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.

Having watched quite a few Trek fan productions, I didn't hold out much hope for this film. It was a pleasant surprise to be able to sit down and watch it from start to finish without any real pain. The special effects are very good. No out-of-perspective CGI, some top-notch cosmology, and an overall nice look that fits beautifully in the Trek Enterprise universe. The "smokey" ship background that some have complained about didn't bother me at all. It was really just a bit of soft-focus designed to disguise some prop flaws and low-budget backdrops... a pretty standard strategy for made-on-a- shoestring flicks.The acting was a bit wooden at times, as might be expected from amateurs. It wasn't great, but never dipped to MST3K standard. Paul Lang's Capt. Hawke reminded me a bit of Avery Brooks' Captain Sisko. He just didn't fit the classic rugged Starfleet captain mold. That said, he was by no means a disaster.Most Trekkers will be familiar with the plot. We've seen it all before in bits and pieces. Overall it was nicely assembled and had plenty of action to keep things moving along. As they say, saved the Universe... again.This is not a great film, but it does show up some of the big-budget flops that seem to occasionally pollute the Star Trek pantheon. It may not be official Trek, but it is pretty darn good.

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.

iv watched horizon three times now and i get more impressed with it the more i watch itjust thick of it just you (and i mean just you not you and a army of people) did this film and that means the CGI the editing the filming the costumes and all the rest that went into making the film on a meager $22,000 i Dir you to do better i don't think i cud now people have commented on the scripted and acting well iv seen worst original star trek,star trek the next generation,star trek deep space 9,star trek voyager and star trek enterprise and lets be honest the acting's not that bad even if its for freenow the tecknow babel this is just nick picking they comment on some thing then leave it up to you to work it out just think of it hes giving the people that watch it to us there imagination and not treating us as being thick