It really is breathtaking awful. At least Nemesis had production value, Into Darkness could be somewhat entertaining if you ignored absolutely everything under the surface and Final Frontier had ambition and some great character scenes. This has that tacky CGI-artificial look, drowning the scene in garish colour filters and naff visual effects: it looks so fake, it wouldn't surprise me were 90% of it shot on a green screen. The direction and editing are choppy at their best, incoherently slicing scenes up one suspects in part to disguise the undercooked fight choreography and the lethargy with which it is performed. Michelle Yeoh is one of the great movie martial artists, but she's getting old and clearly can't do this stuff at a watchable pace anymore. The dialogue is as dense with sub-Marvel quips as the worst of New Trek, the plot and characters as rote as conceivable, which the performances might even make worse: again, I have enormous respect for Michelle Yeoh, but her hamming every line up at the beginning only heightens how lame and tone-deaf her lines are, and her going camp at the beginning clashes aggressively with the moments when the audience is expected to emotionally connect with her (deploying, once again, the most tired backstory tropes going). Jeff Russo's music is as flavourless as ever and at times deployed very strangely, with moments where there should be music falling silent, only to have it arbitrarily pop back in a moment later.
If this isn't quite as horrendous as Picard S1 - in that it's so disconnected from anything recognisably Star Trek that its edgelordiness is easily dismissed with many eyerolls, whereas the first season of Picard revelled in using Trek's history to show absolute contempt if not outright loathing for the values which made all the classic series' so beloved - it's running close, which is as great an indictment as you'll get from me (Picard S1 might be the only piece of media whose existence I actively resent). There's not a single redeeming factor in here, doubling down on everything that has made Kurtzmann Trek so dreadful and partially redeemed only by the fact it's so forgettable that it will hopefully have entirely vanished from my memory by tomorrow. Oh, and just to drop the last turd in the punchbowl, there's a cameo by a slumming celebrity at the end, embarrassing in and of itself but doubly so when you realise it implies someone thought this dreck deserved a sequel - I almost said 'would get' a sequel there, but with quality as barrel-scraping across the board as it is, the scary thing is it's not totally out of the question.
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for years, hopefully the new owners clean this crap up.
