Pat's Movie Reviews: Star Trek

 

For a giant fan of the Star Trek series as I am, it was with a great mix of emotions that I went to go see the new Trek film last Friday.  I was both incredibly excited and very worried at the same time.  I was excited at the idea of getting to see a new Trek film.  After the sadly dismal box office performance of the last Star Trek film (Nemesis) back in 2002, I had long ago accepted that we would probably never see another big budget Star Trek film ever again.  However, I hadn't expected Hollywood's future obsession with franchise reboots which has enabled the original crew of the USS Enterprise to once again boldly go where no one has gone before.

 

This amazing turn of fortune was also what had me worried though.  A franchise reboot of Star Trek?  Really?  That's an incredibly tall order you're talking about there.  Star Trek has been around for over 40 years.  The characters from the original series are cultural icons.  The names Kirk and Spock are universally known, even amongst people who have never seen the show.  How do you make a film that can redifine those characters for a new generation and not make it come across as either lame or at best a pale shadow of the original series?  How do you make Star Trek relevant and exciting again to kids today to make them new fans of the series?

 

The answer apparently is that you borrow a lot of pages from that other really popular sci-fi franchise . . . Star Wars.

 

Now that comment can be taken in many different ways.  To die hard Trek fans, that's a very bad thing.  Star Trek and Star Wars are very disimiliar franchises with the latter being a high energy adventure series filled with tons of action and the former being a slower paced, usually more cerebral based series.  Trek has its action too, but it was never to the same degree as that in Star Wars.  For the vast majority of the movie going audience though, infusing Trek with a little bit (or a lot) of Star Wars magic may be just what the Doctor ordered.  Most of the mainstream complaints I've heard about Star Trek from non fans all my life is that the shows are too slow and boring.  They're too nerdy.  So it makes total sense to me then that Paramount would want their brand new Star Trek film to be as sleek and exciting and as Star Wars as possible.  Afterall, their job is to get people to buy tickets to see their film, and say what you will about the Star Wars prequel films, they all made a ton of money.  Paramount saw that and wanted a little piece of the action.

 

So now we have this new, shiny, exciting, action packed Star Trek film.  The trailers have made it look amazing, but does the film deliver?  Does the film accomplish all of it's difficult goals? Does it re-energize a failing franchise?  Does it treat the original series with the respect and dignity it deserves?  Does it manage not to come off as a cheap knock off?  Does it stand on its own as a potential new movie franchise?  And finally (and probably most importantly),  does it suck?

 

Well let me say right here and now that the film most definitely does not suck.  And the answer to all of those other questions, suprisingly, are yes.   Yes, the film delivers everything that the trailers have promised.  The new Star Trek film is fast, exciting, exhilarating to watch and is overall incredibly entertaining.  This new Trek film has taken everything that was fun and adventurous from the original 1960's TV series and has made it exciting again.  It has taken the iconic characters of Kirk and Spock and made them relevant again to younger audiences.  Hell, it even managed to make Pavel Chekov cool!

 

The biggest suprise I had watching the film was just how much I loved the casting choices for each and every single character in it.  I am a huge William Shatner fan, and I was incredibly skeptical of Chris Pine and his ability to do justice to the character.  However, Pine's version of Kirk is every bit as smooth, confident and charming as Shatner's was.  He has the right swagger, the right cocky smirk and even the same rampant sex drive too.  The same holds true for Zachary Quinto's Spock.  Aside from looking almost dead on like a young Leonard Nimoy, Quinto manages to perfectly capture the giant sea of repressed emotion that is Spock.  And Karl Urban as McCoy?  Oh wow, I couldn't have wished for a better actor to play him.  Urban's delivery of McCoy's lines were spot on.  I felt like I was listening to Deforest Kelly once again as I watched Urban lecturing Spock or ranting against the dangers of space travel.

 

The rest of the cast is just as amazing.  John Cho made Sulu a badass fighter and pilot once again.  Zoe Saldana brought all the strength and intelligence needed to play Uhura and more.  Anton Yelchin made Chekov an endearing and capable crewman worthy of his peers' respect.  And Simon Pegg as Scotty was absolutely brilliant.  One of my biggest complaints about the film actually was that Scotty didn't get nearly enough screen time.  I will give full credit to JJ Abrams and his casting people here.  They definitely know how to properly cast a film. 

 

As a summer popcorn film, the new Star Trek works amazingly well.  However, it also suffers from some of the same problems that plague a lot of big budget summer action flicks.  The plot did leave a bit to be desired, including some rather gaping plotholes that were more noticable than Spock's pointy ears.  I don't want to spoil too much here, but I will say that there's a key element to the plot which is a substance called Red Matter that has all sorts of amazing and devastating effects yet somehow we never really learn where this stuff came from, who made it or why, or even how the hell it works.  Also, there's a goodly amount of time travel nonsense that, while needed to explain away a lot of things in the film, also manages to make things  more complicated than they needed to be.

 

Another major shortcoming of the film is the lack of a strong main villain.  This isn't a knock against actor Eric Bana at all.  In fact I thought his performance as the Romulan Captain Nero was just fine.  It's the character himself I have a problem with.  I didn't really see him as a match for either Kirk or Spock mentally, his motivations didn't make a whole lot of sense if you start thinking what he could have accomplished with the Red Matter once he had control of it, and generally he spent most of the film being entirely ineffective and unimportant.  It made me seriously wonder if Khan Noonien Singh is the only worthy adversary that Kirk and company will ever face.

 

I also had some issues with a couple of technical elements of the film, such as annoying product placement (Nokia?  Really?) and JJ Abrams' massive overuse of lens flares throughout the movie, but for the most part these were minor concerns when compared to some of the massive story and technical flaws that exist in other summer films like last week's Wolverine film.

 

In the end, as a Trekkie it gives me great pleasure to say that I really liked the new Star Trek film.  This film could have gone so wrong in so many ways, and while it's certainly not a perfect film, it definitely was enjoyable to watch and managed to entertain even the bitter and jaded nerd that I am.  My favorite part of the film was the last 10 minutes or so when the whole crew finally comes together and works as a team to save the day.  That honestly felt like classic Trek to me.  And at the very end when Chris Pine walks onto the bridge in full uniform for the first time in the film and takes his rightful place in the Captain's chair, I had no problems whatsoever believing that he was James Tiberius Kirk.

 

As a franchise reboot, this worked perfectly.  It has left me wanting more.  Now that the new origin story is out of the way, I can't wait to see what we have in store in the next film.  If this film was Star Trek's version of Batman Begins, I can't even dream of how amazingly awesome their version of Dark Knight could be.  Right now, the potential is endless.  So long as they don't go saving Humpback Whales in the next film, then it should be pretty damned awesome.

 

Final Grade:  A-