New Star Trek does everything wrong

Dear new "Star Trek"

I don't think we can be friends. You're not as bad as the Jar Jar Abrahams reboots, but ya ain't Star Trek. Not by a long shot.

Your choice of casting of James Frain as Sarek was a good move. So was your decision to have the Klingons be all about racial purity, an apt theme indeed for the current political situation. That moral element to the show is very fitting and I approve.

However, you seem to fail at just about everything else. You've turned the Klingons into orcs. Literally orcs. You could swap the two between their respective franchises and no-one would notice. Hell, I bet you're already being sued for copyright violations on that one.

For some reason - God knows why - you insist on the Klingons speaking Klingon constantly. Why ?!?! Their language is an ugly pile of shite, like listening to a baboon that's being repeatedly jabbed with pain sticks by a sexually enraged silverback gorilla. It's just a series of bizarre monkey noises. No-one wants to hear that. No-one. Especially when it's well-established practise within the franchise to use native alien languages sparingly. Instead you've decided to go for the Star Wars Holiday Special approach. Sigh.

Then there are the humans. It's hard to tell if they're interesting or not, because honestly there's so much lens flare I can't see anything so I've no idea who's speaking. Your instruction to the cinematography department must have been something like, "make it a big glowy thing" for every single scene. You've also dropped the ensemble cast approach of all other Star Trek series, focusing very heavily on just a few characters (who weren't particularly interesting and weren't in the least bit charismatic) at the utter expense of the others.

In keeping with the big glowy thing approach, you insist on angling the camera in a jaunty and highly distracting fashion. I mean, 1995 called and said they want their wonky tripod back. The slightly unsteady cam doesn't work either. Neither does doing a 360 flyaround of cast members - it just makes me dizzy. What's that all about ? Must you supersaturate my senses at all times in case I get so bored that my leg drops off or something ? And, just in case you weren't aware, I hate to tell you but space is mostly black. It isn't full of giant glowy things all over the place. Kindof sucks the meaning of "space" if you're going to cram it chock-full of stuff everywhere as far as the eye can see.

I understand the need to redesign some aspects of the ships, uniforms and aliens of the period. Fair enough. But your choices just don't work. Iconic, memorable designs tend to be clear and simple. The Shenzhou is alright, I suppose, ghastly internal lighting notwithstanding. It looks more-or-less in keeping with basic established Federation ships. The Klingons though... good grief. I'm gonna say this again : they're not orcs. The bat'leth is not a design that needs fundamental altering, nor is a Bird of Prey. They need modernising, sure, but not discarding utterly. As with the cinematography, the approach appears to be, "cram as much stuff on the screen at all times as possible in case anyone actually looks at anything !". This approach is flawed because it doesn't make any sense.

Similarly your storytelling is, simply put, all wrong. You open with an overly-dramatic pair of episodes that might (suitably edited) have worked if they were at the end of the season. You can't start with the high drama, because at this stage absolutely no-one cares about any of the characters. How could they ? There hasn't been time to get to know them yet; they're just ephemeral glowy blob things on a screen. And the violence is somewhat excessive for my tastes : I'm a Game of Thrones fan, but dammit, Star Trek is fundamentally a family show. It's supposed to be primarily about exploration and morality : epic battle scenes and even occasional brutal violence have their place, but not at this level and not so soon. And this is your starting point. Hmmm.

Let us not speak of the court scene where the judges appear as silhouettes behind bright spotlights. Actually yes, let's do that, because it shows very well how heavy-handed your storytelling is. Instead of showing us things that would happen in space in a fictional universe, you're showing us dramatic interpretations of things with extra glowy things. Now, TOS was much more theatrical than the other series, but it abandoned this for the movies. Re-inventing this approach might work, with more subtlety and less glowy things. But since you completely lack subtlety it just made the emphasis on shoddy storytelling all the stronger.

I'm not sure how the rest of the series will proceed, but at the moment it feels like watching an extended movie. I don't want that. I want stories. You didn't give me any of those, you have me a single extended sequence rent with flashbacks. You never bothered to introduce the crew, you just dumped them on us in the middle of a mission. There's a reason no other Star Trek series has tried that. Because it's silly. It's bad storytelling and I don't like it.

Toodle-oo.