This is my “What I thought of “Star Trek”” journal entry. The title is a Loony Tunes/ Liberace reference, but it’s also an oblique allusion to Captain Kirk’s little-seen brother, because I like coming up with clever and/or just plain confusing journal titles. Maybe it makes me feel smarter than I am.

So, I’ve been a Star Trek fan ever since I got hooked on The Next Generation, but my enthusiasm started to dwindle once Deep Space 9 went off the air. I thought Voyager seldom lived up to its potential and Enterprise I would just rather pretend never happened. The franchise really got stale after being controlled by the same creative team for so many years, so I was pretty optimistic about this film because a fresh perspective was exactly what was needed. I think it’s also good to reach out to a broader audience that doesn’t necessarily know the difference between a Klingon and an android ( something I was confused over when I was first exposed to TNG) To say I was giddy with anticipation might be overstating things, but it’s the closest I’ve come to feeling giddy about anything.

I went to a ten o’clock showing the night it premiered, a week ago Thursday. I didn’t go to earlier because there were sitcoms on NBC I wanted to watch, plus I was afraid the theater might be brimming with crazy fans, but the one I went to, there were only a handful of audience members. It was a weeknight, after all, and most sensible people probably went sooner.

Previously, I joked that if the movie sucked, I might step in front of a bus. At first I was going to say that if the movie wasn’t more amazing than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy and the first Matrix combined, I’d step in front of a bus, as a joke about how high my expectations were growing. Maybe that goes part of the way towards explaining why I was actually mildly disappointed with “Star Trek.” I liked it, but I didn’t love it. It was good, but not great. There were a few plot points that I felt were too ridiculous for me to suspend my disbelief, even for science fiction. The villain’s backstory could have been better developed. I know they put out a prequel comic for all that, but you shouldn’t have to put out supplemental material to make the plot more coherent; the movie should be enough.

I thought the time travel element here was a clever way of making this movie both a sequel and a prequel, and also a reboot. I can accept that the events in the movie take place in an alternate timeline that doesn’t erase the previous one, even though some nuts on the imdb boards might bitch that this is contrary to the way time travel is usually presented in Star Trek. I certainly don’t think of myself as one of those Trekkies who is going to obsessively nitpick over every inconsistency. I don’t care if the Enterprise was built in space or in Iowa or if Kirk knows how to drive stick or not. Some of the changes were intersting. I like what they did with Uhura, even if it shunted the only female character into the role of obligatory love interest. Still, there were a couple major deviations from the established canon that I didn’t see coming and possibly affected my overall enjoyment of the film. By the end of the movie, I guess I was expecting history to go back on track and things to be more or less the way they were by the start of the TV show, and in a way, they were, but they also made some huge alterations to let you know that anything goes in this universe.

I wouldn’t want my lukewarm response to Star Trek to deter anyone else from going, not that anyone cares about my opinion. Overall reaction to the movie seems to have been overwhelmingly positive, which I am happy about. I will see the movie again and maybe my attitude will be different then.

I’d tried to tell myself that I’d have to buy a new car before I saw Star Trek, but that was a promise I couldn’t keep to myself, even if I am scared to drive my car anywhere because I don’t know what might happen. Maybe that was a mistake, because as I watched the movie, I couldn’t help thinking, “This was not worth risking my life over.”

As I was in the theater, I also felt a desire to watch “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” again, which was possibly a not a good sign. I looked up the movie on Amazon afterwards and discovered that it, along with all the other Star Trek movies, have been discontinued by the manufacturer. What the hell is up with that? How does it make sense to discontinue all these movies when there’s a new movie out and presumably more people will be interested in seeing them? Is that some sick way of boosting demand or just poor thinking? There was a car I was planning on buying, but someone beat me to it, but I was more upset about these movies being out of print than I was about that. Maybe that goes to show how out of whack my priorities are.