Star Trek: Horizon

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.