Star Trek: These are the Voyages of the Starship Enterprise, and Just Maybe the Best Voyage Yet.
There can really be no denying that the amount of things that had to go right for JJ Abrams to pull off what I’ve witnessed this past day put his odds of success at pretty close to a million to one. To be able to cobble together the perfect recasting of one of the most beloved acting ensembles in television history was alone a daunting task. To find the right script is always a difficult task for any film project. Now, how do you put together a slam bang action sci-fi flick that will enthrall casual audiences as well as please some of the most finicky fan bases of any cult franchise?
Without exception, without apology and unbelievably without a single misstep he did it. Now, 40 years after the premier of Star Trek on television and over 30 years since the premier of the first film in the franchise now putting it’s 11th movie on the screen we very possibly have the best film of all of them.
I am a long time Star Trek fan. As a tike in the 1970s I watched it religiously. I saw every film in the series on opening weekend up until the last two mediocre Next Gen movies. Though I’ve bounced back and forth over the years to other franchises like Doctor Who and more recently Galactica I have always found a home in the Star Trek universe. I should have been the first to be skeptical about recasting and rebooting this franchise. It had really fallen from grace in recent years, even with me.
Paramount has treated Star Trek as its beloved cash cow franchise since the 1980s. Crank it out as cheaply as possible and rake in the profits. The rumored story was that the budget for Star Trek VI was so cheap that Paramount cut the wardrobe budget forcing them to again reuse the ragged and literally moth-eaten and frayed Starfleet uniforms made for Star Trek II.
I was actually in the camp that was thrilled to see Trek fall into the hands of Abrams for a reboot. The last two films were such momentous disappointments along with the hit and miss down turn of the TV incarnations of Voyager and Enterprise that the only real hope of reinvigorating it would be to take an entirely new approach. And love his work or hate it, Abrams knows entertainment. Lost is 5 years running one of the most brilliant sci-fi/fantasy dramas on television, Cloverfield was one of last year’s most original and exciting film projects, and even Fringe has found a huge audience, even if I turned it off after the pilot episode. The man knows what makes entertainment, and Trek as an entertainment property had almost nothing left to lose.
So, from the opening moments of the film set around 30 years prior to the era of the Original Star Trek series we see a distinct contrast to what we’ve seen in the previous 10 films, a huge, glitzy exciting space battle that completely blows away any other like it in the history of the film or TV franchise. It also sends an immediate message to knowledgeable fans in the first two minutes of the new film that Abrams is tossing all known Trek continuity out the window, but with a logical and satisfying explanation even if there is a twinge of sadness. He slowly builds a story arc that we know must historically change many of the most beloved moments from the original programs and films.
In the original series episode Balance of Terror, the Enterprise and Captain Kirk become the first set of humans to ever lay eyes on a Romulan. Not any more. A massive Romulan battleship emerges from a wormhole, dwarfing the Starfleet vessel USS Kelvin with a young upstanding First Officer named George Kirk who’s wife is in labor with their child that will bear the name James T. Kirk. Romulan Captain Nero’s revenge romp does not leave him any iota of concern about altering time lines or creating time paradoxes. He just wants some satisfaction and retribution for a crime he holds the older Spock accountable for.
Abrams knew that the fan contingent would nitpick any and all continuity and canon debates for his film to death, so he basically put a script on screen that allows him to rewrite or keep as much of Star Trek continuity as he wants. By traveling back in time, the Romulan Captain Nero, Eric Bana, on a revenge mission chasing down Ambassador Spock from the post Next Generation Trek Era through time. And to say that Nero alters the course of history is putting it lightly. He massively changes the course of the history of the United Federation of Planets.
The end result for the Star Trek characters we know and love amounts to pulling together most of the ensemble into the positions we are familiar with just a tad bit earlier than happened in the timeline of events we fans are familiar with. And frightening as that may sound, it works. There’s only a slight trepidation that is quickly washed away by the astonishingly brilliant and certainly somewhat lucky casting of our beloved crew. After all, if he were to have enslaved this project to strict canon, we would have had the immediate issue that in the historical Trek timelines, the Enterprise crew as we came to know them did not start out together, so to bring us a recreation of that ensemble, he had to shake up Starfleet history just enough to make sense in the context of the new film as a real continuation of the entire canon of the franchise.
