10 Dumbest Things In Star Trek (2009)
Did Star Trek's reboot trade brains for action and ample nacelles?
Despite being sold as an action-adventure show, Star Trek’s always had something of a rep for putting story before action, so much so that it’s often and accurately characterized as “talky.” Even as video compositing and CGI saw the cost of visual effects drop, the Trek franchise largely avoided the influence of Star Wars to go big on the action at a cost to character and theme.
That changed when director JJ Abrams rebooted the original as a big-budget blockbuster in 2009 and dialed the action-adventure quotient to Lucasfilm levels. The reaction? Well, no one can hate on a franchise like its own devotees, and many were the fans that decried this new take in a Not My Star Trek fashion and accused it of dumbing down their favorite sci-fi enterprise.
Sure, there's plenty that's silly, convenient, and coincidental. And some will never forgive the lens flares or the brewery. But those nitpicks aside, what's truly dumb in the Kelvin timeline?
Let’s implode some red matter and make a portal back to 2009 and find out.
10. Red Matter Matters
Despite fan complaints, the so-called Red Matter is no more preposterous than a lot of other unobtainium substances postulated and employed in various Treks, be it star-killing trilithium (Star Trek Generations) or the anything-muppet Genesis Wave (Star Trek II and III), to name but two examples. If we’re being honest it’s the dumb name that fans bristle at. If it had been called “quantum-gravitic xyrillium” or some other technobabble words pulled out of someone’s aft, no one would have blinked. But calling it “Red Matter”...somehow that was the bridge too far.
Silly name aside, if the Red Matter can form a black hole capable of Hoovering up a supernova, just how is it supposed to be deployed? Some supernovae leave nothing where the star was, and others leave various types of collapsed stars at their centers. Can Spock Prime set it off in the hollow center of where the star had been? How the hell do you drill into a neutron star? If before the star blows up, was he supposed to get it into the star’s core? If not, why did the Nero have to drill to the center of Vulcan and the Earth to set it off?
Did anyone even think this through?
I think we know the answer to that…