Note: I originally posted this on my Facebook page, for a "general audience" of friends who may or may not have seen the movie yet.
My TrekBBS sig pretty much says it all: Star Trek is back - not like it never was gone, but like it never was, period.
After years of slow decline under the two most recent Trek TV series, the hit-and-(mostly-)miss Voyager and Enterprise, punctuated by two lackluster movies (Insurrection and Nemesis) which didn't exactly take box offices at warp speed, the once-mighty and proud Star Trek franchise seemingly slipped into oblivion in 2005 (when Enterprise left the air), largely unnoticed and unmourned even by many sci-fi/fantasy aficionados, much less the general public. And no wonder: By that time Harry Potter-mania was in full swing, and the long-awaited transformation of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader was right around the corner (with Revenge of the Sith hitting theaters only a few days after Enterprise signed off). Factor in Star Trek's aging fan base and a prevailing post-9/11 national mood seemingly at odds with Trek's generally pacifist outlook, and there was every reason to doubt the franchise would ever return from its self-imposed exile.
Enter J.J. Abrams, the man with the Midas touch for just about every TV series or feature film he's produced. Even so, rebooting Star Trek was bound to be his greatest challenge yet. How do you make such a legendary and formidable pop-culture institution, a product of the late 1960s that enjoyed a revival in the '80s and '90s, relevant to 21st-century audiences while preserving all that made it great in the first place? Abrams's answer to this dilemma is, fittingly enough, to take a leaf from the backstory of James T. Kirk himself. Just as Kirk, as a cadet performing an Academy training sim, rescued the Kobayashi Maru by changing the conditions of the test, Abrams has revived the Star Trek franchise by redrawing the landscape of its universe.
This becomes apparent right from the get-go, well before we ever lay eyes on either the Enterprise or Chris Pine as the new Kirk. The movie's jaw-dropping, heart-wrenching opening sequence, which sees George Kirk sacrifice himself in a blaze of glory to protect his crew, along with his wife and newborn son James Tiberius from time-traveling villain Nero (Eric Bana), not only sets the table for the rest of the film, but establishes a whole new look and feel for the Star Trek universe - one which, unlike previous Trek projects, was designed and built for the silver screen from Day One. Gone are the gleaming, compact, spit-and-polish sets of old; Abrams's shipboard environs have a more industrial and "lived-in", yet grander appearance than any of the previous movies ever had, much less the TV series. (Even Deep Space Nine, a Trek spinoff series set aboard an old alien space station taken over and retrofitted by Starfleet, went for a similar "lived-in" style but never came close to this level of detail.)
But the amazing opening sequence is, well, only the beginning. The movie shifts gears several times over the next thirty minutes or so, following Spock as a child and young adult (Zachary Quinto) who turns his back on a Vulcan society prejudiced against his half-human parentage and enlists in Starfleet, and Jim Kirk as a feisty troublemaker who also enlists on the advice of Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) after getting into a bar fight with some of Pike's crew. Along the way Kirk also meets Nyota Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Dr. Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban), and of course cheats on the aforementioned Kobayashi Maru test, resulting in a disciplinary hearing and a confrontation with the test's designer: Spock. Yet just as the sparks start to fly in earnest between Kirk and Spock, a distress call from Vulcan abruptly ends the hearing and initiates a chain of events - including the unlikely appearance of a (very) old friend - culminating in the formation of the classic Enterprise crew and the rise of Kirk as their captain, but also forever transforming many previously familiar aspects of Trek lore, great and small.
I won't spoil the rest of the film here, in the off-chance you've been living under a rock or otherwise haven't had occasion to see it yet. Suffice it to say that Abrams and his screenwriters, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, took a huge risk in shaking up the Star Trek universe as drastically as they have. After all, if viewers don't buy into this new take on the Trek universe, the movie falls flat and the franchise probably dies for good this time. Then again, considering the franchise's sorry state in the first place, maybe it wasn't such a great risk. As a wise man once said, when you ain't got nothin', you've got nothin' to lose. And given that any attempt at a reboot was bound to upset continuity sticklers no matter what, Abrams and company can hardly be faulted for electing to boldly go whole-hog with it. In any case, their changes do work very well, not just to drive this story, but to make abundantly clear to diehard Trekkie and casual moviegoer alike that the Abrams film series (let's face it, at least one sequel is now a foregone conclusion) won't be a slave to the enormous volume, complexity and frequent self-contradiction of the old Star Trek canon.
