I loved the new Star Trek movie as an entertainment and as a spectacle, but not as RPG inspiration. As a long time sci-fi nerd and science fiction role-playing games aficionado I was a little hesitant about seeing a JJ Abram’s Star Trek, he often does dark and brooding rather than the whiz-bang and witty of star Trek, but it was great. The script was tongue in cheek without being disrespectful, the acting was great and the characters were true to the original, but even though I was entertained, my sci-fi nerd soul wasn’t nourished. It was a sugary snack of a sci-fi movie and there was no meat to sink my science fiction role-playing game designer and illustrator teeth into.
The plot was quite lame, good enough to keep the action coming and give the characters situations that show off the tensions between them, but nothing that would inspire even a single session of a sci-fi role playing game like Traveller. There was no real new equipment to copy, and the idea that a mining spaceship – even one from the future – could waltz up to Vulcan and, leaving fleets of wrecked defensive spaceships in its wake, destroy the whole planet was hard to swallow.
The set design was terrible, the inside of the spaceships looked terrible; the Enterprise had angle point lamps on the desks for goodness sake. The interiors of the original Enterprise looked much more memorable and futuristic than this incarnation. The engine rooms of the new Enterprise were especially unbelievable as a starship engineering section, where the original was a giant chamber with huge forces being kept in check the new spaceship engine room was a dingy little place where chemicals are mixed in plastic pipes.
The Enterprise itself was looking a little squat an uninspiring. A fat rounded porcelain thing that looked almost like a toilet. The bad guys were the other extreme. Water sloshing about on the floor of their pitch dark spaceship. Everything spiky and evil looking. The giant energy beam that cut to the core of planets, a little platform that dangled on a string. Completely over the top, but like I said, a great film.
