Good for what it is, but missing a lot

Rating: 7/10 (1 January 2010)

"Star Trek" is good for what it is, which is boys' space opera, and on that single level it satisfies the senses. J. J. Abrams is a director with the common touch, the ability to reach a mass audience without appearing to patronize it. All the same, the movie is missing a lot of things that even boys' adventure stories should have.
Most obviously, it lacks a subject. The Star Trek series was always about something; this movie isn't about anything. It has no moral, no message, no point to make about human experience; and although its plot would seem to require that it show the maturation of the two main characters, Kirk and Spock, it doesn't: they remain the same at the end as at the beginning, like comic book characters. As a result, although the movie runs two and quarter hours, one leaves it with a sense of having seen less, about enough for one episode of a Saturday morning cartoon.
Also, the movie has no beauty, even of the mechanized kind. A lot of techno movies, and even anime, offer alluring pictures along the way; here all the mecha and the architecture, while not particularly true to life, are more like engineering designs. The film-making is similarly workmanlike: it keeps the action going, but without grace or lyricism; it does the job, and that's all.
Finally, the movie dumbs down and vulgarizes the series unnecessarily. And although Spock is pictured exactly as on the series, Kirk has been turned into a hard-drinking, hard-loving hell-raiser, who never turns into the Kirk we know and love (or tolerate). Yet, oddly for such a character, he seems to have only three acquaintances, and even the progress of his relationships with them isn't dramatized. We get only a handful of illustrative moments, one-offs, like comic book panels. The same is true of his training at the academy, and indeed of most of the other elements in the movie.
The script is credited to the executive producers; Abrams can write better than this; I wonder why he didn't redo it himself.