The film does have its shortcomings, though for the most part they are understandable. For starters, it isn't quite a complete reboot. In order to "preserve" the original canon (which I and others here have taken to calling "Trek Prime"), Abrams, Orci and Kurtzman characterize the events of the film as part of an alternate reality, which diverges from Trek Prime when Nero first appears in the opening sequence, which is set in the year 2233. In other words, the reboot only goes back to 2233, leaving almost three centuries' worth of Trek "history" since 1966 (the year TOS premiered) intact. The problem here is that this "history" includes some significant events between 1966 and today, most notably the Eugenics Wars and the rise and fall of one Khan Noonien Singh in the 1990s. Needless to say, real-world history didn't quite turn out that way, which you'd think would have a pretty dramatic impact on the intervening centuries between our time and Kirk's. This is all a more elaborate way of saying it would have made more sense to wipe the entire slate clean, not just the part that occurs after 2233. Trek "history" could then be rewritten as needed, but with 2009 as the point of departure instead of 1966. Bye-bye Eugenics Wars (and Khan, though both could still certainly have been "moved" to some later time frame), hello fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11, among other things.
Also, when the filmmakers' primary objective is to re-establish well-known characters and lay down the new ground rules for their universe, all while trying to fulfill the usual expectations that come with a summer tentpole flick, well, something else has gotta give. In the case of Star Trek, that something is the threadbare plot, especially concerning Nero. It's not that Nero is a wooden or uncompelling bad guy - Bana does a great job with the material he was given, infusing Nero with an inconsolable rage and obsession we've not seen in a Trek villain since Khan - it's that his motivations are never fully fleshed out, so unless you've read Countdown (the graphic novel companion to the movie, which tells Nero's backstory in the future where he comes from), it's hard to get a handle on just what's eating this guy, why he harbors a grudge against Spock in particular, or whatever possessed him to commit the grand-scale, canon-rewriting atrocity he does. Orci and Kurtzman's script also tends to gloss over some other developments that bear further explanation, never satisfactorily explains just what "red matter" (the film's MacGuffin) is, and relies pretty heavily on serendipity to drive the plot.
Still, what the film lacks in a meaty story, it more than makes up for in fulfilling its aforementioned primary objective. Orci and Kurtzman never miss a chance to reacquaint viewers with the Enterprise crew and the familiar trappings of the Trek universe - and they get a big assist in that respect from the new core cast. Pine quickly establishes Kirk as a hotshot, natural-born fighter with a knack for thinking on his feet and a strong loyalty to his comrades. Quinto's Spock is as easily recognizable as Leonard Nimoy's was in TOS, yet wears pride in his human heritage on his sleeve in a way Nimoy's Spock rarely if ever did. Urban and Simon Pegg nail McCoy and Montgomery Scott, respectively, paying fine tributes to the two TOS cast members (DeForest Kelley and James Doohan, respectively) who have passed beyond the real "final frontier".
Hikaru Sulu (John Cho) and especially Pavel Chekov (Anton Yelchin) are still works in progress, but so far so good with both of them. The wild card of the new cast is Saldana's Uhura, who brings a bit more assertiveness to the character, and is given a bit more prominent role, than Nichelle Nichols' Uhura usually had in TOS. She also acquires an unexpected love interest, a development that has thrown many a diehard Trekkie for a loop, but it doesn't come off nearly as awkwardly as might be expected. It's always hard to fill the shoes of legends, but every member of the new core cast rises to the occasion.
Last but certainly not least, this being the first Trek film released as a summer tentpole since the infamous Star Trek V 20 years ago, there's Star Trek's blockbuster cred (read: action and eye/ear candy) to consider. There are several action sequences scattered throughout the film, but only two of them really stand out: the aforementioned opening sequence, and the space-paratrooper sequence we've all seen sampled in virtually every ad and trailer for the film, in which Kirk and Sulu (along with the obligatory redshirt) literally drop in on a couple of Nero's thugs. Ironically, the climactic sequence turns out to be fairly pedestrian; it's a more or less straightforward shoot-'em-up. Even so, Orci and Kurtzman work enough humor and "character moments" into the action scenes to keep audiences engaged on multiple levels - a far cry from the forced set-piece gags of Insurrection, and even farther from the mostly humorless Nemesis.
