Star Trek
STAR TREK. WAS. AWESOME.
Wolverine may have marked the technical beginning of summer, but Star Trek got it started. I am in no way a Trekkie (I was always into Star Wars), but to love Star Trek, I didn’t need to be. Great writing, great directing, great acting, and great effects all came together in a perfect storm of greatness.
JJ Abrams is renowned for his sci fi projects and certainly didn’t disappoint here. The Onion News Network has a piece: “Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As ‘Fun, Watchable’”, and it’s funny because, well, it’s true. This one boldly goes where no Star Trek movie has gone before: solid, mass-market appeal.
It’s an origin movie, and it does a great job of reintroducing the mythology of the franchise for the rest of the population- we know who Kirk and Spock are, we know what the USS Enterprise is, and we know there’s something called a Tribble that we’re supposed to find funny. The movie assumes you know nothing, takes these as fresh, new characters, and creates the story of how they come together, and it really feels like that.
I have zero complaints regarding the actors. They all did incredible jobs of giving fresh takes on these characters while keeping them in tune with the people they will one day be and paying homage to the actors that came before them.
Chris Pine is quite possibly the next addition to my list of actors I will see in any movie. His Kirk is brash, arrogant, cocky, simply unable to quit, an asshole- and I loved it. The charisma! The blind ambition! Ohhhh. Of all the actors, he is the least like his prior incarnation, yet his own spin on the character fits and meshes seamlessly with the story and rest of the ensemble. I have nothing but good things to say about Kirk.
Zachary Quinto looks and acts the part of Spock flawlessly, but his acting isn’t in any way constrained by previous embodiments like other movies released this year (WATCHMEN YOU BROKE MY HEART). He adds an edge, a constant internal struggle between logic and emotion that I don’t recall in Leonard Nimoy’s Spock. Spock is, in short, a bad ass. He kicks it, and in a break from tradition, he gets it instead of Kirk, which I liked.
Simon Pegg is the perfect, impish Scotty, and I certainly would have liked to see more of him. But, his role fit the story well, and I don’t remember Scotty being a character that was focused on very much anyway. Karl Urban as Bones McCoy is a wild-eyed, hard-cussin and hard-drinking sonofabitch and I loved it. Harold Cho as Sulu killed it and has a much more normal-looking face than George Takei, and kicked some awesome ass of his own. Zoe Saldana was a great, headstrong Uhulu in some groovy, independent-woman disco boots and a mini skirt. And I loved Anton Yelchin’s Russian accent, and the jokes made with that.
With any franchise with pre-developed characters, such as an adaptation or reboot, there are certain things fans are going to expect. Star Trek nails it all here, but there were two things I noticed in particular. One, Star Trek hit each of its catchphrases in a way that I’ve seen few other movies do. Contrarily, Wolverine did everything a movie shouldn’t do when dealing with pre-established catchphrases. There was a beat, or a moment of awkward attention, paid to each one that felt unnatural and recited (most cringe-worthy was “‘Cause I’m the best at what I do, and what I do ain’t very nice.”). Star Trek has buckets more of them, yet at no point did I ever feel they were out of place or delivered just so they could be delivered. Many times, I was even surprised when I heard them. They were included, but delivered like any other line in the movie, which gave them an authenticity few films achieve.
God, do you remember X3’s “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch”? Shudder.
Two, some people might complain that there are no red-shirts here. If you pay attention, you’ll see a very obvious one.
I want to touch on one more thing here. Most series reboots- Batman Begins, for example- don’t really acknowledge the previous films and characters and simply take us back to the beginning, fresh start, clean slate. Star Trek doesn’t exactly do that. I don’t want to give too much away here, but they reboot the series (and bring in a Nemoy cameo) in a very interesting, and satisfying, way that could be argued even fits in with the continuity of the previous movies. This is a prequel, sequel, and reboot, all in one, and some serious kudos are due to the writers for pulling that off. I’ve read some complaints that the explanatory sequence is kind of weak, or maybe simple is the right word, but they really couldn’t have made it much more complex without over-complicating it. Considering the role this film plays in the franchise as a whole, any more would have made it too much, too confusing.
All in all, Star Trek is a great movie for sci fi nerds and general movie fans alike. It’s not going to win any awards, but it’s a solid summer flick that anyone can enjoy. I heard a friend of mine call it this summer’s Iron Man, and I have to agree. It’s a whole movie, explains the characters for anyone who needs it, and provides a good base for the franchise to jump from. I said I’d wait to see Wolverine on FX, but I’d definitely get this one on DVD.
