Blame or Credit the "Parallel Universe"?

Rating: 6/10 (11 May 2013)

Eric Bana's renegade, time-warping Romulan Nero has a lot to answer for. Not only, in the first film, did his 'A Sound Of Thunder' style time-messing change Kirk's physiognomy, but also that of Chekov. Brunettes became Aryan Adonises. Olive-skinned Hispanic television actors became high-cheek boned, dyed-black-redhead English TV ones.
Why fuss over racial casting? Why moan over the choice of the brilliant Benedict Cumberbatch in a role he makes his own (he looks more like a 1960s TV baddie than Ricardo Montalban at any rate)?
Well, Gene Roddenberry created a well-paced series with a cast whose very presence on screen broke barriers. Khan (for it is he played by Cumberbatch here) was a landmark role for Hispanic icon Ricardo Montalban and it is strange that one of his fellows was not cast here. Benicio Del Toro would have been magnificent.
Why keep tribbles as lumps of faun wool when the grandeur, flawed glory and warped codes of the Klingons are dispensed with in favour of turning them into disposable LOTR orcs acting like the stormtroopers from 'Star Wars'?
My rambling has a point. Abrams has all the ingredients of exciting and funny space opera yet his batch of flash-bang gumbo, with odd, sleight-of-hand emotional wringers and wiki'd-in-a-day nods to Trek-lore tastes bland compared to the sometimes cheesily overcooked banquet Roddenberry bequeathed.
That Trek lore and history - even aesthetic - is so drastically altered, apparently by that attack on the Kelvin by Eric Bana all those years before - leaves less of a blank cheque to rewrite than JJ Abrams has a right to cash.
An entertainingly thrilling film - but an unsettling watch all the same for anyone remotely familiar with Trek in all its TV incarnations - where diplomacy and philosophy were merely flanked - and for solid plot-motivating reasons - by phasers and torpedoes.
Whatever any viewer's reaction may be, Karl Urban's uncanny channeling of DeForest Kelly is, as in the first film, worth the price of admission alone and his is the most memorable performance in the whole interstellar jambalaya.