simonpcpearson I suppose that it is unfair to judge Star Trek: Horizon by professional standards. Perhaps we have been spoiled by the excellence of Prelude To Axanar, Star Trek New Voyages and Star Trek Continues but I have begun to have high expectations for Trek fan films, perhaps unrealistically so.Those involved in the making of Star Trek: Horizon are , I assume, amateurs and probably cannot attain the professional standards of the aforementioned productions.Excuses can be made for the poor acting and the fact that the film looks as though it was filmed through a dense fog, but there is no excuse for the completely unoriginal script. A good script should cost no more than a bad one. Horizon ( or should that be STH?) has a script that feels like a blatant rip off of previous Trek scripts with the elements put together in some semblance of order. That is simply not good enough. We loved Prelude To Axanar ( like the original Star Trek TV series) for their innovation. We adored Star Trek New Voyages and Star Trek Continues for their attention to atmosphere, tone and detail.Mayve I'm being harsh but Star Trek:Horizon fails short in all these areas 3/10

Matthew Kresal 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.

FromDecatur As a Star Trek fan, this was a very satisfying film. It enlivened the universe of the Star Trek: Enterprise show without seeming weighed down by history as Enterprise was. It beautifully referenced the STNG show which featured Iconia.The plot had a lot of action balanced with human relationships in the finest Star Trek tradition. We had a sense of established relationships among the crew of Discovery. The Captain was an interesting character, with a balanced yet strong approach to command.In a good way, the film left me wanting more. I'd like to have seen the events leading up to the film and the events following the film with the Romulan War.

oscar-35 *Spoiler/plot- Star Trek: Horizon 2016. Galactic alien race works with StarFleet to solve a massive problem of the legendary Iconian benevolent race competes with a militaristic alien race for control of the known universe. *Special Stars- Fandom amateur & unknown performers, Paul Lang, Marc Bowers, Ryan Webber, Callie Bussell, Ashley Croft. *Theme- Scientific exploration of the galaxy is possible.*Trivia/location/goofs- internet fan donation project. fan video, online. *Emotion- While visually this project looks professional in it's massive and boring planetary and space flight scenes; the script dialog writing of huge amounts of necessary ex positional plot scenes make this show very slow stone-age, and plodding. What is worse is the project's writers have taken mind-numbing Star Trek 'technobabble' into dizzying lengths for the audience to follow. TOO long CGI shots to provide plot understanding and progress into this confusing plot video drama. Overuse of CGI generated 'lense-flare' and 'soft focus' is annoying to the viewer. The viewer is turned off to watching much more from this fan group. That much plot exposition has made this project hard for audience to get involved, understand and therefore boring for the viewer. Use of trendy 'flavor of the minute' gimmicks like artificial software lens flare makes this video unwatchable.*Based On- Star Trek 'Enteprise' era canon.