Exactly What Star Trek Needed

Rating: 8/10 (8 May 2009)

Sometime around the midpoint of Star Trek, the characters stand on the bridge of the Enterprise discussing the implications of living in an alternate universe, and what their lives might have been like had Captain Nero and the Narada not interfered with the timeline.
The inside knowledge of the characters gives them the intelligence to understand that this is not how things are supposed to be, but that (with the advice of the elder Spock), maybe things are destined to work out a certain way in any eventuality.
But for all of this ingenuity in setting the stage, Star Trek still has to tell a dramatic story, and it mostly succeeds in doing so.
Nero and Ambassador Spock have been catapulted back in time roughly 100 years, after succeeding in stopping a massive supernova, but failing to save Nero's home planet Romulus from destruction. That's the extent of the understanding required of the time travel plot. The rest is motivated purely by revenge by the grief-maddened Nero, and it's interesting that Nero is in many ways a sympathetic – although completely psychotic – villain. He's not evil. He's insane. A working man who's family was destroyed by a mistake he interprets as apathy or conspiracy.
Gene Roddenberry's original intentions for Star Trek – for Captain April of the USS Yorktown in the late 1950s to early 1960s – was an adventure show with a moral or allegorical undertone that could be exciting, believable enough from a science standpoint, but most of all, entertaining. Roddenberry felt that if it wasn't important for Joe Friday to explain how his revolver worked on Dragnet, it shouldn't be important for Captain April to explain how his phaser worked; its function should be evident in the way the characters reacted to it. In that respect, prevalence of the technology was less important that telling a story about believable characters in an exciting adventure with some kind of subtext.
This Star Trek is light on the allegory, but the subtext remains in spades.
Most affected are James Kirk and Spock, who's lives are irrevocably changed by Nero's actions.
In this reality, Kirk's father is killed in the moment of Kirk's birth, and instead of an upwardly mobile young man, we see a rebel with the duality of being the genius and leader he was born to be. An undisciplined, cocky miscreant with the swagger and mental ability of a great commander. The conflict and contrast here provides a meaningful portrait of someone struggling against destiny, and moreso than with any other character, studies the theories of nature vs nurture. "James T. Kirk was a great man, but that was another life," Nero suggests at one point in the film, but by the third act we see the shiftless and reckless rebel maturing into the Captain Kirk he was perhaps destined to become by any means.
Opposite Kirk is Spock. Spock's struggles are initially internal, a fight to reconcile the two halves of his physiology – the emotional, passionate human, and the logical, stoic Vulcan. Spock's conflict becomes external when his home planet Vulcan is destroyed by Nero, his species of people wiped out, and his mother killed. How Spock comes to terms with his conflicts is as central to the story as Kirk's.
And then there's adventure, which there is certainly plenty of, thanks to state of the art and expertly executed practical and CGI effects. Perhaps as importantly, the action sequences are well framed and well paced, so the film never feels so fast you can't keep up, nor so confusing you can't tell who's doing what. This is not an easy thing to accomplish, even for a veteran director.
Not everything is perfect, however. Some of the camera work, while inventive, can be disorienting, specifically some of the spiraling shots in the opening sequence. These don't detract from understanding of the flow of action, but come across as pretentiously gimmicky. Likewise, bright camera flares are often overused, especially on the bridge of the Enterprise.
Despite the abundance of Vulcan characters, there are also leaps of logic. Most notable of these is the sequence where Kirk and Scotty are beamed from Delta Vega to the Enterprise, which is at warp. Assuming the transporter has some sort of finite range (otherwise, one would not need a starship at all), and that the Enterprise is moving away at billions of miles per second, the feat doesn't seem to be in targeting such a fast moving object (as is portrayed), but instead a feat of long-distance beaming. If we can transport billions of miles, why do we need the starship we're beaming to? Likewise, the meeting of Kirk, Elder Spock, and Scotty on Delta Vega comes across as entirely coincidental, and at quite a stretch of the imagination. I suppose one could invoke destiny, but I don't think I buy it.
In the end, Star Trek seems to spend more time building back stories than it does working on its own present story, and the meat of the central drama might sometimes take a back seat to explaining who's who and why. That's not to say there isn't drama – good drama – just that there often isn't enough of it.
What we're left with here is an essential origin story to set up a new franchise – a franchise that, by all appearances, honors the philosophy of Gene Roddenberry and the characterizations and chemistry of his crew of the starship Enterprise, while not being afraid to try new things. This is a very good example of science fiction action and drama that relies more on characters and pacing than it does on meaningless technical explanations. A very emotional – if not cerebral – entry in the Star Trek mythos that does Gene Roddenberry proud and paves the way for better adventures to come.