The Movie: I love Star Trek: The Next Generation, and yet, I'd never seen this movie before, but by all accounts, it's one of the worst Star Trek movies ever made. But hey, I had to see it anyway, right?

The basic premise is that through some sort of time anomaly, Captain Kirk of the original Star Trek series appears 78 years in the future in the time of Captain Picard and the rest of the Next Generation crew. Together, they battle the bad guy and save millions of lives.

Truthfully, this movie had its moments. Seeing Data's first experience with the emotion chip for instance. Some parts of this movie even made me chuckle. But many parts of this movie just had me asking "why!?"

What was with the lighting on the Enterprise-D? Did Starfleet make some kind of new directive that everyone now has to work and live with the lights turned off? Is it some sort of energy conservation thing? I dunno, but I don't know why they had the lights off all the time. They lived by the light of a nearby star that sent shafts of yellow light beaming in through each window, leaving sharp shadows everywhere. Maybe it made dramatic sense, maybe not, but it certainly didn't make any common sense.

And man. I'm sorry original series fans, but William Shatner is such a horrible actor. I almost wanted to puke when Patrick Stewart as Picard acted like he was in such awe of meeting William Shatner as Kirk. I was sitting there going "dude, why are you tripping all over yourself like that? You're like 10,000 times the actor that guy is!"

And the ending was somewhat... anti-climatic. I mean, when Kirk and Picard finally foil the bad guy's plans, the film just did not effectively convey that hundreds of millions of lives were just at stake. And can we say ///WORST DEATH SCENE EVAR!!!??

But anyway. It was still an OK movie, but really falls short of the Star Trek: The Next Generation standard, if you ask me.

The DVD: This is a pretty horrible DVD. The video transfer was OK quality, but 2.35:1 non-anamorphic widescreen. Can we say "lets use only 57% of the available vertical resolution" anyone? The audio was pretty good though, delivering a good subwoofer wallop every time the Enterprise(s) got walloped by weapons and cosmic forces. And special features? What special features? Not even a trailer. Or cast bios. Absolutely nothing. But it seems like Paramount is slowly going through and redoing their Star Trek movie DVDs, starting with Star Trek: The Motion Picture and soon Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I suppose that eventually they'll get to this one too.