Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation |
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Collection published: 2010 Acquired: June 2021 Read: October 2025 |
I spent some time late last year into early this year reading my way through the various "Kelvin timeline" comics and novels. Some of them I reviewed on the TrekBBS, though I fell behind. But what I never got around to doing was posting those reviews here. So, finally, time to do it!
I was kind of worried about this book going in; in my experience, most comics adaptations of films are not up to much, often reading as a condensed version of a story optimized for a different medium.
To my surprise, then, scripters Mike Johnson & Tim Jones and artist
David Messina deliver a pretty strong retelling of the 2009 film. I
mean, it won't knock your world alight, but it does a good job of
hitting the beats of the story via the medium of comics. Probably this
is at least partially because it's been given a whole six issues, so
(mostly) it's not too compressed. But also Johnson/Jones/Messina have
good pacing instincts, sometimes piling a lot of panels into a single
page, sometimes using double-page spreads in order to capture a key
moment. Clearly also some thought was put into putting issue endpoints
at key moments, so that each issue works as a unit.
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| from Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation #5 (art by David Messina & Claudia Balboni and Gaetano Carlucci) |
The result is an adaptation that reads fairly genuinely as a comic. It's probably at its best when covering the earlier parts of the story; it's not until the end of issue #3 that Nero's attack begins, so the early parts of the book have a lot of space to unfold key moments like the destruction of the Kelvin or the reveal of the Enterprise in space. On the other hand, moments like Kirk's and Spock's fight on the bridge are given numerous panels on a single page, really giving them an impact.
Indeed, issue #4 is probably the one compression hurt the most; the drill battle is just not interesting in this format, with key moments like Sulu's unfolding sword going by too quick to leave an impression, and I found the death of Amanda way too rushed to give it the import it needed, and then the issue's final panel, weirdly, does not clearly communicate the destruction of Vulcan. The unnecessary Galaxy Questeseque second climax of the film, where the Enterprise is almost pulled into a black hole, comes across as even more unnecessary here.
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| from Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation #4 (art by David Messina & Claudia Balboni and Gaetano Carlucci) |
This is the first in a series of posts about the Kelvin timeline Star Trek comics (and novels). The next installment covers More Beautiful than Death.