The visual effects are almost worth a full-length review in their own right. TOS was as notorious for its cheesy look and feel as its successor series and films were recognized for their much higher standards. Even during Trek's declining years in the late 1990s and 2000s, production values remained top-notch. Abrams has smartly maintained this high standard for his film, bringing back LucasFilm's Industrial Light and Magic to handle the special effects, their first work on a Trek film since 1996's First Contact. Even ILM has raised their game here, especially when it comes to computer-generated imagery. Their heavy use of CGI in the Star Wars prequels was stylistically impressive, but it wasn't hard to recognize most of it as, well, CGI. Not so with Star Trek. The Enterprise and other ships look incredibly lifelike, as do cityscapes on Earth and Vulcan, as though they had been filmed the old-fashioned way using internally-lit large scale models, when in fact they are all CGI. Even space debris looks solid and real rather than virtual. The only obvious CGI effect in the film is toward the end, when globs of "red matter" floating in space are shown colliding and clumping together in an effect reminiscent of the floating Klingon blood from Star Trek VI.
Abrams' use of sound - and lack thereof - is equally impressive, even though the reuse of some TOS sound effects seems a bit anachronistic. During several action sequences Abrams dials down the sound effects or mutes them completely, opting to let Michael Giacchino's score, or even dead silence, convey the tension instead. Speaking of Giacchino's score, you can count me as a fan. It is a bit generic, but it works very well with the film, and it has grown on me with each viewing. His new main theme is already almost as easily identifiable with Abrams' Star Trek as the late Jerry Goldsmith's theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture was with that movie and subsequent projects, including the Next Generation TV series.
After ten previous attempts that came off more like TV episodes writ large than true feature films, someone has finally thrown out the old Star Trek rulebook and figured out how to do the franchise justice on the silver screen. Enough of me prattling on about it though - get out to a theater and see it for yourself. I have, three times now.
My TrekBBS sig pretty much says it all: Star Trek is back - not like it never was gone, but like it never was, period.
After years of slow decline under the two most recent Trek TV series, the hit-and-(mostly-)miss Voyager and Enterprise, punctuated by two lackluster movies (Insurrection and Nemesis) which didn't exactly take box offices at warp speed, the once-mighty and proud Star Trek franchise seemingly slipped into oblivion in 2005 (when Enterprise left the air), largely unnoticed and unmourned even by many sci-fi/fantasy aficionados, much less the general public. And no wonder: By that time Harry Potter-mania was in full swing, and the long-awaited transformation of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader was right around the corner (with Revenge of the Sith hitting theaters only a few days after Enterprise signed off). Factor in Star Trek's aging fan base and a prevailing post-9/11 national mood seemingly at odds with Trek's generally pacifist outlook, and there was every reason to doubt the franchise would ever return from its self-imposed exile.
Enter J.J. Abrams, the man with the Midas touch for just about every TV series or feature film he's produced. Even so, rebooting Star Trek was bound to be his greatest challenge yet. How do you make such a legendary and formidable pop-culture institution, a product of the late 1960s that enjoyed a revival in the '80s and '90s, relevant to 21st-century audiences while preserving all that made it great in the first place? Abrams's answer to this dilemma is, fittingly enough, to take a leaf from the backstory of James T. Kirk himself. Just as Kirk, as a cadet performing an Academy training sim, rescued the Kobayashi Maru by changing the conditions of the test, Abrams has revived the Star Trek franchise by redrawing the landscape of its universe.
This becomes apparent right from the get-go, well before we ever lay eyes on either the Enterprise or Chris Pine as the new Kirk. The movie's jaw-dropping, heart-wrenching opening sequence, which sees George Kirk sacrifice himself in a blaze of glory to protect his crew, along with his wife and newborn son James Tiberius from time-traveling villain Nero (Eric Bana), not only sets the table for the rest of the film, but establishes a whole new look and feel for the Star Trek universe - one which, unlike previous Trek projects, was designed and built for the silver screen from Day One. Gone are the gleaming, compact, spit-and-polish sets of old; Abrams's shipboard environs have a more industrial and "lived-in", yet grander appearance than any of the previous movies ever had, much less the TV series. (Even Deep Space Nine, a Trek spinoff series set aboard an old alien space station taken over and retrofitted by Starfleet, went for a similar "lived-in" style but never came close to this level of detail.)