First, the pivot point of the Star Trek universe has always been James T. Kirk. I also firmly believe that when the universe finally reaches its time of demise and the advanced beings that inhabit it are making all the lists of superlatives, most notably, of the most important/bad ass men in history, William Shatner will be damned near the top of that list. With that acknowledged and accepted, Chris Pine is absolute perfection in the role of young Jim Kirk. The essence of all that we believe that a young and much less mature Kirk would be is embodied, celebrated and nailed perfectly in Pine’s performance. And even amidst a checklist of brilliant performances in the film, Pine is patient zero from which the new Trek will either breed and live or die in flames, and Pine simply fucking nails it. He’s easily as charismatic, funny and thoughtful as any single actor in the film and his presence on screen after his introductory moments should make even the hardest hearted of Shatner fans grin ear to ear. He doesn’t just remake Kirk in his own image, he honors Bill Shatner in every scene by giving us his fresh young approach mixed lovingly with the essence of Shatner’s egotistical yet courageous character.
I do not intend to offer any major spoilers here, but I will pass on my personal favorite Chris Pine moment in the film: an intensely satisfying scene that Star Trek fans have been longing to witness since 1982’s The Wrath of Kahn: Kirk’s infamous Kobayasi Maru test in the academy. Not only do we get to see the entire test, it’s everything we could possibly have hoped it would be and one of the most hilarious guilty fan moments in the film. Fear not, however, this is the most blatant fan pandering moment in the film. While Abrams fills the film with nods and reverent reference and flashes of classic Trek continuity, he never over does it and shows the ultimate respect for the source material even with his self-created license to alter continuity.
Before I move on to rest of the main cast, I want to bring up a performance that caught me completely off gaurd turning out to be one of the most engaging and outstanding supporting performances in Star Trek: Bruce Greenwood as First Captain of the Enterprise Christopher Pike. No love is shown for The Animated Series chronology establishing Captain Robert April as the first Enterprise captain before Pike. However, if you are still a hardcore apologist for the canon of Star Trek: The Animated Series, the new film does retain Kirk’s status as the third captain of the Enterprise. I’ll leave it you to see the new film to find out who the second captain is now in current official Trek continuity.
While I thought from the prerelease trailers and articles that the references to Pike were just going to be throways for fans, Greenwood really rounds this film’s cast with a fantastically realized performance showing us a confident and brilliant starship captain that turns out to be the one that talks Kirk into joining Starfleet Academy, a challenge Kirk takes as a serious questioning of his ability to be somebody. Those that remember the horrifically disfigured Pike from The Menagerie will soon realize that the shake up of continuity has serious implicaitions for Trek canon, though it is addressed to some extent in the closing moments of the film.
It is with some sorrow, but more glee that I’m happy to report Zachary Quinto out-spocks Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek. Like almost the entire recast, we don’t for one moment doubt Spock. Though it’s a different actor, he is Spock in every essence of the word and we do not question our acceptance at any point. Like Pine, he nails this to such a degree that long before the closing credits roll with the rearrangement of the classic Star Trek theme music, Quinto is Spock for the audience once and for all, even acting alongside Nimoy.
Of the main supporting characters, we are handed three more spot on performances starting with Karl Urban who honors DeForest Kelley’s Dr. McCoy. Urban’s work may have been the hardest and he was acknowledged by the opening night crowd I saw it with for having two or three applause garnering classic “Bones” moments starting with his introduction to Jim Kirk on the shuttle to the Academy explaining that he hates working in space but since his ex-wife took everything in the divorce he didn’t have much left other than to sign up for military service.
British cult actor and filmmaker Simon Pegg who wrote and starred in last years phenomenally funny Hot Fuzz as well as Shaun of the Dead gives us a classic interpretation of Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott in another portrayal that made fans squee in their seats.
The last kudos rounding out the cast of supporting characters is the performance that strays the farthest from our established notions of the original character, and that would be the incredibly sexy Zoe Saldana as Uhura. She is a young attractive linquistics prodigy in the academy who we first meet fighting off the advances of a young, inebriated civilian Jim Kirk in an Iowa barroom. Saldana adds a depth to Uhura that Nichelle Nichols never really got to explore in the classic series or films. And while much of her appeal is a hot body and a crowd pleasing underwear scene, she opens up the door to events in the past of the familiar characters that will cause fans some shock. Really, that’s all I can say without hitting spoiler territory.
