Flick Check: Star Trek: During the worst of my sick evenings in Florida I resorted to the in-room movies and paid a ludicrous amount of money to watch J. J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot. The plot itself is basically the same re-hashed dreck of all the old school Star Trek movies. Some familiar group of people go around saving the galaxy from some contrived danger or other all the while giving cartoonish self-narration as they go. All the old bollocks is there. Declaring this or that to be impossible, but using inane, pseudo-scientific gobble-dee-gook to save the day when someone shouts "Just do it, mister!" with authority. Information is withheld and revealed irrationally; preposterously timed to enhance tension. Characters aren't so much developed as puppeteered. You know: all the usual drivel. For that matter, it's no different from 99.999% of action movies of any stripe.
And yet, I found it oddly watchable and even enjoyable at times. Weeks later, I'm still not sure why. It had a good sense of humor. It moved quickly. The young actors hired to replace the old warhorses were exceedingly well cast -- in a mindless movie such as this, casting is at least 50% responsible for its success. Maybe J. J. Abrams just knows how to do action really well, on a level that I can't quite explain. Or maybe it was the cold medicine.
In any case, it's a good one to check out once it comes to cable, but it's not worth paying any money for. Unless your head is densely packed with mucus and you are stuck in a motel in a Florida town that essentially closes down once the early-bird specials are over. In that case you can spend thrice the going rate and not feel cheated.
