Star Trek

Star Trek (***1/2)

Reviving old franchises with new movies is very much in vogue right now, and so it likely didn't come as much of a surprise to anyone when it was announced that a new Star Trek movie was in the works featuring new actors stepping into the shoes of the original crew. Less predictable, perhaps, was the manner in which it would return. Not quire a full Batman Begins or Casino Royale style "reboot," the movie instead uses a time-travel plot device to keep the story in the same "universe" as the original series, while changing the circumstances by which the crew came together, and, in one case, actually having a character meet his older self. Directed by J. J. Abrams-- who has seemingly become a household name now with the massive successes of his brainchild "Lost", and another big event movie, Cloverfield--the movie sets aside a lot of the technobabble, space-archaeology, and long-winded philosophical and ethical debates that often seem to go hand-in-hand with the series. In their place, he sets up a much louder, more action-oriented, more confrontational, and more operatic movie than we're used to seeing under the Star Trek moniker. Still, the movie is aware of the history that its building on (or, I guess, rewriting in this case), and while I imagine many of the die-hards who have been dressing up as Spock at conventions for the last 20 years will be put off by the movie's more simplistic, less science-y veneer, I thought that it struck more or less the right balance, and I think most others will as well. Its certainly entertaining.

The movie opens aboard a Federation ship that James Kirk's father, George, is serving on. James Kirk's mother is elsewhere on the ship, busy giving birth to him, when a giant Romulan ship appears seemingly out of nowhere and opens fire. Romulan's demand that the ship's captain come aboard their ship via a transport shuttle, and so the elder Kirk is left in charge in his absence. The captain doesn't come back alive, and so George Kirk is left in command, and goes down with the ship, going a good enough job of stalling to allow the rest of the ship's passengers, including his wife and just-born son to escape. We flash forward a few years later, and see that James Tiberius Kirk was quite the rebellious child, as he goes joyriding in his step-fathers car in a scene that will probably go down as the only time in Star Trek history that the Beastie Boys have been featured. Eventually, as he reaches physical if perhaps not mental adulthood, Kirk meets Captain Pike, the soon to be helmsman of the newly completed Starship Enterprise, after getting into a barfight with a bunch of his cadets. We get the somewhat cliched "Yeah, you're a reckloose, but I know there's potential in you because I know who your father was" conversation, and Kirk eventually agrees to join Starfleet Acadamy. In the meantime, on Vulcan, a young Spock makes a similar decision to join Starfleet, declining an invitation into a prestigious vulcan science guild, mainly because he was tired of being chided about how being half-human made him somehow weaker. Throw in a Bones McCoy, an Uhura, and a Checkov along the way (it takes a little while longer for Scotty to show up) and voila, you have the original Enterprise crew.

How closely the new interpretations of these characters matches the original varies from actor to actor. Chris Pine gives Kirk some of that certain swagger and brashness that he had in the old series, but stops short of trying to emulate William Shatner's oft-parodied "I'm going to put emphasis on whatever the hell words I want to in a sentence and you can't stop me" manner of speaking. Zachary Quinto, probably best known as playing Sylar on "Heroes" looks a lot like a young Leonard Nimoy, but gives Spock a certain arrogance to his whole "everything I do is dictated by logic" routine that I don't think was there before. Karl Urban, on the other hand, pretty much just tries to be the living embodiment of DeForest Kelly's old Bones McCoy, playing up all of his mannerisms to the fullest, from his inquisitive raised eye-brows, to his seemingly constant manic, bug-eyed, "I'm one step away from flipping out" demeanor. I think its almost too much, and when McCoy intentionally drugs Kirk to sneak him aboard a mission that he's supposed to be banned from, the movie becomes as slapstick as Star Trek has ever been, but damn is it fun to watch. The movie's villian is Nero (Eric Bana): the Romulan captain of the ship from the beginning of the film, who comes back 25 years later after killing Kirk's father to again do battle with a ship that Kirk wasn't supposed to be captain of but eventually ends up being just that. Nero is really only developed enough to explain what his motivations are, and certainly will not ever be mentioned in the same sentence as the nigh-universally agreed upon ultimate Trek villan Khan (or should I say KHAAAAAAAN). Said motivations have to do with the future destruction of his home-world Romulus, the circumstances of with don't really make a whole lot of sense. Really, Nero's whole plan doesn't make a whole lot of sense either in that it doesn't really solve the initial problem of his planet going kaput, and I guess it just has to be assumed that he's really pissed off and too blinded by revenge to really think things out. Nero is somewhat intriguing in the beginning of the film when he's cloaked in mystery, but as is so often the case, he becomes less interesting of a villain as we see more of him, and there really isn't all that much interesting to see here.

A whole bunch of the old series' oft-used elements show up here, presumably mostly meant as homages; thrown in with a wink and a nod. Kirk messes around with a voluptuous green-skinned alien woman, a redshirt gets killed as part of a dangerous away team mission while all the major characters survive, McCoy has at least three variations of "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor!" that I counted, and Scotty even throws in an "I've given 'er all she's got Cap'n!" As I said earlier, though, a lot of the heady, long-winded asides that Star Trek has been known to delve in to, especially once it reached the "Next Generation" era, are pretty much absent here. I'm not necessarily sad that they're gone, as even though they were interesting when they were done well, they often detracted from the suspense of the main plot (would you be more interested in a climactic battle with the borg, or a meandering debate on how best to interpret the Prime Directive?) I think sometimes, though, J. J. Abram's vision goes too far in the other direction, mostly content to settle into the "a wizard did it!!" mentality, as ships are sucked into black holes and characters haphazardly jump around in space-time. Whereas George Lucas created Star Wars to basically be a tribute to old swashbuckling adventure movies that took the tried and true formula from said movies and put it in the setting of outer space, Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek was always somewhat grounded in science, even if it was fictional science. I'm not sure that Abrams's pretty simplistic movie really holds true to that vision. With that said, if you don't own a mint-in-box Spock action figure that you bought at a Star Trek convention in 1983, you might not really give a damn about all that and just want to see an entertaining movie. The 2009 iteration of Star Trek--in all its loud, bombastic glory--is very much just that.