply stupid and hackneyed, thistime travel aspect lets the writers depart from the Star Treknarrative, established through several TV series and several movies,both original and Next Generation. And depart they do, whenever theyfeel like it. The movie takes place when Kirk is a cadet at StarfleetAcademy, so it happens before anything in the TV series or previousmovies. But the unimaginative writers couldn't be bothered to work outa plot consistent with the all the rest of the Star Trek collection.Instead, they had to jazz things up by having Vulcan destroyed andSpock's mother killed, thus rendering impossible several episodes inthe TV series and the old movies. The writers excuse this travesty bysaying that the time thread was disrupted by the nutty Romulans' timetravel. Well, isn't that cute? With that logic, they can do just aboutanything and claim they have produced a Star Trek movie. In fact, thatis just what they have done. What they have created is a movie thatsteals the name and glory of the old shows and then does something notjust unrelated but downright contradictory with its forebears.

There is some good stuff in the show. The young Spock is very good,very well portrayed by Zachary Quinto. He is the one character in themovie that has real character development. We also get a plausibleexplanation of McCoy's background, also portrayed by a competent actor,Karl Urban. The rest of the cast is pretty much a blow off. Worst ofall, I think, is young Kirk. Yeah, Kirk is supposed to be cocky, butthis guy is just a pain in the ass. Chris Pine grossly overplays thecocky part so that he ends up looking like weak slapstick. That maywell not be Pine's fault. The director and the writers surely bear atleast part and maybe all the blame. The other characters are shallowand not worth the time to discuss.

The plot is idiotic. I already explained the hackneyed time travelpart. There are quite a few other stupidities, such as the following.There is the miraculous "red matter," one drop of which is capable ofimploding an entire planet, yet somehow a large glob of it can becarried around in a very small force field in a star ship and thenextracted one drop at a time with a hypodermic needle without damagingthe ship or even the needle. Come on. The famous episode of Kirkcheating to beat the combat simulation in the Academy is overwrittenand overacted so that it is neither plausible nor amusing, just silly.Worst of all, though, is the end of the movie. Remember, Kirk and allthese guys are just young'uns at the Academy, not even graduated yet.By a totally stupid plot twist, they end up commanding the flagship ofthe fleet, the Enterprise, in the battle with the Romulans, even thoughthey're still cadets, not even midshipmen. OK, let's let that pass. Ofcourse, they are so brilliant that they take out the Romulan ship fromthe future by great derring-do. Idiotic, but we let that pass, too.Then when they get back to Starfleet, guess what? The whole team(except the young Spock, but hold on) is given permanent command of theEnterprise. No, we won't let that pass. I mean, GET REAL!! A bunch ofkids commanding the fleet flagship? Yeah, right. Oh, I said Spockwasn't included. That's because at the very end, Spock waltzes on boardand informs Kirk that he has noticed that Kirk has not yet chosen aFirst Officer (yeah, right, a bunch of kids are about to take the fleetflagship out into space without a First Officer), so he asks permissionto fill the post. The brat Kirk nods OK, and that's it. Spock gets thejob. No need to get approval from Starfleet or anything. Thewhippersnapper crew goes off merrily into the future, presumablyremaining together for at least 20 years on the same ship – as if thatever would happen.

This is the kind of light stuff an unimaginative hack writes for5-year-olds. As a pretender to be the prequel to all the rest of theStar Trek productions, it is trash, nothing but trash.

The reviews I have been reading for Star Trek, even though its ratingis so high seem very negative. This leads me to believe that a lot of"Trekkies" felt the urge to rip holes in the storyline andperformances.

Yes there are massive holes in the details of red matter and themotives behind some of the vendettas held, but please don't tell me theoriginal was true to life and logic. YOU MUST BE HAVING A LAUGH! MostScifi films have flaws, but they are enjoyable as forms of escapism.

THIS FILM ROCKS because of this. It is after all, the first of whatwill be a long series, no doubt. The characters were established andthe actors brought there own personalities along with aspects of thereolder selves. As this is technically the first film of a new franchise,it has set the scene very well for future additions.

This is a film for a new generation, people in this world need morethan a painted cardboard box as a control station and they need actorsthey can associate with and that is what this film achieves.

The plot may not be the strongest, but the effects and characters morethan made up for this, there was more humour in this than many comediesI have seen of late.

Roll on the next and many more to come!