Star Trek: Horizon

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.

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.

I suppose that it is unfair to judge Star Trek: Horizon by professional standards. Perhaps we have been spoiled by the excellence of Prelude To Axanar, Star Trek New Voyages and Star Trek Continues but I have begun to have high expectations for Trek fan films, perhaps unrealistically so.Those involved in the making of Star Trek: Horizon are , I assume, amateurs and probably cannot attain the professional standards of the aforementioned productions.

Excuses can be made for the poor acting and the fact that the film looks as though it was filmed through a dense fog, but there is no excuse for the completely unoriginal script. A good script should cost no more than a bad one. Horizon ( or should that be STH?) has a script that feels like a blatant rip off of previous Trek scripts with the elements put together in some semblance of order. That is simply not good enough. We loved Prelude To Axanar ( like the original Star Trek TV series) for their innovation. We adored Star Trek New Voyages and Star Trek Continues for their attention to atmosphere, tone and detail.

Mayve I'm being harsh but Star Trek:Horizon fails short in all these areas 3/10

If I had to rate this along side official Star Trek productions, I would say it falls right in the middle. Much better than the really bad official stuff, but not as good as some of the best Trek out there.

In fact, my only complaint has to do with the videography. There appears to be this ambient haze everywhere, especially inside of ships. I don't know if this is a result of green-screen usage, or just creative license. But I didn't like it. I kept thinking "Why is the ship always full of fog?" But it certainly wasn't a deal-breaker. Really a minor nit-pick more than anything.

The characters and acting seemed different from regular Star Trek, but not necessarily bad. In fact, I'd say these characters were more like real people.

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.