Star Trek or not Star Trek?

That is the question.

And the fans of the old series (and all of its clones) and the new fans of this latest voyage are having at it on the blogs and bulletin boards and news sites.

My daughter and I went to see the new movie last night. It was fast-paced, blurry, loud, bright and had plot-holes big enough to drive a starship through.

With all the millions of credits spent on great casting, fabulous sets and special effects, it was a break in the super-reality chain-of-logic to see the "engineering room" of the spiffy'd-up Enterprise and find out that the ship runs on twentieth-century fluidics. That's my theory, at least, because it looked like a water-recycling plant. Scotty deserves a nicer place to work. The new place was no particular improvement over his research lab on Delta Vega.

Yup, that's my singular gripe. One set. (More likely, a cheap location.) It just slapped me in the face and whacked me out of my pretend command chair in the multiplex pocket theater.

All the rest of the stuff, you can explain away to the inevitable paradoxes of yet another well-worn Star Trek time-travel story - this one at least leaving us with some new, dark twists in the trekiverse. We were overdue for some new imagination. No real complaint there.

(Well, I might gripe about the twentieth time that the cinematographer flashed halogens in my eyes instead of letting me see what was happening between the characters.)

Other than that, I'm on board with Scotty, whose show-stopping line at the very wrongest moment made it all the more wonderful:

"I like this ship! It's exciting!"