But the amazing opening sequence is, well, only the beginning. The movie shifts gears several times over the next thirty minutes or so, following Spock as a child and young adult (Zachary Quinto) who turns his back on a Vulcan society prejudiced against his half-human parentage and enlists in Starfleet, and Jim Kirk as a feisty troublemaker who also enlists on the advice of Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) after getting into a bar fight with some of Pike's crew. Along the way Kirk also meets Nyota Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Dr. Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban), and of course cheats on the aforementioned Kobayashi Maru test, resulting in a disciplinary hearing and a confrontation with the test's designer: Spock. Yet just as the sparks start to fly in earnest between Kirk and Spock, a distress call from Vulcan abruptly ends the hearing and initiates a chain of events - including the unlikely appearance of a (very) old friend - culminating in the formation of the classic Enterprise crew and the rise of Kirk as their captain, but also forever transforming many previously familiar aspects of Trek lore, great and small.
I won't spoil the rest of the film here, in the off-chance you've been living under a rock or otherwise haven't had occasion to see it yet. Suffice it to say that Abrams and his screenwriters, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, took a huge risk in shaking up the Star Trek universe as drastically as they have. After all, if viewers don't buy into this new take on the Trek universe, the movie falls flat and the franchise probably dies for good this time. Then again, considering the franchise's sorry state in the first place, maybe it wasn't such a great risk. As a wise man once said, when you ain't got nothin', you've got nothin' to lose. And given that any attempt at a reboot was bound to upset continuity sticklers no matter what, Abrams and company can hardly be faulted for electing to boldly go whole-hog with it. In any case, their changes do work very well, not just to drive this story, but to make abundantly clear to diehard Trekkie and casual moviegoer alike that the Abrams film series (let's face it, at least one sequel is now a foregone conclusion) won't be a slave to the enormous volume, complexity and frequent self-contradiction of the old Star Trek canon.
The film does have its shortcomings, though for the most part they are understandable. For starters, it isn't quite a complete reboot. In order to "preserve" the original canon (which I and others here have taken to calling "Trek Prime"), Abrams, Orci and Kurtzman characterize the events of the film as part of an alternate reality, which diverges from Trek Prime when Nero first appears in the opening sequence, which is set in the year 2233. In other words, the reboot only goes back to 2233, leaving almost three centuries' worth of Trek "history" since 1966 (the year TOS premiered) intact. The problem here is that this "history" includes some significant events between 1966 and today, most notably the Eugenics Wars and the rise and fall of one Khan Noonien Singh in the 1990s. Needless to say, real-world history didn't quite turn out that way, which you'd think would have a pretty dramatic impact on the intervening centuries between our time and Kirk's. This is all a more elaborate way of saying it would have made more sense to wipe the entire slate clean, not just the part that occurs after 2233. Trek "history" could then be rewritten as needed, but with 2009 as the point of departure instead of 1966. Bye-bye Eugenics Wars (and Khan, though both could still certainly have been "moved" to some later time frame), hello fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11, among other things.
Also, when the filmmakers' primary objective is to re-establish well-known characters and lay down the new ground rules for their universe, all while trying to fulfill the usual expectations that come with a summer tentpole flick, well, something else has gotta give. In the case of Star Trek, that something is the threadbare plot, especially concerning Nero. It's not that Nero is a wooden or uncompelling bad guy - Bana does a great job with the material he was given, infusing Nero with an inconsolable rage and obsession we've not seen in a Trek villain since Khan - it's that his motivations are never fully fleshed out, so unless you've read Countdown (the graphic novel companion to the movie, which tells Nero's backstory in the future where he comes from), it's hard to get a handle on just what's eating this guy, why he harbors a grudge against Spock in particular, or whatever possessed him to commit the grand-scale, canon-rewriting atrocity he does. Orci and Kurtzman's script also tends to gloss over some other developments that bear further explanation, never satisfactorily explains just what "red matter" (the film's MacGuffin) is, and relies pretty heavily on serendipity to drive the plot.
