Star Trek Reviews
Top CriticThe Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Examiner.com
Abrams manages quite well in making $150 million look like an episode of Babylon 5. Fistfights are poorly edited, and when he wants to create excitement and tension, Abrams simply has the camera shake around a lot in close-up.
The Age (Australia)
Well, at least they got it half right.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Antagony & Ecstasy
Just because a film is noisy, colorful and fast does not ipso facto mean that it is also a rollicking entertainment.
Full Review
| Original Score: 6/10
KyleSmithOnline.com
Barely competent. J.J. Abrams has a TV soul.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
eFilmCritic.com
The film is just another noisy space opera in which the humanity takes a back seat to the hardware, something that the real "Star Trek" managed to avoid at its peak moments.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
eFilmCritic.com
For nearly its first hour, I felt I was witnessing Abrams hitting every beat just right, only to see him and his writers spend the final hour getting just about everything wrong.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Goatdog's Movies
Abrams doesn't get the franchise that Roddenberry created.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
That jolt of energy may resuscitate the franchise; its breathing, however, feels shallow.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Cinema Sight
While entertaining as a space soap opera, the film dismantles much of what made Star Trek once great.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Movie City News
Amazing sound, a ton of fury, signifying nothing... So densely orchestrated that the film never gives the audience a moment to breath it all in.
Full Review
| Original Score: 7.5/10
Quinto is the one person here who may leave teen-aged viewers more perplexed than puffed up; he somehow rebukes the movie's whole obsession with backstory and immaturity by seeming riper and wiser than the charmless folly that is spun around him.
New York Press
This Star Trek sells cuteness, sentimentality and explosive F/X as if Starship Troopers, Minority Report, Mission to Mars or even Blade Runner or The Matrix (all visionary standard-setters) never happened.
L.A. Weekly
Even by the standards of its own predecessors, this Trek feels like it was made by a committee of logic-minded Vulcans (or franchise-protective studio executives) rather than a filmmaker with the singular personality of Nicholas Meyer.
ÜberCiné
It's been thirty years since I last found myself at the movies, rooting for a black hole.
rec.arts.movies.reviews
A mindless, milling mess. Just what you would expect from somebody schooled in the Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer academy of bad directing.
Flix Capacitor
The character work is consistently ace, but Star Trek 2009 doesn't offer the high-minded, underlying ideas that the show was known for.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
The Aristocrat
... it pleases me to report that the new film from Director J.J. Abrams pulled me (a Trek newbie) in like a Romulan tractor beam.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
American Profile
Salutes the rich history of the franchise while avoiding any hint of hokey, by-the-book starch.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
What Culture
Star Trek is a welcome return to the flippant, big-budget bonanza that exists purely for the spectacle,
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