Now, a fine cast and funny and thoughtful script is not quite enough to rank this film as all I’m purporting it to be, so let me add the piece de resistance to the entire affair. The cherry on the sundae so to speak. It’s one of the best science fiction films in or out of the Star Trek universe that you’re likely to see and definitely the best in years. This time, Paramount pulled out the financial stops. No moldy costumes or oft-reused sets. The effects are on par with best you’ll see in this era, on par with anything you’ve seen in the most recent Star Wars trilogy, albeit not as flashy or over the top as Lucas’s recent muppet-inspired mayhem.
If the question ever arose as to whether Abrams can direct action let’s put this to rest now. The space battle sequences are superlative, exciting and visual candy of which you will not tire before the end. There is a mid-film action set piece with three of our heroes making an outrageous but exciting “sky-dive” from low Earth orbit onto a mile-high hovering platform over Spock’s home planet of Vulcan that will blow you away showing how a young Sulu and Kirk can kick the ass of a couple of over-confident Romulan henchmen. The climax of the film puts the Enterprise into the tightest and most compromising position the original ship ever saw prior to it’s destruction in Star Trek III: the Search for Spock. Yes, the climax of the film is not only outstandingly executed, but the sequence along with the closing scenes will leave you wondering how a film with a run time of two hours plus can go so quickly.
In any case, I’m a 37 year old lapsed Star Trek geek that drove home incredibly satisfied early this morning from the late night Thursday premier of an incredibly unlikely blast of a film. My 12 year old son is not a Trek fan. He’s seen none of the movies and only an episode or two of the classic series on our season 1 Blu-ray set we got last week. On the way out of the theater he made the comment that that it “may have been one of the best movies he’s ever seen.” Strong words from him, and certainly not a definitive review, but I was happy to see my son getting just a smidgeon of the pleasure I have since before his age out of Star Trek.
Although I’ve heaped on a ton of glowing praise throughout this review that any fan should be skeptical of, I think I can sum up in one word the most important factor in why Star Trek is such a resounding success. Going back the original Star Trek The Motion Picture, it’s the element that the fan base and critics said was the missing element and the element that the fans and critics hailed was back at the premier of Star Trek II. It’s back again: FUN. This film, above all else is fun from top to bottom.
See it. See it this weekend, and see it in IMAX during the limited engagement if possible. The space battles are brilliant on the IMAX screen. I’ll be back again for my second helping of Star Trek tomorrow.
…as an addendum to the original review posted last night, this delightful tidbit from The Onion:
Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As ‘Fun, Watchable’
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4 Responses to “Star Trek: These are the Voyages of the Starship Enterprise, and Just Maybe the Best Voyage Yet.”
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May 23rd, 2009 at 5:53 pm
So, a question for you, Scuzz, since I know you’re a long-time Trekkie and maybe can give me a concrete “scientific” answer. If two people are plummeting towards the surface of a planet, say, Vulcan, and the ship beams them back before they plow into the surface, shouldn’t they materialize on the ship moving at the same velocity and therefore splat onto the deck like chunky salsa? I’m just askin’…
May 24th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
That actually crossed my mind, whether the momentum would carry through. Technically don’t think it would. The transporter is not recreating the conditions you were in during the transport. In fact, if you get down to it, the transporter literally kills you. In the midst of destroying all the molecules in your body it analyzes them and basically just sends the information across to build a copy, in effect, killing you and making a brand new copy of you with exactly the same molecule make up and memories. Kinda takes the fun out of it. The official verdict: no carry over of the inertia. Is that the only piece of logic that hung you up on the film? It could go both ways, when they beamed back on to the ship traveling at Warp speed, why didn’t the retain the 0 inertia and thereby blow directly out of the ship blasting a hole in the back of the transporter room since they were not moving and the ship was traveling faster than light.
May 25th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
“Is that the only piece of logic that hung you up on the film?”
Good Lord, no. That was just the one that made me chuckle the most. I also wondered, as you did, about beaming onto a ship moving faster than light and relative inertia. And escape shuttles without warp capability and how long they’d have to fly to find any sort of rescue. And why they built spaceships on the ground. And how come Earth apparently has absolutely zero defenses against attacking ships. And why a mining vessel was packing SuperMegaDeath warhead missiles. And why Spock needed a VW-sized ball of red matter when one drop was sufficient to wipe out a planet. And lots more.
Don’t get me wrong, it was a fun movie and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Just left a lot of questions.
May 27th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Im willing to glaze over a lot of logical leaps for a movie as fun as this was. My tolerance for silliness is directly proportional to the entertainment value of the art containing it.