Skip to content

Star Trek

Star Trek: Picard (series) – Beyer / Chabon / Goldsman (2020-2023)

There have been many Star Trek spin-offs. I do not really follow them. When looking for a bit of a quiet series to watch, I gave this one a try. This spin-off -of course- has Patrick Steward return to the Star Trek franchise.

There are three seasons with a variety of stories. Picard has retired and lives on a wine farm. We are in some time in the future in which several of the kinds of beings that we know from earlier Star Trek material coexist. Usually picard is asked for help, he has to talk his way back into Starfleet to obtain a ship, is confronted by missteps in his past, but manages to go on his mission.

There are references to earlier Star Trek films (and series?), old characters return and in a way “Star Trek: Picard” is a bit of a reunion.

There is more action than I remember in other Star Trek material that I know. The series are fairly predictable, but alright watching.

Star Trek (original + next generations) (1979-2002)

After the “Terminator” and “Alien” movie series, we tried Star Trek. More about that here. We only saw a part of the Star Trek releases, the six “original series films” and the four “Next Generations” films. After this came three films with new (young) actors.

The first film is great. The other films of the “original series” are entertaining too, but not too interesting. Sometimes the crew travels back in time to our own time, making jokes about our 1980’ies.

In the first “generations” film we meet both captain Picard and Kirk and this is obviously a transition film. The remaining “generations” films are more contemporary science fiction with mildly interesting stories.

I think in the past I only knew the Picard films, even though Kirk looked familiar. For some reason I had the idea that Star Trek was a TV series. Perhaps I have seen glimpses of either the “Star Trek Phase II” series (1977) with William Shatner as Captain Kirk and/or “Star Trek The Next Generation” (1987-1994) with Patrick Steward as Captain Picard.

Be that as it may, the films are better than I remember the series, but other than the first film, they are not more than entertaining.

Star Trek: Beyond * Justin Lin (2016)

It is starting to seem as if I like sci-fi, while in fact I am just curious to see what they would make of a contemporary Star Trek film. Like with the last Star Wars this Star Trek is “based on characters created by…”. It has little to do with what I remember of Star Trek.

We have Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, but are they supposed to be children of the original characters? In a too rapid ‘intro’ we learn about the spaceship Enterprice and the world the crew lives in. The ship is sent on a rescue mission and they end up fighting a dark enemy in an unknown area of “the nebula”.

The film has humor that does not really work (in the beginning almost on ‘screwball’ level), drama that does not really work and mostly seems to want to impress as a space spectacle with star wars, but… it does not really work.

What remains is a weak film with a few elements that you may know from the old films.