Star Trek!, originally uploaded by Michael Ong.

Visited Mint Museum of Toys today and chanced upon this in the shop.

Decided to get the whole series!

U.S.S Enterprise NCC-1701 to 1701-E (even including the future 1701-D)

U.S.S Promethues

U.S.S Farragut

Ship models from Furuta.

Can’t wait to assemble them next weekend!

Just got back from the gala screening! The 11th film to bear the Star Trek brand is definitely a modern rewrite with a brand new cast. There’s humor between the characters as they get to know each other for the first time and action scenes galore with very well done special effects (just that the lens flare was a tad too much at times).

We watched this movie from two very different perspectives, myself with the experience of watching TOS, TNG, VOY, DS9, ENT (at least twice of each episode, yes I’m a trek fan! ) and reading lots of fiction on the characters in storybook and comic form and YH who is totally new to the Star Trek franchise. I sat down to the movie hoping that they wouldn’t ruin all the years of history and came out feeling that perhaps its a good thing they had done a refresh. After all, the last seven years has been without a new trek movie or series being aired. The new Kirk (Chris Pine) is definitely reminiscent of Shatner’s Kirk with his swagger and all about the action character. Spock (both Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto) shine in their performance. The usual time travel trick allows them to interact and gives a nice twist to how the storyline has changed to accommodate the new cast and direction.

Some minor gripes would be perhaps after getting used to the clean, utilitarian design of the engine room, here we are shown a sprawling network of pipes and archways that looked more in place in a brewery. While it definitely added to the set design and lots of explosions, it felt very cluttered. The bridge with its brand new white tones made me wonder who would want to work in an environment that gave you constant white glare. And “red matter” for the plot device, did we just step into an Alias set (you know what I mean if you watch Alias)?

The villain in the show is the Romulans this time, though we only see a facet of them with Eric Bana being the sad, lonely and psychotic person who seeks revenge for future deeds. There has been many times when this has been done (Voyager’s Year Of Hell) so it’s nothing new as a plot. After Trek II Wrath of Khan, it would perhaps be hard to write another interesting villain but one can only hope with the new direction, we’ll see lots more quality Trek in the years to come.

J. J. Abrams’s new Star Trek is about to be shown on May 8th 2009. Today at  8.50pm we’re getting a special treat courtesy of omy.sg.

I’ve been a fan of J.J. Abram’s work like Alias for quite some time. When his name came up as the director of the new movie, it was definitely a piece of good news as I’ve felt that the recent movies and series (Enterprise) have lacked the excitement of what science fiction should be about. It has been a long wait since the last film Star Trek Nemesis in 2002!

After a delay in release on December 25th 2008, we’re finally getting to watch a new cast and well known Zachary Quinto (if you watch Heroes, you’ll know Sylar) as Spock, this should be greatest adventure of all time with the U.S.S. Enterprise.