Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
5/11/09
Were Star Trek (I'm
talking Original Recipe here) any other show, I'd call myself a pretty
big fan. I've seen all the episodes many times and can discuss them
by title, know all 6 Original Cast movies by heart and have been proficient
in that Vulcan hand salute for a good 30 years. But my affection
still pales in the face of the legions of devotees who've learned Klingon,
made their own costumes, met the entire original cast in person and memorized
the blueprints of the Starship Enterprise. Yes, Star Trek
is the original geek phenomenon, the one for which most of the rituals
(conventions, do-it-yourself fan fiction, dressing up as the characters)
of modern fandom were invented. No surprise, then, that it's taken
a very long time for Paramount, the holder of the Trek rights, to
warm to the inevitable notion of casting a new round of actors in the iconic
roles of Captain James T. Kirk and his crew. To execute this delicate
task, they selected director JJ Abrams, who knows something about iconic
television as the co-creator of Lost. With writers Roberto
Orci and Alex Kurtzman (who also worked with him on the TV series Alias
and Fringe), he treads lightly with appropriate reverence, creating
a time-twisting tale about character, destiny and the enduring value of
friendship that doesn't exactly crackle with summer action juice, but should
warm the hearts of Trekkies of all shapes and sizes.
Stardate 2233: the
USS Kelvin investigates a lightning storm in space, which opens into a
black hole that disgorges a massive alien ship. It attacks, crippling
the Kelvin and opening a channel on which Captain Nero (Eric Bana) demands
that Kelvin Captain Robau (Faran Tahir) beam over to negotiate a truce.
He agrees, leaving George Kirk (Chris Hemsworth) in command. When
Robau knows nothing about seemingly future events (including the whereabouts
of “Ambassador Spock”) the Romulan kills him and attacks anew. Kirk
orders a full evacuation, including his pregnant wife Winona (Jennifer
Morrison), who's gone into labor. The autopilot is offline:
someone has to stay behind and buy time for the escape pods to get away.
While in constant communication with Winona as she gives birth to a son
they name James Tiberius Kirk, George hits Nero's ship with everything
he's got and sets a collision course. At the cost of his life, Kirk
saves hundreds of escaping crewmen and Nero isn't heard from again for
22 years, when James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is a shiftless young man picking
barroom fights despite his massive potential and off-the-charts test scores.
He's approached by Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) who encourages
him to join Starfleet. Pike did a dissertation on George Kirk's heroism
and pushes the right buttons to get young Jim to sign up. Along with
young linguist Nyota Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Doctor Leonard McCoy (Karl
Urban), looking to put a bad divorce behind by leaving the planet, Kirk
vows to be a Starfleet officer within 3 years. And three years later,
after messing with the Kobayashi Maru test programmed by young Vulcan officer
Spock (Zachary Quinto), Kirk's disciplinary hearing is interrupted by an
emergency transmission from Vulcan: a lightning storm in space, followed
by a giant machine drilling into the surface of the planet. Pike
gathers an untested team on the Starship Enterprise to rendezvous with
other starfleet vessels called in to help. They get there and find
the other ships all routed by Nero, who pummels the Enterprise and demands
that Pike beam over to negotiate a surrender. But the Romulan has
far more than that in mind, and the freshly minted Enterprise crew led
by Spock and his first officer Kirk must find a way to save the Federation,
with a little help from another future traveler who followed Nero back
through the wormhole. The credits call him Spock Prime (Leonard Nimoy).
Yeah, I know, that might
be the longest plot synopsis on this site, but for all the studio's marketing
Star
Trek as a streamlined origin story non-Trekkies can understand without
trouble, I found it to be an EXTREMELY complicated time travel tale whose
appeal rests largely on your familiarity with the subject matter.
Scanning my brain for counterparts, the movie I found it most similar to
was actually Stephen Hopkins' underrated big-screen version of Lost
in Space. But while Akiva Goldsman crafted a brain-twisting loop
of past and future characters to fill his stand-alone LIS screenplay,
here Orci and Kurtzman have gone much farther. Star Trek,
depending upon how you like your time travel theory, has either completely
obliterated the original series timeline or (as I prefer to think of it)
created an alternate universe tangent in which the new Abrams series of
movies will be set. Oh, sure, I guess you could watch this story
as a space opera if you didn't know Bones from Scotty, but I'm not sure
how much you'd actually get out of it. What I found most interesting
about Star Trek was the way it meditates on a well-known (albeit
fictional) life shot off in a new direction when one of its' most important
elements (the man who raised him) is removed.
In ten bravura minutes, Abrams
and actor Chris Hemsworth do an astonishing job of introducing George Kirk
as a great man, the kind who'd make a great father and we can easily believe
raised the iconic James T. Kirk we've known all these years. But
now he's gone, and Kirk could easily drift through an unfulfilled life
without someone to point him in the right direction except that George's
heroic example had inspired Pike, who in turn takes it upon himself to
try to correct his hero's son's course. Jim was born for greatness,
so he doesn't need a complete makeover, just to have the pieces of his
life start to fall into place. Pike gives him Starfleet, which immediately
leads to one of his greatest friendships, with McCoy. And then the
main body of the movie concerns how the intervention of the future Spock
who had been and ever would be his friend allows him to regain that friendship
and the duty for which he was born, the Captaincy of the Enterprise.
