Connoiseurs May Relish This Trek

Rating: 9/10 (21 May 2013)

Connoisseurs of "Star Trek" may fall in love again with tribbles and Khan Noonian-Singh. Those not familiar with Star Trek will still enjoy this stand-alone story which doesn't even require the audience to recall the first of J. Abrams' resurrections, with much the same acting crew, in 2009.
I first watched James Tiberius Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. Bones McCoy, Scotty, Lt. Uhura, Mr. Sulu and Chekhov, go where no man or woman had gone before, back in 1966. I get as much of a kick out of this movie.
The pilot of the first Star Trek series, a two-part episode entitled "The Menagerie," starred Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike. With his sapphire-blue eyes and charismatic personality, Hunter had been successful earlier playing Jesus Christ in "King of Kings." Bruce Greenwood fleshes out what Commander Pike was truly like before his injury depicted 47 years ago in Roddenberry's first stab at creating the Federation.
William Shatner was an up-and-coming young actor who had achieved considerable fame in Stratford Ontario, acting in quite an array of the Bard's histories, comedies, tragedies and romances. Shatner had been impressive in such films as "Judgment at Nuremburg," "The Brothers Karamazov" and "The World of Suzi Wong." Christopher Pike in the current reboot has to be Kirk, believably, without being Shatner.
Even to attempt to recapture the imagery, the cadence and the poignancy of those early shows would be very daunting. For director Abrams to meld numerous fan-favorite characters, themes and scenes, producing one of the best Star Trek films I have seen, is truly admirable.
Karl Urban's tone, pace, his Southern accent, even his body language and timing, channel DeForrest Kelly's Dr. McCoy, right down to the doctor's paranoia about technology, especially the idea of his molecules being discorporated, then recorporated, when he is asked to "beam down." The Chief Engineer doing most of the beaming down, Commander Montgomery Scott, is re-imagined by Simon Pegg, who takes Scott where James Doohan, the original Scotty, had not gone before, making Scott just as important in several scenes as any of the principal characters. Both Scott and Uhura figure prominently into the resolution of the many tangled webs in the plot in ways that Doohan and Nichelle Nichols, the original Uhura, would be proud, and maybe even more than a little envious, of.
Zachary Quinto's interpretation of the young Mr. Spock is breathtakingly like the Spock that Trekkies know and love, yet Quinto makes that character his own, as well, newly-minted. The brief impressive cameo by Leonard Nimoy, himself, is tantamount to a Vulcan mind-meld between the older and younger actor. Quinto's acting skills somehow both recapitulate and reinvent those of his predecessor.
Chris Pine is not William Shatner. Somehow, however, Pine manages to act more headstrong, more impulsive, and even more of an outrageous maverick who seems to think that rules are like candy canes to be crunched and swallowed or spat out, before reinventing new procedures that defy the Prime Directive to solve thorny galactic conundrums.
This movie cranks. With a running time of about two hours, there is no lull, no dead space, no time for your adrenalin to abate even a little. At several points, the suspense was almost unbearable, when I could not imagine how the entire crew might escape certain death.
Abrams, who has also produced "Lost" and "Super 8," is at the top of his form.
The cinematography is extraordinary, accentuating, amplifying and delineating scenes and moments like a Greek chorus.
Generally speaking, the Academy Award Committee turns a blind eye toward science fiction films, but it is just possible that they may make an exception in terms of the way this movie was filmed.
The great scientist, Sir Arthur C. Clark, warned 53 years ago in "Profiles in the Future," that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That's how I felt watching this movie. These professional pretenders produced one believable illusion after another. Cognizant of brilliant benchmarks that went before, movies like "Alien," Abrams has created a movie that can stand up to the great ones.
Most amazingly, Abrams has created a Star Trek movie that does not require its audience to remember Ricardo Montalban in "Space Seed," or Roddenberry's "Star Trek III," both of which this movie powerfully alludes to.
The suspense and excitement actually accelerate as the movie flows along. That is rare. Abrams and crew are to be praised as artists who care about their craft and their legacy. In Hollywood, that is extremely rare. To attempt to enrapture Trekkies, Trekkers, and the uninitiated -takes guts.