It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Rating: 7/10 (14 May 2009)

The new Star Trek is all consuming - undercutting low expectations with a colourful landscape of rich visuals married with pace and driven by kinetic flair both in front of and behind the camera. Abram's Mission Impossible looked flat and felt static but Star Trek really moves with swooning camera movements, conspicuously eye catching composition and a degree of self-confidence that scoops you up and carries you along for that Hollywood Holy Grail – "the ride". There's artistry in its visual effects, an omission from most blockbusters, and the design is a combination of craft and graft, contrasting the smooth sheen of the Enterprise's bridge with her new boiler room bowels. Its future tech with a touch of real world grease and it speaks to the filmmakers intentions of partnering the geek aesthetic with something less esoteric for the unconverted.
Ironically for a movie that turns on future proofing legacies, the film's weakness is its story that feels slight and is driven by the commercial requirement to clear the decks for a new series of films – a deficiency that will become more apparent as time strips away its visual impact. Given that the script lacks any of the emotional or intellectual rigour that at least threatened to punctuate previous instalments, it does at least introduce a sense of fun and bravado that alludes to the best of the original series and it's more of a romp than before, signalling a new direction that owes as much to Star Wars, much apparent in the movie's dramatic thrust, as much to the series whose name it bears.
Goodwill notwithstanding, there are elements to this new approach that won't sit easily with aficionados of the Enterprise. The decision to wipe out 43 years of continuity, well conceived but poorly explained and embodied in a villain who is more plot device than character, is a poor return on a lifetime of devotion for hardcore fans – and the philosophical and moral implications of Nero's actions are given a cursory shrug in the interests of moving the story forward, a treatment which makes the decision seem flippant. The humour is sometimes too broad in a bid to appeal to an imaginary constituency of barely brain-stemmed teens, though it frequently recovers, and those on product placement watch will recoil with the news that both Nokia and Budweiser have made it to the 23rd century – a feat all the more remarkable on account of the nuclear war that occurs in Trek's chronology between our present and the time occupied by the libidinous Captain of the Enterprise.
Once the new cast settle into their familiar positions sometime during the final third, it feels natural and reassuringly familiar. Pine, retaining Shatner's cock sureness but dropping the melodramatic pauses, captures the spirit of his predecessor and is a worthy successor, though Orci and Kutzman could reward his performance by deepening his characterisation in the next instalment. Qunito's Spock is fine but lacks Nimoy's presence – how you miss the dulcet tones and Karl Urban's Doctor McCoy is perfect – instantly evocative of Deforrest Kelley without becoming an impersonation. True to the original series, the rest of the cast are little more than scenery, though the new Uhura is some of the best you'll see all year and certainly deserves more to do in future. Her sexually inspired turn adds a decent measure of human beauty to the gorgeous computer generated vistas.
A sensory treat it may be, visual effects and production design spit roasting your optics, but the impact is undermined by the absence of an equally inspired score. Great genre movies are defined by their musical dimension – imagine Star Wars without Williams, Blade Runner without Vangelis but the paucity of great compositions in recent years suggests that as the previous generation of great composers falls away, no one is coming up to replace them. A movie on this scale demanded symphonic support on an hysterical scale – something akin to Goldsmith's intervention in the otherwise lifeless 1979 film, but instead it's a generic score that substitutes volume for melodic coherence and memorable motifs. You've heard the like many times before and will be pushed to recall a note of it afterwards. The composers will claim that the trend is now toward so called 'emotional augmentation' – atmospheric scoring rather than out and out musical enrichment of the narrative, but this reduces what was once an integral part of these movies to clinical diagnostic support and it's unworthy of the potential of the movie score and the art form's heritage.
Exciting, inviting and a little bit frightening (the new Chekov's accent is as unsettling as any planetary destruction), Star Trek will polarise die-hards but have little trouble charming the uninitiated. It has scale, energy and a likable interplay between the leads, all of which go a long way toward apologising for some of the screenplay's less intelligible choices. Where it does succeed ultimately, is in evoking the spirit if not the intellectual curiosity of Rodenberry's series, and although we'll expect an extra dimension to the characters in the next instalment, there's enough optimism on display here to allow the filmmakers the benefit of the doubtthough just this once you understand.