Spock, of course, needs Kirk
just as much, and it's interesting to watch how the movie fills in the
background of the Angry Young Spock we've seen hinted at in the past but
never shown this explicitly. It comes as no surprise that the Vulcans
around him treat the fact that his mother (Winona Ryder) was human as a
disability, but Quinto does a solid job of showing us how slight after
slight over his entire life made the young Spock a prickly jerk before
his Enterprise friendships humanized him. This actually dovetails
really well with the more extreme elements of Nimoy's performance in the
original The Cage pilot as well as the early episodes of the series,
before he shaved off some of Spock's harsher edges (stop that shouting,
man!). And it plays perfectly with the appearance of the original
Spock here, continuing his work in the final original cast movie The
Undiscovered Country and his appearance in the Unification episode
of Star Trek: The Next Generation that showed us a Spock who
was at last completely at peace with himself. Seeing those early
scenes on Vulcan and then Nimoy's smooth, nuanced performance show us the
man's complete arc, the nifty vision of an elderly man greeting his younger
self and saying “don't worry, kid, it's all gonna work out.”
Star Trek was always
about optimism, and there's a great deal of optimism to this movie's central
conceit that you can detonate a gigantic bomb at the very heart of James
T. Kirk's origin story but that things will inexorably drift back toward
the way they were Meant To Be. Of course, the new altered timeline
isn't good for everyone (I'll leave the reason why for you to discover),
but at least one character will vastly prefer his lot in the new future
to his destiny in the old one.
As you can tell, all this
time travel/destiny stuff really connected with my love for these characters,
and I have to say that with a couple of days to process it, I'm writing
about the movie now with an enthusiasm I didn't necessarily leave the theater
with. I look forward to seeing it again, and I'll be sure to share
my thoughts here when I do. But I still haven't even gotten down
to the more basic questions, including that most important: how does
the new cast match up to the old?
It's almost not a fair question.
The original cast has been mocked, parodied and vilified over the years
in a way that in no way changes the fact that they named the first friggin
Space Shuttle after them. These were iconic performances with a capital
“I”, and whatever depth they may have lacked on the original series was
more than compensated for in the 80's movie series, including a three-picture
trilogy (The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock and The
Voyage Home) that is among the greatest in movie history. Were
the new Trek cast originating these roles, I doubt I'd be writing
a similarly gooey review in my late 70's of a new film about their adventures.
But they do get the job done, sometimes by pinging the original performances,
sometimes not. Pine is a solid, square-jawed action hero, who mixes
Kirk's iconic cocky confidence with the harsher shadings of his new origin.
He summons William Shatner's immortal original performance just once, but
when he does so, it's to great effect. Quinto, meanwhile, is going
Full Nimoy, if for no other reason that his predecessor is right there
next to him. It's a bit distracting, to be honest, that his smooth,
thoughtful voice is so closely identified with his famous role as the psychotic
superpowered killer Sylar on TV's Heroes. But he was Spock
enough to get by, and as I mentioned I did like the bitter shading he brought
to the role.
For me, the movie's best
performance comes from Urban, a self-described “religious Star Trek
fan” who totally disappears into the role of Bones, delivering a fully
studied impersonation of DeForest Kelley's famous performance so good it
would still steal the show even if we had no idea what he was aping.
And that allows the writers to also write him most closely to his original
counterpart, with lines like “the ex-wife took the whole damn planet in
the divorce,” and “I suffer from aviaphobia. It means the fear of
dying in something that flies,” becoming instant Bones classics.
The best of the rest is Anton Yelchin, whose Chekov accent (as originally
put on by Walter Koenig) is just about perfect. John Cho is a great
choice for Sulu because he caries himself with the same courageous dignity
as predecessor George Takei. Zoe Saldana didn't really remind me
of Nichelle Nichols' Uhura at all, but she did justice to the role in her
own way and I really liked the way the movie leaned on the specialness
of her linguistic skills the series often took for granted. And romance
with Spock? Talk about your alternate universes! Simon Pegg
pretty much just does his thing as Scotty, although I did like the way
he becomes more Scotty-like once he finds himself where he belongs in the
Enterprise engine room. People forget that James Doohan was actually
very professional and serious in the original series, so the decision to,
I don't know, “pre-revert” to the “wacky Scotty” of the movies is a little
odd. Bruce Greenwood, too, simply makes Christopher Pike another
of his intense but understanding authority figures, but since I always
really like those performances, I can't complain. It was great to
hear Majel Barrett Roddenberry one last time as the voice of Spock Prime's
ship computer: she recorded her lines less than two weeks before
her death earlier this year. Leading the guest stars, Bana is very
loose as the vengeful Nero, and I wish he had more to do.
Which brings us down to the
actual issue of the movie's story. It's fun and has some action high
points, but I honestly expected more both in terms of action and spectacle.
Long portions of the 126-minute movie are devoted to tracking the characters'
origins and time spent in space with Kirk and Spock at odds on how to pursue
Nero. As a result, the Romulans and their plan to murder the Federation
they blame for their own dark future take a back seat, and the action beats
of the third act don't pop as well as they might have (for my money, Nero
needs to come much closer to having his plan succeed for the climax to
have maximum impact). It's kinda funny that the most exciting sequence
is totally random, with Kirk chased across an ice planet by a weird big
red monster that looked like it slithered out of The
Mist. Perversely, in trying to create a summer popcorn Star
Trek movie for everyone, Abrams has still crafted a film that's more
fun to think about than watch.
The crew has done an amazing
job of creating a modern Enterprise, costumes, etc. that bridge the gap
between current film standards and the look of their 1960's counterparts:
across the board, Star Trek is a lovingly crafted tribute to television's
most beloved Sci-Fi series. If it doesn't necessarily stand on its'
own nearly as well as intended, well, I didn't need it to. It's no
competition for Star Trek at its' best, but it beats the hell out
of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, putting this new franchise
well ahead of the game. |
