Picture: Sound: Extras: 
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Movie: Picture: Sound: Extras:
Even more surprising is that, with a few fits and start such as 2004's abortive six episode 'Star Trek: New Voyages', the quality has remained middling to high.
With the most recent Star Trek movie, it has gotten to more than 'High'. After some 97,000 votes, the 2009 movie stands at position 133 of the Internet Movie Database 'Top 250' list.
Anyone who wants to do a remake or a sequel or, as in this case, a prequel, should watch this movie to see how it's done. The main ingredient was respect for what had come before. By its nature, a respectful prequel must leave things as they were, otherwise what comes later in the fictional chronology makes no sense.
With Star Trek, Abrams and his team tell a story which veered impossibly into contradictions with the 560 other hours of Star Trek, yet finishes off leaving them plausible. In the meantime there is plenty of exceptionally classy camera and CGI work, along with a decent story-line, to make for a thrilling two hours.
But you won't get anywhere near what you should from this experience unless you have a big screen, a great surround system, and the Blu-ray version of this movie.
Whereas Harry Potter's movies, CGI intensive as they are, still preserve the overall softness of film in their final look, Star Trek gets super sharp resolution at every point on everything, whether filmed or created in the bowels of a computer. Consistency has been maintained between the two sources, so it merges together seamlessly and attractively. So while Harry Potter is a pleasant viewing experience, Star Trek is an exciting one, a thrilling one, with every pixel preserved in a generous 32.7Mbps MPEG4 AVC transfer. It is indeed one worth using to demonstrate your high-end system to everyone.
And so is the sound. It is this kind of movie that makes spending big on your subwoofer worthwhile. The levels of truly deep bass, especially in the opening battle, are prodigious.
The only extra on the main disc (aside from the commentary) is BD-Live access. As I write, that is limited to an RSS feed from NASA news. If Paramount follows its past practice, such as with Transformers, you can expect more BD-Live material to become available.
You also get a 'Digital Copy' capable of being loaded onto your computer or iPod or other compatible portable video device, and a second Blu-ray disc with over 220 minutes of full 1080p24 extras.
(Australian rating); Region Free
The following video bitrate graph was generated by BDInfo 0.5.3:
