Star Trek: Horizon (2016)

I was ready to stop watching this Star Trek fan film from some of the reviews I read. I suggest giving this film a chance. The pacing, attention to detail, and technical film-making ability made the 101 minutes of this film go by pretty quickly. I found myself enjoying the acting of these people. It is sometimes more interesting to have people who look like "regular" folk tell us the story, which in this case was a good story with some weight to it. It was all put together with a good eye. I recommend this film. The makers should be proud of their work.

Ah fan films. With the rise of crowdfunding, affordable high quality cameras and the ability to create CGI effects on one's own computer (or to find someone else who could do it) the last decade or so has seen the rise of this genre of fan works. Perhaps the most notable franchise to have seen this proliferation is Star Trek which was essentially being kept alive by fan films after Enterprise finished its TV run and in-between entries in the rebooted film series. While things like New Voyages and indeed Star Trek Continues have been doing excellent recreations and pastiches of the Original Series, they seemed to really be going where that series had gone before though they got better over time. What I suppose I really craved as a life long Trekkie was for the Trek universe to be expanded upon, not just recreated in all of its original glory. Hence why I found Star Trek: Horizon so intriguing when I stumbled back across it recently having heard of it some months ago. I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw.Horizon is set during the Romulan War, a much talked about piece of Trek's history that has never been explored on-screen. Set not long after the TV series Enterprise finished, the fan film focuses on the NX-01's sister ship the Discovery in the midst of that conflict. The ship and her crew led by Captain Hawke, after surviving a battle in the film's opening minutes, are sent on a mission to take out a new Romulan weapon that could turn the tide of the war. Their mission leads the crew, which also includes a Romulan defector, to a bigger threat to the Coalition of Planets and the future of Earth.Being a fan of Enterprise (that ill-regarded prequel series filled with great ideas but which took four years to find its feet and lost its audience along the way), the idea of a fan film set during its era and the Romulan War appealed to me. Tommy Kraft, the film's writer/director, has created a love letter to that series in every way possible in creating this movie length spin-off of Enterprise dealing not just with the Romulan War but tying up a lose end or two from that series as well. If you're aware of that series and some of its bigger plot lines, there's plenty to enjoy here plot wise as Kraft creates a compelling story. The dialogue, which can often be tricky for fan films, is good most of the time (though a couple of times it gets a bit too involved in technobabble). It's a prime example of good fan film writing.Horizon is also visually impressive, something even more surprising given its budget of about $22,000. The film is a a mix between Enterprise and the reboot films with the costumes and sets of the former being central to the film (and recreated spectacularly) while the cinematography and overall visual style of Horizon draw heavily from the reboots. Indeed there's a sequence involving Hawke and the villain's eventual villain that owes more than a small debt to the mind-meld sequence form the 2009 film. That's not all though.Where the film is most impressive is in its effects. The ship exteriors and the battle sequences are top-notch and might well be the best I've seen in any of the fan productions I've watched to date with the film's opening fifteen to twenty minutes especially being a visual feast. Where the visuals are perhaps less impressive is in the film's sometimes over-reliance on green screen which can become obvious at times as the film was shot almost entirely that way. That being said, those moments are few and far between and the film's visuals are amongst its strongest selling points. Indeed, Horizon is even more impressive by that small budget. Despite that small budget, it's an impressive effort which puts many bigger budgeted films to shame. For a fraction of the budget of a SyFy, the film looks and flows far better than many of those films or their straight to DVD counterparts. It's a sign of what low- budget genre films that can do and I find myself hoping that Kraft goes on to future projects. For now though, if you're a Trekkie look this up and give a watch.

This is a film made on a very low budget compared to other Star Trek movies. I was very impressed with this movie and with the way it was made and produced Sadly I found it was let down severely by the dialogue; (The way that Captain Harrison Hawke communicates with his crew really was not in my opinion the way of a Star Trek captain, there just did not seem that authoritative tone). That being said this was a good film with good effects and acting and if it was not for the aforementioned dialogue I would have rated this a lot higher. Well done to everyone involved this was a great fan made film and I am sure future projects will be even better than this one.

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.