Still, what the film lacks in a meaty story, it more than makes up for in fulfilling its aforementioned primary objective. Orci and Kurtzman never miss a chance to reacquaint viewers with the Enterprise crew and the familiar trappings of the Trek universe - and they get a big assist in that respect from the new core cast. Pine quickly establishes Kirk as a hotshot, natural-born fighter with a knack for thinking on his feet and a strong loyalty to his comrades. Quinto's Spock is as easily recognizable as Leonard Nimoy's was in TOS, yet wears pride in his human heritage on his sleeve in a way Nimoy's Spock rarely if ever did. Urban and Simon Pegg nail McCoy and Montgomery Scott, respectively, paying fine tributes to the two TOS cast members (DeForest Kelley and James Doohan, respectively) who have passed beyond the real "final frontier".
Hikaru Sulu (John Cho) and especially Pavel Chekov (Anton Yelchin) are still works in progress, but so far so good with both of them. The wild card of the new cast is Saldana's Uhura, who brings a bit more assertiveness to the character, and is given a bit more prominent role, than Nichelle Nichols' Uhura usually had in TOS. She also acquires an unexpected love interest, a development that has thrown many a diehard Trekkie for a loop, but it doesn't come off nearly as awkwardly as might be expected. It's always hard to fill the shoes of legends, but every member of the new core cast rises to the occasion.
Last but certainly not least, this being the first Trek film released as a summer tentpole since the infamous Star Trek V 20 years ago, there's Star Trek's blockbuster cred (read: action and eye/ear candy) to consider. There are several action sequences scattered throughout the film, but only two of them really stand out: the aforementioned opening sequence, and the space-paratrooper sequence we've all seen sampled in virtually every ad and trailer for the film, in which Kirk and Sulu (along with the obligatory redshirt) literally drop in on a couple of Nero's thugs. Ironically, the climactic sequence turns out to be fairly pedestrian; it's a more or less straightforward shoot-'em-up. Even so, Orci and Kurtzman work enough humor and "character moments" into the action scenes to keep audiences engaged on multiple levels - a far cry from the forced set-piece gags of Insurrection, and even farther from the mostly humorless Nemesis.
The visual effects are almost worth a full-length review in their own right. TOS was as notorious for its cheesy look and feel as its successor series and films were recognized for their much higher standards. Even during Trek's declining years in the late 1990s and 2000s, production values remained top-notch. Abrams has smartly maintained this high standard for his film, bringing back LucasFilm's Industrial Light and Magic to handle the special effects, their first work on a Trek film since 1996's First Contact. Even ILM has raised their game here, especially when it comes to computer-generated imagery. Their heavy use of CGI in the Star Wars prequels was stylistically impressive, but it wasn't hard to recognize most of it as, well, CGI. Not so with Star Trek. The Enterprise and other ships look incredibly lifelike, as do cityscapes on Earth and Vulcan, as though they had been filmed the old-fashioned way using internally-lit large scale models, when in fact they are all CGI. Even space debris looks solid and real rather than virtual. The only obvious CGI effect in the film is toward the end, when globs of "red matter" floating in space are shown colliding and clumping together in an effect reminiscent of the floating Klingon blood from Star Trek VI.
Abrams' use of sound - and lack thereof - is equally impressive, even though the reuse of some TOS sound effects seems a bit anachronistic. During several action sequences Abrams dials down the sound effects or mutes them completely, opting to let Michael Giacchino's score, or even dead silence, convey the tension instead. Speaking of Giacchino's score, you can count me as a fan. It is a bit generic, but it works very well with the film, and it has grown on me with each viewing. His new main theme is already almost as easily identifiable with Abrams' Star Trek as the late Jerry Goldsmith's theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture was with that movie and subsequent projects, including the Next Generation TV series.
After ten previous attempts that came off more like TV episodes writ large than true feature films, someone has finally thrown out the old Star Trek rulebook and figured out how to do the franchise justice on the silver screen. Enough of me prattling on about it though - get out to a theater and see it for yourself. I have, three times now.
