And then the trailer hit. I don’t know if it was the fantastic
music, the awesome casting or the fact that it looked so freaking amazing that
brought tears to my eyes, but I will fully admit that I cried a little. Trek was coming back and it was going to
rock the fucking house! It did. It rocked hard.
Young, brash James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is left in charge of
the Enterprise after a vengeful Romulan (Eric Bana), who has traveled back in
time and altered history, kidnaps his captain (Bruce Greenwood) and destroys
the planet Vulcan. In order to rescue his colleague and stop an assault on
Earth, Kirk must learn to work with his by-the-book first officer Spock
(Zachary Quinto) and the rest of the crew in order to realize his true destiny.
If you don’t already know, this film takes place in an
alternate timeline in order to create its own unique continuity and not mess
with all that has come before it. It was a smart move to allow the filmmakers
the free reign to do whatever they wanted and tell any story they saw fit. It
worked.
Let’s talk about the casting. Chris Pine, who I had only
previously seen in a small part in Smokin’
Aces, is positively awesome as Kirk. He has the arrogant swagger and the
correct attitude to play this character and he kicks ass. Zachary Quinto is
also perfectly cast as Spock as well. After seeing him play such an awful
character on Heroes I was skeptical,
but he won me over completely. Karl Urban as McCoy, Zoe Saldana as Uhura, Simon
Pegg as Scotty, Anton Yelchin as Chekov and John Cho as Sulu – all great. Every
one of them brings something new to their role and I had no issues with their performances.
The villainous Romulan Nero is played by Eric Bana and he
looks like he’s having the time of his life. He gets himself so worked up at
some points during the story that I thought he would have an aneurism, but he
really took his part seriously and tried to make him sympathetic as well as
batshit crazy. He doesn’t eat the scenery like a Montalban or a Plummer, but he
has an intensity about him that makes him one of the better villains in the
series.
It’s Leonard Nimoy as Spock Prime, the older character from
the original timeline, who is the secret weapon in the casting department. His involvement
was based on the strength of the script he read and only signed on when it met
with his approval. He is fantastic as old Spock and gives the film a link to
the others as it blazes its own path. He also gives the film a classy feel. He
may be ancient, but he’s still a great actor.
Director J.J. Abrams, who at that time had made quite a name
for himself creating such popular television shows like Felicity, Alias and Lost, and a few years before directed
his first feature, Mission: Impossible III, was the target of a little bit of fan controversy upon announcing his
involvement since he claimed he “never liked Star Trek” and “was always more of a Star Wars fan”. That turned out to be a good thing because he
needed to be able to alter things in this franchise without any of the baggage
fandom would have brought with it, and in the end he made a movie that has the
action adventure feel of a (good) Star
Wars film but retains everything that make it Trek as well. He gets great performances out of his cast, instills a sense of fun that has been missing from these films for a decade or
so, gives the film a breakneck pacing structure and makes sure that everything
looks awesome and cool. He definitely was the right man for this job because he
makes the entire universe seem fresh and new, and spiced it up for modern
audiences that weren’t fans of the source material to begin with. It’s the most
accessible out of all the films and after Star
Trek’s release the property was red hot as never before.
The script by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Transformers, Fringe, Mission: Impossible
III) is reverential to the original series, but goes off on its own tangent
in creative and intelligent ways. The problem with it is, like with The Voyage Home and Insurrection before it, the dumb sense of humor. I should have
known it would be there since these guys wrote all the goofy stuff in the first
Transformers movie (they blame
Michael Bay for all the crap in Transformers:
Revenge of the Fallen which is why they didn’t return for the third film),
but I wasn’t prepared by how stupid it would be. Scotty being beamed into a
water tank and being sucked through a system of pipes? Kirk’s hands swelling up
to the size of cantaloupes? Sulu leaving the Enterprise’s parking brakes on? Some
of this stuff is ridiculously insulting and doesn’t belong in the film at all.
Another issue with the script are all the plot holes and
nonsensical rules established. Example - Spock creates a black hole in the
future to swallow up the energy of a sun that has gone supernova and threatens
to destroy the galaxy. This black hole also serves as a portal back in time. So
Spock was going to send all this destructive energy back into the past? Wouldn’t
that destroy the galaxy in the past? Do all the black holes created in the past
go back to the future or further into the past? Does that mean Vulcan was
sucked into the more distant past? Nero’s big plan is to destroy the Vulcan
home world and Earth because they couldn’t stop Romulus from being destroyed by
the shockwave in the future, and he thinks it will allow Romulus to become the
major superpower in the galaxy. Destroying Earth and Vulcan isn’t going to stop
that sun from going supernova. In fact his plan should have been to tell both
worlds that it will happen and to start working on a solution. But he’s mad
with grief so I let that go. Nero, who was a miner and not a scientist, knows
the exact time and place that Spock will emerge from the future into the past? And
why did Kirk get promoted to First Officer after he snuck aboard against
orders? Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Bullshit!
They did come up with some interesting variations on the
established canon, such as Spock and Uhura being romantically involved, Kirk’s
father being killed by Nero in the opening scene, Captain Pike becoming a father
figure to Kirk and the destruction of Vulcan. It kept me on my toes and I was
constantly looking forward to what detail they would alter next. But even though all these changes in the timeline had altered events, the same crew managed to come together on the Enterprise in spite of this. The idea that these characters were destined to work together was fascinating (sorry about the pun) to me. I also liked seeing how the seeds of friendship between Kirk and Spock began to grow. I had always wondered about that since they always seemed like complete opposites.
Regardless, the movie is fun and entertaining despite its
major flaws. Michael Giacchino composed a wonderfully catchy score, the special
effects are phenomenal and the action scenes are sweet as hell (love the
orbital skydiving and the warping into a debris field stuff). The set design,
while looking a little too “Made by Apple, Inc.” for the Enterprise bridge, is
all cool and sleek. I do have a little problem with the engine room looking
like a brewery and less like what we associate with that location, but it’s
negligible.
Abrams knocked it out of the park. Star Trek was a huge hit and made more money than any other film in
the series. Fans and non-fans alike were singing its praises, and Star Wars fans that were dismayed with
their franchise after the craptastic prequels suddenly started to drop their
unreasonable dislike for ours. Trek
was back in a big way. The future looked bright for my favorite science fiction
series.
3.5 out of 5
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