Millennial Trek

Rating: 5/10 (7 June 2014)

2009's version of "Star Trek" is a fast-paced, action-packed, frenetic, illogical, nonsensical thrill ride of a movie designed for today's attention-deprived audiences. Two hours in the movie theater left me with a headache and a slight feeling of nausea, which was no doubt the director's intention. Destroy the audience's senses and you're halfway to winning their devotion, much like how a skilled torturer treats his prisoner.
The movie has characters called Kirk and Spock, just as the old TV series did, but that's about as far as the similarities go. The other roles -- Uhura, Scotty, Chekov -- were reinvented for the film, but since they were two-dimensional to begin with that's hardly an issue; what's more annoying is that the writers have updated James T. Kirk for the Millennial generation by making him an unlikable, self-centered, preening egotist without even a shred of charm or a single admirable trait. It's fun to watch him get beat up, which happens at least twice, but I don't think that's the reaction the writers had in mind.
There's a manic plot involving a time-traveling villain blowing up planets with the help of some technobabble weapon, who's the catalyst for a series of contrived coincidences that bring together the heroic crew of the Starship Enterprise. Meanwhile Kirk and Spock meet for the first time, and their relationship follows the formula of a romantic comedy: first they're interested, then they hate each other, then after a big fight they come to love each other, and by the end of the story they're the best of friends.
There are a few odd things that I can only consider anachronisms: Kirk listens to the Beastie Boys and orders Budweiser at a bar, as if the movie didn't actually take place three hundred years in the future. Presumably this was done to let non-Trek fans know that it was okay to enjoy the movie. At the same time there's a visit from Leonard Nimoy, the Original Flavor Spock, to tell Trekkies that it's a legit Trek film after all. The references and homages to Star Trek canon come off more like jokes or parodies, as if it were an overblown SNL skit rather than a major motion picture.
But forget all that: Trekkie or not, all you really need to know about this movie is that it will offer you mindless entertainment for about two hours, assaulting your eyes and ears and sense of equilibrium in every way possible with today's computer-generated technology. About three hours after you started, you'll probably have overcome the motion sickness and forgotten everything you just saw.