 Several critics appear to regard the 10th Star Trek movie as a kind of nemesis, and they're apparently determined to prove that the pen is mightier than the phaser. Many are calling for Paramount to finally pull the plug on the franchise. Joel Siegel commented on Good Morning America: "The effects are so cheesy, the cartoons NASA sent out 30 years ago about space travel looked better than this computer generated animation. This is like early TV -- Captain Video, Space Patrol -- when they'd shake the camera and throw boxes onto the set to make it look like a crash." Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News carries the same complaint further: "There comes a time when the future looks old, and that's where Star Trek finds itself on the time-space continuum. The Enterprise crew has been wearing uniforms imagined by designers in the 1960s, upgrading from patterns developed in the Flash Gordon era. Today, they look about as futuristic as Nehru jackets and bell-bottoms." Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post complains about "the sparks." He writes: "For some reason, dating back to the TV years when special effects were hardly advanced and the budgets minuscule, the Star Trek action sequences all involved sparks falling from pipes. That squalid tradition continues, so that in the oh-so-frequent space and phaser battles, rogue phaser blasts and other rays of destruction always bring showers of sparks raining down. It's like the worst kind of sensible suburban Fourth of July." Still, Star Trek continues to show that hard-boiled critics can be drawn to its cause. Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune comments. "Nemesis is a deep-space overachiever that tries to conquer the universe again on a diminished budget and ship-bound settings. It doesn't win every battle ... [but] the moviemakers here attack us at our weak emotional spots with nostalgia, special effects, coruscating action and auld lang syne." Stephen Holden begins his review in the New York Times: "Let's have a small round of applause for good old reliable Star Trek. Now deep into its fourth decade (if you count its television and screen incarnations) the science-fiction franchise ... keeps chugging along inside its own cheerfully nostalgic time warp." Similarly, Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times concludes his review with these words: "Familiarity and continuity are what the success of this series has always been about. We've been here before, and we like the neighborhood." |
