Star Trek: Horizon

I found this movie to be a worthy effort.

The GOOD: Considering it is crowdfunded, this movie is INCREDIBLE for the shoestring budget that it was made on, and a somewhat enjoyable viewing experience. If you are a fan of Star Trek, then check it out! Special effects are on par and done very well. The plot is well thought out and is intriguing.

The BAD: Some of the acting just isn't there... occasionally a line is delivered and I just sat there saying to myself "Huh". Some line just drop like a rock in the ocean. The seem out of place or lacking any real emotion.

Much of the filming on the "ship" itself leads me to believe that they don't have LED bulbs in the future... they might as well be filming in a cave, everything is SO Dark.

The UGLY: The script is spattered with lines that just don't feel right for Star Trek. Some of the Characters don't feel real, they are a cliché (perhaps more character development was necessary)... I feel like the script needed to be a bit more polished, and some of the acting just isn't on par with the big budget products.

Summary: All and all Star Trek - Horizon, is a worthy effort that is a decent story and worthy of your time if you can forgive some of the bad lines and characters that you just don't connect with. Would I have paid $8 to see this movie?? Probably not, but considering what it is, and how it was made, it is a decent movie.

I'm old enough to remember when Star Trek first came out, and I thought it was fantastic. I was ten years old and easy to impress. This movie has some of those same qualities, it looks cheap, sounds cheap and for what it is not a bad job overall.Yes it has its flaws but it also has its strengths. All in all not bad, considering.

Filled with errors and stilted dialogue, this effort by fans is laudable in its vision. But shaky cam and haze doesn't a good film make.

Star Trek: Horizon lacks the grandeur of the feature films: there is no grand stage and Shakespeare feel. What made ST: TWOK great isn't here. There isn't a cracked mirror to see ourselves make things worse: there are ill-fitting uniforms, wooden performances and a very weak enemy. The Romulan Admiral shows how a twenty-something might react to adversity, and probably because the actor playing him is still in his teens.

Here's an example of poor writing: Captain Whatsisname orders the crew to abandon ship. But of course, no one does.

The ship is out of the fracas: shaky cam is still shivering, swaying and generally producing mal-de-mer.

The film would have been better to curb the enthusiasm, spend a little more time on plot, story and dialogue. Who's at fault? The director of course. It *looks* OK on the surface mostly. The CGI effects are compelling, the sets look good, the sound is mostly good. But there is no reason to go beyond the first forty minutes.

Lucky for us it's a freebie.

Having watched quite a few Trek fan productions, I didn't hold out much hope for this film. It was a pleasant surprise to be able to sit down and watch it from start to finish without any real pain. The special effects are very good. No out-of-perspective CGI, some top-notch cosmology, and an overall nice look that fits beautifully in the Trek Enterprise universe. The "smokey" ship background that some have complained about didn't bother me at all. It was really just a bit of soft-focus designed to disguise some prop flaws and low-budget backdrops... a pretty standard strategy for made-on-a- shoestring flicks.

The acting was a bit wooden at times, as might be expected from amateurs. It wasn't great, but never dipped to MST3K standard. Paul Lang's Capt. Hawke reminded me a bit of Avery Brooks' Captain Sisko. He just didn't fit the classic rugged Starfleet captain mold. That said, he was by no means a disaster.

Most Trekkers will be familiar with the plot. We've seen it all before in bits and pieces. Overall it was nicely assembled and had plenty of action to keep things moving along. As they say, saved the Universe... again.

This is not a great film, but it does show up some of the big-budget flops that seem to occasionally pollute the Star Trek pantheon. It may not be official Trek, but it is pretty darn good.

It's hard to decide what rating to assign to this Kickstarter-funded Star Trek fan film. The fact that it's been done on an absolute shoe-string budget by commercial Hollywood standards plus that the crew and cast are amateurs means that one is inclined to be generous with the critique.

However, a movie deserves an honest review no matter who made it and I wouldn't want to be generous to the point of patronising.

Given the humble resources from which it was created, this is really quite a good film. Okay yes, the acting is a little awkward and the dialogue a bit stilted. But lest we forget, some of the original Star Trek cast were a bit hammy (I'm looking at you, Shatner). It also has a tiny cast, so you don't really get the sense of Starfleet...more a sort of Starsquad. Overall, though, it's a huge leap forward from earlier fan film efforts.

Unsurprisingly, the film relies heavily on CGI just like its commercial cousins. What is surprising is that it's mostly quite well done, especially the spacecraft. Mostly.

By far, by a veritable country mile, the worst thing about this movie is that it's absolutely saturated with lens flares and an almost constant soft-focus haze - perhaps to help disguise the imperfections in the background CGI or scenery? From what I could tell in the few scenes where the blur and lens flares weren't dialled up to eleven, it still looked okay so I really think it was a mistake to go so overboard with the visual distortions.

This is especially unfortunate because this movie almost...almost...had me suspending belief and becoming immersed but the god-awful continued glare and flare visual overlays just kept breaking the mood.

Final verdict? A flawed but nonetheless very impressive fan film. I doff my hat to Tommy Kraft, his cast and crew.