REVIEW - Star Trek

So I don't know if you guys heard about this, but they made a new Star Trek movie and it was released over the weekend. Lots of people went to see it and most of them left the theater with big dumb smiles on their faces. It's that kind of movie.

Let's get the whole cast thing out of the way first: across the board, everybody does a good job. This is no easy task. Captain Kirk was suitably Kirkish (minus Shatner's trademark pentameter); Sulu got to be a really good pilot who can sword fight; McCoy was absolutely 110% perfect; Captain Pike was pretty great (but spoiler: no Crispy Boop-Boop Pike this go around, maybe next time).

Not everyone is exactly like the old days, though. Spock has been having some emotion control issues; also he has a girlfriend. I can live with this as long as they don't go to the "emotional Spock" well too many times in future installments. Chekhov is missing his trademark Beatles wig and is now some kind of supergenius. Uhura is incredibly skilled at linguistics, as opposed to that scene with the Klingon dictionary in Star Trek VI. New Uhura would have aced that situation. Scotty was pretty great, but I'm biased because I think Simon Pegg is awesome. He shows up pretty late in the film, and he too has his obligatory moments, but he's a bit younger and Peggier than Original Scotty.

(SIDEBAR: for those who have seen the film, Scotty's story about Admiral Archer and his beagle are a reference to the disastrous Trek spinoff Enterprise. Archer was played by Scott Bakula. I sat through every torturous minute of that series and reviewed it here, though in fairness it started to get decent toward the end. I'm not sure his reference works timeline-wise, but maybe Archer lived to be very old? Someone do the math and research plz.)

Eric Bana plays the Romulan antagonist, Nero, who has a tree branch in his eyeball because his planet blew up or some such. It wasn't 100% clear, and ultimately it didn't really matter. Nero wasn't Trek's most compelling villain ever, not by a long shot, but I think that was more the script's fault than Bana's. A lot of people have asked what Nero was doing for 25 years, and maybe it's a plot hole and maybe it isn't; I can't be bothered to care.

Winona Ryder plays Spock's mother, which is kind of a weird bit of casting to me since she's not that old really. Actresses in Hollywood complain that there are no roles for older women, but once one pops up they slap some old-age makeup on Winona Ryder. Whatever. Winona, call me.

Speaking of Spock, the distracting dentures of Leonard Nimoy pop in for one last extended cameo appearance as Original Spock (or Spock Prime, or Old Spock, or whatever), which is a pretty great thing and lends a sense of legitimacy to the whole experience. Some might complain that William Shatner wasn't in the film anywhere, but plot-wise there really wasn't any way to put him in the film since Original Kirk died in a previous film (Berman & Braga are now sabotaging Trek long-distance!), and he couldn't even play Kirk's dad or anything because of the film's plot. But yeah, Nimoy, good stuff.

Speaking of the plot, this is where things get a bit hairy. J.J. Abrams, director of such films as Mission: Impossible III and creator of hit shows like Lost, Alias, and Felicity, is very much into mystery. Remember all the non-hype hype surrounding Cloverfield? That was Abrams' doing. If you've ever seen his TED discussion (if not, check it out here, it's pretty interesting), you know that the dude is all about suspense, mystery, etc. Abrams is a pretty good director; he's more than competent with the action stuff and gets excellent performances from his actors, but what he excells at here is making a terrible script seem like it actually might make some sense.

Enter Alex Kurtzmann and Roberto Orci, writers of such tours de force as Transformers, wherein, as you'll recall, an Autobot urinated on John Turturro and Anthony Anderson ate a whole plate of donuts. Hilarious! Thankfully, here the esteemed writing duo have a bit more respect (perhaps even reverence!) for the source material, but also realized (kind of correctly, in my opinion) that Trek had crawled so far up its own sphincter that the only way to save it would be to blow it up.

At this point, the old geek joke is true; it should really be called Time Trek. I mean, as early as the original series the writers were finding ways to save costume and location budget by inventing the Guardian of Forever or some such plot device to transport the crew to the 20th century. Then there was that movie where they saved the whales; then Next Generation did it a bunch of times, even in their movies; DS9 did it a few times, especially with their famous(?) Tribble episode; I can only assume Voyager did it; and Enterprise was all about time travel. Generally, these time travel plots are full of deus ex machina and silly plot devices, where the writers basically tell the audience, "just work with us here." Which is really lazy screenwriting, but in the unrealistic world of scifi, to actually explain this stuff would require dissertations by the law offices of Einstein, Hawking & Copernicus, and who really has the time. So we get stuff like flux capacitors and red matter and dilithium crystals and whatever.

Director Abrams knows that we really, desperately don't give a crap about such things, but the story still requires some kind of semi-realistic (or at least explainable) framework, so he tries to wrap all this stupid technobabble in a coating of tasty explosions and special effects. I'm not sure the film would have worked in the hands of another director; we get just enough technobabble plot baloney to sort of get what is happening and why, but ample action and excitement of the whiz-bang variety to prevent us from realizing how thin and ridiculous the story really is.

Also, there's enough pathos and gravitas to keep us from realizing that they've completely blown up the Star Trek universe that people have spent the last 40 years caring about to some extent. There's no going back, Old Spock even says so. Were fanboys gnashing their teeth in dark theaters around the world over the weekend? Hopefully they were too distracted by all the explosions. It was a pretty good time.

I will say this, though: next time (and there certainly will be a next time), ease up on the lens flares, J.J. Seriously.