The New/Alternate Generation

Rating: 8/10 (7 May 2009)

JJ Abrams is a smart director - at the least smart enough to know what makes the original Star Trek show from the 60s, as well as the movies at their best (see Wrath of Khan thru Voyage Home), appeal so strongly to everyone from hardcore trekkies to just your average TV or movie-going public at large. It's a good script. Smart, actually, enough to try and give some new ideas or at least give us some characters to give a damn about. In his revised version of Star Trek he starts at the beginning, only an alternate beginning: it's still Kirk, Spock, "Bones" McCoy, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov and (for a little while) Scotty, but there's some slight changes, alterations in the lineage thanks to a meddlesome, incredibly ticked-off Romulan.
In this case Abrams and the writers, Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzmann, get to have their cake and eat it in terms of story and character development; they can reboot a franchise right from the start but with some extra surprises. And because it treats time travel with a fresh perspective - you may be confused at first as to why Spock appears not only as his young self played by Zachary Quinto AND as the (formerly) one-and-only played by Leonard Nimoy - there's no limit to what can occur in a franchise that is only beholden to the original in terms of staying true to the characters, their methods and personalities, and the essential things that make Trek what it is with its ships, the federation, Klingons and Romulans, Vulcan, everything. It's a truly inspired screenplay written by people who love the show, and want to get right to the heart of the big behemoth to see what makes it tick.
If there are any complaints they're mostly minor, in terms of technical things. Abrams, who's only previous film was the third Mission: Impossible feature, isn't always assured during the fight scenes and cuts around a little too fast and jagged to always take. There's also a pet-peeve that one can have with lens flare (you may know what it is, in layman's terms it's that blue and other colored light that comes in horizontal lines, of which in this film I lost count), which became I assume an artistic choice as opposed to a flaw, one that didn't serve the movie really well. And while it's definitely a step up for Abrams in getting top-notch performances, especially from young actors who are definitely getting their biggest breaks yet here (albeit some are already stars and character actors, some unknown by me), there's a treatment to the direction in the movement of it that is somewhat akin to TV. Sometimes this is not a bad thing in the slightest; whenever scenes out in space were shown, in big battles or otherwise, it was fantastic, spectacular footage, by far the best in the entire franchise. As for "dutch" angles and rapid-fire camera movements...
But I digress, what most people will be concerned to know is: are these new kids the real deal? Do they fill in the shoes of iconic pop-culture figures like James T. Kirk and Spock and everyone else on the Enterprise? Without a doubt, they all rise to the challenge. Chris Pine is Kirk without having to submit to a Shatner imitation (save, arguably, for a couple of scenes like when he hits on girls or is doing the Kobayashi Maru test), and he makes Kirk his own through and through; he makes me thoroughly excited to see where he'll go in this rebooted series. Ditto for Quinto, who brings his own calm and intensity to a Spock that needs to rise up to meet his elder form right in front of him at one point. Others like Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, (of course) Simon Pegg and John Cho, they're all a pleasure to see not taking over roles as imitations, but just being themselves as the characters.
So, Star Trek, this revised edition is up to the standards of a franchise that can concern itself with action and suspense and adventure, but is also as much character driven as it is with story. No matter what quibbles I might have with certain aesthetic choices, this is the best we've seen from this diluted and over-exposed franchise (I mean Trek in general, through all of its re-incarnations of Next Gen and Deep Space 9) since its previous hey-day in the 1980s. It's fresh, exciting, funny, and has smart action to go with its package.