The greatest adventure of all time begins with "Star Trek," the incredible story of a young crew's maiden voyage onboard the most advanced starship ever created: the U.S.S. Enterprise. On a journey filled with action, comedy and cosmic peril, the new recruits must find a way to stop an evil being whose mission of vengeance threatens all of mankind.
The fate of the galaxy rests in the hands of bitter rivals. One, James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), is a delinquent, thrill-seeking Iowa farm boy. The other, Spock (Zachary Quinto), was raised in a logic-based society that rejects all emotion. As fiery instinct clashes with calm reason, their unlikely but powerful partnership is the only thing capable of leading their crew through unimaginable danger, boldly going where no one has gone before!
Starring: John Cho, Ben Cross, Bruce Greenwood, Simon Pegg, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Winona Ryder, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Anton Yelchin, Eric Bana, Leonard Nimoy
Rating: four stars out of five
It felt like they’d pulled the plug on Star Trek. Not even Trekkies liked the last film, the aptly-titled Nemesis (2002), enough to make it work at the box office. In the nick of time, here comes Lost supremo JJ Abrams with a defibrillator, and the whole thing bursts back to life with a resplendence, charm and gusto that are thrilling to see. Muscular fun which will convert even those with a total phobia of pointy ears and warp speed, Star Trek has gone minimalist with the title, but they could have taken their pick, really, from Rebirth to New Lease of Life or just Star Trek: It’s Good Again.
You’d have to have been around longer than me to remember the early days of the original TV show – Abrams himself was born in 1966, the year it first aired. It’s a fitting, almost personal touch that he begins his new epic cross-cutting between the labour pains of James T Kirk’s mother and a head-to-head intergalactic firefight – spectacular enough, but topped in both timing and impact by sequences later on. While Mrs Kirk grunts and heaves, Jim’s dad gives up his own life to save 800 shipmates from an attack by Romulans, the most moody-broody of this universe’s three alien races.
The particularly dyspeptic Nero (Eric Bana) remains chief villain, but the focus is squarely on Jim’s rites of passage – he’s next seen as a tearaway joyriding hotrods and causing bar brawls in the dustier corners of Iowa. In the background, Abrams and his effects team give us one of their grandest coups: if you look to the horizon you can see Earth’s gargantuan docking stations looming up, barely visible in the morning mist. It’s the kind of touch George Lucas would have rammed in your face, but they deliver it with reverent, understated care.
Meanwhile, Jim’s future right-hand on the USS Enterprise is busy sailing through exams and fending off bullies on the egghead planet of Vulcan. This is Spock, played with smart reserve and a mercurial inner temper by Zachary Quinto. The movie charts their relationship – initially stormy, to say the least – in a nicely oblique way: it’s the main event, dramatically speaking, but there’s always something more thumpingly urgent to command their attention, whether it’s a Vulcan distress signal or the continuing rampages of those pesky Romulans.
Abrams thinks well in sequences, has world-class editing at his disposal, and knows when to give the audience what we want – a grippingly tense mano-a-mano on a fiery Romulan drilling platform – and when to defer such pleasures for later. It appears to be an unwritten law of the universe that all impending Earth calamities must occur within a few feet of the Golden Gate Bridge: verging on cheesy, but also the kind of broad, blockbustery touch that makes this Star Trek readily accessible to the masses, not just those with a degree in Klingon linguistics.
One of the more surprising fonts of pleasure is the screenplay, by Transformers scribes Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman – there’s a lot of good, bickering camaraderie and just enough coarse one-liners (“Are you out of your Vulcan mind?”) to keep things buoyant. I was worried Chris Pine’s Kirk would come over like an obnoxious frat boy, but I take it all back: the requisite Shatner smarm is present and correct, but he’s hard-working, energetic, and knows what he’s doing. Zoe Saldana’s game, likeable Uhura – the sole girl in this gang, unless you count Winona Ryder as Spock’s doting mum – reveals the mystery of what bras they wear under those multi-coloured jumpsuits. As for the sidekicks, Anton Yelchin’s fun-sized Russian navigator Chekov is just the right side of the adorable/annoying line, and Simon Pegg (who popped up to similar effect in Abrams’s M:i:III) gives Scotty his usual killer timing – if there’s anyone who can make the simple act of requesting a towel much funnier, I should ask them to stay.
It’s not 100 per cent peachy. Through no fault of Eric Bana’s credible enough stab at Method Romulan, the baddie side of things feels mismanaged, the time-travel aspects of the plot more laboured than ingenious. Given the awesome outward appearance of their deadly hive – it prickles forth like an ultramagnified close-up on a nasty black nit – it’s a tad disappointing that the inside, where these malcontents fester and scheme, just looks like a greenish industrial slag heap.
Still, complaints of insufficiently evil interior decorating hardly put much of a dent in Abrams’s achievement. This is a grand success – perhaps a new populist benchmark in what to do with a flagging franchise, and a witty, light-on-its-feet prequel which makes instant toast of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. May it live long and prosper, by which we mean, sequels, soon, please.
Release Date: November 20, 2009
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Director:Brad Silberling
