Media Blog

Sunday, May 17, 2009 – Star Trek
I’m no fanboy on the subject of Star Trek – I didn’t care for Voyager but loved Enterprise, the latter brought me back – but this really is the first time Star Trek has felt right in years, if not decades.
Star Trek
Scored (4 of 5) * * * * Seen 10 May 2009
Talking with fellow fans, I thought that a fun thing for Paramount to do for Star Trek’s thirtieth anniversary would be to make a new movie, with new people playing the familiar characters but a modern production. Many people believe that there shouldn’t be any more than that, because The Original Series was by far the best.
They have gone back to the beginning to tell a first chapter which had never appeared on film, and focused on the things that made these worlds appealing in the first place. And as good as those other two movies are, the process is especially revelatory for Star Trek: Batman and James Bond have been kept in an enforced stasis, but Star Trek had allowed forty years of details to accumulate, and it achieved a astounding level of solemnity that was not in the original. Aside from how the sequel series converted ideals into dogma, there is in retrospect, something very wrong about how the features made a show about boldly going forward into aging, death and obsolescence.
Writters and director J.J. Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman Opened with the moments leading to James T. Kirk’s birth as a Romulan ship emerges from an anomaly with its captain, Nero (Eric Bana), demanding to speak to “Ambassador Spock”. The U.S.S. Kelvin and its first officer George Kirk, hold Nero back. We’re then see scenes of Kirk’s son James and the half-human, half-Vulcan Spock as children and adolesents, taking their paths to the Starfleet Academy, where Kirk makes friends with Dr. Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban). Word of a crisis on Spock’s home planet forces Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) and Commander Spock to crew the newley completed starship Enterprise with junior officers and cadets, including Kirk, McCoy, Helmsman Sulu (John Cho), 17-year-old whiz kid Pavel Chekov (Anton Yelchin), and xenolinguist Uhura (Zoe Saldana). When they arrive they discover that Nero is back and the stakes are high.
At this point they announce that the familiar future history of Star Trek is no longer set in stone. This will definitely annoy some fans, but it gets the franchise back to where it started in the 60’s when Gene Roddenberry and crew were making it up as they went. Abrams and crew restore that sense of recklessness and it pairs a good match to their main character.
Chris Pine captures that part of Kirk. His Kirk isn’t the same as William Shatner’s – but he’s still young and headstrong, overestimating himself, a cocky yet mature man. Whether he’s being cunning or foolhardy Kirk is decisive, but can afford to be because he’s got the brains and charisma. Zachary Quinto’s Spock is the same way, although overt self-examination to him. He does what’s expected, keeping his emotions in check, as the Vulcans favor logic above all else, he also has Spock’s dry sarcasm right (others playing Vulcans have had a hard time with the just short of smug part).
The cast does a good job of recreating the characters. Karl Urban’s McCoy is by far the closest to his predecessor. For all Urban’s McCoy complaining, he’s also excited about his fresh start and the potential for adventure. Yelchin and Saldana perhaps make characters who mainly were seat warmers in the 60’s more memorable this time around, although John Cho seems to have been left in the background. Simon Pegg adds a good late boost as Scotty, and Bruce Greenwood a mentor figure as Pike. Eric Bana is sort of all over the map as Nero and it’s not just that much of his backstory has been off-loaded into a comic book tie-in, but Bana sometimes seems unsure of Nero’s role as fierce or laid-back, a working-class guy thrown into super villainy by circumstance.
The original series star Leonard Nimoy is here, as an aged Spock, lending a little more legitimacy. It’s clear that, although they are aiming for new and modern, the filmmakers are being careful not to mess with the formula too much, which has worked for forty plus years. They keep things moving along at a brisk enough pace.
This is the first bit of Star Trek filmed in my lifetime that feels like the original. It’s fast-paced, sexy, funny, full of excitement and adventure. The various incarnations of Star Trek have some good and bad things, but it’s been a while since it’s been this unpredictable.
Labels: action, sci-fi, Star Trek

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